kottke.org posts about books
From Big Think and Pop Charts, A Literary Map of America that “highlights the real and imagined settings of hundreds of books”. Frank Jacobs takes a closer look at some of the imaginary places on the map, including Sleepy Hollow, Lake Wobegon, Brokeback Mountain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s East Egg and West Egg.
There are many ways to read this map: as a peculiar road map of the United States, a potted history of the same, a metatext of American literature, a guide to American literary genres and their centers of gravity, and more. I will get to at least some of them later, but for now, I want to examine the effect that scholars call broadly “imaginative geography,” more precisely “toponymic capture,” and more elegantly “authorial inscription.” It is the process by which a writer’s vision of a place becomes so dominant that it effectively overwrites that place’s prior identity in the public imagination.
We could say other parts of America have been “colonized” by other texts the same way King’s horror stories have influenced our perception of Maine. A gentler metaphor, from Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City, is of cultural and literary memory as an “overlay.” It resides above physical geography like a transparency on an overhead projector, a slightly shifting but persistent presence.
In Landmarks, the English nature writer Robert Macfarlane develops the idea that a sufficiently powerful text doesn’t just describe a landscape, but alters the mind that subsequently encounters it. He uses the verb phrase “to see through” to define it: you see the Suffolk coast through W.G. Sebald, the Mississippi through Mark Twain, the South (as a particularly “Gothic” place) through Faulkner.
The map is available as a poster.
Writer and comedian Zach Mander took quotes from Karl Marx and paired them with illustrations from books by Richard Scarry like What Do People Do All Day? and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.
See also Mamdani’s Richard Scarry socialism.
A comment by Adam Keys about showing grace in airports over on Craig Mod’s site reminded me of this story from the introduction of Genny Rumancik’s book The Wisdom of Feeling: Finding Clarity, Courage, and Connection Through Emotional Intelligence:
I was in the last boarding group, and when they finally called our zone, there was a bottleneck of people trying to get in line to board. As I stood waiting and shuffling around, I watched as a man took a step forward to get in line and saw him step right in front of a woman who was on her last nerve.
She threw her hands up in the air and spoke angrily but passively to the man’s back, “What an ass. Oh, well, I guess you must be sooo important—you should just go right ahead! Don’t worry about the rest of us.”
She rolled her eyes and heaved heavy sighs, throwing a little tantrum.
The man didn’t realize he’d done anything wrong, and it took him a moment to realize the kerfuffle happening behind him was related to his actions. As he turned around and saw how flustered she was, he reacted with genuine wide-eyed surprise and apology, “Oh, I’m sorry! Please, go ahead.”
The woman doubled down.
Hands up, avoiding eye contact, exaggerating sighs, and waving him forward. “No, no, no, go ahead, Mr. Big Shot.”
The man paused and turned like he was going to walk forward but then stopped.
He took a breath, turned all the way around to face the woman, and gently said, “This feels important to you. Please, I would like for you to go ahead of me.”
He stepped to the side and calmly gestured for her to go forward. There was no passive aggression, no sarcasm, no hidden agenda. Those of us watching could feel that he meant it.
At this, the woman deflated. Her aggressive energy melted.
She began apologizing, “No, I’m sorry, I’ve had such a hard day. That damn delay just put me right over the edge…”
“I completely understand,” he responded, smiling and nodding back at her.
By then the line was moving forward. I took my place behind them and listened to their amicable conversation about holiday plans as we boarded the plane.
This was a small moment in time—an interaction that took maybe ninety seconds in total—that impacted me deeply. I was so impressed by how this man was able to be present to this woman’s aggressive behavior in a tense, public setting without taking it on or responding defensively.
He remained calm, present, and genuinely kind, and in doing so helped her regain her own composure, which then resulted in a warm connection between the two of them.
His maturity neutralized the tension in the space, making it safer for everyone else in the vicinity, too.
There’s so much aggression in airports…it brings out the worst in people. Ever since reading this passage, I have been trying to be more mindful and chill in crowded public spaces.1 Part of that effort, as it relates to airports in particular, involves this advice: “Arrive early and move through the airport like the Dalai Lama.”
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi’s new book is about wealth inequality in America. Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are (Amazon) follows ten people with ten different incomes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10% and everything in-between:
For five years, data journalist Mona Chalabi followed them all, documenting how wealth shaped their feelings, their choices, their identities, and their insecurities. She researched the data behind their taxes, groceries, inheritances, and so much more to understand the systems that keep people stuck. But then, she too found herself facing the same fears, when her mother’s sudden illness and subsequent medical bills threatened her own financial safety and made the questions she had been writing about all too real. How much money is enough? To live a “good” life? To protect the people you love in an emergency?
This looks great — Chalabi’s work is always worth a look. Shades of Studs Terkel and What Do People Do All Day crossed with Barbara Ehrenreich. Chalabi did a recent interview with It’s Nice That about the book.
Part of the message of the book is that class doesn’t show up enough in our intersectional identities, and that that’s fundamentally dishonest. I would hope that people read the book and then get much more fluent and comfortable with describing their current wealth and income, as well as the one that they grew up in. I think that’s kind of ambitious, but you never know.
Ten Lives is out today in the US.
I visited Jimbōchō today, a neighborhood that’s home to more than 100 used bookstores. Many sell only Japanese books, but some of them have books in English or sell magazines, posters, or visual books that are interesting to browse no matter what language you speak. I visited maybe 20-30 of the stores; here are four of my favorites.
Sawaguchi Book Store features larger format books on art, design, photography, fashion, and architecture. The walls of the staircase are covered in wonderful posters; it took me awhile to climb those stairs. On the second floor, I found a Princess Mononoke movie poster for ¥50,000; tempting. Also on that floor, there’s a small seating area where you can enjoy a beverage out of their two vending machines and quietly read a book or look out the window.
Kitazawa Bookstore. A beautiful old bookstore selling mostly English titles. I spent a lot of time in here browsing. I found a nice leather-bound Pride and Prejudice and a copy of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls from the 40s. They had these little notes scattered amongst the shelves gently reminding patrons of the store’s guidelines: “Here, silence helps words to grow. Hold each book with both hands, as if to embrace it.” Another one: “Don’t rush or force the pages wide. Stories, too, are most beautiful when they open slowly.”
Komiyama Shoten is another bookstore specializing in books about art, arcitecture, design, photography, and fashion. I found a cache of old Raygun magazines from the 90s along with a ton of other design books & magazines — on the third floor, I think. On that same floor, they have a collection of erotica and LGBTQ+ books, including a couple of amazing books by Tom of Finland. Lots of great posters throughout the store as well, including a poster for Kids (1995) signed by Larry Clark.
Ohya Shobu features books, woodblock prints, and maps from the Edo and Meiji periods. Super old stuff. The huge map of Edo (Tokyo) in the window is worth the trip by itself. Because everything was so ancient and presumably delicate, I was a bit timid about picking stuff up to look through it, but I’m gonna go back when I’m feeling bolder.
One thing I didn’t get a chance to work into my post about the unexpected memory bomb triggered by my spice drawer was the tight, deep connection between smell and memory. I first learned about this relationship in college when I read A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman for a class. It’s still one of my favorite books. Here’s some of what she has to say about smell:
Smell is the most direct of all our senses. When I hold a violet to my nose and inhale, odor molecules float back into the nasal cavity behind the bridge of the nose, where they are absorbed by the mucosa containing receptor cells bearing microscopic hairs called cilia. Five million of these cells fire impulses to the brain’s olfactory bulb or smell center. Such cells are unique to the nose. If you destroy a neuron in the brain, it’s finished forever; it won’t regrow. If you damage neurons in your eyes or ears, both organs will be irreparably damaged. But the neurons in the nose are replaced about every thirty days and, unlike any other neurons in the body, they stick right out and wave in the air current like anemones on a coral reef.
And:
Unlike the other senses, smell needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation. A smell can be overwhelmingly nostalgic because it triggers powerful images and emotions before we have time to edit them. What you see and hear may quickly fade into the compost heap of short-term memory, but, as Edwin T. Morris points out in Fragrance, “there is almost no short-term memory with odors.” It’s all long term. Furthermore, smells stimulate learning and retention. “When children were given olfactory information along with a word list,” Morris noted, “the list was recalled much more easily and better retained in memory than when given without the olfactory cues.” When we give perfume to someone, we give them liquid memory. Kipling was right: “Smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart-strings crack.”
And:
Smell was the first of our senses, and it was so successful that in time the small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from the olfactory stalks. We think because we smelled.
Our sense of smell, like so many of our other body functions, is a throwback to that time, early in evolution, when we thrived in the oceans. An odor must first dissolve into a watery solution our mucous membranes can absorb before we can smell it. Scuba-diving in the Bahamas some years ago, I became aware of two things for the first time: that we carry the ocean within us; that our veins mirror the tides. As a human woman, with ovaries where eggs lie like roe, entering the smooth, undulating womb of the ocean from which our ancestors evolved millennia ago, I was so moved my eyes teared underwater, and I mixed my saltiness with the ocean’s. Distracted by such thoughts, I looked around to find my position vis-a-vis the boat, and couldn’t. But it didn’t matter: Home was everywhere.
I could basically quote the whole smell chapter…it’s interesting throughout. Great book — if you’ve never read it, I’d recommend checking it out.
From NTS, this is a two-hour mix of jazz music featured in the books of Haruki Murakami.
‘Somewhere along the line Coltrane’s soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it’s McCoy Tyner’s piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody’s — a nameless, faceless somebody’s — dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that’s how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest’ —Kafka On The Shore
The playlist features tracks by Ornette Coleman, Coltrane, Dizzy, the Bill Evans Trio, Monk, Mingus, and Miles Davis. Some of the video’s comments:
I had just prepared a light meal and hit play on this playlist when the telephone began to ring.
about to make my morning matcha, a spring breeze is flowing through the open windows, the air smells of optimism
Early morning, sun shining to balcony, having espresso and writing.
Studying the day before the exam with a bittersweet optimism while playing this and holding on to my hopes
Canned cold beer, windows open on a warm summer night, just after finishing a simple dinner of rice and salmon and sitting next to my cat
See also Classical Music from Murakami Novels. Both of these are going straight into my Underscore collection.
I’m currently doing the thing I do after seeing a movie (The Odyssey) I really enjoyed or found interesting: digging into related media. Yesterday I had an hour in the car, so I listened to this episode of The Daily podcast with Madeline Miller and Emily Wilson.
I think it’s quite odd to think that one book or one translation erases the others. I mean, if people prefer some other translation or if people want to read the Greek, I would love for them to do that. I think it’s great. I have no desire to legislate about which versions of “The Odyssey,” or of any ancient text, people want to engage with. So I think there’s something quite strange about the idea that the canon doesn’t have room for many, many different interpretations, translations, engagements, reinventions.
I’ve also flagged this New York Review of Books podcast with Daniel Mendelsohn, another NYT podcast with Madeline Miller, and this WNYC podcast with Emily Wilson for future listening.
As for reading, Wilson and Mendelsohn both did contemporary translations of The Odyssey within the past few years: The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson (I loved this, read it aloud to my kids) and The Odyssey translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. Actor Stephen Fry recently did a more approachable reimagining of The Odyssey. The Odyssey: A Graphic Novel by Gareth Hinds is even more accessible, especially for younger readers.
Miller is the author of two great novels based on the Iliad and the Odyssey: Circe (my personal favorite of the two…I love this book and tell everyone to read it)1 and The Song of Achilles.
Other novels based on Homer’s works: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.
Mendelsohn also wrote An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic back in 2018; it sounds really interesting:
When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician’s unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his “one last chance” to learn the great literature he’d neglected in his youth—and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist.
Do you have any recommendations for podcasts or favorite Odyssey translations/retellings?
Nicholas Rougeux, whose work I have featured here before, has published a complete digital edition of William Jardine’s 40-volume book series on natural history published in the early-to-mid 19th-century. As part of the project, Rougeux restored each of the more than 1300 illustrations in the library, and the results are fantastic.
Rougeux wrote a post on the history of The Naturalist’s Library and how the project came about.
The Library is credited with having a significant democratizing effect on the study of natural history because Jardine and Lizars prioritized affordability and portability. Each book was only 4 by 6 inches and priced at six shillings, making them a much more accessible alternative to the “unwieldy folios” from other naturalists. This led to a tremendous demand for each one, resulting in tens of thousands of copies being printed overall. Just two years into publication, a notice appears at the beginning of one volume stating, “we have sold upwards of 60,000 volumes, in which there have been nearly 2,400,000 coloured plates given as Illustration.” Exact sales numbers are difficult to come by but history has shown that the series was very popular with estimates of 10,000 copies sold for each volume, totaling at least 400,000.
In order to help with his research, he borrowed a biography of Jardine from the library and built a custom rig out of K’nex construction toy pieces to scan the whole thing.
About a month later, I discovered a 2001 biography about Jardine, Sir William Jardine: A Life in Natural History, which only existed as a physical copy. I emailed the publisher to ask for a digital copy but had no luck. So I did what any self-respecting researcher would do and borrowed it on an inter-library loan and made my own digital copy by building a very janky custom rig out of old K’nex parts to take pictures of each page with my phone that I later combined into a searchable PDF. The OCR on it could be improved but having it available digitally allowed me to consult it in my research.
You can check out the shop for posters of the illustrations as well as a complete, bound, 800-page volume of all 1300+ illustrations.
Palantir, the data analysis defense contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, was named after the magical seeing stones from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. This video compares the ethos of the company with that of Tolkien.
The palantiri of The Lord of the Rings are sort of like crystal balls or “seeing stones” that allow their users to communicate across vast distances, see events from afar, and sometimes even peer into the future. But just about everybody who tries to use a palantir in The Lord of the Rings is deceived by it, acting on the visions they’re receiving without the greater context or wisdom of what’s behind them. So why would the people behind Palantir want to name the company and build its culture around these powerful yet easily corruptible magical objects?
J.R.R. Tolkien was famously anti-tech and anti-government, expressing his fears of what would happen when those two forces combined through his fantasy works and his letters to friends, family, and colleagues. If he were alive in the age of Palantir, he might not be thrilled that a tech company with lucrative government contracts is name-checking his creations.
Palantir is one of the purest instantiations of the Torment Nexus in tech today:
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.
See also The Right Is Obsessed With Lord of the Rings. But They Don’t Understand It.
In Tolkien’s books, it is not the men of Gondor who turn back the forces of evil and save the Shire; it’s those gentle, peaceful hobbits who pull the whole thing off. They’re the only species able to carry the One Ring of Power, because they are, by their nature, unambitious. All they want is to live their peaceful bourgeois lives of tea and toast and jam, so they are able to withstand the temptations of the ring and its promises of power, ultimately carrying it far enough to destroy it. The best the men of Gondor can do to help is refuse to ever touch the ring, because they know that if they pick it up, they will not be able to resist temptation.
To translate this into the metaphor: If you’re taking Tolkien as your guide, and you believe your homeland to be under invasion by the forces of evil, the solution is not to try to consolidate your power, harden your nature, and glory in needless cruelty. The solution is to refuse power whenever it is offered to you and to fight from a place of humility.
Any of these dopes — Musk, Thiel, Vance — would 100% have tried to take the Ring for themselves.
I’d vaguely remembered that Hulu was adapting The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, as a sequel to the TV series of the same name, but I was surprised to find out that the show has premiered and is already three episodes in (a fourth will be available today).
The initial series lost its way after 2-3 seasons, but I still ended up watching the whole thing. I’ll probably give The Testaments a shot as well.
I’ve been hearing nothing but good things about Ben Lerner’s new novel Transcription (Amazon) which comes out tomorrow. From the book’s description:
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of COVID, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but written with the intensity of a séance, Lerner shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.
And the cover is great:
I read Lerner’s 10:04 years ago and really liked it…I might pick this one up (and at only 144 pages, I might actually finish it).1
More reading: Ben Lerner and the Impossible Interview, The Gentle Parenting Of Ben Lerner’s ‘Transcription’, A Novel as Slim as an iPhone Has a Lot to Say About Technology, Ben Lerner’s Latest Is a Strange and Brilliant Attempt to Resurrect the Novel, and Ben Lerner’s Big Feelings.
I was thankful to read Marcin Wichary’s review of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything. I first heard about the book months and months ago; it sounded potentially interesting but I was afraid it was going to suffer from a now-familiar myopia of the “tech” old guard. Wichary writes:
I will just say it: I wish the author was more woke. The book is very male-coded. The main chosen areas of investigation are: motorcycles! tanks! guns! wars! There are moments towards the end where Elon Musk and Bill Gates are talked about as if it was still 15 years ago and we haven’t actually learned anything since. (No word of Cybertruck, either.)
We know maintenance tends to be unrewarded and forgotten come promotion time. We know that tedious tasks are often assigned to women and people of color while white men go around doing “genius things.” It’s hard to imagine women not being present in a book about maintenance, and yet — and I wish I was joking — the only woman of any significance in the entire book is… The Statue Of Liberty.
Oof. Yeah. Writing a book with that title (and its attendant aspirations) while ignoring the expertise and experiences of the vast majority of the world’s population (and more than half of the US population) is just not good enough at this point. It’s lazy and incurious, especially for an author frequently lauded as the opposite of both.
(Bit of a sharp turn perhaps, but a recent contrast to Brand’s approach is the PBS series The American Revolution, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. Instead of yet another retelling of the Revolutionary War focused on battles, Founding Fathers, and heroic tales of the good guys, Burns and his team drew from a broader pool of participants (many voices of women, free & enslaved Black people, Native Americans, etc.) and emphasized the extent to which the Revolution was many different things to many different people: a fight for freedom, a campaign to continue the enslavement of Black people, a cover for raping & pillaging, and the birth of a new colonizing nation. The result was a balanced, truthful, and insightful look at the war, an event that should be reckoned with at least as much as it’s celebrated.)
In 2017, city planner Jeff Speck gave a talk on the four ways to make a city more walkable:
In the typical American city, in which most people own cars and the temptation is to drive them all the time, if you’re going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that’s as good as a drive or better. What does that mean? It means you need to offer four things simultaneously: there needs to be a proper reason to walk, the walk has to be safe and feel safe, the walk has to be comfortable, and the walk has to be interesting.
I know Speck is talking about cities here, but these four rules — useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting — get at something about living in rural Vermont that I’ve always had trouble articulating: for a place that’s so outdoors-oriented with so many trails and places to hike, a good walk can be difficult to find. I can walk out my door to take a walk that’s sorta safe (walking against traffic on the side of the road — some assholes don’t slow down or move over that much). Comfort is variable: cars kick up dust and my house is surrounded by pretty steep hills. I can’t really walk to anywhere useful, and there aren’t too many possible routes so the interest of the scenery, though beautiful in the summer, gets stale. So then I’m left with driving somewhere to walk, which always just bums me out.
Anyway, this explains why every time I get to walkable city (Tokyo, Rome, NYC, Paris), I am instantly like, yes!! This! This is a walk.
Related reading: Speck is the author of Walkable City (Amazon) and Walkable City Rules (Amazon). (via paul stout)
A new book by Rebecca Solnit came out yesterday; it’s called The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change (Amazon). The synopsis:
Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.
In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.
The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.
While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.
I feel like maybe I should read this. I need some hope about the world.
See also Solnit’s recent Longreads Questionnaire.
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