Bookcombe

Jia Tolentino is almost exactly my age. I like to think we share many childhood influences - the Southern suburbs, a history of cheerleading, Peace Corps, a participation in but skepticism of beauty aspirations, a move to New York City, millenial pop. Of course, Jia Tolentino is a far more interesting and brilliant millenial. I hold her up as an example of success, someone for me to aspire to be like, or conversly, to notice all the ways in which I have failed.

Fortunately, my model of success has thoughts on the way that we, especially women, especially millenial women who grew up coding html Angelfire sites and coveting denim miniskirts, imagine success and why it has a look. In the essay Always Be Optimizing, she writes of media examples of the ideal woman:

There is an exaggerated binary fatalism to these stories, in which women are either successes or failures, always one fo the other - and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life. If you can't escape the market, why stop working on its terms?

To be clear, I don't beat myself up because Jia Tolentino is beautiful and I'm not. I beat myself up because there are so many opportunities to have failed. On a low day, I want to become that ideal woman she describes - "beautiful, happy, carefree, and perfectly competent." On a good day, I remember her point "to look any particular way and to actually be that way are two separate concepts, and striving to look carefree and happy can interfere with your ability to feel so."

Women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy - two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality. And yet there is enormous pleasure in individual success.

This is a phenomenon I see a lot at really probably every gym I've ever been to, even the progressive ones. People, especially women, completely supportive of other people's bodies, shyly admitting that while of course a thinner or ripped body is not a better body, not by their values, in fact they would actually like to please look shredded for an upcoming event. I count myself in this. Without wanting to shame women for their wants, because enough of that, I have to recognize the mindfuck at play. If we're turning to our appearance to send the message of our success (or at least how much better I am than all the other women at my high school reunion - fuck you, girl whose name I don't even remember) then how much have we really let go of damaging beauty standards?

That we really should investigate the forces at play behind our desires, as unpopular as that has become in contemporary mainstream feminism, is also supported by Amia Srinivasan in last year's The Right to Sex.

The thread connecting each essay in this collection is the internet, but it's also just being a person, especially a woman, in the age we live.

I said that I felt Jia and I have a lot in common, including both being in the Peace Corps. This experience appears in more detail towards the end of the essay We come from Old Virginia, and for me emitted a flurry of highlighting and mental high fiving Jia. Because I, too, left the Peace Corps one year early and I, too, completely lost my mind being harassed constantly and the conflict of being "supposed to...adhere to other people's norms."

I had it so easy compared to every local woman I knew. But even the suggestion that I was making something out of nothing made me wonder if I was, in fact, making something out of nothing. I started wanting things to happen to me, as if to prove to myself that I wasn't crazy, wasn't hallucinating. Spiky with resentment, I glared at men who looked at me too closely, daring them to give me another even to write down in my little secret file of incidents, daring them to make visible the dawning sense I had of women living in a continual state of violation, daring them to help me realize that I wasn't making any of this up.

I had that secret file, too Jia!! Yes, I UNDERSTAND YOU!!

And that would be enough for a popular feminist culture it-book of the summer. But Jia is doing more here than providing trendy blog posts, she's asking us to think better. I think this collection is closer in spirit to the aforementioned The Right to Sex than to, say, Shrill. It self-critically probes apart the reductivist assumptions implicit in let's call it instagram feminism, to name the app that I deleted after reading Trick Mirror. And for that attention to nuance, I truly admire Jia Tolentino.

The US edition of this book is called Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Because we need the title to be a very clear indicator of exactly what the book will be about.

Interesting companion piece to another Fitzcarraldo Edition In Memory of Memory, which is about how memory is its own kind of creation and storytelling (and also relates to modern Russian history). Second-hand Time both highlights that very issue and overcomes it by presenting you with voice after voice after voice giving you each time a different memory of the same bigger events.

One thing I was really struck by, in addition to an absolute obsession with salami, was a sentiment of "we wanted democracy and freedom, not the capitalist situation that we have now." (I'm not quoting anyone in particular, this is my take of several interviewees.) Which makes one ask, did Russia achieve democracy and freedom with the fall of the USSR? The past decade makes clear no, no it did not.

a book about language's relationship to reality, as utilized by a religious heretic in Poland, is 100% completely up my alley. One because language, although I'm much more superficial about it, interested in different languages' connections to each other and changes over time. There are plenty of languages at play in this book, especially the one near and dear to my heart, Polish. I love a moment where Jacob Frank is struggling to understand Polish morphological changes. You and me both, Jacob.

And hereticism, in Poland. Something about my memory of Poland makes me behave with more anarchy because I find myself craving more rebellion, more heretics every time I hear news from Poland. Strajk Kobiet (plural genitive case) warms the cockles of my heart.

interview with Olga Tokarczuk translated from Gazeta Wyborcza

I moved back to the US 10 months ago, and back to my little house in California 5 months ago. For all of that time, I have had most of my books sat on the floor because I am both so picky about furniture, and also so reluctant to buy furniture new.

Does anyone else have that problem?

Well, I finally did the evil thing and bought the amazon dupe of what I really wanted and despite several finger hooverings over the "cancel order" button, this 6-shelf unit showed up today.