by John Moe

Depression IS hilarious! Laugh-out-loud funny!

OK it isn’t exactly depression that’s hilarious; it’s John Moe, a Person with Depression. I’ve got laugh-out-loud funny bits bookmarked, but they tend to be scenes that go on for a little while rather than one-liners, so not ideal for quoting.

I’ve also bookmarked more Serious items which are funny in a less ha-ha way and do lend themselves to recording here. John reminisces about the group of friends he hung out with in high school. Each could be classified as the good-looking one, the rebel, the philosopher, but John isn’t sure what role he played. Maybe the funny one, but he isn’t sure. “Depression has solidly imprinted that era as a time when I was worthless, so I honestly don’t know why anyone hung out with me.” I feel the same way about my high school group! I don’t know what role I played! I feel that way about my current friendships as well! What role do I play? I have no idea why anyone hangs out with me.

OK, one laugh-out-loud funny: John has a job where he’s being expected to do the impossible. “It was like being told to build an airplane but with no blueprints and also you’re a cocker spaniel.”

Back to more Serious: John lives near the Mall of America. To people around the world, the MoA is a cartoon, a symbol, etc. To John, it’s a nearby mall that has a lot of things that sometimes he goes to. “For people with depression, suicide is kind of like” that. “It’s a real thing… we know that it’s a real place you can drive to.”

And “Comedian Mike Drucker says he can’t commit suicide because all his friends will just write three paragraphs about themselves on Facebook, and ‘someone’s going to get two hundred Likes off my death.'”

Finally my favorite: Your problems have maps. “You can’t move to Minnesota and get away from all your problems. Or New York or Los Angeles or Rome or Melbourne or Mars. Your problems have maps, and they will find you.” (  )

by Corey Robin

A well-researched and thickly detailed yet not overly long book; the whole thesis is perfectly laid out in the introduction, while the rest is just supporting evidence. What do you know about Clarence Thomas? I was with most Americans: the only things they “know about him are that he once was accused of sexual harassment and that he almost never speaks from the bench.” And that he’s a black guy that always voted with the late Scalia. Hence the enigma of the title.

Corey Robin’s well-supported thesis is that Thomas is not a conservative who happens to be black. His conservatism is on the contrary rooted in black radicalism. Thomas grew up in the Black Power movement and read and listened to the speeches of Malcolm X repeatedly throughout his life. His vision is one of black separatism based on the traditional patriarchal values he grew up with, raised by an autocratic grandfather. His grandfather, a self-made black businessman, is also the basis for his vision of a black separatist capitalism and feeds into his jurisprudence on cases of economics, the free market, and decisions like Citizens United, which deemed corporate entities entitled to free speech rights.

It’s a thing to wrap your head around: Thomas is so radical he’s conservative. And yet it’s all out there in plain sight in his writings and his decisions on the Court. The book lays it out in detail. Yet somehow we don’t know this – I didn’t. We don’t see it. We see a black conservative and just kind of think, “Well, these things happen.” Robin’s book begins with a quote from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me… When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything & anything except me.” Reading this book is exactly an eye-opening exercise. (  )

by Ben Ehrenreich

Disappointing. I don’t even have any good quotes bookmarked. It reads much like somebody’s “notebooks”, and I guess I should have taken the title more literally, but I’d been expecting something a little more coherent. Ehrenreich spends about half the book reporting from Joshua Tree, and the other half from Las Vegas where he is temporarily living due to having earned a fellowship there. The book is best describing the desert; his love for Joshua Tree shines through. Naturally, Las Vegas is described as being like some circle of hell. It’s so miserable to read; I get it, Vegas is crazy horrible, but you’re presumably there for a reason, right? The institution that hired you, your colleagues, surely there is some beauty or bright spot to be found? COULD WE HEAR ABOUT IT? Likewise, the guy seems to have the biggest horror movie scrolling on his phone’s Twitter feed. He’s always putting in asides where he looks at his phone and sees somebody being decapitated or watches the polar ice caps melt before his eyes; and again I wanted to shout, STEP AWAY FROM THE PHONE, DUDE. You don’t HAVE to subscribe to these horrible things. You don’t even have to be on Twitter! Sorry, I am probably missing some deep, dark beauty enveloped in this book, but it obviously didn’t find me. (  )

I can’t wait for this book to come out. I listened to a podcast tonight about it with the author, Virginia Postrel. I’m going to be interested in every single page. I know the author from the days when I used to read Reason magazine and she was the editor. I also read another one of her books, over 20 years ago. I’m very happy that as part of her research she learned how to weave on a hand loom, and took dye classes as well. I loved sitting on the floor listening to her talk about textiles while I sorted my carded fibers.