Bright future, stuck like a bum star

The Future Is Like Pie #16

Author

Lisa Maria Marquis
December 31, 2019

Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.

—from "The Conditional,” Ada Limón

Some book recommendations from me, on this, the last day of 2019. I read moderately this year, but everything I read I can highly recommend.

First, some recent articles about technology:

The Web, he saw, allowed everyone everywhere to develop the same otaku obsessions—with television, coffee, sneakers, guns. The mere possibility of such knowledge lay like a scrim over the world. A physical object was also a search term: an espresso wasn’t just an espresso; it was also Web pages about crema, fair trade, roasting techniques, varieties of beans. Things were texts; reality had been augmented. Brand strategists revised the knowledge around objects to make them more desirable, and companies, places, Presidents, wars, and people could be advantageously rebranded, as though the world itself could be reprogrammed. It seemed to Gibson that this constant reprogramming, which had become a major driver of economic life, was imbuing the present with a feeling—something like fatigue, or jet lag, or loss. The suddenness with which the world’s code could be rewritten astonished him.

  • From a thoughtful book review that's about much more than its books (“Life Under the Algorithm” by Gabriel Winant):

[The was] the defining compromise of twentieth-century American capitalism: Increase your output, get paid more. Wages go up with productivity. Until, it turns out,  they don’t anymore…The decline of unions, the rise of inequality, the crisis of liberal democracy, and the changing face of American culture all, in one form or another, relate to this transformation. We work and work and barely get by, while wealth pools up in obscene quantities out of view. Pile more pig iron, but don’t imagine you’re high-priced.

[T]here’s a sixteen year old somewhere with Cystic Fibrosis who just found out that Trikafta is going to eliminate the vast majority of his CF symptoms. He’ll not just live to 44, he’ll probably live into his 80s. He’ll not spend months in the hospital every year, he’ll not have to do daily therapy treatments to keep his lungs healthy, he’ll likely avoid CF-related diabetes and intestinal blockages. And in the same week, he learned that there are scientists at Harvard who would prefer that he not exist. They would prefer it so hard that they built a dating app to prevent his existence.

  • From an inspired/inspiring blog post by my friend Ethan Marcotte (“Getting to work”):

We have a considerable amount of power as workers, but if current trends are to be believed, that power’s diminishing. No single one of us can fix our industry: it’s going to take all of us, and we need to start now. Organize your workplaces, my loves. And then, if you possibly can, unionize.
 

Nonfiction I read and loved:

  • What You Have Heard is True, Carolyn Forché: I had the very good fortune to work with Carolyn a few summers ago during a writers’ retreat, so it’s been exhilarating to see this extraordinary work launch to such high critical acclaim. In it, she recounts witnessing the beginnings of the Salvadoran Civil War, in a way that is both horrific and dreamy, terrifying and lyrical—a dark, stark, poetic memoir that is as beautiful and disturbing as it is necessary.
     

  • Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat, Harvey Levenstein: I love a good cultural history, and this one looks to the social and technological forces that shaped American opinions around food, nutrition, and consumption over the past 150 years. Behold: we only think flies are dirty because of a misinformed Victorian-era public service campaign! We’ve known vitamin pills have no effect on our health since the 1940s! We used racism to imbue yogurt with magic powers and no science at all! Whew.
     

  • H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald: I do not think I realized this was a memoir until many pages in, but that certainly did not alter my immediate adoration. Part-depression memoir, part-elegy, part-zoologic study, part-biography of T.H. White—she winds all these threads together curiously, cohesively, compellingly.

Novels I read and loved:

  • My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante: Semi-autobiographical notes on a provincial midcentury Italian upbringing; violence, poverty, family dramas, and unspoken rules; a narrator being pulled into adulthood and away from her roots. A bit slow to start, but ultimately I couldn’t put it down. The book’s final sentence gave me chills.
     

  • The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin: I was so late to the party on this one, but the party is hardly over. A fantasy planet (no, our planet?) with a society in which some people (powerful, dangerous, and therefore carefully oppressed) can manipulate rocks, minerals, even tectonic plates with their minds—come for the world-building, stay for the world-unraveling.
     

  • Circe, Madeline Miller: I know, this is being pushed so so hard on Libro.fm. And it was, in fact, the first thing I listened to on Libro.fm (the local-bookstore version of Audible). What can I say—I’m a sucker for Greek myth, and I loved reading her Achilles a few years ago, and Circe did not disappoint.
     

  • The Tenth Muse, Catherine Chung: Oh, my dear friend wrote this: a novel about a midcentury mathematician trying to unravel both universal enigmas and the mysteries of her own birth amid racism, sexism, fairytales, and war.

Poetry I read and loved (I wanted to leave you with some lines, but my books are still in storage):

  • Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky

  • The Bad Wife Handbook, Rachel Zucker

  • Orakl, Daniele Pantano

  • Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans & Lovely Gun, Ruth Ellen Kocher

  • Honeyfish, Lauren Alleyne

  • Gold that Frames the Mirror, Brandon Melendez

Stay warm, friends. Help others stay warm.