Book Notes: The Hike by Drew Magary

Notes on: The Hike by Drew Magary

The story of a short journey that turns into a long journey, by turns funny, strange, sweet, and exciting.

Ben is on a business trip to the Poconos. He's away from his wife and kids, and his hotel is boring, so he decides to go for a quick hike in the forest behind it. He ends up going someplace far stranger and unimaginable, and for far longer than he thought he would be hiking.

Like all journey-stories, this book is about fate and how our relationships with others and our world form the choices we make. Ben meets all manner of strange creatures (including giants, demons, ghosts, dog-faced killers, huge insects) and bizarre people (a 16th century conquistador, stranded out of time, and an irascible talking crab, among others) and these collisions change the choices that he makes while on the Path. And along the way, his memories of his wife and children are the distant light that keep him moving.

Lest I leave the impression that this is some dour, weighty book--Drew Magary is a really funny writer. If you know him, you know his hilarious contributions to Deadspin, and especially his LOL column "Why your team sucks." And while the book isn't exactly humorous, it is very funny in places, whether it's the repartee between Ben and the cannibal giant who captures him, or his maddeningly funny/frustrating experiences early in the novel trying to get his iphone to work. Even when the book is more serious, Magary's prose is fast and rich and his world-building and imaginative set-pieces are really striking.

Quentin's Weeknotes 4/6/19-4/12/19

This week:

• I read about surging interest in Democratic Socialism in my home state. As with DSA activism in other places, it's mostly young people, and people with debt, who are flocking to the DSA. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was that they were really focused on local issues and local politics, with a great deal of antipathy to all of the furious pre-Primary fever that is currently gripping the state.
• I listened to Chris Hayes' interview with the astonishing Mariame Kaba, who is perhaps one of the most original thinkers and activists in America. I first got to know her on twitter as @prisonculture, and her fierce and uncompromising work at the complete abolition of prisons and policing. This podcast is a good summary of her provacative but deeply human and ethical argument.
• I attended the Museum Association of New York Conference, in Cooperstown. What was so great to see was so many museums working to actively engage diverse communities around issues of contemporary relevance, no matter what stuff or content they were curating and exhibiting. I was amazed and inspired by presentations from folks at the Dyckman house in New York City (making this 18th century house Museum a welcoming place for their mostly Dominican neighbors), the Seward House in Auburn (confronting the vitriol and controversy over confederate monuments head-on), and the Long Island Children's Museum (making itself a central place of refuge and learning for recent immigrants).
  
• I finished reading The Hike by Drew Magary. Not particularly deep, but fun, funny, and imaginative, like a video game in prose form, and not in the lame way.
  

Quentin's Weeknotes 3/30/19-4/5/19

This week:

• I read this great interview with Chris Cerf and Norm Stiles, who crafted some iconic songs on Sesame Street in the 1970s and 80s. These guys are clearly close friends and had a great time making kids music for adults and adult music for kids.  "Put down the duckie" is perhaps their most famous for its celebrity-filled video, but I'm fond, as they are, of "Dance Ourselves to Sleep", which, as you'll see below, is really funny and strange.
• I've been listening to the music of Billy Eilish, who is making dark, surreal, genre-defying pop. Her videos are as bizarre and stylized as her music, and "Bury a Friend" is the creepy, monster-under-the-bed love story I didn't know I needed in my life.

Quentin's Weeknotes 3/23/19-3/29/19

This Week:

• We drove down to visit one of my oldest friends, the Minister of Intrigue and his family. It was far too short of a trip, but we had a great old time visiting Longwood Gardens, playing Funemployed, watching Impratical Jokers, and just generally catching up.
• I was reminded to always call your congress-person. Always. Because that's the only way they'll learn you exist in the numbers that you do. And they are not going to change of their own volition.
• I read Matt Taibbi's excoriation of the national media's feverish coverage of the Russia investigation in the wake of the relase of the Mueller Report. I have always been suspicious and dismissive of the idea that Trump was working for the Russian government, not because I didn't think that he was, but because there are a lot more interesting and important factors  that led to his winning the 2016 election. Grabbing onto the idea that he was a Russian puppet felt like an easy way to avoid more difficult questions about American political identity. I'm glad that this thing is over with, and I wish it had been over with sooner.
  
• I listened to Chris Hayes interview Jonathan Metzl about his new book Dying of Whiteness. Metzl is a clinical psychologist and critical sociologist, and his new book documents how allegiance to White identity politics has negatively impacted the health of White Americans--reduced gun access restrictions leading to more suicides, and rejection of the Affordible Care Act's medicaid expansion leading to higher healthcare costs and worse health outcomes all around, as two examples. There's a line of argument in liberal and progressive circles that rural Americans routinely vote against their own (economic) interests, due to conservatives weaponizing cultural politics--this is the argument (which at the time I found very appealing) of Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?" Metzl has turned this argument on its head, and asked what "culture" rural Americans are voting for, and the answer is a culture of White grievance and supremacy. In other words, they are voting for policies that are harming them because they see themselves as historical actors defending a racial/national identity. For Metzl (and I buy this too), it's an affirmative choice, not a form of false consciousness.
• I finished reading "The Obama Inheritance", a ripping anthology of contemporary noir, crime, sci-fi, and  thriller writers who use right-wing conspiracies about Obama as source material. It was a wild ride, and a lot of fun, in a "the only way out is through" sort of way. 
  

Book Notes: The Obama Inheritance

Notes on The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir, edited by Gary Phillips

Date finished: 3/25/19

A wild ride with a really clever premise, and featuring some amazing tales.

It's kind of all there in the title--this is a book in which writers of mystery, suspense, science fiction, and thrillers take, as a given, all of the conspiracies that were drummed up about President Obama, and turn them into a narrative. Given how feverish and bizarre many of these ideas were, it's a rich mine to plumb. The pulp tradition looms large here, with spy thrillers, space-monsters, and action heroes making regular appearances.

As with all anthologies, the results are variable. Some of these stories were thrill-rides, others reveled in the horrific implications of their inspiration, and others used the opportunity to contemplate America as an idea and a lived experience, particularly around issues of race (perhaps not surprisingly, as most of the contributors are people of color). The stories that I liked the best took the feverish, almost psychedelic weirdness of the far-right's swamp of Obama-hate and ran with it. Eric Beetner's "True Skin" and L. Scott Jose's "Give me Your Free, Your Brave, Your Proud Masses Yearning to Conquer" take on the idea of Obama as a lizard-person, with equal parts funny and disgusting results. Nisi Shawl's "Evens" plays with the idea of clones and their implications for succession and term limits.  Other stories draw on other mythologies and fold them into our current political situation--Star Trek for Adam Lance Garcia's "The continuing Mission" and The Scarlet Pimpernel in Gary Phillips "Thus Strikes the Black Pimpernel". Still others are action-filled thrillers like "Michelle in Hot Water" by Kate Flora and "Forked Tongue" by Lise McLendon.

My favorite story is perhaps the strangest--"The Psalm of Bo" by Christopher Chambers, framed as a gospel according to the Obama's beloved water Spaniel, and recounting the story of how dogs inherit the Earth. It's almost quiet and meditative, even as the story it depicts is absolutely bonkers and delightful.

It's hard to escape the world we're in, dangerous and spiteful as it is. But this anthology does the great work of confronting that world head-on. Maybe that's the best approach--certainly it made for an entertaining read.