personalcjcjcj

[personalcjcjcj]

death's end (trilogy overall)

discussed at book club with alexis & kristie

main thing i found myself questioning throughout the series: how is it that a civilization as advanced as trisolaris did not have any ability to lie or deceive, when lying has been so integral to human history? perhaps it has to do with their social structure (we never really heard much on whether there was a societal hierarchy or not, and perhaps if there is none and people are more on equal footing then there is less to lie over). perhaps it goes deeper and there's a lack of greed or self-interest, which often is what usually begets lying. perhaps the presence (or lack) of resources has always been democratic -- everyone has the ability to dehydrate, and it doesn't sound like food as we know it is a thing, so there may be fewer things to fight over. i wonder if it was mainly a plot device or whether there was some type of societal commentary cixin liu was drawing.

this book in particular was probably broadest in scope. it covered millions of years and a significant part of it occurs in outer space. parts of it got a little too complicated to fully grasp -- ie. how being in a higher dimension looks and feels -- but i found the explanation of the origins of the universe to be very elegant and simple. i've never thought to question the speed of light, but in cixin liu's universe, it used to be infinitely higher, and the universe itself had more dimensions too. with time however there's been an inevitable decay in both dimensions and speeds of light, and now the universe is dying. the idea that you can also manipulate the speed of light and become somewhat of a black hole itself to prevent light speed travel was also very creative. all this is to say that when we first learn about outer space it seems so vast, infinite, and limitless, but it takes a higher order of thought to see the universe itself as a finite and historical object.

this book also really had me thinking about humanity, because this is where humanity breaks away from Earth -- both in the form of the large exiled spaceships that discover the higher dimensional fragments, and in the form of cixin and AA fleeing the destruction of the solar system. humanity itself is context-dependent. in the exiled spaceship, people were eating human remains nonchalantly, and in the eventual testimonies they say that everything (including their reference point/axis of ethics) changed once they were severed from Earth. similarly, you also see people hibernating through eras and waking up in a completely different society of information overload and feminized men. even in our human history, humanity 2000 years ago was dramatically different from now. it was thought-provoking to see a story that portrayed humanity as a living organism, capable of breaking off into segments and transforming over time. perhaps there is much more mutability to human society than we can even realize.

things we also talked about in book club: the relative absence of politics especially towards the end of the trilogy. would it really have been possible for all of the nuclear powers to cooperate with cheng xin's experiment and donate their entire stockpile of nuclear weapons? i think not, or at least not without a huge political shitstorm lasting a minimum of years. there is inter-nation mistrust and competition that the conflict with trisolaris could very well escalate. and the UN is more of a figurehead than an actionable political body, which made its transformation into the world's leading space agency also somewhat unbelievable. none of the wall facers were female (except in the TV series). humanity is probably more likely to kill each other while waiting for trisolaris to arrive -- but that wouldn't have made for a good sci fi book.

[personalcjcjcj]

babel

this felt like reading harry potter except with deep allegorical undertones on colonialism, cultural identity, and social inequality. she writes with a voice that is very charged and at times raging, and for me as another american chinese female it is gratifying to see someone like me write so fearlessly. the story itself is pretty easy to get into -- gifted young students studying at a british school of magic is a tried and true premise -- and it's highly visual (felt like i was seeing it play like a movie in real time). i have no idea how she managed to learn so much linguistics to write this story but it's meta how she was probably poring over etymological texts just like the babel students. lots of questions to consider, like:

what is the "best" way to resist the establishment? there's multiple competing schools of thoughts espoused by anthony (in the non-violence camp involving negotiating with the establishment), griffin (who says violence is the only way to get the establishment to see and respect you as more than just a nuisance), and early robin (live a dual life -- carrying out the establishment's mission by day, participate in low risk acts of resistance by night).

where is home if it's not found in the country you were born in or the country you reside in? which country, then, should your loyalties lie? this area may be out of scope for what is already a hugely ambitious undertaking, but a limitation of this novel was that china/canton is painted somewhat one-dimensionally. commissioner lin is the neutral face of a monolith society that is either going to be declared war on or not by the british, but i would've been really interested to see robin spend a longer time there as an adult and get a richer exploration of the more unexpected, bittersweet, nostalgic, or disturbing aspects of returning to a homeland you no longer recognize.

is there a way to be ensconced in the (ivory) tower and still be a responsible citizen of the world, or do you need to burn the tower down from the inside?

overall -- stunning!

[personalcjcjcj]

the goldfinch

narrator voice is precocious for 13 yo

sexist attitudes twds women (xandra's style) -- almost seems like written by straight man's male gaze

is donna tartt a woodworker?? so much detail. also so many languages and so much drug use. very thoroughly researched if none of it is from her own experience

the ending is too tidy and too much telling not showing (3 main themes: good can come from a bad path or bad decisions, we can't choose what we want or don't want or "we can't escape who we are", life is a catastrophe)

this reads very quickly and almost like a thriller for how long it is

this whole story does make you think a lot about free will and nature vs. nurture. one of the big cornerstones that's illustrated here is that an early childhood tragedy, like losing your sole parent in a bombing, can irrevocably alter the course of your life -- and for people without the privilege of money or supportive community, falling into the traps of things like drugs is all too easy. but the other conflicting message from this book is you can't change who you are -- was he predestined to go down this path with or without his mom's death? also, it takes him until the end of the book to start taking responsibility for his actions. he's so passive and he knows it, and it's hard not to feel like you want to shake him.

turns weirdly positive on the last page? "life is short. it's a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch"

end definitely feels like the weakest

[personalcjcjcj]

the boys in the boat

well researched and well told story on the 9 boys who rowed crew in the Berlin Olympics

focuses on joe rantz, who had a heartbreaking childhood involving being abandoned by his family, and illustrates how far resilience, willpower, humility, and willingness to work hard can potentially take you

gave me a new appreciation for crew, which i completely did not understand prior to this book. crew is a truly a team sport; even in sports like soccer or football, you have your star strikers or QBs, but in crew everyone moves together in the same boat and the perfect rowing comes from perfect unison. it was really meaningful to see how the trusting in others inherent in crew, which joe had trouble doing given his past, helped to heal joe

well interspersed commentary on the beginnings of WWII as well

[personalcjcjcj]

the candy house

i can't tell if the scattered and at times impersonal narrative voice(s) of this book is deliberately crafted or not, but while it's not my cup of tea reading-wise (i'm not always against writing from multiple different perspectives, ie. the overstory, but i prefer it when there's a rich and painstaking character-building arc to them), it's incontrovertible that it supports the primary themes and messages of this book -- that the externalization of your entire consciousness into a "collective," which anyone can then consume, can lead to what egan describes as being in the middle of a snowstorm, where you're accosted simultaneously by millions upon millions of individual snowflakes colliding against each other, being carried by the wind, breezing past you, landing on your head, etc etc etc. NYT calls it a "concept album," or social media personified ("collaborative novel written by your friends and friends of friends on Facebook or Instagram, each link opening on a new protagonist"), which i think is really apt.

i guess what i'm trying to say is that this book is more hypothesis-generating and thought-provoking for its subject matter, rather than memorable for its writing. things to consider:

would this externalization really lead to "tens of thousands of crimes solved; child pornography all but eradicated; Alzheimer's and dementia sharply reduced by reinfusions of saved healthy consciousness; dying languages preserved and revived; a legion of missing persons found; and a global rise in empathy that accompanied a sharp decline in purist orthodoxies"? how do we define progress from a technological innovation, and at is there a price to pay where progress is no longer worth the loss? the stakes seem higher and higher, the double edged sword sharper and sharper, as time goes on.

to what ends will humans try to quantifiably describe ("algebraize") and commodify every single human interaction, and what will it reveal about us? one of the chapters that stuck out the most to me was written in the perspective of a counter, who robotically assesses every human interaction (even his own with his crush) statistically before proceeding further. we're already reached an age where spotify creates recommended playlists, youtube shows you recommended videos, and instagram shows you recommended ads targeted based on your trackable internet presence, but this book shows you that there can be so much more to it. how does this confound our offline lives? do we actually have free will?

[personalcjcjcj]

the big swiss

riveting and fast-paced, especially at the end (finishing it feels like getting off a roller coaster ride). the premise alone got me into it

too much detail on the beginnings of greta's relationship with stacy -- felt it distracted from the rest of the book and wasn't sure what it added.

some laugh out loud sentences which is saying something since i don't laugh out loud during reading

the scene where pinon gets shot and greta finds out is very emotional

ultimately greta's journey is about healing her inner child

[personalcjcjcj]

2023 books -- the right to sex

a balanced take on sex and its many implications/permutations. at some points i felt frustrated by the lengths she went to describe the different sides of certain controversies (like the phenomenon of asian female + white male couples, or what to do about porn) without taking an obvious stance herself. but this all adds to her main point in the final essay, which is that labeling something without first taking the time to critically consider the whole of it can sometimes be reductive, and as a result, counterproductive. the exception to is her impassioned argument against romantic professor-student relationships.

the conspiracy against men

if the aim is not merely to punish male sexual domination but to end it, feminism must address questions that many feminists would rather avoid: whether a carceral approach that systemically harms poor people and people of color can serve sexual justice; whether the notion of due process -- and perhaps too the presumption of innocence -- should apply to social media and public accusations; whether punishment produces social change. what does it really take to alter the mind of patriarchy?

talking to my students about porn

why is it that when white men rape they are violating a norm, but when brown men rape they are conforming to one? (the norm of polite well behaved white man who made a terrible mistake like brock turner, vs stereotype of mexican rapists and everyone is a rapist)

cites only words by catharine mackinnon -- porn teaches men to hear "yes" when women say "no"; to disbelieve women who say they were harassed or raped; to see resistance as coyness, and coyness as invitation. the exercise of pornographers' right to free speech undermines women's own right to free speech --> porn is an act of subordination, and the very fact that judges, lawyers, and philosophers insist on treating porn as a question of free speech -- a question of what it says rather than what it does -- betrays their implicitly male perspective. ordering an attack on someone is punishable even though it's technically speech, but why are things different for men who, by creating porn, order attacks on women?

be cautious on imposing legal restrictions on porn, because in the past this has led to "fringe" porn being banned --> banning anything on whipping/spanking can also lead to the ban of the whole of this fetish website berating men by restraining/pegging them, while leaving conventional porn to become the one-size-fits-all (which is already a porn that is implicitly problematic)

"whatever the law says, porn is going to be made, bought, and sold. what should matter most to feminists is not what the law says about porn, but what the law does for and to the women who work in it" -- but isn't this also kind of reductive and failing to be imaginative, which is what the essay concludes by supporting?

the right to sex

it is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalization with a sense of entitlement to women's bodies, those women who protest against their sexual marginalization typically do so with talk not of entitlement but empowerment...the question posed by radical self-love movements is not whether there is a right to sex (there isn't), but whether there is a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires.

not only is gender politicized, but also desire. it's not innate and biological but rather a manifestation of what society has told us is attractive. and this goes as deep as heterosexuality vs homosexuality

coda was good

adrienne rich: to acknolwedge that for women heterosexuality may not be a 'preference' at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force is an immense step to take if you consider yourself freely and 'innately' heterosexual

political lesbianism vs. 'real' lesbianism -- but is there any lesbianism that isn't political?

on not sleeping with your students

the professor's failure in cases of consensual teacher-student sex isn't just a failure to redirect the student's erotic energies toward its proper object. it is a failure to resist taking advantage of the fact that women are socialized in a particular way that conduces to patriarchy (to find subordination sexy, and that if you find a woman to be amazing it must be envy and not desire, but vice versa is the case if it's a male). it reproduces the very dynamics on which it feeds, by making sure that the benefits of education will not accrue equally to men and women.

therapists get a lot of training on how to deal with transference, but not professors

sex, carceralism, capitalism

carceral solutions (like banning prostitution, arresting domestically violent husbands) tend to make things worse for the women who are already worst off. this is because carceral feminism invites the wielding of the state's coercive power against the women who suffer the most from gendered violence; it also fails to address those social realities -- poverty, racism, caste -- that lie at the root of most crime.

carceral approaches to gender justice tend to presuppose a subject who is a "pure" case of women's "common oppression," uncomplicated by factors such as calss and race. the belief that a sex worker will be helped by the criminalization of her trade rests on the assumption that she has other choices available to her

a feminism that focuses on what all women have in common harms the worst off women

[personalcjcjcj]

the course of love

love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm

our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. we have allowed our love stories to end way too early. we seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue

in the beginning: love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion. it reaches a peak when you feel that you can reveal all of yourself, which you sometimes keep hidden for the sake of propriety.

being married may be associated with caution, conservatism, and timidity, but getting married is an altogether different, more reckless, and hterefore more appealingly romantic proposition.

marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate

taking the blame out on your partner -- they are the center of your emotional universe, and by extension you feel they are responsible for the things that happen in your life (also because you can dare to be extravagantly unreasonable to them more so than any other person in your life) -- like childlike attachment towards parents

Romanticism is more about the quest to find love than to give it

having a child teaches you about giving love without expecting anything in return -- this is a love not based on admiration of strength but rather compassion for weakness/dependency

sex and parenthood: in some ways, you may have found a partner who resembles your parent. when you have a child together, that will bring forth their parental qualities and identity much more, increasingly obscuring their sexual selves under that parental cloak. they look more like your parent again, and hard to have sex with that

arousal also has to do with the urge to join together, which implies there is some sort of separation leading up to it. but when every part of your life is joined together as it is in a long-term marriage (living, finances, chores, kids), there is minimal "me/you" vs "we." one needs a certain amount of autonomy in order for being undressed to feel like a treat

adultery can be a symptom (of feeling rejected in the marriage)

jealousy can be stupid but it still happens and is still instinctive, and sometimes wisdom is knowing when wisdom is not an option

marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for

on one hand, a marriage is about understanding each other, but on another hand it's also about diplomacy (because people seek both stability/security and adventure in their relationship and this is impossible to reconcile, leading to occasionally ricocheting thoughts that one needs to have sensitivity towards expressing with no filter)

learning and dealing with each other's attachment styles is an act of love -- love as a skill, not just an enthusiasm

maturity comes from seeing each individual as a vulnerable being motivated by imperfect things like anxiety/fear and having sympathy for them

no one is perfect if you get to know them. they're only the most perfect-appearing in the beginning

they have been married for 13 years, but only now does rabih feel ready for marriage. given that marriage yields its most important lessons only to those who have enrolled in its curriculum, it's normal that readiness should follow and not precede the ceremony itself, perhaps by a decade or two.

ready for marriage if you are:

giving up on perfection (because nobody is perfect)

giving up on being fully understood (there is no way to fully understand someone else over the course of time, and so someone is not automatically inept or crazy when you inevitably run up on the limits of your understanding)

admit that you are crazy (only when you are alone with nobody to confront you do you think you are normal and good)

it's not their fault (getting mad over in-laws, dishes has more to do w the impossibility of the institution of marriage than them as a person)

ready to love rather than be loved (as a society we are fixated on the latter, and this is how we are first exposed to love as a child, but expecting the same from your partner is a recipe for disaster)

ready for a life of sexual frustration (monogamy can be hard, but infidelity can arouse the most primitive jealousies and abandonment issues in your partner so better not to)

ready and wanting to learn from your partner (there will be ways in which they are better than you, and you should be open to their teachings)

aware that you are not compatible (the Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the "right" person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. there is no such person over the long term. we are too varied and particular. there cannot be lasting congruence. the partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace. rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the "right" person. compatibility is an achievement in love; it shouldn't be its precondition)

you understand that the love stories in films and books is not real, and you shouldn't be measuring your relationship up to it

do you feel that, with this person at your side, you are able to handle things life throws at you?

[personalcjcjcj]

our 20s

hanna: bed and sleep melissa: long islands and cleaning zach: league and existentialism cecilia: “can someone tell me”

[personalcjcjcj]

BIA-ALCL patient

resident: “we can potentially consider doing radiation to the residual cells in your breast with the intent of a cure.”

patient: “say that last part again, please.”

resident: “we’re hoping for a cure. a cure is possible.”

patient: “can you say that a third time?”

resident: “a cure is possible.”

patient, tears in eyes: “thank you. i really needed to hear that.”

[personalcjcjcj]

If there is too great a discrepancy between the “true” and the “false” self, it will make for a vulnerable sense of identity.

[personalcjcjcj]

[personalcjcjcj]

amazing

[personalcjcjcj]

old poem

this–

the alcove of softly shriveled skin

mildly warm with rest

my midas fingers molding

flickering sanctity into enveloping cocoon  

pulsating vessels, indiscernible

in a tessellation of youth and age

–was my home

[personalcjcjcj]

i’ll always miss you J

[personalcjcjcj]

“i’ll keep you in mind”

mr. d’s parting words on the last day of palliative care 

a patient with stomach adenocarcinoma and peritoneal carcinomatosis who i had accompanied to a rad-onc CT simulation and then interviewed the following day for my consult note. he had bright eyes and a curved smile. he wanted to enjoy life in peace.