A book is inherently something that is viewed; a memoir is one more way of being stared at. It is not unusual when reading a memoir or autobiography to feel like a voyeur, and this is perhaps particularly true when the subject is part of a marginalized group in which the reader is not included. I struggled reading a book like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, because of the private intimacy of certain moments, such as Strayed consuming her mother’s ashes — but I felt guilty reading Lehrer’s and Grue’s memoirs, as if I was somehow perpetrating yet more crimes against their privacy, even though I had been invited to do so by the authors. Maybe that is part of the point, of course: to force the reader into inhabiting the gaze. However, at the end of each book, I felt buoyed by the writers’ ability to demand that disabled people be viewed as individuals, each in the particular way they chose to be portrayed.
Math is often described this way, as a language or a tool that humans created to describe the world around them, with precision.
But there's another school of thought which suggests math is actually what the world is made of; that nature follows the same simple rules, time and time again, because mathematics underpins the fundamental laws of the physical world.
It’s perhaps asking too much for social scientists to invalidate half a century’s worth of demographic assessment of the baby boomers. But what about “Generation Z,” a term that’s so far struggled to establish any meaningful difference between millennials and zoomers? Are we really, simply stuck with these terms? What do we lose in rejecting “zoomer”? We stand to gain a far more accurate and sensible comprehension of our culture, and ourselves.
Michelle de Kretser’s slyly intelligent sixth novel pairs two first-person narratives. One takes place in a dystopian near-future Melbourne, where Lyle, an immigrant father of two, is employed by the state to write sinister-sounding “evaluations” nominating fellow migrants for arrest and repatriation; the other half of the book is set in 1981 and follows Lili, a 22-year-old Australian working as a teaching assistant in France, prior to postgraduate literary study in Oxford. It’s typical of De Kretser’s sophistication that she leaves the link between these narratives entirely up to you – even the order in which they are to be read is left to the individual reader, given the book’s reversible, Kindle-defying two-way design.
In Drunk, a witty and erudite homage to alcohol, Slingerland offers a novel explanation to an old evolutionary puzzle: Why do we keep drinking? “Humans are the only species that deliberately, systematically, and regularly gets drunk,” he writes. “The rarity of this behavior is not surprising, given its costs.” The downsides of alcohol have always been obvious: impaired motor skills, wretched decision-making, excruciating headaches, and assorted long-term damage to body and soul. Logically, a society of teetotalers ought to be so much more productive that it would long ago have conquered its drunken neighbors and eventually the rest of the planet. Yet from the ancient world until today, from the wine sipped at Greek philosophers’ symposia to the champagne toasts on New Year’s Eve, the richest and most dynamic societies have given alcohol a central role in their cultures.
It is clear that his lifetime of proximity to works by great masters has made him a well informed afficionado, and one gets a sense of what he likes and doesn’t like. One also gets the sense it is his love of art that has driven him to write this work that makes modern art understandable and accessible to the rest of us. This easily readable, engaging book is a good way to get familiar with the foundations of modern art.