archytas's reviews
1670 reviews

Once again, an eclectic collection of science writing. This year's was a little less climate change focused, although James Purtill's bleakly short "Western Australia had its hottest summer ever, but climate change barely made the news" may be partly why science writers are no longer motivated to write pieces they feel will exhaust them with misery and disappear without a trace.
But some of the 'lighter'pieces here are really interesting - Belinda Smith on how chip flavours are made; Bianca Nogrady on how coffee flavours are made and perhaps the best "how it is done"piece, Matthew Ward Agius on solar challenges and what they are really achieving.
Others cover work that gives you hope, especially India Shackleford on Indigiemogis and language revival. And there are a few nicely thoughtprovoking big picture pieces, including Tabitah Carvan on how the wild creates our home.

Each of the seven chapters in this book was structured to uncover the kernels of truth underlying seven myths about the creative brain, as well as the chain of events that led to specific narratives being propagated. In adopting this approach, my direct aim was to inform readers about the bigger and—dare I say—more exciting stories surrounding these dominant ideas.
This book is much better than I think the blurb gives you to understand. Abraham explores the different ways in which the brain might support creative endeavour, and debunks even more.
Key lessons here include that a lot more is being claimed than is known; that creativity has a wide range of causal factors, which also have a wide range of brain functions, and my favourite because it is so rarely understood in this field, that you also can’t ignore the impact of socioeconomic factors. In talking about the association of mental illness with professional artists and writers, for example, Abraham tartly points out that the association of professional artists with poverty, insecure employment and denial of health care definately has a bigger impact than any question of associated brain wiring.
Recommended.

This book had been languishing on my to-read pile until my partner finally chose the Leftovers from our shows-we-should-have-never-watched list, which had the scene-stealing Emily Meade in a bit part, which reminded me of the engrossing Deuce (in which Meade put an unforgettable turn as a porn star), which in turn reminded me of this book as the second unforgettable performance in the series by Maggie Gyllenhaal was as Candy, a character loosely modelled on Royalle, so I packed the book for a beach long weekend read, and yes, that is exactly how my brain works.
The first thing to note is that loose was very much the modelling for Simon and Pelecanos in writing the Deuce. Their Candy was a streetwalker who finds art through porn. Kamensky's book reveals a very different story - a New York survivor who immerses herself in the queer and alternative theatre scene in San Franscisco, and turns to porn as her theatre career falters and her heroin habit grows, Royalle brought her past to porn, and was certainly not a creation of it.
Kamensky weaves Royalle's story alongside social, economic and political analysis of the sweeping years between the 1960s and the 2010s. As a historian who lived through the "feminist sex wars"of the 1980s and 1990s and now teaches this to bewildered, arch Gen Zs, she is both invested in how ferocious these debates became and capable of seeing, in hindsight, how stupid and ultimately useless it all was. This is a perspective I could empathise with, including the wincing at how much something that mattered so much might now seem so ... quaint. 
Kamesky had great material to work with. Royalle kept a daily diary her whole life, and this archive is now safely stored in a library, providing the primary material for the book.
Royalle I was also aware of as a 1990s figure, an icon frequently held up by the sex positive feminists (of which I was one) who wanted to prove that sexuality could have feminist expression, often simplified to feminist porn was possible. This version of Royalle appears in the book, but often as a fragile shell - a lot of bravado, backed underneath by a failing business model, swept up in the general whirlwind of the end of the era of profitable pornography in the face of the internet. Many aspects of Royalle's life that Kamensky has brought out challenge the simplistic narratives. A sexually abuse, pedophiliac father, clear lifelong anguish from her abandonment as a baby by her teenage mother, fall all to neatly into stereotypes of traumatised sex workers. Royalle refused to either erase her trauma or her efforts to be more than it, nor to bow to those who then argued that it negated her capacity to choose her own life. While Kamensky at times is clearly frustrated by the ego of her subject, she draws with great respect on the enormity of what she achieved - not only a life lived on her own terms, but one that demanded to try creation of a safer space.
In leaving the mainstream porn industry, Royalle did several significant things. Firstly, she built and celebrated a community of women who demanded a space for ethical sexually explicit entertainment, and refused to sit in the boxes porn had created for them. These women, which included Annie Sprinkle, continued to meet regularly throughout Royalle's life, and organised her funeral and celebrated her life. More than any specific initiative, this community feels like a huge achievement in an industry designed to disempower and marginalise women.
Secondly, Royalle created safe sex initiatives and programs on set for her performers, setting a total ban on sex without condoms, insisting on - and paying for - regular testing of her performers and providing safe sex education resources on set, and then throughout the industry. She was the first producer to do this, and was out of step with practice for some time until others caught up. It is clear in the book that this comes through her ongoing participation in queer circles, and the devastating loss of so many of her oldest friends in the pandemic. But at time when she is financially struggling, it more than any other component, stands for her ethical centre and willingness to model a different way of doing business. It saved lives. She also made films showing safe sex techniques. (It is notable that Deuce omits entirely the community orientation of Royalle, and how much everything she did was with others in some way or another)
The book is slow and was worth savouring. There is a pathos to it, which is mirrored in Royalle's own diary as porn slips into an ever-escalating violence and mock realism, while also becoming less and less lucrative for the performers involved. Her own videos, based in couples scenarios and arthouse shots, have proven to have long lives - contrasting sharply with the novelty drive of the rest of the industry - but too late to matter. But the book also celebrates her achievements as a beacon for a different way, a woman who provides still evidence, that this was neither inevitable nor what most women wanted.

This is a grippingly told ode to the book - a deftly crafted tale that winds through various turning points in the life of a text. Doerr's characters are all inspired in their own way, to try to create something better. At first this seems more philosophical but as the novel winds on, it becomes clearer that this book is connected in a very practical way to the future of humanity. I found it slow going at first, but by the middle I was desperately hooked into the story, and the fates of all the individual characters.

It is slightly surprising that this book is as good as it is, given what it is attempting. Baxter combines a painfully sharp - in the funniest way - study of the messy psychology of making art with a broader social critique of how women are patronised, boxed in and denied gravitas in the scene. This means balancing a narrative around her protagonist's anxiety spiralling her out of control - often played for laughs - with a narrative about how difficult it is for her to be taken seriously and claim her power. Somehow, it really, really works, making this a fun, if chaotic, read that never fails its characters. The book is propelled by the same frenetic energy that captures its main character - who is beside herself as her latest exhibition opening approaches - 
I suspect I would have liked it a great deal more if I knew the art scene being satirised, or even had artists as a part of world. But as someone uneasy around conceptual art, I still found it a great read. And maybe I know a little more now!

This is movingly written set of stories about women in Chile. All the women have burdens - they are seeing a psychologist - but they also reflect the lives of women everywhere, not just in Chile. What binds them together is their determination to strive beyond the limitations that have been placed on them - by societal expectation, war, disability, parental or spousal control. 

This is a moving and thoughtful account of Opantish, which sought to mobilise against gang sexual assault in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. El-Rifae has an anthropologists eye here, and a deep interest in how this work impacted the volunteers, and in examining the group dynamics, making it a very engaging read for anyone with experience of organising in mass demonstrations. The stakes are high - both because of the sense of urgency in the movement, and the brutal, systematic and overwhelming nature of the attacks. Committed to making a difference, these activists persist even when the scale of the danger - female activists on the teams in the square frequently are sexually assaulted themselves, and male activists also on occasion - and the sheer impossibility of keeping up is clear. This creates a range of dynamics, all of which El-rifae mines with compassion and respect, to draw out some kind of lesson about how to organise and exist in unjust societies.
This is not an easy read often - I had little idea how bad the assaults were before reading it - but it is a hopeful and invigorating one. One of the most memorable bits for me is when the group start enlisting men on the outskirts (or even inskirts) of the assaults to help, recognising that the line between hero and abuser can be thinner than we often acknowledge and using community accountability in interesting ways. This theme also enables El-rifae to balance her regrets and her pride in ways that enable analysis and also a call to action.

I don't know how to review this book, because nothing about it should work and yet everything does. This reads more like memoir than a novel, but the strong insistence that it is a novel also forces the question of what narrative is, what writers try to achieve, and how life and work intersect. It reminded me incessantly of Monkey Grip - possibly because it is set in a in the same city in similar eras (well a decade or so) - but likely because both inhabit this similar uncertain netherworld in which art is made out of truth, or maybe truth is made out of life, in a way that examines the intersection between social constraint and self.  De Kretser's work has always felt carefully constructed to me, but Theory and Practice did not (although it clearly was). Rather it feels unleashed, like this was just waiting to be written, even as it resonates, puns and circles back on itself in clever ways. And even as it explicitly toys with how our theories and our practice shape each other. Our protagonist grapples with her love for Woolf and her growing exposure to Woolf's racism and antisemitism, just as she hits the Melbourne theory-intensive English literature scene, and just as she jealously fixates on her lover's girlfriend while writing feminism. We see how theory can be a refuge, but also a deception, an avoidance and a hypocrisy.  A way of not-seeing or refusing to look. The work also chronicles the way that things which feel eternal in your 20s change, like everything else, like you, in fact.
It has been almost two weeks since I read this that I am reviewing, and my thoughts about this book still feel more whirled than settled. I did love reading it though, and tore through it, which feels worth recording. I also want very much to say that I thought she was very kind to St Kilda, a suburb with great pubs but a lousy beach, but this is not at all relevant to anyone else's enjoyment of the work. 

This is a highly readable history, full of courtly intrigue, and focused on the friendship between Pasha Ibrahim and Suleyman. It reads almost like historical fiction - and I probably would have been more comfortable with it if it had  been marketed as that - but there is no question that de Bellaigue is a cracking read which helps to understand how Ottoman politics worked. 

A reasonably didactic, beautifully drawn, graphic novel covering a small group of students in Ankara in the 1970s and 1980s. A little understanding of history would help going in, as White's strength here is in evoking the sense of rapid change and semi chaos, perhaps sometimes at the expense of clarity. I very much enjoyed it though, and we have too few tests which cover what intense periods of social upheaval were like to those at the centre.