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[personal profile] marlowe1
237.On Violence by Hannah Arendt - I was reading this one and pleasantly surprised by how light it seemed in comparison to her other works. I mean, shit, this is Hannah Arendt we're talking about and I read On Revolution 3 or 4 times and I still don't know if I really get where all of her arguments were going. In this one, she's talking about the ways that violence is used and how Power and Violence are on a spectrum. With absolute power, there's no need for violence. When there's only violence, the power is not there. Violence is what the state and the actors do to grab or hold onto power. She also discusses the student protests and the ways that the state seemed weak when it reacted disproportionately harshly to protests.

And then Hannah Arendt gets super racist. Suddenly she goes from a dispassionate philosopher making observations and conclusions about society and turns into WHITE LADY ACADEMIC feeling insecure about the black studies department. She keeps saying that the Black Panthers offer nothing and that all the student riots to force administrators to seek out diversity will only lead to more "unqualified" black students (like she assumes that every black student who comes to college will be a stereotype from a hood movie, barely able to read) and they will study non-subjects like Swahili or African literature. Yeah, that bitch really said that African literature is non-existent. Things Fall Apart had been out for a decade. Maybe super existentialist lady was too busy coining terms like the banality of evil to actually read a fucking book by a black person, much less an African.

238.Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story by Julia Wertz - Later in this book after she tries to date a guy and gets her heart broken, Wertz blames him for many things including gas lighting her and being a snob and then says that he talked her into taking anti-anxiety meds in order to hide that something was wrong. She never modifies that viewpoint. This is a woman who is full of anxieties and angst (this IS a book about how she stopped drinking but also sometimes took uppers) and she thinks that she'd be better WITHOUT meds? Fuck that.

At this point that as much as I was entertained by her story telling ability and found the whole book fascinating, I don't think I would actually like Julia Wertz were we in the same social circles. In a previous work she admitted that she was part of the gentrification of Brooklyn by living in an illegal apartment in Greenpoint. In this one, she's starting to hate the fact that the rich boyfriend from a "different social class" ignores her issues as an upper middle class woman. Granted, $800/month for a one bedroom apartment is more money that I'm paying for my share of a two bedroom apartment (although it wasn't at the time. Fuck NYC landlords) and she is just taking off to Costa Rico because her boyfriend wants to go on vacation. Granted, this is a good story but I'm still annoyed by the whole "I'm so poor and so underclass when I'm living in my own apartment without roommates and going off on vacation on a moment's notice" aspect.

Still, this is an interesting book and Julia Wertz is a great story teller. And the horrible aspects of the protagonist make her an interesting main character. So I definitely recommend this one.

This is the end of the year and I'm getting kind of tired of writing these reviews. This is why I take a year between these projects.

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Tim Lieder

December 2023

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