some new books I got!
I had some personal-use money set aside because to be honest, I am really really bad at falling into the kind of pseudo-asceticism considered “good” by social default … a.k.a. work, study, sleep, repeat.
& then I ended up buying nonfiction books & theory with that money 💀💀💀
I do struggle with reading fiction, I am very picky(?) and often need personalized recommendations, which leads to. Serious, theory, nonfiction reads which arent a Break per se. maybe it’s the auschizm .
got these books, for a few reasons:
Abolish Silicon Valley (W. Liu) and Palo Alto: a History of California, Capitalism, and the World (M. Harris)
Silicon Valley (SV) is a morbid fascination of mine. SV is a place stratified into the tech-bourgeois and the precariat who may, on the surface, appear similar. The whole place is a suburb and thus encourages its inhabitants to mask. The same street would have multiple large homes owned by the same family, and small, crumbling homes inhabited by a clown-car of underpaid workers. El Camino Real, a Spanish-colonial road which passes by many tech campuses, is lined on both sides with people living in their cars. San Francisco’s queer & hippie communities (the Castro, Haight-Ashbury…) have been evicted by gentrification, and afaik the Tenderloin stands alone as resistant due to its reputation and much of it being non-profit SROs set up for drug addiction rehabilitation and safe homes for queers.
People with useful but mundane jobs, people with jobs that keep SV running like farmers, customer service, the miners at the concrete-aggregate mine… all fucked. Desperate. These places get shot up by workers who see terrorism as the only way out. SV belongs to the “unicorn” CEOs, who are given credit for the work done by their employees, who are given money due to their “eccentric genius” appearance regardless of merit – Elizabeth Holmes, SBF, Elon Musk, so on… – the rest who keep the lights on might chance into catching some of the economic windfall. It wants entrepreneurs and exceptional individuals only, neoliberal fantasyland, which is falling to pieces because this model is grounded in fantasy.
SV is a suburb of massive importance, its main exports being cultural-tech (Netflix, Uber, Google, Facebook/Meta, Tesla) therefore being a driver of The gig economy, Planned obsolescence, Privacy invasion, Streaming/subscription services and Renting things instead of owning them ... it is the nesting-ground of 21st-century hell, the exemplar Annihilatory Suburb where the locus of control shifts externally to idolized oligarchs. and this impact is absolutely not geographically constrained.
Planta Sapiens (P. Calvo, N. Lawrence)
Mentioned my animist beliefs here: all things are living entities in some way, and so killing is unavoidable and happens as part of natural cycles … as beings capable of perceiving this, our responsibility thus becomes to minimize suffering, fear, pain... in animals, we have a better idea of what this entails, IMO due to their human-adjacency (e.g. the UK laws re:animal welfare). But in plants? I personally would like to know more, to know if certain things are thought to cause avoidable suffering or not. But regardless it’s fascinating and the general disregard for non-animal intelligence is emblematic of larger trends around human chauvinism as-broadened to fauna chauvinism. why we(generalization) revolt at the idea of culling invasive domestic cats, but don’t care about killing weeds in the garden in pursuit of homogeneity.
Transdisciplinary Knowledge Co-Production: a Guide for Sustainable Cities (K. Hemström, D. Simon, H. Palmer, B. Perry, M. Polk)
Putting things into categories is useful, because eliminating categories that oversimplify will probably eliminate all categories and make it really hard to actually comprehend things… typically, interest is piqued by a broader concept and then narrows as one discovers more. The education pipeline of, Science –> Biology –> Ecology –> Behavioral ecology –> Behavioral ecology WRT ecotoxicology WRT evo-devo –> The impacts of agent orange on animal development –> Agent orange & one specific species –> ...
getting to that endpoint in one leap isn’t super feasible, maybe unless you observe that specific endpoint by circumstance, which would basically constrict most people’s studies to their own lived experience. As if academia’s demographic & topic-focus unbalance needs to be worsened.
But categorization is flawed and should not be considered the rule. By putting Things into Subjects, we fail to grasp things that are cross-subjects. Disabilities that affect different organs/systems get ignored by organ/system-specialist doctors. Estuaries get ignored by science for decades, because they’re too marine for freshwater scientists, but too freshwater for marine scientists.
Concerning ideas like urban sustainability, compartmentalization would be incredibly nonsensical. But generally, one needs tools and frameworks to mitigate its effects, and those aren’t necessarily common knowledge. Hence why I got this book.
An Unquiet Mind (K. R. Jamison)
Growing up I received a lot of support for depression which I didn’t really have in an immensely severe capacity. DPDR, delusion, impulsivity, and hypomania are major concerns for my wellbeing, but they’re Not the diagnosis I was “allowed”(?) to have. Schizoaffective-like auschizm-auDHD-OCD , idk. Anyways I want to know more about mania, because “mental health advocacy” has diluted into anxiety, depression, and *some8 autistic/ADHD experiences. Jamison has works that have discussed how the idea of bipolar as mania-depression or hypomania-depression is flawed, because many people experience consistent mania with not so much depressive presentation.
The Divided Self (R. D. Laing)
I knew about Laing via my correspondence with Austrian-Scottish antipsych collectives which draw from Laing and Art Brut Center Gugging. Laing is a progenitor of the idea of schizospec experience as a normal psychological adjustment to the fucked up world we live in. Laing advocated for those in his residences to explore an “anarchy of experience”, not being forced into medication and institutionalization, instead pursuing things they actually wanted … people like Mary Barnes underwent regression therapy after reaching out to Laing on their own accord, with Barnes beginning to paint with her own faeces on the walls … instead of denying this art-urge, she was given similar-texture materials (grease crayons) to continue to explore art in a way that doesn’t have so much of a disease risk for herself.
So Laing’s ideas and treatments and communities were pretty remarkable for his contemporaries, and is important in the pushback against the “medical model of mental illness” – which is why I got this book. Laing was kind of shitty though sometimes, taking advantage of the vulnerable people in his care … so part of my interest also lays in identifying remnants/reflections of that aspect in his ideology.
Picking up this publication led to me finally remembering a book I read a part of when I was working at a second-hand book shop (I could read any book we had!) – Laing & A. Esterson's work Sanity, Madness and the Family. I had picked up the book at a time where I was suffering under misdiagnoses and inappropriate medicines, & it really clicked in some way. I'll certainly be looking out for a copy.
Disability Praxis: the Body as a Site of Struggle (B. Williams-Findlay)
“Trespass! Protest! Blockade!” “Spend time outside in your community, spend time in nature, learn self-sufficiency to reduce reliance on oppressive systems, boycott certain brands…!” all good advice, considering the amount of people who can and should do these things but do not.
but the capacity of the disabled community to do these things is generally an afterthought. When I see it discussed, it’s usually providing financial aid (since when were disabled ppl known to have tons of disposable income…?), or doing online emotional support & advocacy (which are rightfully critiqued as many people do nothing more than that, but catches disabled people who can’t do more in the crossfire). …obviously do these things is you can.
it’ll be nice to see what this has to say about disability praxis because honestly I feel modern (physically?)-abled-driven rhetoric is gonna kill me, even though private discussions in collectives do not reflect the public rhetoric.
Living with the Dead (V. M. Viestad, A. Viestad)
hashtag, Death Positivity, trademark emoji.
If you've read some of my other posts, you're probably familiar with the fact I'm super interested in the culture surrounding death ... death is a terrifying & unavoidable thing all human cultures have had to grapple with, & we have come up with an extraordinary variety of rituals and practices.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (G. Maté)
a thread tangled with other things discussed in the above texts & also more.
Addiction rhetoric exemplifies the idea of victim-blaming. Then there is the idea of medicalization, of how taking amphetamines is good if you have the Right Diagnosis and bad if you Don’t, regardless of barriers to diagnosis. There is racism, there is anti-leftism, there is the War on Drugs. There is Purdue’s OxyContin and the exploitation of the fallible human body and the desire to accumulate capital driving deadly crises.
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so Yippee!! I look forward to these! I have other books first though.
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thanks for reading!🪱🦀
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