Still Mostly True by Brian Andreas

       In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger invented Instagram, which is still one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. Instagram has been the launching pad for a number of poets’ careers, for better or for worse, capitalizing on short-form poems with just one or two sentences with line breaks and maybe a doodled accompaniment. Often these poems take the form of tidbits of wisdom or advice. Often their tone is designed to be relatable. Well, with Brian Andreas’ 1994 collection Still Mostly True: Collected Stories & Drawings, we’re not quite at the age of Instagram poetry, but we’re in a similar mode of an outsider’s “unpracticed” hand.

Andreas provides a series of short poems, the collection of which can be read start to finish in one half-hour sitting. Most of the poems are two or three sentences with some silly conceit, accompanied by a doodled image that is simultaneously childish and grotesque. Even the fonts of the book are cartoonish—one the huge print of a children’s book, the other the artist’s chicken scratch.

Most of the poems, I have to admit, I felt compelled to gloss over. Here’s a sample of a representative one that I feel encapsulates the simplicity of structure and the not-entirely-landing-humour of the collection: “He won the grand / prize of a vacuum / cleaner & all the / canned goods he / could carry & / when they told him / he couldn’t believe it. // I thought I was / buying drink tickets, / he said” (“Winning Ticket”).

There are a couple of poems in the collection that touch on something sincere. Maybe it’s because it’s such a naive approach, but once in a while the poems hit on something deeper. I’m not going to pretend that these poems will revolutionize our interior worlds, but two stood out as touching reflections.

One untitled drawing is accompanied by the following poem:

he has a hole
where his
heart used to
be because
it fell out when he was running from scary
things one night in a dream & it hurts all the
time now & he doesn’t know how to fix it &
sometimes I think he doesn’t even remember that it’s gone

I appreciate this sense of lack. It’s a bit lackluster to chalk it up to a dream but if you stretch your imagination a little, it feels a little more meaningful.

The other poem gets stupider but there’s still an emotional core worth talking about. The poem goes as follows: “he wore a pot on his head in all / kinds of weather. / I never learned / to cook / I got it / after my / mother died. / he said. I just / know it would / make her happy / that I’m using / it.” Sure, the premise is dumb and implausible, but there’s something sweet about not using the pot for its intended purpose but wanting to bring comfort to his deceased mother.

Anyway, the poetry collection isn’t particularly memorable. It’s not especially developed; the poems wash over you in rapid succession and once they’re done, I was ready to stop thinking about them. The drawings are whimsical but, again, don’t have enough of a distinct visual style to leave a lasting impact.

Nonetheless, happy reading!

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

        There is an illicit pleasure in reading Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God. The main character is charged with hate and sees hate as a true creative force; the titillating cynicism and adolescent rage of the book couldn’t help but bring smiles to my face.

The main character of Hval’s novel is a young girl in conservative Norway that is looking for any kind of alternative to the quotidian existence she sees around her. To that end, she has an obsession with black metal and witchcraft and what she refers to as the “cosmic internet.” The novel follows these fascinations as it jumps around in time; we see her early roots as a member of a black metal band that (maybe) never actually plays concerts—instead she engages in performances so subterranean as to be undetectable and not even music related. The lines between music, visual art, witchcraft, and language collapse. So too does the idea of an independent producer become incomprehensible as subversive art becomes by necessity a collective, collaborative work. The other component of the book follows the main character’s filmic ambitions, including a full account of her film in the back third of the film. If you’re looking for a conventional story, Girls Against God is largely lacking, but if you’re looking for some vibes and philosophical reflection, Hval’s work is an absolute treat.

If you’re a true devotee of my reviews, you might remember my commentary on The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. I find that premise extraordinarily unlikely. One of my critiques of The Hearing Test is its referentiality to other art works and it really relies heavily on readers’ knowledge. Girls Against God does something similar, but Hval is much more generous in elaborating on its touchstones. There are extended summaries and analyses of the works, often replete with imagery. In that way, the text is more accessible even in its offputtingness. Or, maybe it’s just that the touchstones are more part of my cultural lexicon.

Hval expounds in particular on the aesthetic of early black metal—an interesting angle, given the author’s own musical style. She describes music videos found as extra features on early black metal CDs and the way she describes its grittiness and content and wild cuts and sweeping shots of high-contrast nature is just perfect. In the aesthetic, she sees a primitivism that restores sincerity to art. When planning for her film, she notes, “I don’t know what the film is going to be about yet, but I like the early black metal aesthetic, so near to my own childhood. Strangely, it gives me hope, hope that it’s possible to make art primitively, in a way that isn’t steeped in professionalism and compromise. Art that still hates. I remember how much hope there is in hatred” (8). That manifesto sets the direction for all of the main character’s efforts. I adore this notion that hatred is hope—indeed, there has to be hope for there to be hatred, or else we would simply have indifference and apathy.

Throughout the book, she seeks connection with others through various means. One way that manifests is in the Satanism associated with black metal: “I can establish a connection or a pact, demonstrated through the connect-the-dots drawing between myself and the world of the gods, the underworld, or between myself in the past tense and myself in the present. Or all of it simultaneously. Maybe I could even draw up a map between me and you” (26). She’s trying to be part of something bigger than just herself. The connect-the-dots metaphor works in that way; she’s looking to be the lines between points. To that end, when she plans her film, she thinks, “Maybe this film has created a place to meet” (26). She makes a direct address to the audience—which is in itself odd, given that there is not a frame narrative that establishes she’s writing for others. Nonetheless, she presents the audience with a series of questions: “Do you also recognize the desire for secret and impossible connections? Do you recognise the loneliness, could we share in it? Could we get closer to each other? Could you and I and the film be the start of a we? A we which takes the form of an expanding community of girls who hate?” (26).

Hval’s narrator’s gesture is twofold. On the one hand, she’s aiming to escape the prison of subjectivity and on the other she’s trying to build a subterranean network of connection. Reflecting about her relationship with religion, she notes, “Sin is still inside me; everything is my fault and my responsibility, because I’m doomed to be alone, locked inside this subjectivity” (37). There is an exhaustion to the process of creating oneself: “I am so tired of chasing after it, this subjectivity, looking for something that’s all mine, that doesn’t have any context, surroundings or background. It’s so lonely. It’s so limited. It’s so heavy” (37). I appreciate this angle to exploring the posthumanist principle that we are not individuals but rather we exist in a context that has formulated us. She continues, “The subject is reflected negatively, the subject is so alone, so threatened, so scared, so dying, so guilty” (37). She considers how she wants to swap some of these negatives for “something else, something shared” (37). The passage ends with a delightful crescendo and what some might deem an anticlimax but which nonetheless has a ring of truth for those in the know. She concludes the passage, “I want to take part in a chaos of collective energy. I want to be in a band” (37). The fact that a band is what embodies that collective energy and chaos is just so humorous but also it imbues me with a sense of nostalgia and the optimism of such a project. The other side of Hval’s project is the desire for community, specifically through her witchy communities: “In blasphemy, there’s a secret pact, a desire for a community that isn’t rooted in the Christian, Southern spirit” (43). She elaborates on how the subversiveness allows for these connections:

Blasphemy protects us against the moral fables we grew up with; blasphemy renounces anything that requires our submission. It shows us a crack in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place. Blasphemy has not forgotten where it came from; it maintains that defiance and energy. Blasphemy looks for new ways of saying we. And the band is a we, a community that happens without anyone asking. It’s an unknown communal place, an impossible place. In a place like that, we can make art magic. (43)

I love that spirit of togetherness and spontaneity. I feel like it elevates the idea of being in a band to a metaphysical tour de force.

I’ll return to that in a moment, but I also want to bring up the idea of time. Bands shape sound in time, so there’s a bit of a connection already. There’s also a stunning series of pages—too long to quote here—where the narrator describes her experiences with the early days of the internet. She describes its cosmic power, its ability to connect people across time. It brought me back in time, completely. The way that she describes the experience of finding communities, largely anonymously, and sharing files, connecting over subterranean media—it’s a perfect blast from the past. Then, towards the end of the book, the narrator gives an account of a photograph. Just before the photograph, she blasphemes and she delights in the moment where it is impossible to tell her apart from her well-behaved classmates. She notes that it is “impossible for an unknowing eye to spot the difference in our smiles, but at the moment this picture was taken, I’ve just said fucking hell, in the middle of the photo shoot” (214). The moment is imbued with a power because, even though it’s such a mundane kind of rebellion, it is elevated as symbolic of the collapse between herself and others—yet one that is distilled in time. In aspic? She continues on to say that “Half the class are about to stop smiling; they are about to look around for the sinner as they cautiously cross themselves and touch their hands to their hearts” (214). It’s a moment where the offense has not yet been detected and “a moment later, everything will be defined, crossed, damned, forgiven and blessed” (214). The moment that lacks definition has its subversive power: “right now, in this image, there is chaos; the students aren’t sure what happened yet, who said the word” (214). She continues, “Sound is faster than comprehension, faster than what they call heart and soul and sin. Right now my voice could have come from any of my Christian classmates, a slip of the tongue, a Tourette’s tic; that’s why they react and why they are about to cross themselves” (214). Hval seems to present the idea that a sin has its power when it has not yet been defined or remedied; sin exists as potential and “everyone in the class is a potential sinner” (214). The narrator notes, “the uncertainty is shapeless, even in the middle of this conformity; they themselves aren’t exempt; the guilt includes everyone in the room and leaks from one thing to another. No one remains dry, everyone is defined” (214). It’s a great parallel to the idea of everyone existing in connection with one another. Everyone gets joined by sin and guilt into one mass and “just as the most evangelical of them feel defiled when we’re taught by the lesbian teacher; they fear that she’ll lure them over to her side, that they will say what she says, that they’ll become, or realise that they already are, like her” (214). The notion of the subversiveness awakening something in its audience gives it a compelling power—and there’s a kind of optimism in that.

Towards the end of the book, there is dedicated focus to the symbolism of aspic. Aspic is a kind of jelly in which other things float. It’s a great symbol for the lack of distinction between individual entities. A passage that identifies the sense of connection in aspic reads as follows:

Aspic is made from the collagen in the bone marrow of pigs, and I dream it’s also made from our own bones and our own marrow, because marrow is the very best we have to give of ourselves. In the marrow is found the collagen, the creative power, the coherence. The same sounds ring in marrow as in margin. In my language it’s even the same word. In the margins are the experiments, the bonus material, the unwritten scenes, the unused leftovers, a suggestion for a new world, a suggestion for impossible connections. In the margins are the comments, the hope and hate, suspended in the thick, translucent marrow broth. (229).

For all its sprawling nature, Girls Against God has a knack for recreating this kind of connective aspic. There are a number of strange false starts to the book that float around. The focus on the margins and experiments is critical to what Girls Against God is up to. It is itself “bonus material”---auxilliary content about other works. It is the unused leftovers; consider, for example, we get the fragment of her film as an additional chapter that takes up a reasonable portion of the book. 

Girls Against God asks a question that I find perpetually troubling whether it’s phrased as “can the subaltern speak?” as it is in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or as it appears in Mark Fisher’s question about capitalism: “is there no alternative?”, or indeed, as it is asked by Terese in Girls Against God, “Why does resistance always end up just polishing the traditions?” (69). Hval is exploring the idea of how we might preserve a space of genuine resistance to tradition, a genuine alternative that does not get subsumed into the aspic like everything else. She notes this paradoxical position—wanting to have connection as a form of subversion and yet preserving a special space for the truly radical. Hval offers an extended meditation on the topic: “Think about that word, EXCLUDED. To exclude something, to explain something. THe nature of the subversive isn’t actually to be directly visible but to roam the shadows, to give texture to the seemingly shiny and clean, to scrawl public walls with inexplicable nonsigns that refuse to materialize into language” (96). She’s looking for that shadow space: “the subversive desires to be seen and not seen simultaneously, it desires both to be excluded and to be explained” (96). I think that’s a critical observation for the counterculture; we are riding the line between legibility and rewriting. The trouble, as Hval notes, is that “it’s so easily muted, left behind, forgotten, excluded without being explained. Or it gets picked up and transformed into a language we all understand, that is, explained, but for some reason that always seems to mean commercialised” (96). This succinct passage puts to words the trouble I feel with my own subversive subcultures—how much are we preaching to the choir? When we are preaching to the masses, how does the meaning get hidden behind dollar signs?

I really appreciated the way Hval characterized the grotesque resistance in black metal music videos. I’m not sure I recorded the quotation, but there’s a part where she describes the sound of the music like flies and worms wiggling out of the tape. As she navigates the “cosmic internet” she finds additional videos and details to supplement her research into primitivism in art. She finds a clip of “a black metal gig that looks as if it took place in an assembly hall in an early nineties secondary school” (8). In her note, “wholesome Norwegian youths talk amongst themselves and walk in and out of the room while the band plays on, completely unaffected. Black metal crawls unnoticed through adolescence, mine too” (8). There’s a real love of the genre and the music scene that shines in Hval’s work. There’s a sincerity and authenticity to the depiction of shows like this—I can vividly picture videos of grainy punk shows in a rented church. She thinks about how “it doesn’t burrow down completely. But for as long as it’s there it lives and crawls” (8). She reflects on how one one of the youths in the video could have been her “if [she]’d been a few years older, or if the clip had been from 1997 and not 1991. If [she] hadn’t been a girl and excluded from the black screen” (8). She concludes, “It could have been me: we could have hated, all of us, together. Instead I had to hate alone. Provincial hatred” (8). In the description of black metal music videos, the graininess of the image, the rapid cuts, the high contrast colour palettes, and so on, brought me back to a special moment where the internet made all kinds of possibilities real. Essentially, it was a modern day dada movement. I think in particular of the revolution it caused in my brain when I saw the video for Some Girls’ “...Warm Milk” or the freneticism of The Locusts’ album Plague Soundscapes. Sure, it’s not quite the genre Hval described, but it’s adjacent enough to feel the same.

Hval’s book is, in many ways, about representation and connection. She philosophizes that “to describe is also to construct form and perspective; it’s the reflex of mortal dread” (206). She wonders, “could language be used for something else? Aren’t there other reasons to write? If we let go of the descriptions, will we discover that we’re no longer moving at all, since we already exist within everything in here?” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to renegotiate with language and art: “we’re given up shapes, our own shells and components and we’re back in a flow, that gelatinous substance that ruled the earth before the harder minerals, rock types, skeletons and shells came into existence. This could be the beginning, the white egg, the original place, the original life” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to find that area of potential, the origins, the not-yet before everything gets established and codified. 

Hval meanders in all the right directions. It felt to me to be a deeply intimate and resonant novel that was also accompanied by humour and thoughtfulness. Hval’s other novel, Paradise Rot, had a bit more in terms of story, but she clearly has a gift for introspection and ambitious projects to revolutionize both literature and the world.

Hope we can appreciate the margins without taking out their teeth. Happy hating!

Erewhon Revisited by Samuel Butler

  Back in May, I read Erewhon by Samuel Butler, which is essentially a fictional travelogue where the main character documents the Erewhonian way of life. In the first volume, there are a number of treatises interspersed, documenting their beliefs regarding economics, life and death, religion, and so forth. Erewhon Revisited is much more straightforward as a novel; it documents the protagonist’s return to Erewhon and subsequent return home, where he tells his son everything that has happened. It seems rare that the sequel is so different from the original—here, we have more characters, more action, more of a complete narrative.

Here’s the premise in a nutshell: the protagonist returns to Erewhon, to find it much changed. He arrives to find himself amongst ominous statues and he encounters two strangers—Hanky and Panky. Their mannerisms reveal that he is ill-prepared: his dress is no longer the Erewhonian style; he hunts and eats partridges (which is against the law); he discovers that any foreigners are immediately thrown into the “Blue Pool” with no questions asked—murdered by drowning. Through a series of clever maneuvers, the protagonist, Higgs, tricks Hanky and Panky into believing that he is the ranger authority over the preserve and encourages them to eat the partridges, too, rendering them equally complicit. When Higgs arrives to town, he finds that the Erewhonian culture now revolves around a religion called Sunchildism. As it turns out, at the end of the first book (twenty years earlier) when he departed Erewhon in a hot air balloon with his stolen bride, it prompted a revolution in their attitudes and they now worship him, though Butler lampoons the veracity of religious conviction—the Erewhonians get his story wrong and there is no consensus on what he actually was ‘preaching.’ Conveniently, they are creating a new temple dedicated to him and, through a series of coincidences (including that Higgs had a long-lost son with his sister-in-law), he is in a position to declare himself the actual Sunchild. From there, there is a bunch of legalese rigamarole to bring the false prophets to justice and allow the Sunchild to escape. The book is somewhat of a thought experiment regarding the second coming of Jesus: what if Jesus were to return and try to correct the errors his worshippers have made since his departure?

Being from 1870s, the style of the book will likely present to modern readers as “stuffy”. The language is formal. The sentence structures are elaborate, replete with multiple subordinate clauses, sometimes stretching for multiple pages as the author, Samuel Butler, navigates the complexities of Erewhonian culture relative to others, and in particular, British society. (See what I did there?).

I don’t have a lot of thoughtful commentary about the book. The best I can say is that the novel is more engaging than its predecessor in that it is more story-driven. The pace is still on the slower side, which the narrator acknowledges around page 600, often going into more detail than I think is really necessary. The suspense before the temple dedication is pretty fun, but it gets overdrawn when in the lead-up there is a full diagram of the temple with a full description of the different areas of the temple and where everyone was seated. Most of those details weren’t necessary for the drama of the scene and served mainly to deflate it.

I also have a few minor gripes about the sequencing of the book. More than once, there is a dramatic moment that is narrated in reverse: we are told the outcome and then we see the events that led there. It’s kind of similar to Lord of the Rings in that sense: the suspense gets sucked out when we know in advance that Gandalf escaped the Balrog, for example. There’s something to be said for not burying the lead, but there’s something more to be said for letting the story take its course.

Overall, the book (and the duology) is alright. I think a more thorough study of the text in an academic setting would provide some more layers to appreciate the text. I think the satire of the text would shine through a little more if I knew the ins and outs of British politics at the time. Instead, I’ll just live in ignorance and console myself with the fact that I’ve read a minor classic.

Happy reading!

Museum Visits by Éric Chevillard

  When you walk around a gallery, pause for a few moments at a piece, process, and move on to another piece, you have Éric Chevillard’s Museum Visits. The book is a collection, essentially, of flash fiction stories or prose poems presented back-to-back with no continuous throughline.

With that in mind, the book hinges primarily on Chevillard style. He presents his scenes with humour and surprise. For instance, the second piece in the collection is about his constant need to ejaculate. For page after page, he writes about when and where and how much he ejaculates and it gradually becomes clear that he’s talking about writing. There are a number of these linguistic spins that emerge throughout the collection, too.

In addition to the linguistic playfulness, there’s a playfulness in the construction of the vignettes. In a two page story called “The Gift,” for example, a “stern-faced old wife” presents her husband with a gift for the first time in twenty years. The cold woman has a rare moment of kindness in which she gives him a fountain pen and that brings the husband back in time—back to a time where he had writerly ambitions. Like everything else, his ambitions have worn away. Within a few short pages, there’s the whole story of a marriage and its deterioration, culminating in a moment where the husband appreciates his fountain pen gift by leaning forward and stabbing himself in the neck with it.

The collection mixes a few different types of flash fiction pieces. There are a few character portraits, a few sections about particular artifacts or artworks, and a few more general philosophical reflections on spaces. In terms of referential pieces, I think one of my favourites was “Hegel’s Cap,” about going to see the philosopher’s hat. When he sees the hat for the first time, he reflects on how more philosophers should take on the eccentric style in the modern day. It then becomes a reflection on seeing an artifact for a second time and all the magic has faded from it. Another of my favourite referential pieces is a character portrait in which a grown man repeatedly discusses being a child and throwing moles over Samuel Beckett’s fence. The fact that he brags about this repeatedly brings up reflections on how Samuel Beckett’s life and writing could have been so different if he hadn’t had to deal with moles over the fence all the time.

In terms of the more spatio-philosophical chapters, there are several resonant passages about being in museums. On top of that, there’s a chapter about doors. It begins with the question: “Is there anything more idiotic than a door?” (71). Drawing maybe on a Bachelard influence, Chevillard continues, “The very idea could have come from a mind that was itself open too wide, if not downright unhinged” (71)—note again the playfulness in the wording. Chevillard extends the meditation as follows:

“For either the door provides passage at a point in space where there was formerly nothing to impede free circulation, thus standing guard over it completely uselessly, or it forbids access to this or that place by closing it off, but in that case it’s not enough, because as soon as it’s installed you have to put high walls around it, which means arranging a tiresome cartage of stones and beams, an entire industry of the most exhausting sort, followed by a superhuman labor that hurls the masons up to vertiginous heights on their makeshift scaffolding while the mind-numbing music of the spheres, captured on their transistor radios, resonates all around.” (71).

I love the sprawling nature of the passage, especially because the passage is about the blockages doors impose. Instead, it’s a long sentence, unimpeded by periods. It’s the kind of stylistic elevation to the content that makes Chevillard’s writing more powerful.

I’m going to decontextualize a passage by way of ending the review. In “An Overwhelming Success,” the entry ends with “some inner peace: a peace without images, without shapes or colours, the blessed primordial emptiness of those uncreated worlds where everything remains to be done” (50). I love that moment of raw potential—”where everything remains to be done.” It’s a shame to bring things to a conclusion, to have things so set that they foreclose growth. 

So, with that in mind, I hope that Museum Visits inspires you to seek out something new, something unfinished, something that you haven’t returned to that, like Hegel’s hat, has lost its lustre.

Happy reading!

The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams

  I recently had the privilege to see the greatest band of all time—Propagandhi—two nights in a row. On both nights, they took a break from playing their recent album and went back to 1996 for two minutes to play their song “Apparently, I’m a ‘P.C. Fascist’ (Because I Care About Both Human and Non-Human Animals),” which (on their album Less Talk, More Rock) transitions into the song “Nailing Descartes to the Wall / (Liquid) Meat Is Still Murder.” When the music stops, there is a spoken word transition that everyone knew to sing along with at the concert: “Consider someone else. Stop consuming animals.”

While Propagandhi have been much less militant than their reputation from the 90s, singer Chris Hannah still took a moment to advertise the book Little Red Barns by Will Potter, which was for sale at their merch table, and advertised the message that “it’s never too late to learn about animal agriculture” and to make changes. It was a really affirming moment, especially since I had just finished The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams, which I believe to be a seminal text in the animal liberation movement.

I have a complicated relationship with meat in that I recognize the problems of consuming animal corpses and yet I still haven’t made the leap to being vegetarian or vegan. I have significantly reduced my consumption of meat and dairy from my younger years, but I’m still not there yet.

In this vein, I read The Sexual Politics of Meat, which is an account of how vegetarianism and feminism are part and parcel with one another. The feminization of animals and the animalization of women have occurred concurrently and have led to the devaluation of each. Adams’ argument hinges on what the opening paragraphs of this review already reveal: the “absent referent.” The absent referent is the idea that reality is displaced, hidden, or abstracted through a series of tactics. For example, we talk about beef, not animal corpse. We talk about pork instead of dead big. Through this concealment, people like me are able to continue eating meat, since it exists in the abstract.

I think what most surprised me about Adams’ argument is how much of it hinges on literary referents. She offers a review of feminist literature and highlights their long history of connection to animal liberation. She also documents the reactionary responses that strove to minimize or trivialize both women and animal activism. A particularly compelling part of the book is a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The chapter-length analysis goes through the way that Victor Frankenstein’s creature is aligned with subalterns like women and animals, highlighting in particular the creature’s vegetarianism as an indicator of its status as a virtuous outsider.

Adams also goes through a number of ways that anti-vegetarian movements have tried to de-politicize the choice not to eat meat. For example, when abstaining from meat was reframed as a matter of health, it took away its fangs as a truly subversive act. Adams discusses the “history of distortion” that revises our cultural narrative so that, rather than seeing society as dysfunctional, we see individual people as dysfunctional. Within vegetarianism is a “critique of the dominant culture by attributing psychological motives rather than political motives” and society offers explanations “such as status displacement, the erosion of rural society, or a strong identification with pets” as “obvious attempts to eviscerate” those critiques and diminish “those who protest the activities of the dominant culture.” There’s a great quip from Nobel Laureate Isaach Bashevis Singer in response to people who say they became vegetarian for their health; he responds: “I do it for the health of the chickens.” I think it’s a great way to restore the subversiveness to the defanged claims of casual vegetarianism.

She continues on to note that “one way that the dominant culture avoids the radical critique of vegetarianism is by focusing on individuals who seem to disprove the claims of vegetarians.” She points to the fact that people refer to Hitler being a vegetarian (Adams notes that he was not) as a way of showing how the choice not to eat meat is disconnected from morality, politics, or ethics. I can’t possibly think of any contemporary examples of people (falsely) pointing to one exceptional example and building an entire case against a political movement. Not a’one.

In any case, Adam makes a compelling case against eating meat by exposing how women and animals have been conflated by the patriarchal system that offers them both up to consumption via the absent referent. As a work of literary criticism, there is a lot to discuss. As a work of social justice, there is a lot to discuss. As a seminal text of an ongoing discourse towards the liberation of all living beings, there is a lot to discuss.

Happy reading!

On the Calculation of Volume II by Solvej Balle

        A few months back, I read On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, which is the first in a series of books about Tara Selter, a woman trapped reliving November 18th over and over again. As she navigates this inexplicable phenomenon, there are a few patterns that emerge. When Tara wakes up in the next November 18th, everyone else resets to where they were. The same person drops their knife at breakfast, the train passes at the exact moment, and so on. Tara, though, is able to move around and wake up and operate differently.  On some occasions, she lets people in on her secret and they enjoy a largely unquestioned day together. Tara’s consumption habits have a lingering effect. For instance, if she orders the same meal at a restaurant every day, they eventually run out and it stops appearing on the menu. Also, her possessions generally follow her, though a little less consistently, if she keeps them with her when she goes to bed.

This volume was somewhat less engaging to me, since it was retreading similar ground. The mysteries and rules around this forced time non-travel are the elements of the book that are most compelling to me. For most of the book, there is not much advancement in the central conceit of the book. Instead, it revolves around three core elements:

1) Tara returns to her parents’ home for “Christmas.” Of course, it’s November 18th. But, she explains to her parents that she is reliving the same day and they accept it with relatively little fuss. She also has her sister visit with her and she gives them all gifts and they celebrate a Christmas meal together.

2) Tara chases seasons through Europe. She finds parts of Europe that are close to winter, spring, and summer in their weather, hops on the train, and travels around getting a taste for the change she has lost.

3) Tara’s bag gets stolen while she’s on a train and          some of her possessions.

The issue with the book is that it seems to present new questions but does not fully explore them. For example, the question emerges of whether Tara can bring someone with her. In the first volume, her husband refuses to spontaneously travel with her and he ‘resets.’ In this volume, her sister is inquisitive about how time non-travel works and seems willing to ‘go with her’ if it’s feasible. She considers the ethics of bringing someone ‘out of time’ with her. I would love to see that idea, for example, develop further.

The moment comes up where her bag is stolen. It seems to be a moment of harrowing drama: her entire life is in that bag and it’s already a challenging hanging onto it under her pillow every night. The question of what might happen to the bag—and to Tara with its disappearance is a compelling one to explore, but Balle glosses over it a little quickly. At the time Tara is writing about the stolen bag, she has already recovered it, which sucks away some of the intensity.

I won’t spoil the ending of the book, but that’s when things really pick up. In the last five or so pages, we’re provided a cliffhanger that presents a new critical question: is anyone else experiencing the same phenomenon?

One of the throughlines from the start of the first book is an ancient Roman coin that Tara has obtained and carries around. Towards the end of the second volume, Balle provides a beautiful outline of the significance of the coin. Tara researches it, of course, but there’s one moment in particular that solidifies the symbolism of the coin. She reflects as follows:

Maybe it was simple: I was caught in time and there was the sestertius. Once it had been just metal, it had been molten, fluid, formless and then it had stopped at the moment that it was stamped with the images of Antoninus Pius and Annona, a modius, ears of corn and all. Stop. Fixed. Chink. Out onto the pile of newly minted coins. A frozen moment. (160)

I really appreciate the parallel of time being fluid like a molten liquid and then it becoming fixed into a static image. It’s as though Tara, as though Tara’s day, is fully shaped. I like that it creates this unfortunate situation where in order for something to be shaped it needs to lose its capacity for change. I think the future volumes of the book are going to explore this duality more fully.

While I felt this book was a little slower than the first and more repetitive, let’s be real: I’ll probably read the next five volumes, too, just to see if there are answers and to see if Tara returns to normal or bleeds into something even more strange. I’m not convinced there will be any clear answers, but I’ll keep you posted.

        Happy reading!