Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

  Our time on Earth is finite. On average, about four thousand weeks long.

And that thought terrifies me.

Enter Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, a self-help-ish book about how to rework our relationship with time. If you’ve ever taken a peek at my to-do lists, you’re likely to see why such a book is necessary for me. I want to do it all, I feel like there’s never enough time, and I’m perpetually afraid of having wasted time that is irrecoverable.

But Oliver Burkeman is here to say, “Settle down, Proust, everything you want is impossible anyway!” (Hooray?). Burkeman’s central claim in the text is that we hold on to unhealthy—and even cruel—beliefs about time that are working against our actual lives. No matter what we aim to accomplish, it will never be finished. One task done, another pops up, and the idea of somehow gaining mastery over time is actually a disabling belief that prevents us from doing what is actually important.

In contrast to many books in the self-help genre, Burkeman is not giving you a list of rules to follow in order to make better use of your time (“how to stop procrastinating”, and all that type jazz). In fact, the sense of productivity culture that underlies those types of books is something Burkeman is challenging. In one passage he writes the following:

The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work, in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after school activities, generate more profit for your employer, and yet paradoxically you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.

Thus, in a sense, even if we could be more productive: would it even be sensible to follow-through? For whom are we expending our time? The passage continues with a reference to Edward T. Hall’s suggestion that “Time moves like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones, and becoming more productive just seems to cause the belt to speed up, or eventually to break down.” A lot of people, I would suggest, are in “break down” mode precisely because there is no keeping up with the endless tasks we are required to accomplish. In Burkeman’s words, “It’s now common to encounter reports, especially from younger adults of an all-encompassing, bone-deep burnout, characterized by an inability to complete basic daily chores, the paralyzing exhaustion of a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean, production machines.” I feel that.

In fact, a lot of what Burkeman discusses is deeply relatable and he continues to focus on the psychological, physical, and existential impacts of measured time. I almost felt a faint hint of Mark Fisher’s comments with respect to capitalism and time. This is particularly true in the following quotation that Burkeman presents:

Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day. And this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seemed to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever-further over the horizon. Our days are spent trying to get through tasks in order to get them out of the way, with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters—and worrying in the meantime that we don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move. The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency.

Just impeccable. I feel like our relationship to time, productivity, and capitalism are all linked in this passage. The idea of contrasting what life is supposed to be with what it has become as a result of constant productivity and capital is, in my view, very well articulated—especially because so much of it is ubiquitous in our systems. The line about having to raise our hands to pee is something that is so common in schools and reinforces the idea that we must live according to others’ expectations and timelines. From a personal standpoint, I see myself in the characterization that “this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seemed to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever-further over the horizon.” The idea of trying to deal with all of the meaningless things in order to work towards the actual things is too real; it’s a deeply engrained mentality that the important things require full attention, and how can they have my full attention if I have to worry about all of the little things that don’t matter at all? I am trying to cope with my “joyless urgency.”

Burkeman notes that our relationship to time has changed because we are in a situation of “task-oriented living” versus whatever we have now. In task-oriented living, Burkeman argues, “the rhythms of life are governed by tasks rather than abstract timelines”. He makes reference to a medieval farmer who would wake with the sun, sleep with the dusk, and allow the length of day to vary based on the season. Just as an aside, I think that the example could have been about Indigenous people in Canada as much as about medieval farmers, but I digress. The key part here is that “there was no need to think of time as abstract and separate from life.” An example that really resonated with me is that, Burkeman says, “You milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvest time and anybody who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that, for example doing a month’s milking in a single day to get it out of the way, or by trying to make the harvest come sooner, would rightly have been considered a lunatic.” Here I am: a lunatic. Despite reading this book and gaining a lot from it, I still am trying to work weeks ahead in my daily planner to somehow clear my schedule of all responsibilities. Yet, responsibilities can’t be handled like this. In the separation of task-oriented living towards more abstract-time based living, we have gained a great deal of anxiety. For the medieval farmer, “There was no anxious pressure to get everything done, either, because a farmer’s work is infinite. There will always be another milking and another harvest forever. There is no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion.” I’m struck by this characterization in its truth and also in the despair that it causes me. There will always be more to mark, there will always be more classes to plan, there will always be more book reviews to write, more video games to finish and clear off my mental load. Even entertainment-based activities are reframed as tasks.

Just to expand a little further, Burkeman refers to “those days before clocks.” In those times, he says, “when you when you did need to explain how long something might take, your only option was to compare it with some other concrete activity. Medieval people might talk of a task lasting a miserere while, the time it took to recite psalm 50, known as the miserere from the Bible, or alternatively, a pissing while, which should require no explanation.” I feel like there is some resonance here. We have the trace of those comparative measurements lingering in our language, but overall we try to quantify in abstract terms. It’s ten minutes up the street, it’s going to be a fifteen hour project, and so on. Even as I am about to begin an additional qualifications course, I’m told how many hours I’m expected to spend, not what tasks I’m expected to complete. In a comparative-task measurement, Burkeman says,

one can imagine that experience would have felt expansive and fluid, suffused with something it might not be an exaggeration to call a kind of magic. Notwithstanding the many real privations of his existence, our peasant farmer might have sensed a luminous, awe-inspiring dimension to the world around him, untroubled by the notion of time ticking away, he might have experienced a heightened awareness of the vividness of things, the feeling of timelessness [...] living in deep-time.

It is a kind of magic in those moments when we are free of time, liberated from it. Instead, he suggests, we do everything we can to “avoid the painful constraints of reality” and focus instead on being productive, of ignoring those bright moments of tranquility.

There’s an addictive quality into task-completion. The people that used to refer to themselves as “workaholics” in job interviews as a cheeky ‘worst quality’ may have been more truthful than they thought. Especially if alcoholism is a means of escaping reality and trying to regain a sense of control of your life, productivity addiction runs parallel. Burkeman notes how common it is for “well-paid, high status, overachievers” to be “accustomed to a life of constant motion.” He sees their “pulsing sense of urgency [as] a form of self-medication, something they were doing as a way to not feel something else.” He then gives the example a woman who feels anxiety whenever she slows to rest and immediately looks for active distraction as a form of “emotional avoidance.” He then continues on to note that these traits are similar to alcoholics.

Let’s focus for a moment on the idea of avoidance. Burkeman argues that “Most of our strategies for becoming more productive make things worse because they’re really just ways of furthering the avoidance. After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do.” It is indeed a bleak thought. I once did the calculation of how many books I read in a year and how many years I expect to live and when I calculate the number of books I’ll likely finish by my death is barely a drop in the bucket of all the incredible writing in the world. So we replace finitude with measurable progress towards some ambiguous dream. Not only do we not have enough time, “It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get. Maybe you simply lack the stamina or talent or other resources to perform well in all the roles that you feel you should. So rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies in an effort to carry on feeling limitless.” Those lines strike me to the core. I can never simply be. I get depressed for a few weeks following the constant pressures of teaching because if I rest I do not feel I have “accomplished” anything. Trying to gain control this way, though, is outright unhealthy: “We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance. Or we implement time management systems that promise to make time for everything so that tough choices won’t be required. Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotence control over life, because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project.” It’s hard not to see myself reflected in this: unable to make decisions, so drowning in tasks that require low stakes. I also think back, though, to my literary theory professor who made the comment that if something said “no experience necessary” it really meant “no experience gained.” Same thing here with choices. We avoid important choices so we never really have to live.

Burkeman links to other sociologists, theorists, and philosophers to help make the case. In this section, he refers to Nietzsche to explain how we “fill our minds with business and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally.” In Nietzsche’s words, “We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life [...] because to us it is even more necessary to not have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.” This can take many forms, whether it be distraction of meaningless nonsense (cf. any meme on Facebook), or, Burkeman states, “we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have.”

There are some political implications here, which I think takes Burkeman’s work a step beyond the general self-help tone. Burkeman notes how “most of us seek a specifically individualistic mastery over time” and that “our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whatever you want.” It becomes clear why capitalism and individualism and time have all bound together in this unhealthy spiral. What is clear to Burkeman, though, is that we do this “because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing from marriage and parenting to business or politics depends on cooperating with others, and therefore exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.” I would go one step further to suggest that this is precisely why the system gets maintained as it is. If, for instance, a company does not want its workers to unionize, what better way than to promote an individualistic sense of time—I am what matters to me, and who has the time to organize and work together? Again—we are distracted from the important work.

In another section, Burkeman addresses the blight of social media. I think it’s commonplace to recognize that our devices distract us from things that are more important. But Burkeman takes that one step further. He says that it’s not simply that devices distract us from things that are more important, but that “they change how we’re defining important matters in the first place. [...] They sabotage our capacity to want what we want to want.” He elaborates on the idea of social media and discusses our instances of heightened judgment of others that occur as a result of seeing a narrow window into them, rather than the full picture. But also, time eats away at us after such moments. For instance, when I see something politically egregious online and I’m out in the world later I think about how I might respond. Burkeman makes that case and says we even retrain our brains to think about how we will share moments afterward—while we’re still in them. Again, connecting politically, Burkeman notes his “unpaid role as a creator of content for Twitter” and how the entire format has been crafted by teams of psychologists. One of the reasons I find Burkeman’s text so rich is that it connects to so many discourses. I feel like these observations serve as a launch pad for so many rich epistemological, political, and existential questions.

 Returning to the personal level for now, Burkeman offers the true, if depressing, observation that we will never do all of what we actually want to do. Since there is so much to do in the world, “At any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around doing virtually nothing of the things you theoretically could have done.” This sounds pretty bleak. Thank goodness Burkeman follows it up by reframing the discussion around choices: “the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.” As a phrase, “neglecting the right things” would have served as a good subtitle for the book and as a good piece of advice in general.

At the end of the day, Burkeman focuses on the ways that these relationships to time are unhealthy and harmful for us. As we chase more and more accomplishment and productivity, he writes, “There is a sort of cruelty [...] in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach and many of us would never dream of demanding of other people. The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then, pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble, and get started on them today.” It’s about as practical as advice in the book gets. As I mentioned, it’s more of a theoretical explanation than a simple enhance-your-productivity checklist. He asks a critical question that I think hits at the heart of our relationships with time and productivity: “In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you’re who you are and not the person you think you ought to be?” I think so much of our pain surrounding time is related to that disconnect of what we expert of ourselves and what is actually realistic. I struggle with that myself. Burkeman says, though, that we cannot treat the present day as part of a journey towards some version of ourselves we think we ought to be. There’s a sadness in that mentality that is implicit in the trouble of all overachievers, I think: “Once you’ve earned your right to exist, you tell yourself, life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control.” But we already have and it never does, anyway. We do not have to prove ourselves, and even if we did, the measure would be, quite frankly, impossible anyway.

Before the review ends, I want to thank you for taking the time to read it (and all of my reviews for 2024). The fact that you have finite time and that you have chosen to spend some of it with me reading, thinking about, and responding to books means the world. I hope you have a year of restfulness, a year of accomplishment, and a year of neglecting the right things.

Happy reading; happy new year.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

  I discovered The Glass Room by Simon Mawer at a book sale and picked it up partially for the cover’s art style and partially because the cover advertises that it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009. The Man Booker does not often lead me astray, so I opted to try out this hitherto unknown to me text.

Not knowing what to expect, I began the book with the vague idea of a Faustian bargain. Viktor and Liesel Landauer are wealthy Czech couple who encounter a Mephistopheles-like architect. He seems to infiltrate his way into their lives in an almost sinister register before building them a dream home made of glass. It’s a modern architectural marvel that sparks much debate. But, when people live in glass houses, well…some problems start to arise.

For the first three hundred pages, roughly, one of the central problems is marital infidelity. We are first introduced to the idea via another Mephistophelean figure: the family friend Hana, who is seeking to have an(other) affair with a composer. She’s a bit of a mischievous cuckoldress that seems to incite both terror and amusement from Liesel when she confides in her. She suggests that all men are prone to infidelity, to which Liesel protests. Unfortunately for Liesel, her husband Viktor proves Hana’s hypothesis by having an affair with a sex worker in Vienna while away on business. Meanwhile, Hana professes her love for Liesel and the two share a charged kiss, but Liesel does not take up the opportunity for an ongoing same-sex affair.

Running concurrently to these affairs is the looming threat of war. We’re in the build-up to World War Two and Viktor gets increasingly fearful of the news. This in particular because he is a Jew as Germany is expanding its influence. As the book continues, we see Viktor give up his business to a non-Jewish family member for safeholding. We also see him end his affair (sort of), by giving a substantial sum to Kata. However, as Germany’s influence displaces people across Europe, by sheer coincidence (maybe), Kata arrives at the glass house, which becomes a dwelling for refugees. Viktor’s affair picks up again and becomes even more illicit since it happens under the nose of his wife.

As the war escalates, the Landauer family is forced to move. They migrate East across Europe, moving to Switzerland and passing through France and so on as they progress towards America, taking Kata with them. I think the main fault of Mawer’s novel is in its repetition. There is so much discussion of the family moving, not moving, of the affair continuing, ending, and so on. I suppose that’s somewhat reflective of historical stagnation (the novel does have quite a lot of reflection about time and history, with one character refusing to admit that history exists…). Narratively, I felt it could be substantially culled. What is most intriguing is, in some ways, least explored.

When Liesel discovers Viktor’s affair, it’s somewhat anticlimactic. She wakes up in the middle of the night and finds that Viktor is not there. She wanders the home until she hears evidence of his amorousness with Kata. I forgot to mention that there are also children in the home—two parented by Viktor and Liesel and one of Kata’s from a previous relationship. Anyway, Liesel discovers the affair in a way that feels accidental rather than narratively engineered. It could have been more finely crafted. What is more compelling, though, is that even after the discovery of the affair Liesel does not outright throw Kata out of their circle. It’s kind of an impossible situation to be in and I felt a lot of empathy for both Liesel and Kata, bound to Viktor in their own ways. That dynamic is rendered even more complex where it is suggested that Liesel herself is attracted to Kata. There’s a looming bisexuality that hovers over the characters in the book that is never quite pushed into full view, but is always lingering at the edge of the frame.

While the central characters are abroad, there are other things happening around the Glass House. The caretakers of the home are using it for their own purposes and have increasingly frequent conversations about how the Landauers are never coming home so they have free reign to do as they see fit. That is, until the Nazis take over the house as a research laboratory. Running concurrently, Liesel is receiving letters from Hana, who stayed home instead of joining them. She still seems to profess a romantic love for Liesel and it’s quite tragic watching her exploits. Hana is likely the most lovable character in the book for being so lost and so loving.

Hana being lost and loving is at the core of her side-story. While the Nazis occupy the glass house, she visits and begins a romance with one of the researchers. He invites her to be photographed as they try to conduct genetic research, with the ultimate purpose being that they want to be able to identify Jews simply by looking at their face structure, body types, and so on. The backstory for Hana’s love life is tragic in its own way, not least of all her choice of affairmate. Mawer reveals that the man was in love with a cousin and that the two had a genetic condition that created a defect in their child, whom they euthanized at the age of four or so. It’s pretty depressing—but it gets worse.

Tragically, Hana sleeps with the man in the glass house and gets pregnant. When she comes to confront him about it, it’s heartbreaking. She wants to keep the baby (she always thought she was barren, which is why she was able to carry on so many affairs). When she confronts her Nazi about it, he implies she will get an abortion. Hana has an absolutely crushing moment where she tells him that he’s a baby killer, referring to his tragic situation with his daughter. He slaps her across the face and then anally rapes her. It’s a brutal, devastating scene. 

Hana’s treatment in the text is so heartbreaking because she is so lonely, so misunderstood, and so desperately loving. The other most crushing moment is likely as the Landauers are moving to America. Viktor makes arrangements for passports and tickets (including return tickets) so that if the train gets turned around they won’t have to go back to Czechoslovakia. As they travel from France to Spain, Nazis apprehend the train and families are separated. Liesel and her children are seemingly safe, Viktor has fake identification, but Kata is separated from the family. It’s crushing that Liesel watches as Viktor fights with the authorities over the legitimacy of Kata’s paperwork. He is putting himself in danger and for his mistress. Liesel is devastated by it and when Viktor fails and cries over the loss, she wonders aloud whether he would cry for her.

The book then drops the central characters for roughly a hundred pages. That is probably the most unsatisfying part of the book. After three hundred pages, we begin anew with other characters. I suppose it’s realistic to Holocaust narratives: lives are cut off short, you don’t know where people end up, and so on. The next hundred pages goes into the history of the glass house. The Nazis give up on the research project and cut funding. The glass house then becomes a dance academy where an older Hana helps run the operation and has a romance with a much younger woman. It’s revealed that she and her husband were taken to concentration camps; her husband was killed and she managed to survive. We then get updates on different characters; Leisel has been invited to visit the glass house, which has now become a museum. There are some heartfelt reunions that are a little too saccharine, and it just feels like we didn’t focus on the right things. Mawer seems to mishandle the conflicts; we don’t see the process of reaching satisfying resolutions, we see the conflict come to a head and then we jump ahead. The fragmentary nature of the narrative is reflective of history, but my own investment waned when jumping around between such a large cast of characters.

As I was trying to review a few details for this book (I finished it about two weeks ago), I stumbled onto the Wikipedia page. As it turns out, there is some controversy. There’s a villa Tugendhat that Mawer supposedly based his novel on. The descendants of the Tugendhat family do not approve of the book. The daughter, Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat accuses the book of being theft: “First, the Nazis took our house and now Mawer took our story. The novel isn’t about our family, it is against our family [...] For me, they are parasites that want to get their glory out of the house.” I can’t really offer much commentary on this conflict, but I do think it’s interesting that a book that is so explicitly promoting empathy towards the Jews impacted by the Holocaust seems to have such a blind spot towards the actual impact of the work on descendants of it.

Overall, I thought the book was okay. I started out very optimistically, and there were a few powerful moments and the imagery of the book is pretty great. Moreover, Hana is such an endearing character and I really appreciated the ambiguous sexual and romantic bonds between characters. There were some compelling dynamics, if a bit repetitive as a narrative. 

Happy reading!

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky

  There are few political thinkers that have been as prolific and formative as Noam Chomsky. Whether it’s through Manufacturing Consent or audio recordings of his voice thrown into the beginning or end of punk songs, it seemed his influence throughout the 90s and early 2000s was inescapable, and for good reason.

Somewhat surprisingly, though, I have actually read very little of Chomsky’s work. The odd book or anthology here and there, and so forth. When I read his work on media production and analysis, I had the proverbial moment of scales falling from my eyes. I also find that he is consistently worldly, aware of all kinds of social movements around the globe, which is perhaps one of the factors that drew me towards reading his book How the World Works. 

How the World Works is a collection of interviews with David Barsamian and edited for focus and clarity by Arthur Naiman. The interviews discuss U.S. foreign policy and how it has operated in particular areas, like NIcaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Southeast Asia, and beyond. There is also discussion of class confrontations within the U.S. itself, particularly with respect to the drug war, the health care system, and exploitation of workers by corporations. That exploitation then takes a global focus, considering how the global economy and free trade in particular has impacted the “Third-World.” There are also various sections of miscellany in which Chomsky offers some more general ideas about things like postmodernism and popular resistance.

In short, the book covers a lot of ground, if shortly. One of the issues of having a selection of interviews is that they are decontextualized from their original source. This volume was published in 2011 and it relies on interviews from even earlier; not that things have changed that much, but the nature of a discussion is that it is ephemeral. As a result, the book does not and cannot offer the most up-to-date discourse on issues like, for instance, the current state of affairs in the Middle East. The other issue is that the conversations often seem to come up short; Chomsky will make an interesting statement and then the section simply ends. If anything, the book has shown me how much more enriching it is for me, personally, when books follow a cohesive structure and really delve into one topic. Chomsky certainly does that elsewhere but the compilation format of text here takes away from the incisiveness of his thought. Also, if somewhat ironically, the observations here offered are not exactly revolutionary. Perhaps at the time Chomsky’s dissidence was unique, but now many of his observations are commonplace—it’s the curse of being a trailblazer, I suppose, that the Left has popularized the ideas to a point where they are no longer, in my eyes, controversial.

That’s not to say he doesn’t offer some excellent commentary rooted in helpful historical frameworks. Something I really appreciate about Chomsky is that he is so informed about popular movements around the world that he never comes across as being a partisan hack. Even on some topics we take for granted—like NAFTA, say—he offers a balanced view that remains critical of corporate power while subverting what we in the general populace have accepted and been sold by corporate-owned media. 

Just a brief tangent here: in one section, Chomsky discusses how in one of his books he was challenged as being a pedant because of his use of footnotes and he pointed to the double-edged sword. If you don’t use footnotes, the right will accuse you of making things up. If you use footnotes and document all of your research, you’re seen as a pedant. Go figure.

Incidentally, one of the things he discusses is that the language of politics is deliberately obscure in order to make it impossible for the masses to talk about them coherently. In turn, we cannot understand what is happening in the world and therefore cannot take action. One example he provides is the discussion of what “socialism” means and the confusion that is strewn about it. He then targets the term “special interest” in common parlance. Chomsky notes that the Republicans in the U.S. have often accused Democrats of being the party of “special interests,” by which they meant “women, labor, the elderly, the young, farmers — in short, the general population.” Chomsky then suggests that there was one area of the population that was never listed as a special interest: corporations and business. It’s funny how political motivations can be masked so easily.

Chomsky takes that discussion further and notes that Democrats then suggested they were not the party of special interests and that they served the national interest, too. What I found particularly surprising is how Chomsky then suggests that the Democrats lack the “single-minded class consciousness of their Republican opponents.” He discusses how the Republicans are aware of their status as owners and managers in class war against the population, implying that they have adopted (bastardized) Marxist rhetoric and concepts and resorting to “jingoist hysteria, fear, and terror, awe of great leaders, and the other standard devices of population control.” Chomsky says that, by comparison, the Democrats are less clear about their motivations and thus lose in the propaganda war. Of course, we couldn’t possibly look to the contemporary United States to find a readymade example in the recent election—surely!

In pointing to the term “conservative,” Chomsky notes they are “advocates of a powerful state that interferes massively in the economy and in social life. They advocate huge state expenditures and a post-war peak of protectionist measures and insurance against market risk, narrowing individual liberties through legislation and court packing, protecting the holy state from unwarranted inspection by the irrelevant citizenry. In short, those programs that are the precise opposite of traditional conservatism.” They are in allegiance to the people that own the country. Personally, I’m more inclined towards Zadie Smith’s definition of conservatives as arsonists, particularly now. Although I’d perhaps add that they are consistently shadows: conservatives pretend to advocate for minimal spending and “axing the tax” and whatnot while secretly spending more than liberal governments at every turn. They may claim desire for a free market while legislating where trade can happen. They may claim to be the popular and populist party but repeal protections on lawful protest. But I digress,

The point is that Chomsky reveals the complexity of language that aims to bar people from political action. Even the supposedly simple categorizations of right and left are not as easily understood. Actually, one of the most poignant discussions in that regard is the discussion of freedom as a concept. The right often makes the claim that the left wants to take away freedoms (while they themselves are literally taking away freedoms…). Chomsky reframes the discussion of freedom and rights, giving several notable examples. We may opt to limit someone’s freedom to smoke in public—sure, it’s a reduction of freedom—but that’s because it impacts others’ right to life and good health. Red lights limit our freedom to drive as we wish to get to work, but protect the rights of the little girl crossing the street. In reframing the discussion, I think it really places good emphasis on what the Left and the Right are after: protection for the vulnerable vs. unmitigated actions.

Chomsky also gave some compelling stats in that regard; I’d be curious where the data originated at the time of his citing it and then what the data looks like now. About 90%-95% of people polled suggested that corporations had a responsibility to limit profits and redistribute wealth among their workers. I feel like they’ve been winning the PR battle and people now think that it’s some kind of Commie Plot to think that corporations should be paying their workers more—although, given the response to the recent CEO shooter, perhaps I’m mistaken.

Returning to a few of the more controversial points regarding language and politics, I was interested in Chomsky’s brief comments on postmodernism. Postmodernism is often presented as a leftist philosophy (cf. Jordan Peterson—or better yet don’t.) Chomsky criticizes its jargon and its oblique nature as actually inhibiting popular action and suggests that at least some of the critiques postmodernism has to offer are formed in ignorance. Their critique of systems as nonsense is somewhat valuable, but at the same time allows the logical systems to be owned exclusively by those who benefit from them. What good does it do, for instance, to expose the fallacies of the economic system to those who are continually exploited by it? Similarly, Chomsky resists the phrase “speaking truth to power” on very sensible grounds—power already knows the truth. We must speak truth about power to and with the workers and the underclass in order to better challenge it.

Of course, that’s where everything leads: how do we change the world? Chomsky offers an interesting discussion of how that question gets framed along the lines of privilege. For oppressed people, when he gives talks they say, “Here’s what we’re doing. How do we improve?” For privileged people, when he gives talks they say, “What’s the solution?” Chomsky’s answer is always for people to organize and continue to do the relentless work of challenging power. I have to admit my own privilege here, because it seems very hard. Chomsky himself recognizes that the workers are left with no time to organize—that’s by design. He notes how student organization is at an all-time low. Everyone is struggling, thus they have no time or energy to resist. The question for me then becomes, how do we liberate people enough that they can continue their work fighting for social causes? I appreciate that there are organizations already doing the work and you just have to join them, but then I also worry about how only the relatively privileged are able to take action on behalf of those who are even more pressed—but then we run into a vanguard situation. I don’t know how to resolve that contradiction.

I would also posit my own idea here for why people are not taking action like they used to or why privileged people keep asking, “What can be done?” The reality is this: people want to see the needle move. We may take action over and over and over and volunteer every weekend but the gains are not immediate. It’s hard to envision continuing to do the work if you feel there’s no effect, and until we can see that needle move we will continually have people asking “What is the solution?” I don’t think that’s a bad thing, per se. It’s not an ill-intentioned question; in my mind, it’s one of pragmatism: where can we see the most gains?

Chomsky refers to a group in (I believe) Brazil a few times. He talks about how the outside intelligentsia went in and made a series of commercials that didn’t land with the public. Then, they hired local students to do the filmography and write the scripts and that was far more effective with the population there. It’s a revolutionary act to put media back in the hands of the populace so that they can discuss more thoroughly the impacts that global policies have on them, free from the corporate biases that sneak into popular media. Some of Chomsky’s comments there are highly encouraging and I hope that people have the sense to engage with their more local media. (Although, Jon Oliver has a great and depressing piece about how local media in the United States is owned and is distributed stories by corporate masters…) Chomsky also proves prescient with respect to social media. I’d be very curious to read his thoughts on social media today; I suspect it’s just as corporately owned and antidemocratic as our previous systems, though now we have the illusion of public discourse. That may be a bit harsh, but even my particular bubbles that I approve of serve to reinforce my own beliefs and play into the illusion of choice with the content that I’m consuming.

Overall, Chomsky’s commentary is illuminating, if not all that surprising anymore. I’d say on most issues I’m in fundamental agreement and otherwise it’s only a matter of the particulars. I’ll continue to appreciate the influence Chomsky has had on me, my chosen communities, and the world at large. Really, I can’t express how foundational he has been. So, there are two net steps to keep that legacy alive: 1) read more of his non-anthology books and 2) get organizing.

Happy reading; happy resisting!

Utopia by Heidi Sopinka

“She’s driving a speed addict’s car in an inside-out shirt, on painkillers, with a hand wrapped in gauze, on her way to find her husband’s dead ex-wife. If she concentrates hard enough, these things will snap into a logical pattern” (146).

If you find these two sentences enticing, then you might be inclined to read Heidi Sopinka’s novel Utopia. In the first section of her novel, we are introduced to two central characters: Billy and Romy, conceptual artists in 1970s America. Billy is a successful artist, primarily by virtue of being male and stealing some of his best known works from Romy. Romy, meanwhile, is taking on ambitious experiential works about light and has a track record of projects that seem in conversation with real-life artist Marina Abramović. Romy has not been as successful and the reason is because she’s a woman. In the opening twenty pages or so of the book, we discover that Romy is a new mother to Billy’s child and we find them all at an artist party getting sloppily drunk. It is on that night that Romy falls to her death, and it’s never quite certain Billy is innocent of murdering her.

From there, we flash forward to Paz, another budding artist and Billy’s second wife. The novel then becomes a sort of inverted version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, which Sopinka has the good sense to acknowledge directly. While Paz is in conversation with her friend, she starts the conversation, “Last night I dreamed —” and her friend interrupts, “That you went to Manderley again” (23). For those unfamiliar with the novel, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” and the novel’s unnamed narrator is haunted by the dead and perfect Rebecca. She feels she is forever in her shadow. Sopinka’s Paz goes through a similar experience, feeling overlooked for her art and by her partner, remembering Romy as an incredible force. As a result, she feels a sense of unreality hovering over her: “I dreamed, not for the first time, that I was in an apocalyptic wall of flames” (23). She then insists that her friend touch the table, and Essa tells her, “Nothing is wrong with this table.” Paz, in turn, “has an uneasy feeling that this does not feel like real life, exactly” (23). When Billy leaves for an exhibition elsewhere and leaves Paz alone at home with his daughter, combined with the fact that she finds Romy’s old diaries, is a perfect storm for her to descend into paranoid speculation and dissociative behaviours.

As the book progresses, Paz becomes less and less certain of herself and more resentful of the gender dynamics in her relationship. Here’s a passage after making love with Billy:

After, she looks over at Billy sleeping. How can he always sleep? She’s always flopping around like a fish that’s been caught. She sits on the bed holding her knees to her chest, wishing she still smoked. Her eyelids flicker. She’s taken a sleeping pill and is fighting it. The curtains move in the breeze and she gets up, hearing a little clicking noise that she follows downstairs, walking slowly. She sits on the couch, the sound of crickets loudly coming through the windows. After a few minutes she walks out onto the porch. In her half-sleep state, she thinks of him sleeping above. He gets to come and go, sleep with her, not give anything away. She lets it happen, but still she can’t help thinking how much power he has. He told her he was glad to be back, and she believed him. But what gets said in the middle of the night doesn’t matter. Daylight cancels everything, and you always have to start again. (114)

The passage captures that sleepy existentialism and morose midnight reflections I’m sure most people have experienced. Sopinka effectively captures that kind of hyperawareness that happens towards night. Paz’s restlessness is very true to life, and the final lines of the passage punctuate the scene really beautifully: “what gets said in the middle of the night doesn’t matter. Daylight cancels everything, and you always have to start again.”

So let’s start again. Utopia is, in some ways, two novels at once. On the one hand, it’s a thrilling and suspenseful mystery: what happened to Romy? On the other hand, it’s a kind of künstlerroman for Paz to discover who she is as an artist. In some ways, it matches the tonal register of Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi or Second Place by Rachel Cusk. It’s also like two novels in that it alternates between being tantalizingly uncertain and bludgeoningly direct.

Both of the registers have their merits, but I’m more inclined towards the mysterious, paranoid side of the equation. In that respect, the relationship between Paz and Romy is most effective. Paz lives in Romy’s shadow, who had lived in Billy’s shadow, and now finds herself obsessed with her husband’s dead wife. Paz cannot escape her jealousy when she finds Romy’s diary, but also must grapple with the guilt of having read it:

The next time she opened it, she found a thin notebook with pale-blue lines, writing of Romy’s detailing works in progress with a kind of murderous compression that verged on poetry. There was a scrap of paper wedged in as a bookmark that fell into her lap. Paz unfolded it. In Billy’s writing, it said ONLY YOU. Her stomach contracted. The words seemed to leap out at her, bringing a flush of jealousy, and then shame at herself for having looked at them. (25)

First of all, I like the characterization of Romy’s writing as “murderous compression that verged on poetry.” The terse note from Billy that says “ONLY YOU” is just the right phrase to inspire that jealousy in Paz; she is another, which is a serious problem for the circle of women artists that accuse Paz of stealing Romy’s life (including her work). Yet, in flashbacks we see that Romy and Paz seem to have their own special connection, opening up to each other in ways that they typically do not (despite Paz’s completely awkward fan-girling)..

In addition to the ambiguity of whether Paz is married to a murderer, Sopinka turns the screw further when Paz starts receiving postcards from Romy. Romy is supposed to dead, but is her death all a performance piece? There are a number of details that throw question on her death; supposedly only one person saw her body. She had also discussed plans for a big artistic project that takes place in the desert. These tidbits, along with the fact that postcards are arriving to Paz with succinct yet ominous messages, create a great dramatic tension. Is Paz part of a twisted game that Romy is playing? Will she emerge from the shadows to show that her death was all part of a performance piece? After all, she fell to her death and had already taken photos of ‘falling’ (which Billy stole and got credit for).

I opened with the passage of Paz driving into the desert. She accidentally severs her finger, and then drives into the desert to follow a lead on the postcard. Paz follows Romy’s footsteps, which again feels conceptual, and then discovers more and more clues before finding Romy’s final artistic project and sharing in communion with it. I won’t spoil more at this point, because that core mystery is finely wrought.

The other component of the book is a direct commentary on the art world that leaves no room for ambiguity. Setting the book in the 1970s is a smart move in that respect, and there’s a clear pattern of male artists getting away with all kind of misogyny while women are left debating how to make it in the art world. There are some hardline views and debate amongst the women, who at times cannibalize one another and at others try to challenge the fundamentally competitive nature of a patriarchal art world.

Towards the end of the book, Billy is taken to court and questioned about Romy’s death. The presentation is excellent; the narration alternates between court transcripts and Paz’s masterwork art project. Going back and forth every few sentences has a great dramatic flare and it’s an effective culmination to multiple storylines. The court transcripts routinely downplay the importance of art in women’s lives and to pathologize women’s experiences. Here are a few examples:

THE DECEASED’S FUTURE PLANS FOR EXHIBITIONS, HER GUGGENHEIM GRANT, AND THE CREATION OF A LONG-TERM PROJECT HAVE BEEN OFFERED UP BY THE PROSECUTORS TO RULE OUT ANY NOTION OF SUICIDE. (OF NO CONSEQUENCE.) 

[...]

EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT THE DECEASED WAS GIVEN TO IRRATIONAL OUTBURSTS OVER MINOR OCCURRENCES AND WAS PRONE TO HYSTERIA, PARTICULARLY AS A POST-PARTUM FEMALE. (ADMISSABLE.)

[...]

WITNESSES SAY SHE LIVED FOR HER WORK. (HEARSAY.)

[...]

ACCORDING TO SEVERAL REPUTABLE SOURCES, THE DECEASED’S WORK HAD, QUOTE UNQUOTE, DEATH VIBES TO IT. (215)

The importance of Romy’s work is downplayed as being of no consequence and that she lived for her work is mere hearsay. What does get accounted for by the court is her post-partum depression and that her work supposedly had “death vibes” (which is a hilarious critique and hits too close too home for casual art commentary).

I’ve not presented the climactic moment for Paz that is interwoven with the court case. In part, it’s because I feel like it ought to be experienced. The other component is that, all things considered, it felt a bit saccharine. Towards the end of the book, there are a lot of feel-gooderies and optimistic moments that don’t entirely hit the mark. It’s a bit of a shame because so much of the book is well-written and the tensions in the text feel a little too easily resolved for effective payoff. 

In terms of style, Sopinka is often rich in description and imagery. An early passage in the book really got me invested in her rich language: “From the porch, [Paz] watched the lawn losing its green, like a lens tightening. Bodies of flies piled at the windowscreens. She began to wander when Flea was sleeping, searching for what, she wasn’t sure. She’d move through the rooms looking over her shoulder, with the methodical self-absorption of a thief, even though she knew Billy wouldn’t be home for hours and that it wasn’t possible for the kind of truth she was looking for in a drawer” (25). The image of a lens tightening is fantastic, especially given the artists’ work with photography. Paz’s characterization with “methodical self-absorption of a thief” adds to the awkward tension of her relationship. Elsewhere, in fact from the passage that started the review, Paz captures the spirit of a manic artist beautifully: “Paz is suddenly ravenous. She fishes around but she’s already finished most of what’s on the passenger seat. She kicks off her sandals and drives in her bare feet. She looks at herself in the rear-view mirror and sees that her shirt is inside out. The heat makes the scenery look almost two-dimensional. It gives it a radical geometry” (146). At the end of that section, there is some great imagery about the two-dimensional desert and its “radical geometry.”

Throughout the book, since the artworks are often so connected to place, there is a lot of description of the setting. There’s a transcendent kind of moment when Paz tracks down Romy’s work with light—which actually reminded me, partially, of an art work I saw in New York where there was a crisp cut square of sky. In any case, Sopinka’s descriptions offer some rich material. The book offers some great visuals.

Towards the end of the book, there’s a short section that wraps things up. There’s a twist to the book similar to Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise which is fine, though not quite as dramatic or mind-blowing as Choi’s novel. The bulk of the book stands on its own well, but the final section adds a few more dimensions and solidifies the feminist impulse of the text.

Overall, I was really impressed with Utopia. There is a lot in the book to like, and even love. The central mystery of the book really finely developed. The characterization in the book is really effective, which leads to strong relationships between characters. The writing is generally strong, if overly ‘clean’ towards the end. Heidi Sopinka is one of the writers I’ve read for the first time this year and is one of my “new writers to watch.”

Happy reading!