This audiobook is incredible, I’ve been listening to it on repeat like a song. I think I’ve listened through four times now. Highly highly highly recoThis audiobook is incredible, I’ve been listening to it on repeat like a song. I think I’ve listened through four times now. Highly highly highly recommend if you are someone struggling with feeling like shit more of the time than seems manageable. Soothing, instructive, informative, transformative.
Update June 2023: Still listening. I just bought a copy of the physical edition so I can underline it and bend its ears and draw stars.
Update October 23: Still on repeat. So good.
Update December 22: I hope I can write about this. I don't know when I've been able to devote so much time and attention to a book like this. One full calendar year. Wild. Cannot recommend this highly enough, or something like it that works better for you. If you are frayed like me, find something like this. It's been wonderful. I feel a lot better....more
I read this in August and was bowled over by it. It's just a really well-told memoir that is also in a nonjournalistic sense some very vivid and movinI read this in August and was bowled over by it. It's just a really well-told memoir that is also in a nonjournalistic sense some very vivid and moving labor reporting, with the additional bracing element of a clear-eyed view into the tarchoked heart of industry. Or an industry, anyway, the oil industry. But also just industry. The industry of men.
It reminded me of John Carpenter's The Thing, a movie where a group of men are living isolated together in a work station and a terrible mutating alien goo or something takes over and they all become terrifying monsters and attack each other until spoiler at the end Kurt Russell is like I am putting an end to this and blows up the whole work station. I think. I have seen this movie twice but I thought it was stupid the first time and didn't totally pay attention, and the second time I watched it with a lot more interest in seeing how it worked rather than snerffing at how it didn't but it is still a little stupid to me and anyway I don't retain great plot synopses even of things I worship, so maybe go read the Wikipedia if you are truly interested in knowing what HAPPENS in The Thing.
Point being it's a movie about isolated figures whose purpose for existing gets really narrowed down to a not very human container and their humanness drains out, gets overwhelmed, becomes monstrous. Which is what happens in Ducks.
So I've been thinking about that since August, how this book and that movie complement one another in this conversation about workplace environments that I am personally always pretty deeply obsessing about; and then the night before last I got to return to my old book club, where I haven't been since 2019, and where I spent a glorious evening cawing and bleating and trilling and being with a bunch of humans, a bunch of warm vibrant cosmic bodies in space and time, and I was like whoa. This is it, this is everything.
Which, that is the part that I hadn't been thinking about with this book, how the opposite of what happens in this book is this thing we can look at in our social and public relationships, and how necessary this social/public element is to our efforts to not be or become monsters, and how fun it can be, how electrifying.
So this book is GREAT, in short. It is NOT a fun or uplifting story. It is an important, difficult memoir, told without rancor or self-service. Amazing. Amazing to digest art like this. Helps me imagine the world can be more than is the case, and hope for better things, what rises from ashes....more
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