Good Pop, Bad Pop: An Inventory (Jarvis Cocker, Vintage / Penguin Random House UK, 2023)

    The experience of reading this book is not unlike listening to PULP’s music. You get the sense of an unguarded look at the complexity of one person’s life as they discover their identity, with a clear focus on the most awkward, misguided, and salient moments in that process. This book gives a closer analysis of some of those half-remembered moments in PULP vocalist Jarvis Cocker’s life through artifact-mediated recall. Basically, he tells a significant chunk of his history through discussion of the objects he has accrued over the course of his life. He’s kept them in a loft in the attic of an old residence of his and he shares a fairly therapeutic recounting of that alcove’s contents.

    Cocker takes us through these objects chronologically, beginning with early trinkets and toys that he uses to explain his interest in science fiction, music, and clothing. Part of the fun of this narrative framing is attempting to guess whether each item will survive the purge, or, in his words, which to COB (a word meaning to throw, as used by the people of Sheffield) or KEEP. If you’re anything like me and have been drawn to the music of PULP for Cocker’s use of inner thinking and spoken monologues during many songs, you’ll be easily able to conjure the sound of his voice in your head as you read.

    The history of how those very spoken monologues came into being is a part of the book, too. In the early days of the band, he and Russell Senior (guitarist) took a day-labor job and their drives to the site in Russell’s mother’s van were soundtracked with a BARRY WHITE cassette. The player was no longer able to eject the tape, so they would repeatedly listen to the a-side, rewind, and listen again. It was during the interminable listens to these songs that Cocker had the idea of talk-singing over some of the instrumental passages in PULP’s songs (most notably in “My Legendary Girlfriend”). This moment, among others, was informative in explaining how some of PULP’s signature sounds or styles came into being. He explains this influence, as well as a few others, including SCOTT WALKER and Eurodisco, as being foundational to the project of PULP.

    You will also enjoy that there are more than a few childhood and adolescent family photos featured in the text. Lest you think his ungainly stage presence is a put-on, these photos and the stories behind them will reassure you that he has always been awkward. It would have been quite humorous to learn from this book that he had been a football hooligan or top-form student as a youth, though! The funniest of these moments was his choice to grow facial hair after analyzing the back sleeve photo of Hugh Cornwell from The STRANGLERS. It’s clear, even from the tiny image in this book, that the facial hair in question is not hair at all. It’s merely a “shadow cast by the cleft in his chin,” as Cocker comes to realize. This attempted stylistic mimicry captures plenty of what makes PULP and Cocker so endearing. Plenty of similar charming indiscretions are found throughout the rest of the text.

    As the page count increases and the amount of remaining pages decreases, you might be doing some mental calculations and inferring that there will not be a lot of time spent on PULP’s most popular era. The book ends just before this time, with a tantalizing image: Cocker’s acceptance letter from the Central School of Art and Design. The letter explains how that institution will be merging with St. Martin’s School of Art and Design in the future months… He implicitly promises another entry in this series, presumably beginning right as “Br*tp*p” (as he calls it) becomes inescapable. I’m looking forward to adding that book to my KEEP pile.

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Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right (Adrienne L. Massanari, The MIT Press, 2024)

    There’s a lot going on with the title of this book that points to many contentious aspects of the current political climate in the United States. The gaming here, Massanari tells us, is not just about the playing of video games, but the way right wingers will game online interactions to their benefit. These places are not the oft-cited public square, but they are places where people contest democracy, whether through the Big Lie of the 2020 U.S. election, or other, related myths. The subtitle lets you know it’s not just the individuals using these platforms who are involved in this process—the companies that make these interactions possible have done plenty to give right-wing voices a higher volume in these spaces. The tech broligarchs have, through ostensibly politically neutral choices, made it possible for the far right to min-max their influence on society. None of these outcomes are accidental.

    Two helpful concepts Massanari discusses throughout the text are geek masculinity and dark play. Each has a role to play in the process described above. For geek masculinity, Massanari explains how figures such as Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg have become wealthy and powerful not through physical prowess or social graces, but through their (alleged) technical know-how and knowledge. She traces the idea of the triumphant nerd (or geek, she notes that she uses the terms interchangeably) at least back to ‘80s movies such as Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, and Sixteen Candles. Where she takes Lori Kendall’s idea of geek masculinity a step further is in discussing how it has boomeranged back into appified health and fitness regimens, so it's now possible to be a brogrammer and a geek all at once. Gotta chase those sick gains at the gym and then power through some coding for your latest software push. Measure and maximize everything, or you’re just wasting time! And, if you do make those gains and get that promotion, it’s because you worked, not because you happen to be a cishet white dude. So, being able to use technology to prove masculine prowess is part of the deal now.

    Dark play, a concept articulated by Richard Schechner, entails a game in which all parties may not realize they are playing or what success looks like. Massanari contrasts this idea with how animals or pets might fight. Cats and dogs are enacting a playful version of life-or-death combat and know when to stop. Foxes or wolves know when the tension has escalated too highly. In dark play, those participating may not all realize a game is being played, or that they are participating in it. If they do come to realize that play is happening, they will find the rules to be “not just mutable, but unstated and contradictory” (p. 101). In some sense, middle and high schools are a haven of dark play, given that what is cool or funny or interesting is subject to these same flexible rules. There are arenas where this competition gets even more harmful, too.

    Maybe you can start to see how boys and men can use their geek masculinity to engage in dark play through social media sites to game certain outcomes that they find beneficial and that are punitive toward anyone who cannot play by those ambiguous rules. This take is not my construction; Massanari spends most of the book discussing various examples of how these two concepts came together to help right-wing ideas become part of the national discourse. Some salient examples are Gamergate (of course!), Donglegate (new to me!), and r/The_Donald (cesspit). In each of these cases, the way geeks and nerds were able to assert control over the policies and moderation tools of various social media sites made them able to engage in harassment campaigns or political propagandizing. Anyone who may have interacted with the prime movers in these spaces may not have realized what they were up against until it was too late for them to prevent harm from spreading further.

    There are plenty of other scintillating ideas in these pages as well. Before she gets into the fuller discussion of geek masculinity, Massanari describes some of the facets of cyberlibertarianism, one of which concerning how people talk about the physical space of the Internet. She explains how “the early web was variously described as an ‘electronic frontier,’ an ‘information superhighway,’ ‘cyberspace,’ and a ‘global village’—metaphors that recalled ‘uncivilized’ landscapes that needed to be tamed by pioneers and ‘cybernauts’” (p. 71). Given that the idea of unregulated access to these lands is part of the history of westward expansion in this country, it’s no wonder that tech bros chafe at any kind of legal consequence for their actions.

    I always enjoy when the music I love shows up in unexpected places, and I’m glad to say there was a moment in Gaming Democracy where this was the case. In explaining how certain kinds of niche knowledge can be beneficial because they reveal social capital, Massanari uses the example of a record-collecting punk. I felt both seen and attacked when reading the example of how “a fan of hardcore punk might demonstrate high subcultural capital (after amassing a collection of rare seven-inch vinyl records by Minor Threat and authoring a popular zine about the genre) but might have relatively low cultural capital in the mainstream (as knowledge of punk rock is considered niche and is not value outside this particular subculture)” (p. 114). I mean, I only ever had the 12” that collected the two MINOR THREAT 7” records and my zines have never been “popular,” but I recognize myself in the description regardless. I don’t think the people at my job care about my ARTICLES OF FAITH or CAUSE FOR ALARM singles.

    In all seriousness, this book is a powerful contribution to our shared understanding of what has been happening in alt-right spaces on the Internet and real life over the past few decades. It did not start with Gamergate, as Massanari acknowledges, but that moment did crystallize a few different patterns of behavior. The ultimate expression of the way dark play interacted with society is through the events of 1/6. As Massanari argues toward the conclusion of her book, this is an example of metagaming, or using knowledge beyond the game to gain an advantage within it. In that sense, the game (i.e., the election) was over, but the losing team did not recognize or accept the outcome, so they stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the result. (Until I read this book, I hadn’t seen the Honkey Kong meme that overlays sprites from Donkey Kong onto some of the rioters climbing the walls outside the Capitol; I laughed.) She concludes by arguing that we should take seriously the threats these online spaces make while also working toward strengthening in-person communities and engaging in mutual aid. She finished this book before the 2024 U.S. election and the accompanying calculated pivots toward authoritarianism by the biggest names in Silicon Valley, so her advice only rings truer in the wake of those developments.

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Alphabetical Diaries (Sheila Heti; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

    When you first open a book, you might skip over the copyright page because it’s not the reason you bought the book. It’s information that has to be there, but it doesn’t always add something to your experience of reading. I usually skip over it, too. But, when I cracked open Alphabetical Diaries for the first time, I wanted to check the publication date. It matched what I expected, but I noticed something else interesting. In the genre section, the Library of Congress indicated this text is classified as experimental. This term is not one I usually see affixed to the kinds of books I like to read, or, for that matter, the music I listen to most of the time. So, it was kind of funny to me (and likely only me) that I enjoyed reading this book while taking in the sounds of the most recent GOGO PENGUIN and NALA SINEPHRO albums. Am I learning how to like jazz now that I’m in my 40s? Should I try to read Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler again? Do I need to trade black coffee for green tea? Who am I?

    If you’re not familiar, the experimental part of this book involves Heti taking a decade worth of diary entries, typing them into a spreadsheet one sentence at a time, and then alphabetizing them based on the initial word of each sentence. The approximately 60,00 words in these pages represent about 12 percent of the actual content of her diary. So, although you are reading her diary, you’re not reading the entries in order, nor are they present in their entirety. Still, Heti’s skill at writing comes through not only in the short form of each sentence but in the larger motifs that appear throughout the text as a whole. There is not a story here but you will get glimpses of narratives.

    The initial cleverness of the idea behind this text results in such interesting pairings of sentences that may never have been slapped together before in the original text. After about 20 pages of reading, I realized I needed to stop dog-earing the parts I wanted to read again because I was eventually going to fold down the corners of the entire book. On each spread, you will be struck by the placement of at least two or three sentences that flow together so fluidly that you will wonder whether they had kept their original running order or whether Heti strategically and thoughtfully placed them in sequence because of the resulting contrast or coalescence. This is about the point in a review where I like to bring in a direct quotation of the author’s work. I can’t bring myself to do that with Alphabetical Diaries because there are too many wonderful examples that I can’t possibly choose just one. Suffice it to say that you will be entertained as you read.

    As you press on through the book, you will meet a few people in Heti’s life. An index of their importance to her (at least as revealed in her diary) is how many sentences begin with their name. Both Pavel and Lars seemed to be important, so in the P and L chapters, you will have a few pages’ worth of sentences beginning with each man’s name. Piper and Mom feature less frequently as sentence starters, but they still appear frequently enough elsewhere in the text. You’ll also be unsurprised that the longest chapter is I, which has a separate section devoted to words beginning with only that letter. It makes sense that the first-person singular pronoun begins most sentences in this book; it’s a diary. Who else could be more important in such a text?

    If you hadn’t already had the thought by the time you reached that chapter, then you might at that point start wondering what other words or sections or letters might have the most (or the least) number of sentences. There is only one sentence for Q and for Z, while V is only present through sentences about Vig, who does not show up frequently otherwise. X is entirely absent. There are plenty of sentences with the interrogative words (who, what, where, when, why) as a whole, though only one with where. Most of the when sentences she has selected are not questions, but are adverbial clauses introducing another idea. I could go on categorizing these smaller trends in the text, but I think you get the point. This book is as fun to think about as it is to read. And, because there’s not a true narrative through line (as in a novel) or a theoretical frame or political explanation to take away (as in a philosophical or historical text), the joy of rereading it is evident. I wonder which sentences will stand out to me next time.

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The Future (Naomi Alderman; Simon & Schuster, 2023)

    A dystopian science fiction book about the future where tech CEOs collaborate with survivalists to withstand a global emergency seems like a good enough book to start off 2025. The premise alone drew me in, but it was Alderman’s craft as a writer, with interesting uses of multiple genres of writing and some clever turns of phrase that kept bringing me deeper into the text. Given that it’s set in an indeterminate future, events such as COVID-19 are in the rear view mirror as part of the world’s past. It’s a trip and a treat to read a book where mass death is just a bit of world building.

    To be honest, I lost track pretty quickly of which of the three CEOs was the head of each company. When I first read about each of them, my main focus was to think which one was meant to be a parody of Musk or Bezos or Zuckerberg or Gates or Cook. As the products and services these men and their companies offer continue to blend and melt into more and more digital slop, it’s hard to keep them separate anyway. In a way, it doesn’t matter which one is which because they’re all pretty much irredeemable as people. They have unique flaws, but at the end of the day, you are still rooting for them all to fail. Alderman describes one of them by writing “In another era he might have been an academic or even a monk, and the world would not have demanded parties from him” (p. 38). So you’ve got one who may have trouble socializing and would probably prefer to be working full time. Another needs guided meditation to manage his anger. You get the idea.

    In contrast to these three men and their entourages, you have a younger woman who has made a living reviewing survivalist gear and promoting tips for how to live in catastrophic times. She’s one these tech freaks and their hangers-on have their eyes on for multiple reasons. You can probably tell from the pacing of the first few chapters (if not the back cover blurb) that all the characters’ paths will cross eventually. You can probably also tell that the world-rending cataclysm implied in all of the prepping will eventually come to pass. Getting there is the fun part. Along the way, you’ll also meet a Romanian professor who, in a moment of exasperation with his students, barks “'Perfect' is machine dream” (p. 209). His students have been discussing how it might be possible to find a perfect romantic match through social media sites or dating apps. His response lets them know that their imperfections are what make them human and that striving for some kind of perfect satisfaction is a fool’s errand. So, he’s a foil for the tech CEOs in that he is comfortable with technology yet knows that it has limits. I felt the same feeling when another character offered this critique of one of the AI programs that was purportedly going to save the world: Supposed machine-recognition that had actually turned out to be tens of thousands of people in India or Venezuela or Ghana, going through photos or translating documents or transcribing voicemails or reviewing automatic writing outputs (p. 332). It’s just that kind of analysis that I love to read because it lets me know authors like Alderman know exactly what they are critiquing with this novel. In that regard, it was no surprise to see Paris Marx, host of Tech Won’t Save Us, mentioned in the Acknowledgments. Alderman's tech criticism is not just part of the plot.

    Alderman is strategic in using that section, too. Unlike some authors who place their  Acknowledgments up front, she saves them for the end because even when the book is done, the plot continues. That’s right—after the Acknowledgments page, there is a separate chapter that functions as an epilogue. Beyond that, there’s a message tucked into the back matter that shares an actual email address you can apparently use to contact one of the characters. I’m going to see what else I can learn from him as I continue to think about the characters and scenes in this thrilling, dark, and hilarious book.

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