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James Bookend

@jamesthebookend

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Currently reading the wind book by Simon Winchester
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I’ll read anything by Max Porter. He packs more emotion into a sentence than anyone I can think of. I recently saw him read / perform / bob and sway / growl at an event in London, and I didn’t want it to end. But I have mixed feelings about ALL THIS UNREAL TIME. It’s a collection full of beautiful language, searing images, and regrets that feel both specific and universal. It’s also a long apology poem—for being a man and on behalf of all men. I mean, sure. But isn’t it a cop out to lay down a blanket apology, where your individual missteps get to hide behind the whole history of men even shittier than yourself? #maxporter #allthisunrrealtime #lanny #shy #metoo by @jamesthebookend
Sayre Quevedo and his brother Connor decide it’s time to track down their absent birth father in hopes of healing parts of them that are broken because they never knew him. Is there anything they could find, or he could give them, that would do that? Oh, like I’d spoil it all by telling you. One of the most interesting elements of this podcast, to me, is Sayre’s decision to live so much of his life with tape rolling. Unlike the influencers who use selfie sticks to put distances between their real selves and personas they invent for the stream, though, his always-on audio kit seems to invite people to spill their secrets, their honest feelings, the outfits they wore when they were strippers, and the heartbreak of unrequited love. #reachingout #sayrequevedo @sayrequevedo by @jamesthebookend
I loved meeting 11-year-old George Forster, a Prussian kid in the 18th Century who translated Russian histories into English that his sketchy father published under his own name. Before he was 20, he was sailing around the world with Captain Cook, collecting plants, painting unfamiliar birds, and being way less racist and murderous than the average European seaman of his time. But 150 pages in, I still hadn’t figured out why I needed to read a whole book about him, so I put it down. #thetraveler #andreawulf #theinventionofnature by @jamesthebookend
When you put aside the tragic elements of a guy slipping on a puddle of grease that sends him off his luxury liner and into the Pacific where he’ll spend the next dozen or so hours waiting to drown, it’s actually kind of funny to be inside the dying thoughts of a man so steeped in privilege, entitlement, and life on a silver platter that premature death is unfathomable. He’s got that blueblood confidence that things will work out, like they always do, even as he watches his ship disappear over the horizon. He could have screamed for help right after he hit the water, but that’s just not the kind of thing a man of his station and bloodline would do. He passes a collective few hours imagining how he’ll recount his adventurous near-death experience to his stockbroker colleagues, a press conference of fawning reporters, and a wife who never ever interrupts him. He takes in an absolutely amazing sunset. But he’s also deeply lonely to be in the middle of the ocean, bobbing in his underwear, eventually realizing no one really missed him enough to turn the ship around. #gentlemanoverboard #herbertclydelewis by @jamesthebookend
Do I need a copy of MOBY DICK in Spanish?! Librería Gulliver, C. del León, 32, Centro, 28014 Madrid, Spain. by @jamesthebookend
It’s tough to be an 11-year-old boy, even back in the early 80s. Strong and confusing emotions about girls, and also your mom. Poor impulse control and fits on violence. Lots to say but an underdeveloped ability to say much at all. This particular 11yo boy gets kicked out of middle school, and his parents hope a spell in nature singing “If I Had a Hammer” with Jesus-loving hippie camp counselors will get him back on track. You’ll have to read it to find out how that goes—and I highly recommend you read it. #atenderage #changraelee by @jamesthebookend
I’m sure I should have more complicated feelings about 70s radical terrorists who robbed banks and blew up buildings, but I just love them. The Weathermen / Weather Underground most all. They were stylish, sexy, pissed off, and driving through the night with nothing but gas station coffee, fake licenses, and a Rand McNally Road Atlas. They walked into the US Capitol, and countless other government and police buildings, detonated homemade explosives, and scared the shit out of everyone who voted for Nixon—all without killing anybody. They sprung loose Timothy Leary from prison and got him to a safe house in Algeria, at least until the Black Panthers who ran the house found him to be a ridiculous and insufferable hippie and kicked him out. (I’m with the Panthers on this one .) It got more interesting, though, when they started having children, and this book is written by one of them, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, son of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. At five, his dad taught him how to spot FBI agents on a stakeout: “If you see a Black guy and a white guy together in an unadorned American sedan [in Harlem in 1981], and they aren’t Gene Hackman and Richard Pryor, they’re cops.” His mother sent him letters from jail, with DIY crossword puzzles that required a deep familiarity with the heroes and history of the global struggle against imperialism. The most powerful part of the book is the intimate look inside the often terrible decisions these fiery activists made when forced to pick between advancing the struggle and taking care of their kids. Oof, that letter Dohrn sent her friend Kathy Boudin, who had left her 14-month-old baby with a sitter while she and her husband embarked on an armored car heist that would land them in prison for decades…. #dangerousdirtyviolentandyoung #theweathermen #weatherunderground #billayers #bernadinedohrn by @jamesthebookend
After I bought all the Faulkners, the bookstore owner decided the Brautigan belonged in San Francisco, so he threw it in for free. And now I know the Slovenian words for trout fishing, watermelon, and abortion! by @jamesthebookend
Found an excellent used bookstore in Ljubljana and immediately cleaned out their Faulkner section by @jamesthebookend
This collection of short, smart, very pretentious essays is sometimes fascinating, like when it explains the symbolic system of professional wrestling, where fans know it’s all a scripted performance and the winner is decided in advance, but it’s a pleasure anyway so long as the performers stick to the gratifying, unspoken plotlines of the wrestling universe. Or how detergent advertisers in the 1950s had to invent a new language of dirtiness before they could convince people to buy foamy soap. I wonder, though, if I basically could have learned the same thing from Mick Jagger when he sang about the man who comes on the radio to tell him how white his shirts can be; but, then again, listening to the Rolling Stones at a cafe wouldn’t have given me nearly the same pretentious cred. I liked Barthes best when he ditched the dense philosopherspeak to insult his adversaries more plainly, like: “If God does in fact speak through Billy Graham, He’s surprisingly stupid.” #rolandbarthes #mythologies by @jamesthebookend
The cohort of lost, shitty men you’ll meet reading THE CASTLE is an argument against retirement. Ronson explores what’s happening to the 7 million men who have fallen out of the conventional workforce and decided not to reenter it. Instead they’re attempting to chart their own paths as online influencers, including the “Lawncare GOAT” who starts paying rent through hugely popular videos of his tween daughters and himself dressing up and babbling like babies, and a trust-funder who lures young women to his castle in Connecticut with promises of (fake) jewelry, (illusive) money, and an opportunity star in his (seeking distribution) reality TV show, “101 Princesses.” Letting this population loose on the internet to see what the algorithm encourages them to do is very much not a good idea. I’m sure AI will make everything right again…. Meanwhile, tell the men in your life to find purpose doing something, anything, other than influencering. (Editor’s note: While I write little book reviews that I hope to influence global reading tastes, I identify as a plastic bookend, not a lost and purposeless white man. Maybe I’ll be OK?) #jonronson #thecastle @jonronson by @jamesthebookend
I can’t wait to accuse a friend of being complicit in the microphysics of power—y’know, Foucault!—and just hope they don’t ask what I mean. French people are so inscrutable. The part of this book that makes a lot of sense, though, is the idea that when all of us suspect we’re being watched at all times, we do the state’s work for it: we imprison ourselves. And back when Foucault wrote this, we didn’t yet live inside our phones, telling the algorithm our whereabouts and our every whim. Almost makes you long for the good old days when a few unfortunate souls got a hand lopped off for stealing, and everyone else basked in a low-tech world of analog anonymity. #foucault #disciplineandpunish by @jamesthebookend

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