jdscott50's reviews
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New York Times Best Selling author and winner of the National Books Circle Award Clint Smith returns with a new book of poetry. In Above Ground, Clint Smith explores the joys and possibilities of fatherhood with the slow realization of the terror that can accompany it. Finding strength through family, he looks to the future with clear eyes. 

There is nothing like the fragility of being a parent. One moment, you are living the dream you never thought would come. At other times, you can feel like a fool bringing a child into this world. Its building community, family, and strong bonds that can see us through.

Favorite Passages:
“But some days, I worry 
that we are welcoming you into the flames
of a world that is burning.
Some days, I am afraid that I am
more kindling than water.”

“I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies
that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.”

“the drone was once a scrap of metal      the drone looks as if it might be a toy          the drone is not a toy      the drone could have been something else       something other than a killing machine      the drone could have been a house      the drone could have been a spoon      the drone could have been a swing      the drone does not know who it is going to kill next      the drone is going to kill next      the drone has learned to disguise itself as a shard of sky      the drone’s hum is a disembodied echo      the drone was mistaken for a star once      the drone renders itself celestial      the drone scoffs at sovereignty      the drone asks       what is a border if you can fly right over it?      the drone was built by a man      the drone killed a man     and a woman     and a child      the drone killed a child      and did not see her face      the drone does not see a face      the drone sees a body      and then the body is gone”

“I’m not sure what it means for us,
not to be the one to fire the bullet
but to behave as if the bullet always belonged
in that chest, and not our own.”

“It’s not that I don’t want people to tell me
I’m doing a good job it’s just I am praised for the sorts
of things no one ever thanks my wife for. I am adorned
in a garland of gold stars for simply being in this body.”

The Gun

the gun heard the first shot the gun thought it was a bursting pipe the gun heard the second shot and the third and the fourth the gun realized this was not a pipe the gun’s teacher told everyone to get on the ground the gun’s teacher went to lock the door the gun saw glass break and the teacher slump and bleed and fall silent the gun texted its parents and said i love you i’m so sorry for any trouble i’ve caused all these years you mean so much to me i’m so sorry the gun thought it would never leave the classroom the gun moved to a closet filled with several other shaking guns the gun texted its best friends in the group chat to see if they were okay the gun waited on a response the gun received one the gun did not receive another the gun waited for an hour the gun heard the door kicked open the gun was still in the closet and didn’t know who had entered the room the gun thought this was the end the gun thought of prom and graduation and college and children and all the things the gun would never have the gun heard more bullets the gun heard he’s down! the gun climbed out of the closet the gun put its hands on its head the gun walked outside the gun saw the cameras the gun hugged its sobbing mother and cried into her arms the gun heard thoughts and prayers the gun heard second amendment the gun heard lone wolf the gun texted its friend again the gun waited for a message the message never came

Working as a bookbinder and book repairer for the Met, Jen's work can sometimes be interesting but monotonous. When repairing a damaged book, she finds a romance novel cover with a German message. It unlocks a mystery. The hunt to find the message's origin takes her on a journey of her identity. Jen is also stuck in her own artistic expression. She just doesn't want to repair famous art and books, she wants to make her own.

Working in a post-11 New York the community still wears fresh scars. Jen searches for connection in her circle, in her community as well as searching the past for answers. I liked the combination of her history and identity and how the gay community was treated post-9/11 and in the 1940s.

Eileen Myles has been writing poetry since 1991. They have been a LAMBDA Literary Award Winner, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and professor emeritus of writing and literature at the University of California San Diego. Ther new book of poetry, A working Life, focuses on the beauty of every day living and the importance of caring for another all told in short punchy prose. 

My favorite poem was Friday Night. THe small words that give us big emotions to love, happiness, and being content. Sometimes, the short stanzas were difficult to read but worth it in many places. 

Essays by artists, writers, and musicians on the impact of woman musicians on their lives. Ann Enright writes about meeting her favorite musician and imagines eloquently expressing her impact on her, but instead finds herself stumbling over her words. Fatima Bhutto talks about the need for music for those in exile. She writes, "now dictators hate beautiful things like music since it inspires people and they cannot control it." 
So many more experiences from Sonic Youth's Kim Jordon to the CEO of Subpop records. 

Favorite Passages:

 There is liberty in musical dissonance. And where there is liberty, there will be mutiny. Tyrants hate music because no matter their force and their power, they will never, not ever, be able to control what is beautiful. 

 “Fruits of My Labor" is a song I most often turn to when I'm at sea in my desk chair with a blank page and the curtains drawn to trick myself into believing I'm writing at dawn. It's a reminder that I'm not the only person who has sat alone with my thoughts and wondered how life got so very confusing, wondered if I can be satisfied, wondered if I can regain the plot, wondered if I can work through my doubts and come out with some beauty. 

 Betrayal is a immanent risk. The disciplinary structure of language which announces its presence at many encounters—class, gender, race, national border—is a cancer endemic to any attempt at the command or disavowal of a language built to monitor scrutinize and direct expression and labor. This betrayal, or its risk, is a terror from which the only escape is a different register altogether. 

 When I witnessed that, I was convinced that music becomes audible when the musician is physically touching the instrument, but the music is already being played within that person. If the music you hear is made up of the vibrations being emitted from one person, layering multiple sounds on top of each other is an extraordinary phenomenon. Then you have an audience who comes to see that, and they bring that influence home with them. Music is vibration, so it enters people's bodies and souls like light. In order to be able to make the music audible that is already playing within you, you need to prepare yourself as a vessel to receive the music. You could say that that's my technique. It's all about keeping yourself light and putting yourself in the position to receive, rather than being tense. 

 

There is a disconnect there and being in this position it makes me feel uncomfortable sometimes. But it's all a part of life. when I create music or art and express myself, in a way, I'm posing everything that is inside of me to the outside world. As soon as my expression makes its way into the world, the person Who receives it interprets it in their own way. The receiver will project themselves onto me, the source of the expression, and create their own mental image of me. All the different people who receive my expression will have different mental images of me, so in a way there are multitudes of "me" that exist. By the time a person receives my expression, I don't exist there anymore. So being the source of this expression, all I can do is be myself and express myself honestly. My job is to expose the sounds that are within me in a way that feels good to me, and be myself to the best of my abilities. 

 

When Reno Penaluma is sitting in her graduate philosophy class, her visiting professor speaks openly on how women do not have the mental fortitude for philosophy. Caught in the moment, instead of protesting it, she internalizes the remarks. Searching for a thesis, she finds connections to prominent women philosophers in history. 

Damaris Cudworth/Lady Marsham, Mary Astell, Catherine Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft all inspire her to redouble her efforts and help these neglected philosophers find new light. "Why have women been given intelligent souls if they cannot improve them?" (Astell) If men are born fee why are women slaves. 

All these women wrote at a time when less than a quarter of women could even write. Yet, their writing would rival Ocke, Hobes, Rousseau, and many who would lay the foundation of modern thought and American Democracy. In their rediscovery, she discovers her own motivation, completes her degree, leaves her husband, and writes this book. A journey of discovery, these inspirational philosophers get a well-deserved review. 

Favorite Passages:
 This book tells the story of how I lost myself in philosophy and then, through my discovery of these early feminist philosophers, found a path back to myself. Despite the centuries that separated us, we were united by our love of philosophy and our frustration, sorrow, and anger. What does a woman do when she’s told that she doesn’t belong or that she’s not as smart as a man because of her sex? Some let it roll off their backs, knowing their worth regardless of what they’re told. I admire these women, but I’m not like them. I can’t maintain that level of equanimity. I struggle, I doubt, but above all, I need answers—or at least attempts to explain what is happening to me and why. In this, I feel a kinship with these four philosophers. 

 To help her readers see women anew, she borrowed language from the new science. She wrote that women were unaccustomed to thinking for themselves and were in an important sense indistinguish- able from automatons. They move and speak, but they are mostly following orders from without and have an “unthinking mechani- cal way of living.”55 Here she invoked Descartes’s division of reality into two substances: the mind, which is immaterial and thinking, and matter, which is its opposite—material and unthinking. These substances were governed by different laws, and the motion of mate- rial things was due to physical forces, whereas the activity of mind was rational. For Astell and many other early modern philosophers, reason was essential to freedom. To follow the commands of some- one else was to be not truly free. A person must earn her own path to salvation. But Astell argued that women lived as if they were only matter in motion, as if they were just “Machins” devoid of mind.56 

 This reminds me of something the philosopher Irigaray once said. She asks what a philosophy of woman’s nature would look like that didn’t derive from the belief that women are inferior and des- tined for motherhood: “But to what reality would woman correspond, independently of her reproductive function?”113 It’s an open ques- tion and one that Astell was also motivated by centuries ago. Astell’s answer was that a woman’s sex should not be her defining feature if she does not want it to be, because humans are foremost rational persons. Even if a woman were to participate in a traditional female role, it should not be because of necessity but rather because she freely chose to do so. A sentiment that—despite her conservatism in other areas—is strikingly modern. 

 A friend wrote that in Astell’s final moments of life, she asked to have her coffin placed next to her bed and to be alone, contemplating the afterlife. 

 She saw the minimal investment in her intellect as symptom- atic of a cultural force inhibiting the minds of women. In these early years she didn’t set forth a path to freedom for women. Instead, she absorbed this oppression and then spun it out into a description of the world as suffocating and harmful to women’s intellects; it was a place where women would live and die, vulnerable and without much control over their own thought. 

 It’s often a tougher path for a woman, because society can be a hostile place for her to cultivate her subjectivity. It was true in the seventeenth century, and it was true for me. Maybe, then, the com- mon experience of being a woman in philosophy is to be effaced: your feelings, your opinions, your presence, your life, your works, your impact are belittled, glanced at, or ignored. The psychological hurdles are one reason why today there are fewer women than men in graduate programs across many disciplines, and even fewer who rise to the top of their class, and why some women seem to come into their own at a slower rate than men. Only years later, when men have outpaced most women in their careers, will women begin to discover how they nearly snuffed themselves out. Just like I was doing. I took Masham’s recommendation to be: Do not retreat. A woman’s path to self-knowledge requires her to risk losing herself to find herself. 

 

Art, philosophy, and literature tell us a different story. That the brief time we are here matters, that it is meaningful and contains beauty. We’ve learned to talk to ourselves in this expansive and dark vacuum to keep ourselves company, so that we can transcend our finite, perplexing condition—if not in fact, then in our imaginations. We’ve learned to free ourselves—if only for the duration of a poem, an equation, a book, a prayer—from our despair.

 

A father (Juan) and son (Gaspar) go on a road trip to spread their mother's ashes, who recently died in a car accident. His family is insistent they stop to see them. The trip is arduous due to Juan's heart condition. Furthermore, there are hints that all is not what it seems. Juan is actually a medium. He can summon the dark forces of hell on command. They are traveling to see his family, who have been guardians of this ritual for hundreds of years. A family greedy with power with the hopes that this ritual will make them immortal and wealthy. With Juan's ill health, they want to continue to use him to open the portal. Their hopes are that his five-year-old son will take on the legacy, but if he doesn't develop powers, they plan to transfer Juan's consciousness into his son. Juan has difficult choices to protect his son against these dark forces. 

With horror at its center, Enriquez brilliantly makes allegories to power and corruption in Argentina. The Dirty War was a dark time in the nation's history, including mass executions, disappearances, and other atrocities. It is these very atrocities that tie into the order's power. Juan being near death and the country in a sort of near-death open portals to hell, with Enriquez suggesting Hell on Earth and Hell is only as thin as a door. There are also aspects of community shame in both instances. A father lamenting he cannot share things with his son, his share of night. 

Favorite Passages:

 The Darkness asked for bodies—as the excuse she gave. But that wasn't true. The Darkness didn't ask for anything, and Juan knew it. In the Order, Mercedes was the firmest believer in the exercise of cruelty and perversion as the path to secret illumination. Juan believed, moreover, that she considered amorality to be a mark of class. The further away she got from moral convention, she thought, the more apparent her inborn superiority became. 

 Ghosts are real. And the ones who come aren’t always the one you’ve called. 

"...he took Gaspar's face in his hands, leaned down to look him in the eyes, and caressed his hair, the box on the ground between them, and he said, You have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn't cursed, I don't konw if I can leave you something that isn't dirty, that isn't dark, our share of night." p 232

Being and orphan meant bearing ashes p 307

What I learned over the years is that the nation of affluence is monotonous. The properties, the land, the companies that others manage for us, the old, dark houses and the new, luminous ones, the leather skin of women who spend summers in the south of France or Spain or Italy, the silver, the Gobelines tapestries, the paintings, the art collections, the gardens, the people who work for us about whom we know nothing. Doesn't matter if Buenos Aires or London. It doesn't matter either that our families are founders of the Order. Being rich makes us like all rich people. Being founders of the Order differentiates us from the whole world. p245

That is also what it is to be rich: that contempt for beauty and the refusal to offer even the dignity of a name. 245 

All fortunes are built on the suffering of others, and ours, though it has unique and astonishing characteristics, is no exception. p 245

Only the mediums can summon this Darkness that speaks and that will help us live forever, help us walk like the gods. Mortals are the past, Florence once said to me. It took a long time for the method of survial to be revealed, and it is, of course, repugnant. I should also add that, so far, it's not only repugnant but also a resounding failure. There is no arguing with faith, though. And it's impossible to disbelieve when the Darkness comes. So, we trust, and we go on. At least, many of us do. Others are sick with doubt.

It feels as if we are constantly running around. Our time is not our own. Jenny Odell's groundbreaking book, How to Do Nothing, demonstrated how to take back our time. In this new book, Saving Time, Odell continues this conversation. Are we a slave to the clock, or is there another way to measure time and make it our own?

I didn't like this one as much as How to Do Nothing. That book was an epiphany into the realization that we constantly think about monetizing ourselves. In Saving Time, she jumps off this idea, but it is less focused. It seems to imply moving oneself to an earth clock, a seasonal clock rather than a capitalistic one, but easier said than done. A good reminder again to take back one's time. 

A dual history and biography of Ai Weiwei and his father, Ai Qing. Ai Qing was a famous poet who lived during Chinese imperialism, World War II, and the eventual Communist rule. His poetry would inspire and encourage the war against Japan and the hope of a new Chinese Nation. However, his defense of criticisms of Mao would have him branded as a Righest and exiled. Ai Weiwei documents these hardships and how this censorship would plant the seed for his own art. His absurdity in art becomes subversive, leading to his own exile, censorship, and incarceration. 

Like his father, he would be detained in a very absurdist fashion. Guards would remain in his room during his detainment and interpretation, leading to many absurd developments. Through it all, his subversive ideas thwart the Chinese government until he eventually needs to leave the country for his safety.

An illuminating look at Ai Weiwei and his father, AI Qing. Oppressive regimes always have their antagonists and, through art and beauty, provide a home for a better way. 

Mathew Desmond returns with a new book. After the success of Eviction, Desmond delves deeper into many of the root causes of poverty in the United States. We may sometimes view poverty and homelessness as a fault in our community. Instead, Desmond demonstrates that this works as designed. The poor can be repeatedly taken advantage of through micro fees that make corporations and CEOs super-rich. The impoverished don't have lawyers and advocates. When they go to the check cashing place, they get fleeced; it works as designed. When they try to get housing and get blocked, it works as designed. Many communities rely on the impoverished as a warning to keep workers in check; this works as designed. What are the solutions? It is uncertain, but these societal ills won't stop until communities begin to care about all of their citizens. 

Munroe Bergdorf lost her modeling contract with L'oreal due to comments addressing racism during the Charlottesville protest. She takes us back to the beginning of her childhood in England with biracial parentage. A Jamaican father and English mother left her confused when she would not become the child they expected. She documents this loneliness as she transitions from a young gay man to a famous trans woman model. 

There is a moving section where she discovers drag and the power it gives her to become her true self. Her journey is remarkable. Just as she emerges with a contract, she is embroiled in controversy for speaking out on racism and standing in solidarity with the people of Charlottesville. It would ruin her first major contract with Loreal. After time and sticking to her guns, she wins a new contract and becomes an ambassador for the gay community. An inspiring story that is sorely needed now. 
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"Summer break had arrived and the last thing I wanted to do was spend it twiddling my thumbs in Essex, so I got a job on the door of a drag club instead. I found drag euphoric. Before I had the language to be able to identify as trans, I would refer to myself as a queen. Drag unlocked part of myself that I’d never experienced before. It was more than just make-up, a wig, heels and a tight dress. It was the feeling of waking up, of accessing the confidence to be fully present, fearless and bold. Going out in drag made me feel like the best version of myself; I felt liberated, as if I was able to wear my feelings for everyone to see, without shame, without filter.”