What?
Take a 2015-era, 11-inch MacBook Air. Strip off the proprietary software tailored exactly for this hardware and model. Install the most do-it-yourself Linux distribution there is.
First up, why (on earth) would I want to do this?
Author: jon
Provocations, Free Women, Free Men and Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academia in the Hour of the Wolf by Camille Paglia
For some reason I keep giving Camille Paglia’s Provocations another shot. I didn’t get any further this time before throwing it across the room, and reading bits of Free Women, Free Men I’m sad to say it too doesn’t hold up very well in hindsight.
To cheer myself up I read her long essay Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders. It’s a bit silly in places, but is very funny and the targets (particularly academic careerism) are very worthwhile:
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Reviews: Primo Levi
If Not Now, When?, The Periodic Table and The Magic Paint by Primo Levi
I’ve been on a Primo Levi roll for a couple of weeks, particularly his short stories. They’re tremendous.
By Linda Boström Knausgaard (2021)
Saw it in the bookshop and I know I can only survive on Knausgaard blood.
Dreamlike account of the obliteration of Linda’s memories through an extended course of ECT in a mental institution, in a sort of fugue through mental states between unconsciousness, memory, dreaming, and awakening.
This is great fun – if perhaps getting a little wrapped up in itself by the end.
An anonymous reader keeps picking up books, becoming fascinated in the first chapter, before having the book lost, stolen, or discovering the whole thing is a mistranslation or forgery.
Calvino does an amazing job of writing a dozen absorbing first chapters with throwaway ease; the bits in between I wasn’t so sure about. It’s very “postmodern” in an obsessed-with-texts, the relationship between reader and writer etc. kind of way. Is this theme really the skeleton key to life? It’s pretty funny, but I get the feeling would be even funnier if all the characters weren’t cyphers.
Now reading Knausgaard #6. I think I’ve got a problem…
I have continued to enjoy them, but there’s definitely an aspect of comfort reading even in the boringness (not to mention Karl Ove’s amazing failures of judgement that make me feel a lot better about all my decisions).
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Review: The Lies That Bind
By Kwame Anthony Appiah (2018)
This is wonderful, just so clear and wholesome in a discussion of a subject – identity – which can of course be pretty fraught.
It belongs to that rare class of writing where the language is so crisp and readable, you barely notice you’re being lead to some really philosophically interesting places. I particularly like his take on meritocracy, which is an idea that exercises me a lot. He does talk quite a lot about himself – but then he’s had such an interesting life and background, I hardly blame him.
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Reviews: Modern African History
The Scramble For Africa by Thomas Pakenham (1990) & The State of Africa by Martin Meredith (2005)
The Scramble For Africa. This is just fascinating – surely one of the strangest few decades in history. Other than the pretty horrific behaviour of the colonists – who, perhaps Brazza excepted, were tremendously low-rent graspers and cheats (as well as plain brutal) – what most strikes me is how shoestring the whole business was. Regions the size of France “claimed” by a few dozen troops, etc. I’ve actually read this before – but the weird format (it’s all chronological, rather than by area) meant I struggled to piece together the whole arc of regions like the Congo. So I only read the central Africa sections in sequence this time, about half the book.
A Man in Love By Karl Ove Knausgaard (2013)
I’m still really liking this, the mixture between the boring day-to-day and unexpected intensity is if anything even more pronounced and is still doing it for me.
I do feel like I need a bit of break from Karl Ove though – there is one heck of a lot of childminding in this one.
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My Trouble #1
(an affectionate pastiche)
So did I tell you about the time when I was a teenager and me and my friend, Jan Vidar, tried to go to a party in Kristiansand on new year’s eve? His friend, Tom, said he would buy the beer for him, and dropped the bottles off in his car. But Jan Vidar’s brother found it and made him return it and swap it back for the money. Tom winked at us, and later we went and got it back. I had to hide it in the woods outside my house before evening. I was wary of my father, but his mood always changed whenever our grandparents were coming, and he said alright we could go to town until 2 in the morning. They think we’ll be going to a friend’s house, so we’ll need to hitchhike and then take a bus. So I said goodbye to my grandma and started the walk through the snow to Jan Vidar’s house after collecting the beer. The snow had settled on the dark bottles, and the sky was luminous and open. Every time a car comes by, I think it’s my uncle Gunnar, so I have to hide the beer in the ditch and walk on, but it’s not him so I go back and collect it. Past the parquet factory, where all the kids work in the evenings, assembling palettes. It was piecework, and they were country kids, never realised that the tally could be cheated. For a while I was worldly and a curiosity, the local girls used to cycle ten kilometres just to take a look at me, but there was nothing interesting in them to me. Past the frozen waterfall and the ravine where it was never warm even in summer. At the top there was Pal’s house, he was slow on the uptake and we could tease him, his mother was always angry with red eyes. I was rude to her once, and laughed about it with Jan Vidar afterwards, and now she always looks at me with hatred. His house is a mess, broken machinery all over the lawns, why do people want to live like that? I thought, or do they think it’s normal?. His father was always quiet and kind, and would let us in to play anyway.