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Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex Boese - 1/5

Elephants on Acid was the text for a seminar class I took this semester that was pitched to me as being about scientific ethics. This was true of the course — I had a great time in class, because our discussions made up for the book’s deficiencies. But on its own, I don’t think I’d recommend this book to anyone but maybe an 8th grader who really likes Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Alex Boese’s compendium of “Bizarre Experiments” does little to examine the ethics behind what, more often than not, shouldn’t even qualify as science. This book follows the same format throughout: every chapter has an overarching theme (some examples including “Bathroom Reading” and “Mating Behavior”), and each chapter is made up of pagelong anecdotes about bizarre, disturbing, or otherwise unnecessarily gross scientific experiments, mostly from the early 20th century. Boese headlines each section with a witty title (“Horny Turkeys and Hypersexual Cats”) and bafflingly, a third-person fictionalization, before giving the most cursory, dumbed-down examination of the experiment, devoid of historical context or discussion on the ethics therein. Most of these anecdotes are then ended with some sort of offensive and not very funny joke. For example, after describing a follow-up to Stanley Milgram’s electroshock experiment which involved actually shocking real dogs, Boese writes “If the poor creature later shook with terror whenever it came to a traffic light while out on its walks, you could understand why.” Boese feels the need to undercut the gravity (and I mean ethical gravity, because most of these experiments contributed absolutely nothing to the scientific zeitgeist) of each experiment with some sort of stupid joke, which both delegitimizes the extensive research he did for this book and self-sabotages any chance of someone taking it seriously. In his introduction, Boese writes, wildly hypocritically:

“I have not included any Nazi research in this book. First, because I didn’t intend the book to be a catalog of atrocities. Second, because I wanted to explore actual scientific research — not sadistic torture designed as science, which is what I consider the Nazi ‘experiments’.”

This would be a fair point if in the introduction to any other book. Firstly, Elephants on Acid already seems like a “catalog of atrocities,” albeit to a lesser extent. Secondly, any true study of scientific ethics should not cover up the atrocities; discussing these are crucial for avoiding them in the future, and lastly, many of the “experiments” discussed were not science by any definition of the term in that they were not intended to generate new knowledge. If Boese attempted to explain how giving the titular elephants LSD or keeping a severed dog head alive is anything more than sadistic torture, I would maybe have a shred of respect for him, but he chose instead to write a tasteless and offensive book in the name of sensationalism and shock value.

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The Living Stones: Cornwall by Ithell Colquhoun - 3/5

My new thing is being somewhat of a book pirate. This, like Colquhoun's The Crying of the Wind, was available nowhere online, and out-of-print copies were out of my price range, so I obtained one through interlibrary loan and scanned it here. Feels good to be a pirate.

This was not quite as interesting as her travel guide to Ireland, which I attribute to Colquhoun's familiarity with Cornwall, having spent most of her life there. She writes of Ireland as a visitor, but of Cornwall as a resident, so the book is less hypnotized by landscape and nature, and more concerned with intimate matters of culture. Some interesting descriptions of local holidays + their pagan origins, and an odd chapter recounting Crowley's visit to Cornwall.

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Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance by Stephanie Niu - 4/5

Through her academic background, Stephanie Niu improves upon the overdone genre of nature poetry in Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance. This chapbook, though short, tells an urgent story of the Anthropocene, namely its effects on Christmas Island, where Niu was conducting research. A big theme is the extinction of the island’s endemic species such as the Christmas Island Pipistrelle and most heartbreakingly, the forest skink. These are told in a series of maps, both demonstrating the species’ dwindling range over the years but also serving as concrete poetry. These map poems were what I found most compelling, and I would not have minded if the entire collection was just these, because I did feel like as an overall work it somewhat lacked cohesion. The ecological undercurrent was present even in the more conventional poems, but I remain unconvinced by the inclusion and ordering of some of the pieces.

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The Crying of the Wind: Ireland by Ithell Colquhoun - 3/5

EDIT: I have scanned and uploaded a copy here: https://archive.org/details/crying-of-the-wind

I had to go on a bit of a quest to find this book; it isn’t available online anywhere to my knowledge (not even my dubious usual sites!) and physical copies go for upwards of a hundred dollars, but luckily I was able to get a card from my university’s library that allowed me to get another card to check it out from a different university’s library. So a whole lot of hype for a travelogue.

I’ve been on a bit of an Ithell Colquhoun kick lately, to the point that I can actually spell her name without verifying. She is most famous for her visual art, which straddles the line between surrealism and abstraction, and much of her literary work such as her novella The Goose of Hermogenes is rooted in the occult tradition to the point that the rest of the surrealist movement apparently found her annoying and kicked her out. I was curious what take such a mythic individual would have on a relatively mundane genre as the travelogue, and I did find The Crying of the Wind an interesting if a bit jarring read. It is jarring in that most of the book is a typical travelogue, recounting conversations with locals and visits to typical tourist sites such as Glendalough, interspersed with asides about the occult or the fairy realm. Fair, because Ireland as a nation has always embodied contradictions, most notably that between their Pagan past and the Catholic Church (syncretisms not unlike what Gloria Anzaldúa talks about in Mexico)! For example, Colquhoun goes into a detailed dive into the theories behind the fairyland before concluding they are “beings inhabiting a supersensual plane which interpenetrates the universe normally perceptible to human senses.” It feels tongue in cheek, but knowing her, it’s not.

Did I enjoy this occult tour of Ireland? I didn’t find it stunning the way my favorite travel writers such as Joan Didion and Vita Sackville-West can be, but it was certainly an interesting angle. Though well-intentioned, Colquhoun’s colonial British upbringing does show itself, which is perhaps expected for a book published in the 1950s, but there was a surprising amount of portraying the Irish as “noble savages” — in an odd way, this book felt quite orientalist at times. Nevertheless, I think I would enjoy travelling with Ithell, just because the attention she gives the local flora on every page reminds me of how much I geek out about plants whenever I travel.

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[Series Review] Scott Pilgrim by Brian Lee O'Malley

Like many people who grew up with it, Edgar Wright’s 2010 adaptation of Scott Pilgrim is a work that I’ve done a full 360˚ on. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever the first time I saw it, when I was maybe 12, then changing my tune on it when it became cool to hate for being “problematic.” Then I found myself reevaluating it in my adult life as a satire; it’s easy to miss the critical edge of opening with Scott’s friends chastising him for dating a high schooler when you are that age, but as an adult it’s very blatant how pathetic the eponymous protagonist is. I had read the series the film was based on maybe ten years ago, and remembered the differences, but not how much more expansive it was.

Since the film adaptation was released before the last of six volumes was released, the beginning of the books and the film seem fairly identical, but it starts to diverge around the second half into ultimately something much more than what I remembered. The books are more character-driven, and less reverent of nerd-culture as O’Malley makes it very clear how much of a loser Scott and by extension his social circle is. But it strikes a delicate balance which is difficult to achieve, to make the characters sympathetic while still being fucked up, which ultimately is the driving motion behind the story. Perhaps it’s because I’m so intimately familiar with the story that I was so invested the second time around, but O’Malley’s simplistic style disarms the reader to tell a very real story about emotional growth without being cloying. The sci-fi elements are a big part of this; in film I usually dislike any sort of narrative subjectivity, in prose it seems almost requisite, and I suppose comic books are somewhere in the middle. The video game structure of having to fight off seven evil exes seems corny at first, but it does seem like an apt externalization of how awkward it is to run into an ex, or an exes ex in public. The climactic fight scene that comprises most of the last volume is a great example: at one point the contents of Ramona’s purse rain over everyone, which is a great visual metaphor for emotional baggage in a very public fight.

A word about the setting. I believe O’Malley exemplifies the same sort of regionalism as Linklater’s 1990 film Slacker, which always wondered if I would find as compelling if I was not from Austin. I have almost no frame of reference for Toronto culture, having visited only once, but a big aspect of Scott Pilgrim’s charm is that it is a portrait of a time, place, and subculture — the late-aughts Toronto indie scene that gave rise to Metric and Broken Social Scene. Part of Scott Pilgrim’s enduring quality is how it immortalizes the cultural quirks, the hangouts and the inside jokes, for a much larger audience than originally intended. I’m from a different time and place, but I see something of my own life in that of the listless twentysomethings from 2004 Toronto.

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The Ecopoetry Anthology edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street - 3/5

It may sound weird to criticize a 600 page anthology for being limited in scope, but there it is. My poet father gifted be The Ecopoetry Anthology in an attempt to get me interested in poets that aren’t Mary Oliver — historically, I have only liked poetry that’s very easy to understand, as I am not a poet myself. For the past year or so this book has been my bedside reading; I have found the only way I can enjoy poetry is if I read one every morning and every night, which is why I feel sort of justified in reviewing something so encyclopedic. There is a lot of good stuff in here, but the editing just seemed weirdly low-effort and claimed to be more authoritative than it really was. Firstly, it is only specified in small print on the back that this is a uniquely American anthology, something which I consider both arbitrary and a mistake. This is not to say that the poets selected were not diverse; the editors made an effort to include works by indigenous and minority poets, but all American. The real lack of diversity is temporal. The first section of the book, on “Historical” poetry, starts in the 1800s with Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and is pretty much arranged chronologically until the 1990s. This, to me, is a missed opportunity to include the wealth of nature writing from other cultures and temporal milieux. Where are Bashō’s haikus? Where is Homer’s wine-dark sea and rosy-fingered dawn? Shakespeare’s “mickle is the powerful grace that lies / In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities”, the Popul Vuh’s account of the creation of the world, the wealth of poetic tradition from Ancient Greece or China? It just seems kind of lame to leave all of this out because it’s not as glamorous as the new. And the vast majority, over 400 pages of the book, is devoted to “Contemporary” poetry (in alphabetical order), a lot of which is great, but a lot which was skippable and made me wonder at the reasoning behind its inclusion. Frankly, a more historical assemblage of ecopoetry would have provided a more interesting survey of the development of ecological and environmental thought throughout time, through a poetic lens, which is something I would absolutely go crazy for. But this isn’t that, and I’m not sure if it even exists yet.

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The Beach by Alex Garland - 4/5

I finished reading this book while touching down in Bangkok. My friend I am visiting here told me The Beach is “required reading” for visiting Thailand. Although the book technically takes place in Thailand, only the beginning is spent among the people; most of the book takes place on the titular beach, a cult-like paradise which made me think The Garden of Eden would have been a better title for this book if Hemingway hadn’t already taken it. Still, it’s an extremely on-point and surprisingly comedic satire of the toxic backpacker-bro culture that exists here, masquerading as a “thriller”. The Beach tells the story of three Europeans who seek out an isolated colony of backpackers in southern Thailand, after which a bunch of crazy shit ensues. I don’t want to give anything away, but what prevented the horrors from actually being scary was the fact that they were almost all self-inflicted. It was a really sort of knowing, ironic exercise in Schadenfreude about extremely unlikeable people who I could not bring myself to care about… so I loved it, of course. It’s written by the same Alex Garland who directed the 2018 film adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, and his grasp of tension really translated well from the page to the screen. Garland was a novelist first, before he was a screenwriter and then director, and The Beach certainly doesn’t read like something written by a filmmaker, in that so much of the action is internal, and his grasp of the unreliable narrator is elegant and honestly really really funny.

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(Series Review) Figure 17 by Genco-Olm - 4/5

Figure 17 is such a strange series because it superficially seems like a generic riff on the magical girl genre, but in only two volumes manages to rip your heart out and kick it in the ass. Apparently this manga duology was based on an anime that was released first, and was a more expansive story, but I chose to read the manga because I remembered having read it when I was maybe eight years old and being completely riveted. Figure 17 tells the story of a somewhat ineffectual girl who gets visited by aliens who clone her, but her clone is somehow also a robot, and they can combine to form a larger woman. Kind of trite, but the reason I liked it was because very little of this mattered. Instead of the alien invasion, the focus was on the character development and their tragic inner lives. The clone is exactly like the protagonist in every way, except she is more confident, and the main arc of the manga was not defeating alien invaders, but learning how to be more self-assured. It’s probably not very good, but I am thankful for having read this story when I was a kid, because even if I didn’t remember the details, I remembered it as having been very relatable and impactful back then, an assessment that is true still. The alien fighting scenes are tedious, and a lot of the manga is probably not very well-thought out, but I nevertheless found myself flying through the last few pages for fear of getting completely emotionally overwhelmed. Definitely something very formative to be revisited. (less)

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The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway - 3/5

My first Hemingway was his last, so I don’t know if my judgement is a fair one. I gave my dad a first edition copy of The Garden of Eden for his birthday, knowing nothing about the narrative, just thinking it would be cool to technically own a first edition Hemingway even if being published posthumously in 1986 takes away some of the novelty of owning a first edition. He ended up liking it enough to recommend it to me, but I can’t find any word to describe it other than frivolous. Perhaps the work stands in contrast with the rest of Hemingway’s oeuvre, but knowing nothing firsthand about his other works, The Garden of Eden was just frivolous! I did immediately find myself drawn to Hemingway’s polarizing style, which reminded me a little bit of contemporary YA books like The Hunger Games. Regardless I still enjoyed his sparse, efficient prose. Despite this, it took me a very long time to finish reading this book, and that’s because the first 3/4 of it are very monotonous! It’s just “He drank whiskey Perrier. She swam in the ocean.” for a hundred-odd pages, until the focal married couple meets a Heiress and both pursue affairs with her (which was a storyline in Portlandia?) Sure, it’s interesting that this book demystifies Hemingway’s reputation as a stoic paragon of masculinity for having a bisexual wife who pretends to be a gayboy, and the characters were well-developed and believable (perhaps because this book allegedly drew from his life). The ending was not without direction and was honestly very satisfying and well-done, but even this cannot justify the lack of movement that comprised most of the book.

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Wayward by Vashti Bunyan - 3/5

Vashti Bunyan is maybe one of my favorite songwriters, so when I heard she released a book I bought it almost immediately (I’ve been on a celebrity biographies kick lately, anyway). Despite this, I wasn’t super impressed with Wayward. It seemed to fall victim to what many biographies do, which is “I did this” then “I did that,” not doing anything more interesting on a literary level at all. What’s odd is Bunyan has almost assuredly had a more interesting life than most; the bulk of this book is spent on her journey from London to the Isle of Skye in a literal horse and cart over two years. It’s inspiring, fantastical even, that her life was really how her music made it sound, but it’s just not told in a very interesting way. The book really puts the pilgrimage front-and-center, and doesn’t dwell too much on her life before or after, but namedrops a lot of surprising celebrities, from Donovan to Joanna Newsom and even the DJ Four Tet. Bunyan’s initial career and re-emergence is an inspiring story, and I loved being able to put context to songs that I’ve loved for so many years, but the quality of the writing unfortunately did not do its subject justice.

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The Goose of Hermogenes by Ithell Colquhoun - 3/5

A woman goes to a mysterious island to visit her uncle who lives alone in a manor house. The Goose of Hermogenes initially seems like a surface-level riff on the Gothic novel, but it quickly becomes something much more synesthetic. I was aware of Ithell Colquhoun as a surrealist-adjacent painter, though apparently she was ousted from the surrealist movement for her involvement with the occult. I definitely could feel the surrealist influence in the stream of events; it definitely could have been a work of automatism, but the influence of the Gothic and the occult are still very present. As a novel, I’m not sure I liked it — it’s very short, clocking in at under a hundred pages, but so dense, as if you’re listening to the narrator tell her tale. In the first two pages alone, she takes a bus to an island, abandons it for a horse and cart, then abandons the cart to proceed past an irrelevant monastery on foot. The dreamlike journey is hard to follow but the highlight comes in chapter four, “Conjunction”, in which the narrator reads a fable entitled “Corolla’s Pinions”. This story, completely unrelated to the rest of the narrative, was strong enough to stand on its own as a short story and if anything I would recommend this book for “Corolla’s Pinions” alone.

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Homer’s Iliad translated by Emily Wilson - 3/5

I think I must have been assigned to read Homer’s Iliad on at least three separate occasions throughout my youth, and Sparknotesed it every time. Which I feel bad about, because I always did want to read it, or maybe I wanted the clout that came with being a person who reads Greek epic poetry. In any case, when Emily Wilson’s new translation was released last year, I finally went for it. I had read selections from her Odyssey and found her approach to translation very accessible and easy to read. There was a lot of media hype about “the first woman to translate Homer” which led to some reviewers claiming this was a feminist reinterpretation of The Iliad. My pet theory is that they had her confused for Maria Dahvana Headley, whose translation of Beowulf was intentionally transformative. In any case, Wilson’s Iliad is meant to be fairly traditional and accurate to the original text, including some metrical craft I could not pick up on. Compared to all the other times I tried to finish the Iliad, I found Wilson’s version a much easier read, so I would recommend it for that reason. The supplemental materials are also way more impressive than most editions and justify the extra cost over just a Project Gutenberg download. Wilson’s introduction is hefty to say the least, at around 75 pages, and was often more moving than the poem itself (She even defends the infamous third chapter, the Catalogue of Ships, imploring the reader to “read them out loud: in mouth and ear, the long list of names become music.” I find comparisons of superhero movies to mythology mostly kind of dumb, but I could see Homer’s audience going crazy each time their guy’s name is called in this chapter the same way people soyface about the Avengers or whatever.) She provides all the context for a beginner like me to understand the poem, but also includes an extensive glossary and notes for each chapter for those who want to dive deeper. The hardcover edition is around $40, so whether or not this masterful editing justifies the high price honestly depends on how much you like reading about guys getting stabbed over and over again. I just got it from the library.

The poem itself was not as impressive. A lot of armchair critics (NOT Wilson) love to claim The Iliad as an anti-war piece to make it palatable to modern audiences. This was not my impression in the slightest. Sure, the epic deals with the horrors of war, often brutally (as I said before, pages upon pages of vivid gory disembowelments) but it seems the product of a society which obsessively fetishized war. I’m not condemning the text based on this, but I do think it’s harder to understand without unpacking the very different set of values that were held back then, so it’s a lot easier to attempt to update the text in a really sloppy way. Wilson does give a really cogent explanation of these ethical differences which helped me understand the text more fully, but that doesn’t mean I agree with it. Every time the equivalent of a Star Trek redshirt got killed off, Homer would expound on his ancestry and life, and then conclude with something like

…Menelaus stabbed his forehead above his nose, right at the bridge, and broke his skull, and popped his eyeballs out.

I literally opened to a random page and found something disgusting on my first try. It’s incessant. But I can see how telling each person’s life story dignifies their death. Still, it is hard to feel any sympathy for men who did not see women as people, but as property, as goes the inciting incident of The Iliad.

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Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews by Mavis Gallant - 4/5

Anyone who has visited Paris, or any part of France will no doubt be familiar with la grève. The French accept labor strikes as part of daily life. It’s no doubt politically effective, though as often as you’ll hear “train’s late? C’est la grève” seldom will the matter being protested be discussed. Reading Mavis Gallant’s first-hand account of the 1968 Paris Riot while missing a boat à cause de la grève was a microdose of the social climate she immerses herself in. Unsure if she mentions the historical context ever, her thoughtfully slipshod prose instead puts the reader in a time and place where the people rioting may not have known what the protests were originally about, either. She illustrates the occasional hypocrisy of the student protesters (“We ask, ‘Why Stalin?’ She hesitates, has been asked this before, says in a parrot’s voice, ‘We are prepared to admit his errors, but he was a revolutionary, too.’ Then so was Hitler.”) but for the most part remains a sympathetic, if detached observer to the myriad of grievances. The prose is sparse (it was intended as field notes) but still remarkably funny. The Events in May: A Paris Notebook is notable for having inspired a section of the film The French Dispatch, and I had read the first half in the Anderson-edited collection An Editor’s Burial. In its entirety it remained out of print until earlier this year, and while The Events in May is clearly the centerpiece of this collection, the other essays are worth mentioning.

The second longest piece in this book is a true-crime essay of almost 70 pages called “Immortal Gatito: The Gabrielle Russier Case,” which was also a surprisingly enthralling read. It tells the story of a female schoolteacher who slept with a 16 year old student, and the ensuing legal battle and eventual suicide of Gabrielle Russier. To make the case understandable for American audiences (the account was originally published in the New Yorker) Gallant expounds on the nuances of Napoleonic law, and somehow makes that interesting. For example, “in a French murder trial the jury is not asked to decide if the defendant did it but if he is guilty,” a nuance which creates nuances such as a man who stabbed his neighbor to death simply for being annoying (“the court expressed sympathy for persons who live in noisy and jerry-built apartment houses.”) But interestingly, this leniency is what caused the courts to come down so hard on Russier (a divorcée). Doubtlessly statutory rape is never okay, but in 1960s France, the same crime committed by a man against a girl would be treated with leniency; this double standard is what sparked a lot of the culture war surrounding this case. “Immortal Gatito” is not an essay I would have sought out if it had not been in this volume, but Gallant treats her subjects with both nuance and sympathy without necessarily forgiving their actions and it made for a fascinating read.

The rest of this collection was not as interesting as these two pieces, and it seemed a lot of them were chosen at random simply for being about Paris, almost as if to cram the book to justify the price. There are some introductions Gallant wrote to various biographies such as Paul Léautaud and Marguerite Yourcenar, but nothing as personal in voice as A Paris Notebook. Her voice throughout makes me want to read more, but I didn’t get enough of an impression from these alone. The last section of the book is reviews of other books, none of which I had read, and mostly biographies. Reading them felt Borges-level meta; though I didn’t get anything out of them, here I am writing a review of reviews.

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Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon - 3/5

I’ve been playing a lot of GTA V lately, around the time that I started reading Inherent Vice, or maybe because of it, because so much of the landscape of this book felt like the daily humdrum of a Los Santos NPC. It’s a book that has a lot of personality, and is an apt portrait-cum-parody of post-Manson LA in a way that no doubt influenced Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under The Sun and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. But having been written in 2009, about the 1970s, I found it less interesting than its predecessor, 1966’s The Crying of Lot 49 which was actually written during the time period it satirizes. One of my favorite books that I’ve read countless times, Lot 49 says everything that Inherent Vice says, but funnier, neater, more concise and more poignant. There are no moments in Inherent Vice equivalent to Oedipa Maas crying in front of Varo’s "Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” just irreverent and occasionally juvenile parody, which honestly seems kind of odd for what’s supposed to be a more mature work. Aside from that, they are virtually identical mystery stories — a past lover sends the protagonist down a paranoid spiral of conspiracy theories and plot points that mostly don’t culminate in anything; in Lot 49, it’s Oedipa Maas, and in Inherent Vice it’s an annoying teenage stoner.

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Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges - 1/5

About Ficciones, Borges said, “Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.” Maybe true if you’re just an ideas guy! Obviously, brevity has its virtues but I don’t think it’s possible to tell some stories in the fake book reviews Borges offers up, which is why I found Ficciones trite and slightly lazy. If you like high concept referential literature you might find these stories interesting, but the best of them I found merely clever and not worth pursuing. In the first collection, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, the only story that felt thought-provoking in the slightest was the famous “Library of Babel,” which I had already read, but even this was merely a thought experiment. In fact, I don’t think a single story had a character worth noting, everything was in service of the central idea in a way that reminded me of Ted Chiang’s collection Exhalation (who even references Borges in some of his work). The second half had a few more highlights, including “The Form of the Sword”, “Death and the Compass”, and “Three Versions of Judas.” Even in these three, which had a payoff which felt worthwhile, the story is so dense and brief that it’s just that and nothing else. Perhaps “Artifices” worked better because Borges deviated from his metafictional formula of fictional book reviews (which Lem did much better, later) but even the high points of this volume were just clever for the sake of being clever, without any additional depth.

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My Body by Emily Ratajkowski - 5/5

I picked up Emily Ratajkowski’s memoir My Body almost completely by chance; I had been looking for Julia Fox’s new book but it was too expensive, so I figured Emrata’s would be approximately the same, and was quickly proven wrong when she opened with a John Berger quote:

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”

I didn’t expect how harrowing it ended up being, though the sparse cover design that seems to take cues from a Didion ought to have clued me in. Knowing almost nothing about Ratajkowski (I had only heard of her from the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl), I found myself fascinated by this brief volume that is at once autobiography and second wave-ish treatise. She calls it a book of essays, which I suppose makes more sense than memoirs because it is not linear, but I still finished it over the course of a single plane ride. I was immediately drawn to Ratajkowski’s clear, introspective and occasionally grotesque prose — my sister asked me if I thought she used a ghostwriter, and I said “no, it’s too weird.” Though it was a fast read, Ratajkowski forces the reader to empathize a life that almost certainly has nothing to do with theirs, the life of a supermodel. But in many ways, it contains truths that assuredly every woman can relate to. In particular, she dispels the myth of “pretty privilege” — the idea that being sexually harassed (or worse!) is somehow something to be thankful for. She writes:

“In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over. Facing the reality of the dynamics at play would have meant admitting how limited my power really was — how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at.”

In My Body, thinkers like Andrea Dworkin and Naomi Wolf find an unexpected successor in the form of some of the realest, most pointed social critique I have read from any contemporary writer. Against the background radiation of the pop-feminism-industrial-complex, Ratajkowski stands out as a writer & as an individual.