To Read & To Write

For a philosophical text translated from French to English, reading Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1970) wasn't too difficult, albeit requiring, of course, ample time and concentration. And for the book having been published a little over fifty years ago, the text remains significant today as a commentary on those forces that drive us, either towards death or into life, passionately, lovingly, flailingly, pathetically, skillfully, terribly, hatefully, so on and so forth... enmeshing us within Lyotard 's concept of the libidinal band - that kind of mobius strip exemplifying the only kind of economy we'd want to be a part of - one that knows no difference between the revealing physical exteriors and the inner, innate, structures that define what lies within. Much of the fascinating aspects of this text ride on the socio-cultural manifestations concerning how the libidinal economy flourishes (as opposed to an economy purely political or purely religious). Sexuality, Marxis...

I don't know how well Shard Cinema (2017) will age compared to Williams' previous two books ( Roman Letters and Combined and Uneven Apocalypse ). However, I do think the theory he provides his readers concerning the contemporary cinematic experience is vital to new interpretations of a world that has become increasingly difficult to conceive of visually. In essence, he writes of a purely visual representation of a kind of momentary halting of time that allows for the movement of abstractions rather than the movement of actual objects; a coming into view of that which has been broken, fractured, severed, and ultimately, shattered. Most of the films he cites are blockbusters that had/have the monetary heft to show their audiences a kind of shattered imaging (it takes a whole lot of money to digitally produce the effect). Interestingly, it seems Williams understands these moments of gradual breakdown - the shift of perspective from "landscape" (or cityscape, etc.) to ...

  While reading Berger's Ways of Seeing for the second time in many years, I reacted less by noting how obvious Berger's arguments were and more by realizing that the text has become somewhat dated. The technology that exists today, especially since the advent of the internet and social media, has become insidiously nuanced and Ways of Seeing had no way to predict that kind of capital evolution in terms of the creation of new ways to exploit the poor through reproduced images, i.e. how advertising now sways the public by manipulating and playing with its fears - if not so much anymore its envy. However, Berger's classic remains a seminal text within Cultural Studies and Critical Theory. Berger explains how society has been affected by the transformation of artistic technology, from oil painting, to the camera, to publicity advertising in the modern world, and how that transformation feeds on itself as a way to stabilize and defend the values and ideologies of the wealth...

  The Barefoot Woman - a title not referring to woman, singular, as suggested grammatically, but instead to a pluralism of each woman whose life has traversed Rwanda, and Africa more generally... the numerous who have walked and worked, loved and cared, by the wounded and hardened soles of their feet. Deeply transformative, the memoir is subtly theatrical, depicting, scene-by-scene, the daily lives of the children, women, and men affected by the violence in Rwanda. The story's hand does not fall heavy on historical detail or context, but instead fills the narrative with full, brilliant, and vibrant evocations of Mukasonga's growing years: her mother's building of a traditional inzu behind their house, the cultivation of precious sorghum and other crops, the tending of feet (and how her mother tried to give her toes "eyes" to soften the blows, to no avail), the delicate and rambunctious process of marriage proposals, the comparison of gorgeous women to the worship...

George Takei's graphic novel - illustrated by Harmony Becker and co-written with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott - is an important entry into American history that, for the most part, has not been delved into at depth (and very much should be). Takei's graphic novel, They Called Us Enemy , chronicles his life's memory beginning with a short childhood spent in California and then only a little bit later, the rest of his childhood spent in Japanese Internment Camps set-up by the U.S. government during World War II due to a attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese government. Takei's journey is an astounding glimpse into a world fraught with racial politics; the problems with defining people, especially immigrants, by their ethnicity, and the extreme, wieldy, power an unlawful government has to wreak havoc on a person's identity, physical and mental, by means of vocabulary (images of the wartime propaganda are shown), ideological impositions on/of "law" (the j...

  A collection of Greta Thunberg's speeches from her travels in 2018 and 2019, No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference is a wrenching written account of her tireless determination to spread solid information - indeed, the Facts - about the global Climate Emergency that is a hallmark moment of the 21st century, not to mention for humanity's epoch in totality. Thunberg introduces herself simply. She just barely mentions her accolades, her academic history, her work history. The most personal she gets is very personal, talking about her fraught fight with her parents to strike for the climate, her younger sister that she worries for, how she misses her dogs, and the collective future of humankind that has found itself hanging in the balance. She leaves the audience with an appropriate onslaught of numbers, percentages, data-driven information regarding how much time (10 - 15 years, if that) we have to turn the Climate Emergency around and what we need to do about it (decidedly...