‘Composing an American Life’, the book’s subtitle, certainly rings true. Adams, born 1947, grew up in East Concord, New Hampshire in a musical family: his mother a professional jazz singer, and father a clarinettist, who gave Adams his first lessons on the instrument. East Concord is a town whose namesake in Massachusetts channels a special connection to the musical and intellectual traditions we hear in Adams’ output. The name evokes the music of Charles Ives, whose ‘Concord’ Sonata for piano attempts a musical homage to the thought and writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau amongst others. Such figures are emblematic of an openness and pragmatism that is characteristically American, and has huge bearing on Adams’ approach to composition. [read full essay]
Bernard Stiegler, trans. Daniel Ross, Automatic Society: Volume 1, The Future of Work
reviewed by Calum Watt
Automatic Society: The Future of Work is the first of an anticipated two volumes by the prolific French philosopher Bernard Stiegler on how we should prepare for a near future in which widespread automation is expected to render much human work obsolete. Identifying a similar trajectory across the West, Stiegler disarmingly predicts that within ten years French unemployment will reach up to 30%. As Stiegler says, ‘this portends an immense transformation’.
Much of Automatic Society... [read more]
In 2010, Robert Barry was among those in attendance at London’s Cafe Oto at an event billed as An Audience With Terry Riley. In the 1960s, in tandem with Steve Reich, Riley had laid the foundations for minimalism in music, with works like In C, works which were ostensibly repetitive but through subtle and incremental variations built in intensity, evolved without conventionally ‘progressing’ in the grand old orchestral manner. These were the foundations of the future. The German Krautrock... [read more]
Terry Gibbs, Why the Dalai Lama is a Socialist: Buddhism and the Compassionate Society
reviewed by Hawa Allan
‘I’m not going to argue in this book that we all need to be Buddhist Marxists,’ writes Terry Gibbs in the introduction to Why the Dalai Lama is a Socialist. Her intention, rather, is to illustrate how certain tenets of Buddhism and Marxism are complementary, and translatable into action that can end the suffering prevalent on our planet. A professor of political science at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Gibbs proceeds to lay out her argument in the defensive tone of an academic... [read more]
Hamja Ahsan, Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert
reviewed by Dominic Fox
The first thing I have to tell you about Shy Radicals is that, while it is often terribly funny, it isn’t a joke. Hamja Ahsan has taken the form of the militant tract, with its demands and denunciations and piercing accusations against a fundamentally disordered world, and used it to talk about, well, shyness. The world as it is for other people, neurotypicals going about their noisy neurotypical business, is confronted as a kind of torture chamber for the shy and introverted, the quiet and... [read more]
Charlie Fox has such good taste, one could forgive him almost anything. This Young Monster is a long, extremely erudite rant about the connections between queerness, monstrosity and the creative drive, with a particular focus on photography and film. Increasingly of interest to academics and cultural critics, the monster is a multivalent symbol for societal rejection, ambiguous identity, and the physical horror of adolescence, among other things. As JJ Cohen put it in Monster Culture (Seven... [read more]
Elif Batuman’s The Idiot is a portrait of the artist as a painfully young woman: naive, earnest and cripplingly self-conscious. Selin – daughter of Turkish immigrants and ‘tallest living member’ of her family, ‘male or female’ – has just started her first year at Harvard. It’s the mid-1990s, and email is brand new. Arriving on campus, Selin is offered an Ethernet cable: ‘What do we do with this, hang ourselves?’ Over the next twelve months, Selin buys an Einstein poster for... [read more]
Dirk Kruijt, Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America: An Oral History
reviewed by Mike Gonzalez
Dirk Kruijt’s Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America is an early contribution to what will certainly be a bumper crop of books revisiting the Cuban experience after Fidel’s death and the rapprochement between Obama and Raul Castro. Donald Trump’s policy on Cuba (as on most issues) is unclear, but from occasional Twitter comments, it appears he is likely to roll back US policy on Cuba to some degree – though, as a faithful servant of big capital, now busy opening business opportunities on... [read more]
Stoddard Martin, Monstrous Century: Essays in 'the Age of the Feuilleton'
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Is there any need to wonder which century it is that stands shamed by its monstrosity in the title of Stoddard Martin's timely collection? If Alain Badiou recently sought to recuperate its image under the polemically unqualified rubric of The Century (2005), Martin joins the majority in his disapprobation of the wretchedness of the interlude that extended from Art Nouveau to the internet age, from experimental aesthetic dynamisms of one sort and another to the global communications morass, and... [read more]
When did the category of teenager, as we comprehend it, come into existence? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word to the United States in 1941 and ‘teenage’ to 1921 in British Columbia. In Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, the category as now understood was certainly not available. The age of consent, apart from anything else, was only raised from 12 to 13 in 1875 (and to 16 only in 1885). That alone meant the early teenage years were sharply different from ours. And of... [read more]
David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
reviewed by Abigail Rhodes
‘How did the pollsters manage to get is so wrong?’ has been a consistent question asked in news headlines since the unpredicted Conservative parliamentary majority in the 2015 general election. Leading leave campaigners in the UK’s 2016 EU Referendum appeared just as stunned by the result as those who had voted to remain. In both of these instances, the voting intention polls had offered no evidence that prepared us for the final outcome. Such mystifying circumstances were mirrored in... [read more]
