Weekly Reading Recap (Week of April 17, 2023)
"The end of poverty is something to stand for, to march for, to sacrifice for."
People’s ideas about what it means to “go viral” on TikTok are subjective. For me, I think a video has to pass 1 million views to really have the feeling of being viral, because it’s around that threshold where “everyone has seen it.”
But, for content creators (especially small creators like me), a video with just a few thousand views can feel pretty viral. When you’re accustomed to a few hundred views, a few dozen likes, and a handful of comments from people you know well, it can be head-spinning to start seeing hundreds of comments stream in.
I had one of those small viral videos this week when I mentioned a line from Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America (see more about the book below). And it was just the kind of video that TikTok tends to promote more often: a political topic with a stance and some facts that people can quibble with. I’d say that 95% of the comments were strongly agreeing. But of course, I decided to lock horns with the handful of people who disagreed.
My advice to any creator (on the left) who is going to do this is to do this with caution. More often than not, you aren’t dealing with an interlocutor trying to expand the shared pool of wisdom through debate. It’s just a troll trying to hijack your audience. Your first, and usually always winning, move is not to play.
But if you do play, remember: they want to message to your audience. Sow doubt about your stance. Distract from the core issues. So, if you choose to engage, always start from the premise of, “how can I communicate what I want to communicate to my audience.” Don’t directly engage debate bros on their terms.
Thankfully on TikTok, those types generally stick to the comments, so you have the visual and audio leg up. Also, especially if you’re wading into political topics, I’d recommend familiarizing yourself with Ian Danskin’s The Alt-Right Playbook, particularly the “Control the Conversation” video. Good luck.
On Repeat
I’m not a religious person. I wouldn’t even call myself a spiritual person. But I have had a spiritual experience. It was listening to Blue Bucket of Gold (Outro) at Sufjan Steven’s Carrie and Lowell tour when he played Constitution Hall in Washington, DC in 2015.1 Sufjan Stevens is one of my two favorite recording artists.
Maybe one day I’ll write or talk more about that experience, but that’s just set up for another amazing experience on the same night: hearing Moses Sumney for the first time. In 2015, Moses was almost completely unknown, and Sufjan had him as the opening act for a good portion of his tour.
He looked a bit nervous, and the crowd wasn’t totally sure what to expect. But then he started recording live loops of snaps and rhythms and layered them under himself as he sang “Rank and File.”
He won the audience, hard. He’s one of very few opening acts that I’ve seen over the years that made a really strong impression.2 And several years later, he came out with the video above for “Rank and File” which is equally creative, powerful, stunning.
Finished This Week
Wrapped up IQ by Joe Ide early this week. Easily one of the best Sherlock dupes I’ve seen/read. I’ll definitely be continuing the series. More details about my thoughts in last week’s recap.
Eldritch Sparks (Shadows of Otherside Book 2) by Whitney Hill
Also finished Eldritch Sparks (again, some additional detail last week). I really like where Hill is taking the series and I’ll be reading book three next month.
My one additional thought is that I feel like Hill fell into a common trap with Eldritch Sparks that a lot of UF stories fall into which is the setting feeling empty. This wasn’t a problem in book one, so I’m hoping this was a minor speed bump. What I mean by this is the Triangle doesn’t feel like it’s a real, living place in Eldritch Sparks.
Almost every person that Arden interacts with is a named, known character and most of those are also Othersiders like her. She doesn’t go to regular bars or see random software engineers in her WeWork (in fact, in Eldritch Sparks Hill makes the point that basically everyone has left Arden’s side of the co-working space and she’s alone).
Now, there is a reason to do this: Arden is feeling increasingly isolated, even from her new boyfriend. She’s also feeling the stress of managing the complex power relationships in her role as Otherside UN Secretary General. But I think it’s a mistake to realize this isolation by removing the nuts and bolts of being in a city. It makes it seem like this story could take place anywhere, and that’s real bad when writing a UF book.
And it’s not necessary to do it to make your characters feel isolated. I’ll let some of my favorite characters from one of my favorite TV shows tell you why:
I never thought there could be anything worse than being all alone in the night.
But there is. Being all alone in a crowd.4
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
A tremendous resource and reveille about poverty in America—how it comes to be, how it is sustained, and how we can abolish it. And that is the language that Desmond uses: we should be working to abolish poverty in America.
This book is slim, clocking in at 188 pages, but it is also deep. Deep in thoughts and ideas and also deep in citations. Like Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology in the algorithmic bias space, Desmond’s work is a summary of the state of the art in social science around poverty with nearly 80 pages of citations.
If you decide to go down the rabbit hole on one of the chapters or even single ideas that Desmond brings up, you will find ample books and papers in the endnotes to get you started.
Still Reading
City of Dreams by Don Winslow
My first Don Winslow was City on Fire and I knew I’d have to read a lot more of him. I haven’t done that (yet), but this week I started on the second in this planned trilogy. It’s a rough retelling of Homer and the Aeneid set among a warring Irish and Italian mafia families in Providence, RI in the late 1980s. And boy is it good (yes, there is an Achilles and Patroclus: Sal and Tony).
City of Dreams picks up immediately after City on Fire, which left the Aeneas character (Danny Ryan, a lower-level enforcer for the Irish) on the losing end of a mafia war and packing up his son and remaining crew to go underground and make their way to California.
Winslow has such efficient writing. He effortlessly weaves dialogue, thought, and narration in staccato bursts. Read a page of either book and you’ll know if you love or hate the writing, but that’s all you’ll need because it’s so distinctive. Highly recommended.
A Fistful of Charms by Kim Harrison
I finally got to the end of the over 100 page “refreshment” scene (as I’m calling it). I’m enjoying what Harrison is doing here, but this reminds me of some other UF books I’ve read in the past year (thinking specifically of one of the Iron Druid books) that had a complete detour right in the middle of the book to handle other stuff before returning to the main plot.
I need to think more about this, but I feel like this is Buffy and Angel creeping into these works. If authors conceive of their novels as analogous to a season of a TV show, they’ll be tempted to have a lot more diversions and peripheral material which may not be as successful in a book. I’m not saying that you can’t have side quests and character development in a UF book, far from it. But the way I see this done a lot is there is a main quest that gets stopped in the middle of the book for this ancillary activity before our characters return. It just feels a bit sloppy to write that way.
Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley
I’m now through volume two and have opinions.
If you’re not familiar, the Carrie and Lowell video on his YouTube channel is fantastic.
Empress Of is probably another, and she coincidentally opened for my other favorite recording artist: Carly Rae Jepsen.
All book links are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which benefit this publication.
Sheriden and Delenn in Babylon 5.