Plenty of coverage on conservative politics in the South, but mutual aid
programs quietly hum along:
Because of the culture of Alabama, the project is not explicit about its
leftist politics and doesn’t do much in the way of conventional political
organizing, allowing it to engage with and retain volunteers from a wide
spectrum of ideologies, including unrepentant Trump supporters. But, quietly,
for some of its volunteers, the AFC is a chance to turn theory into reality.
When people ask Henson about his communist ideas, he just points to the shop.
The Alabama contingent was also tapping into a long history of communism in
the South, which started, Bolton pointed out, among yeoman farmers, for whom
an ad hoc communism was a way of life centered on the harvest, with everyone
pitching in to bring in the season’s produce.
The South has been exoticized by movies like Deliverance, and when a liberal
journalist drops into Alabama to, say, interview someone about Barack Obama,
the writer always seems to choose a racist roofer in a Walmart parking lot. It
works to confirm an outsider’s perspective that the working class in the South
is not worth the effort.
That’s why high school, or a crappy job, or any other restrictive circumstance
can be dangerous: They make dreams too painful to bear. To avoid longing, we
hunker down, wait, and resolve to just survive. Great art becomes a reminder
of the art you want to be making, and of the gigantic world outside of your
small, seemingly inescapable one. We hide from great things because they
inspire us, and in this state, inspiration hurts.
Notable highlights on the next few years of AI development from the CEO of
Anthropic:
On Teaching Character
I am actually fairly optimistic that Claude’s constitutional training will be
more robust to novel situations than people might think, because we are
increasingly finding that high-level training at the level of character and
identity is surprisingly powerful
On Bioweapons
To put it another way, renting a powerful AI gives intelligence to malicious
(but otherwise average) people. I am worried there are potentially a large
number of such people out there, and that if they have access to an easy way
to kill millions of people, sooner or later one of them will do it.
Additionally, those who do have expertise may be enabled to commit even
larger-scale destruction than they could before.
...
We believe that models are likely now approaching the point where, without
safeguards, they could be useful in enabling someone with a STEM degree but
not specifically a biology degree to go through the whole process of producing
a bioweapon.
On Jobs
re: "Humans will find other jobs to do"
By contrast, AI is increasingly matching the general cognitive profile of
humans, which means it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily
be created in response to the old ones being automated. Another way to say it
is that AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general
labor substitute for humans.
And later, on the overlap of labor and democracy:
Democracy is ultimately backstopped by the idea that the population as a whole
is necessary for the operation of the economy. If that economic leverage goes
away, then the implicit social contract of democracy may stop working.
On Taxes
I think the extreme levels of inequality predicted in this essay justify a
more robust tax policy on basic moral grounds, but I can also make a pragmatic
argument to the world’s billionaires that it’s in their interest to support a
good version of it: if they don’t support a good version, they’ll inevitably
get a bad version designed by a mob.
On Meaning and Purpose
We simply need to break the link between the generation of economic value and
self-worth and meaning. But that is a transition society has to make, and
there is always the risk we don’t handle it well.
So I think for me the way I rebel against the idea of basing self-worth on
utility is to dream of worlds where that's not true anymore, rather than
psychoanalyze myself out of what I think is an adaptive response to the world
we live in.
(But also, what a beautiful opportunity to watch two people become friends in
real time.)
RIP to the perfect book format: the mass market paperback.
According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million
in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year
through October were about 15 million units.
For instance: did you know that daily social media use increases the
likelihood a child will commit suicide by 12-18%? Or that teenagers are far
more likely to visit the ER for psychiatric problems if they have an Instagram
account? Or that a child’s amount of social media use, past a certain
threshold, correlates exponentially with poorer sleep, lower reported
wellbeing, and more severe mental health symptoms?
If that was all true for social media -- and again, none of it is -- you and I
both would agree that people under 16 or so should not have access to
platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. Imagine allowing your child to enter any
system that would make them 12-18% more likely to kill themselves. That would
be insane. You wouldn’t let your kid anywhere near that system, and the public
would protest until it was eliminated once for all.
[...]
Yes, there’s the obvious twist -- all the data I just listed is true for the
effects of school. The modern education system is probably the single biggest
threat to the mental health of children. At the very least, the evidence for
its negative effects is unambiguous: the same cannot be said for social media.
I hope we won’t let the greatest threat to the mental health of our children
go unaddressed. Nor do I know how to fix it: to truly remedy the system, we’ll
need a much larger reckoning. But we can, at least, start bringing it down the
same way we built it up: one brick at a time. And to decide which bricks to
remove first from the prison, we should maybe consider the opinions of the
people we’ve locked inside.
"Thank y'all for this opportunity to do needlessly complicated shit. That is the
philosophy of this band." clipping. bringing out all the doodads and
whatchamacallits for their Tiny Desk.
From James L. Haley's
Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii
,
on the nation's uniquely wild and winding journey through modernization and
annexation:
And then the struggle was on for the next seven
monarchs: to
balance bringing their people into the Industrial Age while preserving for
them some sense of cultural identity; to maintain the sovereignty of their
country while dealing with the greediest and most powerful empires in the
world; to provide a modern economy and wealth for their people while becoming
snared ever tighter in the grip of the American economic colossus. For all
this to have taken place in the span of one human lifetime is a pageant of
imperial triumph and human tragedy rare, if not unknown, elsewhere in history.
With sleep delayed, night was peopled with the stories and the cases my
grandfather told and told: legends, apparitions, terrors, unique episodes, old
deaths, scuffles with sticks and stones, the words of our forefathers, an
untiring rumour of memories that would keep me awake while at the same time
gently lulling me. I could never know if he was silent when he realised that I
had fallen asleep or if he kept on talking so as not to leave half-unanswered
the question I invariably asked into the most delayed pauses he placed on
purpose within the account: “And what happened next?”
Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch,
snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens,
spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed
gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and
cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered
wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by
hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River
and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed form kitchen doors,
watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of
steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over
scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers,
heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their
husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes;
candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated
lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars;
weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes;
booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers;
filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses
prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers;
lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses;
prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives;
skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits;
tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and
grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying
not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the
once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies;
syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of
oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers;
blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the
newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the
weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world,
then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn
from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony
of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is
evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred
reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he
thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.
The drive out is strangely quiet. The skyline recedes into the distance. In
Phnom Penh, the streets buzz with motorcycles and cars and chatter. Here, I hear
motors only in the distance, the wind against the tall grass.
The tuk-tuk driver pulls off the marshland road into a small dirt lot. I walk
through an adorned gate, roof the color of clay. On the other side is a walkway
leading up to a large stupa, similarly adorned. On the outside, it appears
solemn, beautiful. On the inside: bones.
Next to the stupa, the guide says, is where they brought them. It would have
been a small shack, and the soldiers would take people off the bus and leave
them there for the night. Sometimes it was longer than a night, the guide says,
when the soldiers simply couldn't kill people fast enough.
I hiked the
Camino de Santiago in
August/September 2025. I did the Camino Frances starting from
Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port
over 28 days,
and for anyone with the time to do it, I highly recommend it.
This page is mostly intended as a set of logistics and pro-tips for anyone
actively interested in walking. It's not intended to persuade someone who's
uncertain about walking (though if that would be interesting, let me know!).
Picking Routes
I walked the Camino Frances, though there are of course many others. The Camino
Portugués is another popular option that's a bit shorter and flatter. There are
plenty of
great comparisons
online too.
I picked the Frances because it seems to be the default pick for most people. I
think it's broadly considered the "classic" Camino from the folks I talked to.
It's also probably the most common route historically, since what we now call
the Camino Frances was one of the only options for crossing the Pyrnees
Mountains in ye olden days.
My main suggestion, though, is to do whatever works for you. Historically the
"real Camino" was just walking out your door and going until you get to the end
-- there was no "official" pathway. Everyone also has their own physical
conditions, time off from work, children to take care of, and all the rest of it
to juggle. Europeans regularly piecemeal the Camino, walking in one-week chunks
and gradually completing it over time. Many walkers I met did
sections1 and then skipped to Sarria for the last 100km. One recurring
theme on the Camino is that there is no right or wrong way to do anything; do
what you can, where you are, with what you've got.
Resources
My primary resource that I highly recommend is
the Wise Pilgrim,
which has a great
mobile app
that's well worth the $5. What's nice is that at a glance, it tells you what
amenities each town has, and for all the albergues in that town, it tells you
whether they provide dinner, whether they have laundry, how many bunks they
have, and so on. There's also reviews, which often give a good signal on the
best hosts/dinner/etc.
Vibes
I knew the Camino was a social experience before I went, but I didn't realize
exactly how social it would be. It's incredibly common to strike up
conversation with other folks on the trail, and if you're staying in albergues,
everyone generally has a few hours of downtime in the afternoons, during which
everyone is usually hanging around chatting and getting dinner together. This is
especially true in the areas with the highest concentrations of pilgrims, such
as the very beginning and after major cities.
If you keep a consistent pace or stick to most of the guidebook stopping points,
you'll most likely encounter the same people repeatedly. New people will come
into and out of your Camino family regularly as people inevitably get injured,
take rest days, or trudge ahead of you, and all of this is part of the journey.
Some of the more rural middle sections might have some days with less people
around, but generally another pilgrim is never too far behind you.
If you do want alone time, fear not. It is widely acknowledged among pilgrims
that everyone walks their own way, and there's absolutely no problem with
greeting someone and then going on your own way. I walked the Camino
significantly faster than most and did much of the middle section almost
entirely on my own, and it was always easy to slot back into groups whenever I
wanted to.
Packing
Pack light, and then pack lighter.
Remember: this will be on your back for most of the day, every day, for a
month. Every ounce counts.
The pack I took is more-or-less the
same set of clothes I use during normal
travel. This clocked in around 12lbs2 at the time, and at that weight I
had no problem with my back or shoulders.
My pack was significantly lighter than most, so much so that people regularly
commented on it on the trail. Most people use full-size, 50+L backpacks like you
might use for the Appalachian Trail. This is way too big. If you have a
full-sized pack like that, by all means use it, but do not feel the need to pack
it full. As the saying goes, "the Camino will provide" -- there are so many
places to buy food and do laundry on the trail that there's little need to
generally pack much more than a few pairs of clothes and some minimal first-aid
supplies.
I'll say more about that under "Logistics", but suffice it to say
that you walk through several majors cities along the way, and every day or two,
you'll pass through at least one town with a pharmacy, all of which have gear
specifically for pilgrims like ibuprofen, ankle braces, blister treatments, and
so on. Don't feel the need to pack everything under the sun.
All you really need: walking shoes, a few sets of shirts/pants/underwear/socks,
a rain coat, toiletries, a towel, a sleeping bag or liner, and probably some
sandals or flip-flops. That's it.
A note on luggage forwarding
There are many services along the Camino that will transfer your luggage from
hotel-to-hotel for you. You are more than welcome to use this, and especially if
you have a physical condition that means you are unable to carry a pack, then by
all means do what is necessary for you to make your trip.
However, I will say that the vast majority of pilgrims carry their packs. I
didn't see hardly anyone doing luggage forawrding until I got to Sarria, and
personally, I think carrying a pack is part of the experience anyways.
Logistics
As I mentioned earlier, a common saying is that "The Camino Provides." There is
an entire cottage industry along the Camino specifically oriented around
providing goods and services for peregrinos, including hotels/hostels,
restaurants, pharmacies, doctors, taxis, churches, sporting goods stores, and
souvenirs.
Accomodations
The most common form of accomodations on the Camino are called albergues.
Albergues are hostels specifically for pilgrims; some are privately owned and
operated, and most towns also have one that's run by the city (usually called
the albergue municipal). The private ones, also sometimes referred to as
hostals, usually have additional services like dinner/breakfast, whereas the
municipals are often quite bare-bones. The going rate for these as of 2025 was
anywhere from 7-15 euros, though you can certainly pay slightly more than that
for a "poshtel."
There are also hotels in many towns, especially in the bigger
"guidebook"3 towns. You may see them called hotels, pensiones, or
in some of the more remote areas, casa rurales. If you're not down for the
hostel vibe, there are plenty of these around (though I would suggest you stay
at least some nights in an albergue).
A note on booking ahead: many albergues allow you to book online, though most of
the municipal ones are first-come-first-served. Some people get anxious about
not having their hotels booked ahead of time, but personally, I preferred the
flexibility of booking day-of or just showing up without a reservation. I was
there during a pretty popular time of year and still never had a problem finding
a room. Even for folks who like to book ahead, I'd say to book only the first
handful of stops and then go from there -- you never know when you'll need to
take a rest day or change your pace.
Laundry
Many albergues have a laundry machine or a sink for doing laundry, as well as
clothes lines for drying. Some nicer albergues and hotels may also have a dryer.
In larger cities (Pamplona/Leon/Burgos/etc.), there are also laundromats. I
generally recommend carrying
detergent sheets, much better than
paying several euros for detergent in a lot of places.
Food
Practically every town will have at least one bar4 that is open throughout
the day. For the bars in smaller towns, you can expect basically the same
options everywhere: in the morning, coffee, tortillas5, and some
simple sandwiches (often just chorizo or jamon/cheese on a baguette); in the
afternoon/evening, bar food and often a three-course menu del dia or menu del
peregrino for pilgrims, which is generally a salad, a grilled protein and
potatoes/veggies, and a dessert (often prepackaged, like pudding or flan).
The best option for dinner is usually to see if your accomodations serve dinner.
Most often this is a cooked by the hospitalero/a, many of whom are solid
cooks. Expect some paella, huevos y patatas, and plenty of red wine.
Many places provide breakfast, but it's usually quite simple: coffee/tea, bread
with butter/jam, and maybe some fruit. In my opinion, it was often not worth the
extra euros to buy breakfast at the accomodation, and instead I would stop at
the first town with a bar and get a sandwich and coffee there.
Personally, I struggled to get enough protein on the Camino. Spanish food is
pretty carb-heavy, and I often bought jamon/cheese and protein drinks at markets
whenever I saw them, and as time went on, I felt the need to eat more meals
throughout the day to get enough calories in. (I'm pretty sure I lost 8-10lbs on
the walk, even with something like 5 meals a day.) There's plenty of food, but
the kinds of food are fairly narrow -- something to keep in mind if you have
dietary restrictions or specific needs.
That covers just about everything I can think of off the top of my head. Most of
all, my advice is to remember that it's a long walk. Take your time, talk to
people, have some quiet moments, and pack light.
Buen Camino!
Be aware of the contact between your feet and the earth. Walk as if you are
kissing the earth with your feet.
Thich Nhat Hanh
One common strategy was to walk Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Pamplona and then
Sarria to Santiago de Compostela, but any chunk will work. Starting at a
common starting point like SJPDP will give you a lot of the social
experience too, since the majority of pilgrims there will be just as fresh
as you are. ↩︎
One adjustment I had made at the time was to substitute my laptop for an
iPad Mini + a bluetooth keyboard, which shaved ~1lb off. Probably worth it. ↩︎
That is, the towns most often recommended as stopping points by guidebooks,
which tend to be more larger and more developed. ↩︎
Don't be fooled by the term "bar", they're more like cafes or restaurants. ↩︎
The Spanish omelette made
with eggs and potatoes, not like the Mexican bread. ↩︎
Similar to my article on the Camino de Santiago,
this article is primarily designed as a list of suggestions for folks who have
already decided to walk the
Kumano Kodo. I highly
recommend it -- it's much more secluded than the Camino, and while it takes a
lot more planning, it's well worth the effort.
Routes
The Kumano Kodo is the name given to the many pilgrimage trails that go around
the Kii Peninsula. My experience is only with the Nakahechi Route, which goes
from Tanabe to the Nachi Grand Shrine. I'd love to do the other routes in the
future! However, the Nakahechi seems to be the most developed, primarily from
the services and promotion provided by the
Tanabe City Kumano Tourism Bureau,
who created most of the official English-language resources.
Physical Requirements
The Nakahechi Route is thoroughly doable for anyone who hikes or runs regularly.
Most days involve walking around 15km/9mi, with the second day being 25km/15mi
(though you can always take a bus to shave off some of that distance if you'd
prefer). The more difficult aspect is the vertical, since each day involves
700-1000m in elevation changes. If you pack light or forward your luggage, it's
totally reasonable to do without much training, in my opinion.
Packing
My suggestions for packing are much the same as my
suggestions for the Camino, so just go
see those. The only change I'll note is that the Kumano Kodo is much more remote
than the Camino, and there is not nearly as much of a "cottage industry" around
the trail so far. You'll find some small grocery stores on occasion and there's
a small convenience store near Hongu Taisha (at the end of Day 2), but that's
the extent of what you'll find, so it's probably wise to pack supplies for the
full few days, since there's no guaranteed places to restock.
Otherwise, my general advice stands: pack light, then pack lighter. You don't
need much. Most accomodations geared towards walkers will provide dinner,
breakfast, and a bento for lunch, so you don't need much food. It's still Japan,
so even in the most remote towns, you'll find vending machines with coffee,
Pocari Sweat, all the usual candidates.
Accomodations
Booking accomodations is perhaps the most tricky part of walking the Kumano Kodo
if you don't speak Japanese. There is a travel service called
Kumano Travel that you can book through. My
experience with it is that it was incredibly slow -- I submitted reservations
and didn't hear back from them for a full week, so I cancelled and just booked
places myself. This makes sense given the reality of the Kumano Kodo: many of
the hotels and accomodations are run by older folks who rarely, if ever, use the
internet, and the service operates (as far as I understand it) by having people
from the Tourism Bureau literally call up the places every now and again to book
for people.
Personally, I just booked through Booking.com and AirBnb, and while this allowed
for less options than Kumano Travel, it meant I got much faster confirmation and
could book at any time.
One note about seasonality: many of the smaller minshuku, guesthouses, or other
businesses are run by a single person, and it's not uncommon for that person to
be traveling or not open during certain parts of the year. The few options there
are can go fast, especially if you're looking to go in the high seasons around
spring/fall. Book well in advance.
Here are the places I booked:
Tanabe: DJANGO Hostel - Great budget
option, and the owner is a very friendly guy who spoke great English.
There's an onigiri restaurant
right across the street from Django that opens at 4am and serves coffee.
Great breakfast option for folks catching the early bus to Takajiri-oji.
For kissa fans, Caravan is
right down the street. Great lunch option if you get into Tanabe pretty
early.
Day 1: I stopped in Chikatsuyu and stayed at
SEN. RETREAT, the newest and most
modern place I stayed on the walk, but I probably wouldn't recommend it for
most folks. It was more expensive than most options, and it's more geared
towards Japanese tourists than walkers, so they do not provide any food like
you'd get at most guesthouses. There is a grocery store and a restaurant
across the street, but it's a bit harder to piece together breakfast/packed
lunch from them. At the time it was the only place bookable/available, but
there's several other guesthouses/minshuku available in the same town that are
bookable online if you look far enough in advance.
There are many other minshuku/guesthouses in the area that are bookable
online, especially if you plan far enough in advance. I'd recommend checking
them out, there's several on Booking.com.
Day 2: Guesthouse Yui is a good old-fashioned
guesthouse run by a sweet older lady. (Note that she doesn't speak English,
but other reviews have said communicating through translation apps is fine.)
It's right next to the local sento if you want to soak in a bath, though the
shower in the guesthouse seemed fine too. There's some packaged food available
for purchase.
Day 3:
@koguchi
was by far my favorite place I stayed on the trail. The hostess is incredibly
kind, not to mention a particularly excellent cook1. It's a classic
ryokan experience -- tatami rooms, a prepared bath, dinner/breakfast with
onigiri for the next day's lunch. Highly recommmend.
Koguchi is, as an aside, an astonishingly beautiful place. The hostess will
pick you up from the trailhead if requested, but the walk in was so nice
that I chose to walk and soak it all in.
Koguchi is also the city with probably the fewest accomodation options. I
believe the only other places are a hostel built from what used to be the
local elementary school, and I believe there's another AirBnb that was quite
expensive and didn't provide any food, and there's really nowhere to eat in
town.
Nachi: WhyKumano is a great little hostel right
next to the station. It's nothing to write home about, but a good budget
option.
If you want to ball out and relax after so much hiking, there are many
resorts around Nachi-Katsuura; it's an area well-known for having a lot of
onsen, so options galore for your post-Kumano-Kodo relaxation period.
Dinner was a very hearty sukiyaki made with deer caught by hunters from the
village. On a cold January evening, I just about died from happiness, and
the following day is the steepest climb, so you'll appreciate eating well
the night before. ↩︎
LeGuin writes that some of mankind's earliest tools were not spears or knives,
but carriers, containers to carry food back home. Stories of slaying a mighty
mammoth naturally stood out in the cultural memory, but the older -- and to
LeGuin, more relatable -- stories were those of the daily work, the foraging and
preparing and ordinary devotion (to borrow from Winnicott). Culture, she says,
originates from containers, not from spears:
So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the
use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought
that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it.
And so too is it for novels.
I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the
novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things.
They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a
particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
[...] Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative
conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as
necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as
conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but
continuing process.
Finally, it's clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a
stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a
rabbit, like a potato.
That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.
I first watched The Tatami Galaxy anime several years ago, and it lit my brain
on fire. I loved the recursive storytelling, the unique and unpredictable
animation style, and the cocky-yet-downtrodden voice of the main character. So
when I saw that Morimi's original novel had been translated into English, I felt
I had to read it, if only because it felt like peering behind the curtain of a
work I really admired.
And while I enjoyed the book, I will say that my biggest takeaway is that it
made me appreciate Masaaki Yuasa's anime adaptation even more.
The book is still a good read, its biggest success being its cerebral,
self-absorbed narrator. I've seen some reviewers find him unreadable or
obnoxious, but the charm and depth with which he's portrayed I really enjoy --
he feels like a character straight out of an old Japanese comedy (à la
Musui's Story
or some kind of modern kokkeibon),
mostly thanks to Morimi's rich references to the Tale of Genji, yokai stories,
and the rich cultural history of Kyoto1. I can also see why this book won
many awards specifically for translation: Emily Balistrieri did a great job
bringing Morimi's voice to life, surely a tall task given how precise the humor
and tone of his work is.
All that said, the original novel version doesn't deliver on the parallel
universes premise nearly as well as the anime adaptation does. This is where I'd
give credit to Yuasa: he really cleaned up the pacing in a way that makes the
comedy and absurdity of the whole thing shine. In the novel, Morimi quite
literally lifts and repeats sections wholesale over and over again, such as the
opening sequence, his descriptions of Ozu, the meeting with the fortune teller,
the moth incident, and so on. In a way it's a limitation of text -- as the
reader, I literally just skipped over a few pages at a time when this started
happening after a few times. In the show, this same gag is done through visual
storytelling and voice acting: characters start talking at absurdly fast paces,
events get compressed, little jokes and jabs like the fortuneteller charging
more money every loop of the story throw in variations every time around. These
small changes make the overarching form much more digestible.
‼️ Spoilers Ahead
From here on out I'll be discussing the context of the book in it's entirety. If your interest has been piqued and you want to read it for yourself, continue at your own peril!
This is most apparent in how each section ends, since he essentially "gets the
girl" in every single branch of the narrative, which I honestly think waters
down the existentialist message that's the high point of the show. The main
character's refusal to embrace life in the beginning iterations still kinda
works out for him, which makes less sense than a world where his abdication of
responsibility comes back to bite him.
All in all, I'm glad this novel walked so that the TV show could run, but if you
haven't seen or weren't a die-hard fan of the show, I don't know if it's worth
it on its own. Probably just go watch the show instead (and then watch
everything else Yuasa has ever made, you'll thank me later).
If anything, this book could stand well on its own purely as a love letter
to the city of Kyoto. ↩︎
I have very mixed feelings here. This book is an engaging entry point to
contemporary left theory (which, caveat emptor, I am not well-versed in, so
take this review with that in mind) and makes valuable arguments with respect to
mental health as well as the titular relationship between ideology and
imagination, but I felt like much of the remainder of the work is imprecise or
impressionistic in ways that I found lacking.
To be specific, many of the arguments in the latter half of the book seem to me
to conflate several different diagnostic factors as roots of the “audit
culture”/bureaucratic expansionism that are core to the felt experience of
“centerless” corporations and purely symbolic work culture. Despite the book's
title, my sense is that Fisher is arguing more specifically that these arise
from the particular expression of capitalism circa 2008, not about capital-C
Capitalism as an economic system. I say this because many of his diagnoses of
audit culture and bureaucracy have a host of interrelated causes. One could
point to, for example, financialization and the requirements of public companies
to “perform work” as part of their duty to shareholders; the rise of
managerialism as a practice in the latter half of the twentieth century, which
went well beyond shareholder-driven corporations to happen in schools,
hospitals, and so on; or even just look at natural ossification and bureaucratic
development of most large organizations as complex technologies require
similarly complex organizations to develop them.
What I mean to say is that while Fisher's diagnosis of these problems is
accurate, his arguments for the mechanism is unclear and often touted simply as
“contemporary capitalism” when it is likely more accurately a whole variety of
causes that should be teased apart. One shouldn't come to such a short volume
and expect it to hash out the whole scope, but we should also be clear in what
this work is: an entryway to future developments.
When I share with people that I travel for months at a time out of a backpack,
the response generally hovers somewhere between light amusement and Lovecraftian
horror. It sets a constraint in a space where many people want to be
unconstrained. I'm travelling, it should be relaxed. And that's precisely why
you should pack light: the last thing you want is to be soaked with sweat from
lugging around a heavy suitcase or awkwardly redistributing clothes to stay
under the 50 pound weight limit your airline enforces.
I'm guilty of being a chronic over-packer myself, always stuck with the
recurring idea that just maybe I'll need a down jacket in Hawaii or five extra
pairs of underwear. It's symptomatic of my own runaway mind, constantly thinking
through infinite what-if scenarios wherein I stain ten T-shirts in three days
and thus absolutely must pack fifteen.
But on every trip I've ever been on, the same thought occurs: I should have
packed less.
Everyone I meet is in transition. The spaces are never one's own, merely
borrowed for a moment -- campgrounds, hostels, gas stations. I catch everyone,
in some way or another, in their own story, in the ebb and flow of their grand
journey elsewhere. I wonder what we all think we're doing here.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a
narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have
learned to freeze the shifting phatasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Greetings, my dearests, from the beautiful Sequoia National Park! Couldn't ask
for a better place to inaugurate this auspicious day: a newsletter is born.
I'll keep this first one brief -- I'm shooting for these to be bi-weekly, and in
them will be updates on what I'm up to -- mostly all the bits and pieces that
haven't explicitly made it into the
travelogues, of which there are many --
and also whatever writing I've been doing in the meantime. Also possibly just
some Cool Stuff that I think is worth sharing, like other folks' writing, music,
film, and so on. And if you've got some cool stuff to share,
send it my way! This'll all be way more casual than the
writing than I usually do, and everybody gets enough email as it is, so I'll try
my best to make it worth your while and to keep things brief-ish.
This is mostly just another way for me to pull my personal updates off of
Instagram. I started using IG to keep everyone posted on what I'm up to
day-to-day -- and to be clear, I'll still be doing so for now -- but I simply
don't like using it. Photos are great, but they are really not the right medium
to convey what I'm up to, although I'm sure everyone appreciates the nice nature
photos and all that. But pretty nature photos aren't really the point, in the
end, so I thought it'd be fun to experiment with alternatives.
This past week has been a busy one. I took a bit of a detour from my National
Parks route and stopped by Los Angeles, primarily so I could swing by an event
for the release of Craig Mod's newest book Things Become Other Things (it's
excellent! read it!), which I
reviewed (and
still want to read for a second time, and probably then a third).
Despite living in California for several years, I had never been to LA. I spent
maybe a week or so in the nearby San Bernadino Mountains, but LA itself never
drew me in. San Francisco is comparatively compact -- only 7 miles long and 7
miles wide, small enough to walk end-to-end in a day -- and only by the time I
left did I feel like I had a foothold there. In contrast, Los Angeles is a
behemoth: the highways are sprawling, and it could probably more appropriately
be described as 10 cities in a trenchcoat. I found getting anywhere to take at
least an hour due to seemingly perennial traffic. (That almost always makes me
hard pass on a city -- it needs to be at least kinda-walkable, have excellent
public transit, or ideally both.) It's also perhaps due to me picking the
cheapest accomodations possible and thus staying in Hollywood, but the constant
presence of Scientology -- I saw the Scientology center, the celebrity center
in Los Feliz, the L. Ron Hubbard memorial building, and about a thousand
advertisements in my few days there -- gave me the ick.
But there were absolutely some bright spots. The Getty is an incredible museum,
not only for its unreasonably good collection but also for its service as a
small oasis for when I was sufficiently road-raged and needed a break. I wasn't
expecting to go there and be amazed by a bunch of Renaissance art, but I
absolutely was. There was also a small celebration for Craig's book release at
Firstborn, a newer restaurant in Chinatown with a killer tasting menu.
But I was ready to get back into a nature after a week in the city, and man,
Sequoia is incredible right now. The snowmelt has the waters running hard,
and my campsite is right next to one of the park's many rivers, so I've got my
own natural white-noise machine to thank for my much-needed mid-day naps.
And since the park is so high up, the weather is perfect. I've been constantly
driving through the scorching desert and feeling like the sun would turn me into
leather for these last few weeks, so the cool alpine air, the nice 70 degree
days, the giant-eared deer that graze in the campsite -- these make me happy.
Recommendations
Looking for Alice --
I've found myself brought back to Henrik Karlsson's blog Escaping Flatland
lately, and so much of his writing is wonderful, but "Looking for Alice"
remains one his best works. “I knew I had to say those exact words. Because I
know the heart of men.”
Joan Didion's "The White Album" (both the essay itself and the
essay collection of the same
name) is so far fantastic. Didion has this unnatural ability to pick just a
few words from someone and have it unravel their entire soul on the page
Pinegrove's last (for now? ever?) release
Montclair (Live at the Wellmont Theater)
made its way back on my playlist this week. Highly recommended for blasting at
top volume while blaring down the highway
With that, I'll let you get back to it. Thanks as always for reading. Drink
water, sit up straight, give someone a hug, all those good things. Catch you
soon.
"I hold on to the hope that contrition is fixed within the steps of the very
walk itself. Each step, an apology. A million apologies. I want to kiss the
foreheads of everyone I see."
A quick story of my own before we get to the book:
I can barely feel my legs. The day started with a vertical march: five
kilometers of hills. Hills so steep that even hundreds of years ago, when
pilgrims far tougher than I walked these routes, they nicknamed it the
"body-breaking slope."
At that point of exhaustion, with a heavy back and legs shot even before
starting, my mind burns so hot with pain that it becomes empty. It almost
inverts itself to the pain: the more miserable I am, the simpler the world
becomes. The cool January air stings my lungs. Everything pares down to its
plainest form: pressure, sensation, heat.
An hour later, a sign marks the top of the pass. I threw down my pack and leaned
back against one the many cedar trees that populate the interior of the Kii
peninsula. I put my hands on its trunk. Trees can grant you a little boost of
energy, if you ask nicely.
Mom used to do that too, put her hands on tree trunks, giving them a hearty pat.
She spoke to plants like friends, offering them help when they drooped or
whispering sweet nothings when they bloomed. I started doing the same on these
hikes. Every time I think of her.
There against the cedar tree, I see her walking in front of me, hear her
whispering to the trees, her voice merging with the soft murmur of leaves. I
remember her at every shrine. I place coins down in her memory, bowing slowly.
Up ahead, the path flattens out, taking me across the top of the ridge. A sign
marks it as the abode of the dead. I heard that souls pass through here, that
they come to Amida-ji a short ways away to ring the temple bell before moving
on. I don't know how, but I see her there, passing over the ridge just beyond
the collapsed teahouse. I know that much to be true.
I pick up my pack and continue on my way. A temple bell rings in the distance.
And again. And again.
Sometimes, a book feels like it was written just for me. Not just for my
particular interests, but for me right here and now, with whatever suffering and
joy and heartache is there. A book just for me-right-now: Craig Mod's
Things Become Other Things.
TBOT follows Mod as he embarks on a long journey across the Kii peninsula in
Japan, walking ancient pilgrimage routes and meeting kissa owners, farmers,
fishermen, and loud-mouthed children. Along the way, he experiences an area in
decline, harkening back to his industrial hometown.
This book is really an extended letter to Bryan, Mod's childhood friend murdered
decades before but whose memory, in the quiet persistence of many weeks of
walking, rises up and imprints itself. The trail, the people, old memories all
intertwine, flow into and out of each other, forming vignettes depicting how
places adapt — or fail to adapt — to economic decline, natural disasters, and
the ever-shifting sands of time.
I also hiked this area -- albeit just for a few days, a small piece of Mod's
total journey -- in January of this year, so the experience was fresh on my mind
as I flipped through. Like Bryan's memory, I kept remembering Mom on this walk.
Reading this book is a wonder in its own right, but for me personally it felt
serindipitous, a sort of recontextualization of my own walk, a way of returning
clear-eyed to the grief and love that bubbled up on those same footpaths.
Throughout the book, we meet a wide cast of characters. Some we glimpse for just
a moment: an inn owner remembering his late wife, weather-beaten farmers
enjoying a bath, an okonomiyaki shop owner who welcomes death. Each and every
one of their perspectives articulate the contours of a world constantly
undergoing change. Mod handles all of them with care. On this front, it's
especially refreshing that Mod describes their actions and translates their
speech completely without pretense, without the awkward othering and mystique
that's often used by Westerners to describe life in Japan. Every person we meet
appears in full-color:
As the husband drives me down off the mountain, back to the Ise-ji path, he
breaks our silence by saying, She ain't ... our daughter.
[...]
She just appeared seven years back. Wanderin' the country, needin' a job,
somehow ... found us. Not a daughter, but like a daughter. Time passes, life
moves, and that's what happens: Things become ... other things.
Brief conversations like this -- in the car, ordering food, walking past a rice
field -- illuminate a group that, despite its decline, is supported and seen.
Their lives can be hard, absolutely. Once-bustling kissas are now empty (save
for Mod with a plate of pizza toast), fishermen's hauls get smaller every year.
But there's never a sense of not-enough. The inn owners still feed Craig huge
stacks of pancakes and send him off with five loaves of bread, small shops get
picked up by the family's next generation. Things continue on, become other
things.
If only Bryan could have seen all of this. Maybe, Mod writes, their lives would
have been different. The sense of scarcity so absent from Craig's walk was by
contrast a defining characteristic of his childhood. He recalls fights, drugs,
the boys' desire to buy a gun. He recalls one of his classmates: "We knew a kid
who got a plastic sandwich bag thick with hash for Christmas, carried and
unveiled it proudly. I visited his house once. They owned no furniture."
"This world turns and turns and the more I move my feet the more I believe in
things we never understood. Life, irrepressible, it billows over the top of
the pot, man. Let me be your eyes as best I can. I'll bear witness to this
wonder you never got to see."
And so Mod balances these two worlds, the memories in his mind binding together
with the roads under foot. He threads one word throughout these chapters:
yoyū, "the excess provided when surrounded by a generous abundance." This
heart-quality, this space is what facilitates healing. It's what allows
communities to bend and not break. Something those two young boys never saw.
And it's through all of these lenses -- abundance, loss, decay, penance -- that
Mod connects his past and present. The monotony of the walk, one foot in front
of the other, gives rise to new worlds, to hope and joy and a deep, wide love. I
went to an event for this book's release, and the final question of the night
from the audience was "What's the secret to an interesting life?"
Brandon Sanderson has loomed at the periphery of my literary awareness for a few
years now. An author selling these massive tomes for millions of diehard fans is
always someone to cheer for in my mind, and The Stormlight Archive was suggested
to me personally as perhaps his greatest accomplishment. Especially after seeing
one of the strangest and most un-generous articles
I've ever read targeted at him, I felt personally compelled to see what books
could possibly generate this much discussion.
But alas: this book left me wanting a lot more.
Sanderson's gift, by far, is writing a compelling plot in a huge, imaginative
world. The various stories of Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar all weave together
neatly, and the mythology backing the expanses of Roshar gives the setting a
depth that lets the individual stories remain in conversation with tales going
back thousands of years. He is skilled at building a world that's rich and
complex, dusting his prose with references to the world's native plants,
currencies, languages, peoples, and religions.
His particular gift for plot is in its clarity — I always felt clear on
characters' motivations and goals, and scenes are lined up with care to always
make the reader feel well-equipped to understand what's going on. He constructs
his plot the way a magician constructs a magic trick, pulling your attention one
way while the mechanics of the world operate unseen, just outside of your field
of vision. If anything, Sanderson has characterized TWOK is being difficult
almost precisely because there's so much information given in the first half
of the novel in order to equip the reader with enough context, background, and
lore to fully dive in to the back half where the action really gets going.
But personally, that's about as far as my interest went. I really wanted to
love this book, but as I crossed the halfway mark — the area where Sanderson
clearly wants to crank up the heat — I sensed my interest losing steam. Where
things started to come together, in a way they felt almost too straight-laced,
and the characters began to fall short of the depth I was searching for.
I will fully acknowledge at the top of this more critical section that I am not
an avid reader of fantasy, and most of my notes here were written right as I was
finishing the book, so take any specific details with a grain of salt. Likewise,
from hearing Sanderson talk about this book, it's clear that many aspects of it
are designed to play out on timelines far greater than a single book, and that
dedicated readers are most rewarded for reading through the full series, which I
haven't done. So take that as permission to take from this review what you find
valuable and leave the rest.
That last bit about Sanderson's sight lines being lined up for a multi-book epic
is actually one of my biggest gripes. The first four parts, which make up the
entire primary storyline, left me wanting something more, as I'll discuss soon.
But Part Five then introduces future plot lines that sounded orders of magnitude
more interesting and complex than what's broached in TWOK, and as I closed out
the last page of the book, I was left only with the feeling that all the work of
completing this book was more like pre-reading for another, better one. I don't
know if these 1200 pages justified themselves fully on that front; in my mind,
they should have stood on their own two feet.
One idea that threads through pretty much every comment I read on this book is
that his characters, and more specifically Kaladin, are The Greatest Thing Ever.
I found this opinion extremely surprising: while the characters are varied and
purposefully-crafted, I never latched on to any of them, and for the most part
I'd characterize most of them as “flat,” imbued with a particular set of
characteristics and personality traits that serve the plot well but at the
expense of conveying real humanity or heart. Indeed this flatness is probably
the primary reason that I started to peel away from the book in the second half.
Good characters are “juicy,” and most that we encounter felt rather dry.
‼️ Spoilers Ahead
From here on out I'll be discussing the context of the book in it's entirety. If your interest has been piqued and you want to read it for yourself, continue at your own peril!
What is most missing to me is real, meaningful backstory. Flashbacks in this
book are just more plot, filling in details and holes about, for example,
Kaladin's preoccupation with losing those around him. They don't, however,
illuminate much about why these characters have their preoccupations in the
first place. We see that Kaladin took responsibility for Tien's death because he
volunteered for that expressed purpose, but other aspects of his backstory, like
the advice of his father, suggest that he was raised with the lesson that you
can't save everyone. So why is he so inflexible and insistent on being the
savior for every single person on a battlefield? That's perhaps his central
character flaw, yet the narrative just shrugs and says “that's just how he is.”
In
Sanderson's annotations of TWOK,
he describes Kaladin as an “all-around awesome guy,” and so he felt that our
first exposure to Kaladin should be from the third-person in order to make that
awesomeness more believable. That's all well and good for the first exposure —
and I agree that that was the right move! — but we then have to follow him
directly for the next ~1000 pages, and I don't think we see enough
not-awesomeness from Kaladin — he's simply Stormblessed, which seemed from his
notes a trope that Sanderson was attempting to avoid. Yes, he fails to save
people, but for the most part, he didn't play a terribly large part in their
deaths — he just was not quite god-like enough to save them, which makes most of
his preoccupation with protecting them actually come off as
self-centered1.
Kaladin has flaws, but those flaws are primarily stem from a single source of
hubris: he cares too much. That's basically the equivalent of going into a job
interview and stating that
your biggest weakness is that you work too hard.
Bridge Four, on the other hand, was the group of characters I felt more affinity
for, perhaps only because individually they're given less limelight and thus
leave more open to the imagination. They're a foil to balance out Kalidan's
savior-like description. They're scrappy and more fully explore the space of
changing from downtrodden bridgemen who'd thrown in the towel to soldiers who
truly embrace “Life before death.” Characters like them, if given more room to
breathe and weren't subjected to essentially being Kaladin's supporters, would
really have shined.
While I mention earlier that Sanderson's gift is for plot, I suppose what I mean
is that his gift is for action. Every scene feels like it has a particular
purpose for what's happening — someone needs to hear some bit of information or
get their hands on an item, and all of that happens. “What could possibly be
wrong with that?” I hear you asking. The problem is pacing.
Plot can be manipulated and enriched in so many different ways2.
There's all sorts of axes on which to make these adjustments: playing with time,
speeding up sections to watch whole years or generations zip by, or by slowing
it down and freezing the action to eek out every detail of an important moment;
creating interesting plot forms by creating symmetries across scenes or by
intertwining different time periods; or conveying information by threading in
particular sounds, colors, tastes, or any other recurring element. Plot is more
than just “the stuff that happens;” it's also the way in which it unfolds, the
way in which the author unfurls the tapestry of events.
Compared to the world of possibilities on that front, the plot of TWOK feels
like a march. Yes, there's a few flashbacks to the past and strange visions
during high storms, but these are all essentially in service of this highly
linear narrative form. Linear narrative is fine, but linear narrative for such a
thick book made me want a palate-cleanser at some point. While earlier I
mentioned that Sanderson telegraphs future events without losing suspense, I
would also argue that the highly linear structure does mean that such
foreshadowing does make big moments have less payoff when they do happen.
Everything is structured as to always make sense, but that comes at the cost of
misaligning the expectations of the characters and the audience, despite the
narrator generally sticking to individual characters' perspectives in each
chapter. I would have liked to be more surprised by Sadeas's betrayal or
Jasnah's fake fabrial, but the seeds of those “twists” were laid out sometimes
hundreds of pages in advance. Part Five largely avoids that criticism — but it's
also almost entirely setting the stage for later books, so it's hard to count
that as any justification for reading the 1200 pages leading up to that.
Based on his own notes, Sanderson seems to worry a lot about readers not having
enough information for later passages to make sense, so his solution is to
front-load the novel with information about the world. Personally, I feel like
this led to large portions of the book being redundant, unnecessary, or almost
overbearing in its unwillingness to trust readers to figure things out. I would
have much rather been on the edge of my seat trying to guess what could happen,
but instead I was mostly thinking to myself by the end of most chapters that it
was time to move things along.
All in all, TWOK had so much potential, and I was hoping for the moment when the
stars aligned to make everything worthwhile. The ending was nearly that for me,
but I don't think that 5% of the novel was enough to justify the previous 95%.
For such a sprawling world and for the many pages spent creating it, it felt too
flat: I wanted more from the characters, more from the narrative form, more
juice. All the impressive worldbuilding and crafted storylines if the
characters don't expose anything about what it means for them to be alive. I'm
intrigued by what's discussed in Part Five that lays the groundwork for later
books, but it remains to be seen if that will get me to maintain interest
through more of this series.
Dalinar learns this exact lesson from Navani later: “Guilt? As
self-indulgence? ‘I never considered it that way before.'” ↩︎
For a fully-fledged discussion of this, Jane Allison's book
Meander, Spiral, Explode
is an excellent resource. ↩︎
I saw a light flash up at me, picking me out of the midnight desert landscape.
“Looks like we've got a problem,” the voice behind the light said.
Out in the desert, the mind is pulled, over and over again, back to its survival
instincts. I was near the campground and dozens of visitors with food and
supplies, and yet a small part of my brain was continuously calculating how much
water I had, when I needed to eat, listening for new sounds: a background task
that slowly syphons away my mental battery.
The voices gradually made their way up to the overlook. A group of college guys
from the campsite — I had seen them earlier across the road, cooking on a
charcoal stove and shouting some friendly bullying and having drawn-out
arguments about a mutual friend. They didn't seem to be aware that in the quiet
of the desert night, their voices could carry for miles, the only competition
being the soft susurration of long grass and the Rio Grande's gentle whisper.
First stop on my Journey Across America is perhaps one of the
least-National-Park-ish National Parks:
Hot Springs. Hot Springs is arguably more
along the lines of a historic site than a National Park. Most of the famous
sites are architectural: the old colonial architecture of Bathhouse Row and The
Arlington. But hey, it's an absolutely lovely place to stop by for a day or so.
I am back on the road — this time exploring these great United States, and
particularly the National Parks.
I have a natural inclination to wander. It's great to spend a lot of time in a
single place, to get to know its rhythms and routines, but I always feel a
little spark in my chest when I get back on the move. This morning I started off
down the highway, and about twenty minutes in I looked out at the tall grass
along the roadside, bending in rolling waves against the wind. My body relaxed,
my vision opened up to the whole landscape. Everything was right where it should
be.
In a foreign country, I'm a stranger in a strange land, helpless. Like a child:
unable to speak the language or navigate your new environment alone, forced to
depend on the kind help of others. Everything is novel, and it's easy to just
revel in that newness. Going back home is the complete opposite. It's familiar,
and finding your way back into that newness requires effort to look beyond the
grooves of daily life. I fall back into old habits, old selves.
For the last few months, I've been traveling with nothing more than a backpack,
and with space at such a premium, printed books were the first thing that had to
go. But the months bore down on me and I missed the texture of the pages on my
fingertips, the smell of ink, and most importantly the strange comfort and
familiarity that one develops with the book's physical presence. I thought back
to my home library, bookshelves overflowing with literary relationships I've
built over the years, and I caved: I found the nearest English-language book
store in Tokyo to find my next read.
There in the stacks, I come upon Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form & Emptiness.
The "form and emptiness" reference first piqued my curiousity, a reference to
the Heart Sutra and perhaps the
most revered line in the Zen lineage (of which Ozeki is a priest):
[F]orm does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form.
Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form. Sensations, perceptions,
formations, and consciousness are also like this.
The epigraphs from Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library" and the
personification of the narrator as The Book, its dedication and love for books
as physical objects, as actors in the universe, were as if the Universe had
heard my cries and placed it there for me to find.
The Book of Form & Emptiness follows teenager Benny Oh who, following the
untimely death of his father, begins hearing voices and is subsequently
diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. One of the few places he can find
refuge is his local public library, where he meets an elderly homeless
intellectual and a young street artist who take him under their wing. Benny's
mother Annabelle also mourns her husband's death, all the while navigating a new
life as a newly single mother, supporting her son through a difficult diagnosis
-- not to mention the trouble she has keeping an eye on him as he regularly runs
off with his newfound companions -- and trying to stay afloat at her job in a
time of rapid automation. Juggling all of these gradually leads Annabelle to
develop a nasty hoarding habit, which only bears down further on her
relationship with Benny and attracts the attention of her landlord.
Perhaps the most notable feature of this novel is the fact that it's narrated by
The Book itself, simultaneously both a freestanding character as well as a voice
for all books everywhere, assuming the role of some kind of Platonic ideal of
The Book. It narrates its own contents in the first person, conversing with
Benny directly (who also narrates some of his own chapters), interleaving action
with commentary on our relationship to books as physical objects, reflections on
its own plot, and the occasional finger-wagging at our world's obsessions with
consumerism and nods to real-life events like climate change and politics.
This sounds like a lot in the abstract, but it's well-contained for the vast
majority of the novel. The Book is more like an omniscient narrator than some
kind of postmodern commentary1, often helping Benny to make sense of
actions as they come and offering consolation in times of need. It really is
endearing, and despite much of its subject matter -- mental health, self-harm,
hoarding, drugs, etc. -- I found most of the book feeling almost cozy.
This is one of Ozeki's greatest skills: no matter how dark her subject matter,
no matter how intense the afflictions her characters have been given, she
expertly balances despair and suffering with heartfulness and compassion.
‼️ Spoilers Ahead
From here on out I'll be discussing the context of the book in it's entirety. If your interest has been piqued and you want to read it for yourself, continue at your own peril!
If anything, I would argue that her compassion is also one of the book's
greatest weaknesses. By the end of the novel, characters have truly been put
through the ringer: Benny has been pulled into participating in a riot and is
checked into the psychiatric ward, the Aleph has relapsed and given in to her
addictions, and Annabelle has been fired and is unwilling to clean her home,
putting her on the edge of eviction. Things are by all means looking bleak. At
this point, The Book steps in and attempts to offer a little dose of reality to
Benny as he sits mute in his hospital room:
We don't want to upset you or make you feel guilty. It's not out of malice
that we're telling you about Annabelle's suffering. We're telling you because,
as your book, that's our job. And even if we'd prefer to spin you pretty fairy
tales and tell tidy stories with happily-ever-afters, we can't. We have to be
real, even if it hurts, and that's your doing.
I read this passage and expected each of these characters to get absolutely
thrown into the blender.
But here is where I think the book begins to collapse under its own weight. That
bit above comes from page 528 of a 546 page novel. We're practically at the
finish line here, this whole grand world that Ozeki has spun pulled tight, and
yet this whole drama gives in to exactly that which it claims not to be: things
end happily-ever-after. Benny literally just gets up out his chair and asks to
leave, and they basically let him go. Annabelle basically hauls ass and cleans
up the house, the psychiatrist who essentially instigated the entire Child
Protective Services call does a 180 and vouches for them, "No-Good" Harold gets
overruled by his mother who owns the building and the eviction saga comes
swiftly to an end. And things end up neat and tidy2. For all the preaching
about taking responsibility, it doesn't truly seem as if any of the characters
actually learned to be responsible for their own suffering.
I have a variety of other quibbles about the novel: the Aleph is a bit of too
much of a
Manic Pixie Dream Girl
for my taste, the whole story of Aikon is completely unnecessary3, and in
general most of the side characters were fairly flat. However, the fact that I
was enthralled for 400 pages only to feel so rushed at the end is what hit me
the hardest.
For all its flaws, I was incredibly enthralled for most of the book, and the
creativity and deftness with which Ozeki handled some sensitive subject matter
made it worth the price of admission. There's a generosity to the portrayal of
Benny, Kenji, and Annabelle that feels nourishing to read, and for that alone I
feel good for having spent a few days with The Book of Form & Emptiness.
Although there are many references, both subtle and explicit, to Jorge Luis
Borges, so the postmodern thread is absolutely present for readers who want
to pull on it. ↩︎
Now that's what I'd call Tidy Magic, amirite? Ba dum tss. ↩︎
I'm entirely sympathetic to the desire to inject aspects of one's life into
creative works, but some of the Zen references came out a bit ham-fisted to
me, although I do have more-than-average familiarity with Zen terminology
etc., so perhaps this is a non-issue for most readers. ↩︎
Some years ago, an experienced meditation teacher described his one-on-one
interactions with students primarily consisting of listening to them, nodding
sagely, and respond: yes, what you're experiencing is normal.
Most people[^linkedin] will go through some variation of the
"quarter-life[^quarterlife] crisis." From the outside, these periods can seem
chaotic and impulsive, from the inside confusing and frustrating. Having some
idea of what to expect can be a helpful starting point -- things like major
psychological studies or
popular books
are a good way to get a foothold -- but these are by nature written from a
thousand-foot view.
On the other side is the individual report, the phenomenological experience of
what it's like to navigate these choppy waters -- mystery, confusion, elation,
and the complete reformation of personality. I thought it worthwhile to write up
some “field notes,” if only as historical artifacts that I can later read
through and have pity on my younger self for their misguidedness; or perhaps for
others to read and maybe find some kinship in a fellow lost traveller, a
stand-in for a seasoned teacher patting you on the shoulder: yes, what you're
experiencing is normal.
