Conviviality and Anti-Sociality

# You will not find me on GoodReads

I read Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. A literary friend of mine recommended I read her memoir but I found this instead. Having been aware of her repute as a pioneer of narrative nonfiction and generally being a woman-at-large in the writing world, I was sure I would be in for a treat, but like a lot of classics, it surprised me. I experienced a bit of the Citizen Kane effect, but I read some contemporary reviews and recent retrospectives and pieced together exactly why she was regarded as so revolutionary in her time. Basically:

• Novel approach to journalism. The New Journalism movement was just beginning, and its main innovation was bringing literary devices and a narrative style to journalism, which went along with an emphasis on immersive reporting.

  Just as today, mainstream headlines felt out of touch with the youth who comprised the voice of counterculture movements. Didion and her peers went and spent time with their subjects, affording them to bring not only deeper insights but also a personal connection.

• Subjectivity. Didion in particular, in this book of essays, aligns her writing along the central theme of (to borrow a famous line from the Yeats poem for which the book is named) “things fall apart.” This was natural for Didion, who felt she was born with “a presentiment of loss” and who experienced, apparently, nothing but disillusionment after disillusionment from Sacramento to New York to Los Angeles and back again.

  She turns this cynicism against her subjects and writes biting criticisms which are not without empathy. Again: a journalist going into the place where everything is happening in the rumble of the 1960s, but bringing her unique voice and perspective as a writer. This theme seemed to resonate with Americans at the time, and the book enjoyed instant mainstream critical acclaim.

It’s this detail, this highly critical tone of hers, that rubbed me the wrong way at first while reading. I felt she was being unreasonably, inexplicably cruel to her subjects, incommensurate with the time she apparently spent with them. It was only from reading some of the reviews of the book, which included biographical articles about her lifelong personal struggles, that I realized she did not hold some particular anathema towards the residents of San Bernadino or Haight-Ashbury, but rather she was constant companion to a general despair that may or may have been a reflection of the circumstances. And so there’s a psychoanalytic logic to this scenario: who better to write about the chaos, loss, and neuroticism of the 1960s than a writer who embodies it all? This, the interleaving of the personal with the public and with the political, the psychology of one generalized to all and of all contained in one, is, I suppose, the point of New Journalism.

I read Tools for Conviviality in pieces, as if I was being passed, each day, one small card, the sum of which comprised the entire book but on each one only a single sentence. It’s a surprisingly tolerable way to read. But in my typical fashion I made a sprint for the end in the last fifty pages. For that I went to MIT’s Dewey library one afternoon and read a very old gray hardcover copy.

Tools for Conviviality is one of those works which, aside from whatever novel presentation of ideas it may put forth, finds a great part of its value in being incredibly quotable. I have to wonder if Ivan Illich optimized for this characteristic. The effect is that I can, when searching for an argument to promote a humanistic approach to technology (so scarcely found in STEM academia), reach for Tools and quickly find some paragraph that authoritatively addresses the exact matter at hand. To support this I wrote down my favorite quotes organized by topic.

The book is densely written. Illich writes with precision but at such a level of consistent abstraction that I found it preferable to read in pieces. I found myself leaping with joy when he would come down from mysterious, three page long discussions on the spiritual effects of industrial production and address the concrete socioeconomic changes that resulted from the adoption of high-speed public transit. Let me be clear and say I do not mind this. It is to be expected from works of theory. But it makes it difficult to recommend that people read this. I certainly would not find this engaging or helpful had I not spent several years studying philosophy like it was a full-time job. I think what he has to say is crucial for any “technologist” to know, though, so I guess the burden of this knowledge is that I have to find a way to effectively communicate it.

I read more Ursula K. Le Guin—The Left Hand of Darkness, my second of her science fiction novels, and fourth overall. Riveting to read, beautiful and epic and understated.

My other reading has been much less focused. I read bits here and there of:

• Slaughterhouse-Five
• The Sun Also Rises
• Ficciones
• The Possessed - which in turn convinced me to read some of Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary
• A Pattern Language
• Don Quixote

I’m enjoying them all, and I jump around. I tend to be slow and meandering for the first half of any given book, and then I devour the latter half. I just wonder in which of these will I reach the inflection point first?

# You will, however, find me on Letterboxd

I saw:

• Crazy Rich Asians - I love this kind of movie; it’s so familiar and comforting. Great for watching on a plane, which is how I saw it.
• Paprika - I was delighted by the subversion of the “detective with a dark past” trope; the soundtrack is stuck in my head.
• Forbidden Planet - watched this on a movie night with my co-op; fun to observe the obvious influence this had on later sci-fi, especially Star Trek; also fun to see cinema that is closer to a play than to modern film; I felt like an intellectual watching a film that had such a deliberate pace and presentation of its story without trying to make a whole thing out of it.
• Hit Man - fun!
• Dune 2 - quite honestly, I was deeply disappointed by its misapprehension of the source material, and the visuals did not move me as much as the first movie.
• My Neighbor Totoro - proof that movies do not need to submit to a restrictive notion of plot or conflict in order to be compelling.
• Watership Down - in general I’m a huge fan of tales of epic journeys, especially when they emphasize the perilous nature of the quest. I appreciated the dedication to them actually being rabbits, albeit rabbits with advanced social structures, as opposed to merely recasting human society in the animal world (e.g., Bee Movie).
• Night on Earth - I liked the shots looking out the window at the cities at night.
• Flow - I didn’t think about the biblical flood allusion until the very end.
• O Brother, Where Art Thou? - I didn’t think about the biblical flood allusion until the very end. Wait–
• A Real Pain - c.f. The Zone of Interest in the portrayal of a concentration camp.
• Perfect Days - yeah it’s pretty good.
• Nosferatu - I was both moved and confused by the apparent thesis of the film, which states that supposedly modern and rational society is helpless when confronted with the undeniable darkness of the world and within us, whether that darkness takes the form of repressed sexual desire, aristocratic oppression, belief in the occult, or the brutality of plague. The observation seems accurate, but I could not detect, in the ending, a positive statement about modernity’s potential to resolve this internal conflict (without recourse to barbarism, e.g. sacrifice). I felt there was a plea for a modern cult of Isis, i.e., a suspension of the taboo on fertility and death, but no solution, no arrow pointing foward. Perhaps, characteristic of the horror genre there is not a resolution to this quandary. A film can only ask the question, not answer it…

# Putting the house in order

The last few months my side quests have involved things like desks, candles, notebooks, lamps, hand towels, and chalices.

I am on the lookout for:

• Pop culture critics who have actual demands implied by their analysis. Theorists should not just describe; they must prescribe. Not follow, lead!

  For example, if you are analyzing queer representation in television, I want to see a strong normative claim about what would be truly progressive and what just appears to be progressive.

• Taxonomies of imaginary worlds. For example, Flow is not acting alone. Who are its accomplices in the realization of post-apocalyptic landscapes of a certain, elusive aesthetic heritage?

• New thoughts on social media. Reframing it. Rethinking it.

• Art about AI art (derogatory).

Good tidings.