Among the two books I am reading in parallel are Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark and Jarrett Kobek’s I Hate The Internet, which, as I bounce between their narratives, I realize render so much of what it means to be (as I am) a liberal technologist living in America in 2017.
Solnit’s writing is symphonic in its range of sources. Kobek’s style leans on an acerbic but incisive wit – his consistent description of the amount of “eumelanin in the basal cell layer” of a character’s epidermis has shades of Vonnegut’s “So it goes.”
And Solnit is a hard read now. I want to feel as hopeful as she did in the context of the first term of the second Bush administration, when she looked to the evolution of Uruguayan politics for inspiration to get through a dark time.
There’s so much on my mind these days it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ve done some good things recently, which I’ll write about in greater detail shortly. But work continues, life continues, and good prose lifts my spirits. Somewhere between hope and hate, I suppose.