Reviews and Comments

Again nothing but praise for using ghosts and monsters as tools to think through the chthulucene. After this I want to read more by Anna Tsing <3

I think I made posts about this on main. Already finished. I liked it, my memory is blanking a bit on content, but I just want to mark it as read on here.

Finished a while back too :) The Camile stories were very interesting, very chthulucene and sympoiesis. Also speakers for the dead :o

Actually finished this a while ago. One of the things I do love here is the representation. If we're imagining futures we're still living in, let's make sure everyone can see themselves in that through many stories that are specifics, not some vague universal story.

Going to get this now I think.

They just invoked the image of a werewolf to talk about interspecies connection between humans and dogs/wolfs. This is so cool.

It's a collection of short stories. I got through the first two, well 'got through' is not quite right, that makes it sound like I didn't enjoy them while I really did. They're great stories about surviving on earth, and people who like plans, and spiders, and cheese, and people. And they're hopeful, a lot more than I am, and I need that.

Reading!

I have finally finished the 'Ghosts' half of the book, and I can't wait to get to read about monsters. I'm going to quote right from the middle of the book here, where the 'Ghosts' and 'Monsters' sections meet: "On a damaged planet monsters and ghosts are figure hiding in plain sight. They point us to forms of noticing the crosscut forms of knowledge, official and vernacular, science and storytelling. They show us co-species practices of living. If monsters are excess, ghosts are absence and invisibility. Monsters are entangled - and contaminated- bodies. Ghosts suffuse landscapes with many kinds of time. Following ghosts and following monsters are different ways of knowing the terrors of the Anthropocene."

I read this one last summer. Maybe if you're like cishet man and are barely involved in feminism, this is a good book. Like, people need to start somewhere. Otherwise it is a pretty shallow book in a many ways. It tries to tackle a lot of aspects about masculinity, the writer not seeming to have expertise on, besides identifying as a man himself. He tries to be progressive but is far out of his league. It keeps showing.

Somewhere in the book he thinks Jordan B. Peterson, someone who has campaigned against better and more LGBTIA+ inclusive sex education, and allies with the conservative far-right groups, is a good person to think with.

So after this book, whoever thought it was insightful, has a lot of progress to make if they really want to take a critical look at masculinity or 'being a man'.

I've been procrastinating on reading more. I've read the first couple of chapter, and the biggest part of this book seems to be SF, which I usually love, but just haven't gotten around to. Maybe soon? The first chapters were good, though I do always get huge flashing warning signs when people talk about that there's too many people, which Haraway does for a little bit...

I've been reading this book slowly, I'm just barely done with the Ghost side. The idea of this side is that ecological change that's been happening recently, and since longer past, is visible in the presence and absence of things now. The past is haunting us like a ghost, kind of, though it doesn't have to be scary per say. I'm just noticing this is affecting how I think about the environments I live in. I live on human-made land, and that has it's own unique things. The absence of a longer history has always bothered me, and how in every forest I could see the trees neatly planted in rows... And slowly that's starting to change.