wmbogart's reviews
72 reviews

Though smaller in scope than his more canonized novels, Great Jones Street is an early demonstration of Delillo's unique tone and approach. It's a little more imprecise than most of his later writing, and there are regrettable passages and asides that he'd likely have excised if he'd had more experience, but his ability to diagnose and distill the absurdity of capitalist "rationality" in its own approximated language is very much in place here.

Bucky Wunderlick, a loose stand-in for Bob Dylan, tries to drop out of public life but finds himself implicated in schemes and conspiracies far beyond his control. When he records The Mountain Tapes (a stand-in for Dylan's own Basement Tapes), a lo-fi mess of mumbled nonsense, warring factions conspire to get their hands on the recordings (and an experimental drug entrusted to his care) for their own commercial or political ends.

The message here, that there's no removing yourself from these systems, and that the "underground" or "counterculture" plays an illusory role in an empty political theater, is deeply cynical. Managers want you to honor contracts and distribute product (either recordings or yourself as "star") to various markets, the media wants "just a little of your time," the commune sees you as a figurehead for a sinister non-ideology, and audiences want you to articulate their own half-understood anger or despair before flaming out. The logical conclusion to all this is The Mountain/Basement Tapes, the articulation of the death of affect, the total rejection of public and commercial demands. But even this, we learn, can be taken by any and all parties as fodder for the machine.

The book is also very, very funny. The passages around coffee in particular got a lotta laughs. And his dialogue always works for me. Love the guy's writing! Wouldn't recommend it to readers as an introduction to DeLillo. Could totally understand why someone would hate this. But for the initiated, or for the ever-growing Dylan-DeLillo contingent, there's a lot to like here.

I think this novel’s strengths are in Ruth's narration; the linguistic choices betray a sense of weariness and hurt at the expense of empathy that makes for an interesting, complex voice. This is made explicit in the book's opening: "I needed them to know that Eleanor was once in possession of valuable things she squandered, which she chose to squander. That is one of the difficult things about personality - in order to convey it effectively there is always that faint smell of acting that muddles things. I needed them to see me in a merciful light."

This is the heart of the novel, and Ruth's plight - a tension between her need for empathy, for a kind of absolution of any guilt around her daughter Eleanor's addiction, and her unwillingness or inability to extend that same courtesy and understanding to her daughter. Ruth is fleshed out and well-written. It's her story, not Eleanor's. The narration plays up her melancholy in its attempts to underplay it. She "very nearly [doesn't] care" and "approximates cheer," and bemoans the need to perform an identity pages before describing her daughter's appearance as "half crazed." She "bows her head a little, as if to show that any insolence [...] was just a case of mistaken identity" but goes on to blame her daughter for "introducing notes of sadness" into her life. When her granddaughter, now in her care, begins to eat, she is thankful "to have a child who doesn't punish [her] through food." The constant centering of herself, though understandably informed by her sense of familial abandonment, is callous.

Vague self-help principles are espoused by the same narrator that largely fails to see people facing addiction as people (including her memorable description of Eleanor and Ben as resembling "common frogs or [...] cartoon conmen"). It's a testament to Boyt that this dynamic doesn't exhaust the reader or turn them against the narrator. She pulls this off by voicing well-rendered, reflective turns of phrase through Ruth. For instance: "odd those times in life when telling the truth sounded like deceit" for instance, or "a sense [that] I was experiencing new things I had lived before, that there was no difference between the past and the present, or rather the differences seemed smaller than the similarities."

Of course, the narrator also spends chapters deriding appearances; of her street as a site for sex-workers to find clients, of her "friends" and their unworthy romantic interests, and of her daughter as she fights addiction. Her preoccupation with appearances likely exacerbates her own disconnect from her daughter. She pays lip service to it, and the text spends a great deal of time detailing her decor preferences and her need to maintain an outward-facing veneer, but she isn't always as conscious or critical of this aspect of herself as the reader might be.

I had a little more trouble with the dialogue throughout, particularly with her stiff-upper-lip friend Jean. Ruth is fleshed out, and her judgments of others are articulate but hollow, tainted by her pain and her insecurities. Outside of her granddaughter Lily, I didn't get any depth of character for anyone else, including (most problematically) Eleanor. This made for a tougher finish to the novel for me, especially as its pace accelerates in its latter half. But what do I know?

In another era online, I'd spend hours upon hours stumbling across blogs from well-read music enthusiasts with a lot of time on their hands. A lot of these bloggers would just back into a thesis by applying whatever they were reading (Guattari, Foucault, Marcuse, Virno, etc) to whatever music they were enjoying at the time. I’m guilty of this theoretical malpractice as much as anyone. It’s a fun exercise, if not a little dishonest or unrigorous.

This book harkens back to those glory days. In this way, you get pieces both compelling (Deleuzian paranoia in Ariel Pink’s need to codify and flatten disparate genres, a reading of Marine Girls that somehow incorporates Cixous’ Laugh of the Medusa, Deleuze’s idea of the becoming-woman, and thalassophobia as a particularly masculine fear) and obvious (Brian Wilson’s Smiley Smile as a radical rejection of the commercial grind, a Debord-heavy piece on R. Stevie Moore’s cognitive dissonance around "stardom").

The author is aware of the limits of some of the “theorizing" here; there are constant disclaimers and jokes around how tenuous the connections are. I’m not entirely convinced by most of the arguments, but I’m not sure they’re intended as arguments in the first place. In any case, I don’t think there’s anything inherently leftist or anti-capitalist in recording outside of a traditional studio.

Lo-fi music subverts some commercial expectations, sure, but I don’t think it is inherently more critical of those expectations or the larger system behind them. Composition and creation in general is already an act of criticism, and the use of “primitive” or noncommercial equipment doesn’t necessarily imply a wholesale rejection of principles we might understand as right-wing (brazen ego-centric individualism, an unquestioning desire to preserve tradition, grossly commercial aspirations, the exploitation of fellow musicians and the rejection of the communal, etc.) Many lo-fi musicians might have “eccentric” aesthetic preferences, but a disturbingly conservative (or even fascistic) ideology is not necessarily incompatible with a little tape hiss or distortion. It’s true of black metal, it’s true of Ariel Pink (and to a lesser extent, R. Stevie Moore), and it’s true of a lot of the artists that weren’t cherry-picked for these essays. It’s telling that a great deal of this music is still rooted in pop, with song structures and melodic gestures recognizable within the larger pop tradition. Compared with, say, free jazz or harsh noise, bedroom pop can be read in bad faith as beholden to certain bourgeois values, even if it eschews others in its production or distribution.

But that’s largely outside the scope here. With a healthy dose of skepticism, this book make for an enjoyable, quick read. I do think the pieces on Daniel Johnston and Perfume Genius are a little flimsy, but the piece on Mount Eerie’s Dawn is strong. A mutual enthusiasm for the music on the part of the author and the reader can make or break essays like this, and your mileage may vary. For better or worse, I have time for it.

Two minor quibbles (I am petty). First - calling Wild Honey “quite uninteresting” is very nearly grounds for dismissal. I had half a mind to set the book down right then and there. (Kidding, sort of). And second - I read a lot of theoretical writing. Lotta jargon passes by these eyes. And in my many years, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything with more instances of the word “quotidian” in my life. Helpful word, sure, absolutely. Love that word. I use it from time to time! Great word. And I understand that a lot of this music proposes an alternative to imposed norms. That’s a lot of what I love about it too! But it’ll take me a while to reintroduce that word into my vocabulary. Might need to give it a little time.

Shorter than I'd like! A large portion of the book is spent summarizing each film's narrative. That's (unfortunately) necessary, as many of these films still aren't widely distributed or shown today, but it does crowd out some of the deeper analysis.

The result is a dense overview that packs in a lot of notes on the antecedents referenced in Rivette's films. But because the book's scope is so wide, many are briefly touched upon rather than fully fleshed out for the reader. Again, a necessity of the format - the author's pieces and interviews on Rivette elsewhere (e.g. in Cine-Files) are great!

Wiles writes that Rivette "permits cinema to follow its dramatic inclination while paradoxically placing this on display." His films "protest the reintegration of art into the mundane world of utilitarian consumerism by promising a restoration of aura through recourse to secularized ritual." I think this is a large part of what I respond to in his films - the recurring offering of what Wells refers to as "radical alternatives to hegemonic constructions."

These constructions, of governance and femininity and culture, are questioned throughout his filmography. Wiles highlights Rivette's relationship to the theater in his films. His plots often involve performers (typically women) who are made aware of something clandestine. In collaboration with one another and through a combination of performance and magic, these protagonists, and the film's crew, come to uncover truths previously hidden from the public.

The theater is a venue for performance, investigation, and labor. In his theatrical "staging" of performances and scenarios, Rivette's camera implicates the viewer as an active participant in the uncovering of these truths. As with any theater's productions of a pre-established play, Rivette changes and updates prior works (plays, novels, films, and myth) in his stagings. Wiles highlights these prior works and their relevance in connection with Rivette's films. That, as a viewer who loves and feels these films deeply but isn't all that knowledgeable otherwise, is the value of this book and other scholarly studies around Rivette. It isn't the whole story, but with films as complex as these, how could it be?

The framing here, wherein Katharina is left to “sift, sheet by sheet” through Hans’ files, sets the tone immediately. Kairos reads by and large as an excavation; the reader is left to sort through reflections and reminiscences. The heart of the text is not in the initial actions of Katharina or Hans, or the then-current concerns around German reunification, but in the recollection of those initial moments; in what those moments might have meant, in the desire to relive or forgo them, in the futility of comparing them to a more dismal present.

The “foundational” moments in Katharina’s relationship with Hans are straightforward and quickly developed. Early interpersonal tact, as in Hans’ conscious decision to “walk past her, [but] not too close” and in the public forgoing of a kiss in favor of “an exchange of glances” gives way to bursts of lyricism as their seemingly mutual desire is fulfilled in a series of firsts. A bill is retained as “a museum piece,” diaries and written correspondence are kept and poured over, and anniversaries of earlier milestones are recognized and celebrated. The end result, for better or worse, is that these moments and images are “etched permanently” into the memories of the couple, or rather into the shared memory that soon threatens the notion of the individual outside their coupling.

A closer reading, on the part of the reader or in Katharina’s hindsight, reveals the “foundation” to be hollow. There’s an implicit paternalism on Hans’ part embedded in his inner monologue from the beginning. He writes “so as not to confuse Katharina” and wonders if he “[might be] expecting too much of her” as he subjects her to trivia and his own cultural inclinations. He speaks “more to himself than to her,” an early indication of the true nature of his desire: to compartmentalize, shape and treat Katharina as an extension of himself.

Hans’ “power” does not preclude his own vulnerability; he is in genuine, overwhelming awe, at least initially. He tellingly stutters in relaying to Katherina: “I-I will remember the picture of you in this mirror as long as I live.” Katharina responds assuredly. “So will I.” Their state of infatuation is mutual, but the specifics of that infatuation, and the power in their relations with one another, differ wildly.

It might be more accurate to say that they are infatuated by the memory, by previous instances rather than by each other. Their dissolution into one another is a byproduct of their mutual obsession with those memories. Both struggle with the distance between those early days and the present, and with the loss of the possibilities and the imagined futures posited by that initial desire. In stunning prose, Hans fears that “all the memories he took such trouble to create will just be the altimeter for his plunge back into normality.” Their desire to preserve those early moments is pathetic, and rendered more melancholic in the framing narrative’s further distance in time. The relationship, the reader recognizes, was always mired in an illusory history, in a compulsion to archive and relive rather than an earnest desire to live or progress with one another.

Ultimately, Hans is never able to see Katharina as a self-actualized person. She too loses sight of herself, and the novel is filled with concerns that she is being subsumed. This is mirrored in the larger concerns around East Germany’s eventual capitulation to commerce and the West - “two different sets of time, two everyday realities, two competing presents, one serving as the other’s netherworld.” Katharina wonders if “it [is] called no-man’s land because someone wandering around in it no longer has any idea who she is?” In the larger political moment and in her relationship with an increasingly abusive Hans, she understandably struggles to maintain a vision of herself removed from her surroundings. The meeting of two forces, Hans and Katharina or East and West Germany, results in an uncertain void, a dialectic that makes clear the tension and unsustainability of the current situation.

Erpenbeck uses a kind of cross-cutting, dialectic literary device throughout the novel; often developments in a piece of music (Pirate Jenny, Candy Says) are alternated against inner monologues or conversations between characters. Eventually that music is replaced by spoken-word cassettes, and delusional, spoken-word accusations are cross-cut against political and organizational concerns around the fall of the Berlin Wall. I do think some of the dialectic underlining is a little too obvious and unfortunate, particularly the section about a trusting “Hans 1” and a skeptical “Hans 2.” The novel’s themes are sketched out and emphasized in nearly every sentence, with little room to breathe, but the prose is strong enough and the ideas are developed to the point where it’s (mostly) justified.

The “conclusion,” as with the rest of the novel, is bleak. A possible alternative, her tryst with Rosa, is described in similar terms to her initial infatuation with Hans, “as though there were no more [separation] from the other, nothing of self and nothing of other.” Rosa cautions Katharina that “no one can completely dissolve in another” and that “what’s left over is what’s interesting.” That positive dialectic, lost on Katharina at the time, is instructive.

Finally, one last, larger dissolution in the union of currency between East and West. East Germany as it was is dissolved, its memory gradually lost in the reunification. This is rendered tragically, in the rapid proliferation of capitalism, joblessness and poverty, but if we take Hans and Katharina’s dissolution as a model, the reunification too can be read as unsustainable. “The landscape between the old that is being abolished and the new that is yet to be installed is a landscape of ruins.” Though we may not see it at the time, those relationships and bodies and countries and situations that appear fixed and rigid are always in flux, always in that state of being abolished.

“Something begins, something ends - or finds its fulfillment. But in the meantime, time pours into life, is braided into it, grows into it, entwines itself with it, but is never one thing: never indifferent, always taut, always strung between a beginning of which one is not aware because one is too busy with life, and an ending which is in the future, and hence in darkness.”

Some of the best writing on Dylan I’ve read - and I’ve read a lot!

Particularly valuable is the writing on Dylan's approach to language. Scobie highlights two major throughlines: the "elaborate style" that relied on "a proliferation of images" and a "loose, nonlinear structure,” and a more plain, (relatively) austere "reliance on colloquial and proverbial speech" that frequently places intertextual material in new contexts.

It all ties back to Dylan's focus on "stopping time" in his work, and Greil Marcus' idea that a great deal of the music Dylan drew from, that is folk and “traditional” music, frequently comes across to the listener as "an allusion to a body of knowledge [that] can never be recovered.” Dylan, a “great poet of absence” in Scobie’s terms, picked up on this quality and incorporated it in his own songwriting.

For instance - with John Wesley Harding, "narrative gestures" are used as "selective invocations of the semiotic codes of outlaw ballads." Elsewhere (as with Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts), the writing is "so elliptical that nothing in the text excludes" a wide array of possible interpretations. Later, in the "born-again" era, Dylan will use this same elliptical writing and abstraction to explore a kind of self-negation or self-division. Eventually, with “Love and Theft” and Time Out of Mind, the approach develops to become a broader intertextual collage of tremendous depth that is necessarily inscrutable in any traditional sense.

Also valuable is Scobie's analysis of specific albums. The Basement Tapes (my personal favorite!) is a series of "fundamental dislocations of the very conditions of utterance." The key to those recordings is in "the absence of conventional systems of signification, as the language of the songs retreats into fragmentation and incoherence: the absence, in post-structuralist terms, of any transcendental signified."

Self-Portrait, in its reliance on material known to the listener, is either "a series of masks," an earnest attempt at outlining influences, or a "radical and definitive denial of the self." Dylan "disavows" writing and "erases altogether the privileged signifier of the [physical or authorial] voice.” In doing so, it creates a compelling portrait of the self, Dylan's or anyone's, as a fluid or unstable amalgamation of influences and personae mediated by the expectations of the audience.

With Time Out of Mind, Dylan "inserts into his own writing the disjunction of 'immemorial' tradition" in the frequent incorporation of "lines [whose] origin has been occluded." Authoritative interpretation and explicit sources are lost in a haze of intentional uncertainty.

Despite thematic similarities, the writing style (and performance) differs wildly from album to album. Scobie charts these changes in a broader overview of Dylan’s simultaneous trickster/messenger inclinations. The guy is complicated!

Anyway, I might not be doing the ideas here justice - if any of this is interesting even at a glance, I’d highly recommend this book.

Incredibly obvious stuff here, unfortunately. Maybe this was valuable at the time, but it reads like some surface-level notes on the explicit themes in De Palma's filmography, without really digging into their implications beyond the narrative.

De Palma more than anyone uses the camera to ask these questions, examine and investigate and consider and complicate what it means to look or be looked at, how the gaze can be used, the role of the viewer and the one(s) viewed and how complicated and misleading those roles and images can be. The author seems vaguely aware of this, but doesn't give much time or thought to the movement of the camera, the edit, the structuring of a sequence, or anything outside of straightforward plot summary and the occasional mention of more obvious visual techniques (e.g. the use splitscreen, though this is under-examined).

This is more of a (poorly-written) timeline of his filmography through The Untouchables and then a few scattered notes on voyeurism, desire, doubling, inferiority complexes, and, most memorably, three separate instances where the author tried to get an interview with De Palma and was politely turned down. He does get a brief interview in around Wise Guys when he likely corners De Palma after a press conference. It is not a good interview.

I'm sure there are better books about De Palma out there, but I've only come across this one in person. At least the brief mentions failed projects were interesting. The initial Cruising screenplay apparently didn't take the maladaption angle that Friedkin (and, in Dressed to Kill, De Palma himself) used. And the whole Fire project, wherein a Jim Morrison type fakes his own death to avoid a (falsified) sexual assault charge set up during a performance by a disgruntled filmmaker whose wife cheated with him? It's a wonder that didn't see the light of day. That was a sure thing. No doubt in my mind that De Palma would've resolved his own inferiority complex and surpassed the cultural impact of Jaws and The Exorcist with that screenplay.

Among other suspect claims (and some very questionable sexual politics) on the author's part: Pacino's roles after The Godfather II "received little notice" until Scarface. De Palma's approach to sex is "very seldom gratuitous." Multiple projects failed to get off the ground (including a contest to co-write scenes in Blow Out) for, and this is a quote that comes up several times, "obscure reasons." 

There's also a page or two of fanfiction for some reason.

A lot of theological discussion, in this book and elsewhere, ends up revolving around the power of the word - and at almost a thousand pages, there are a lot of ‘em here! In the writing of Tokarczuk and Nahman and Chmielowski, the then-present is recorded, disseminated, and made into history, with the caveat that what is written is often not what occurred.

Of course, the word of G-d, or what is believed to be the word of G-d, is of primary importance here. Regardless of faith or sect, the characters that populate this book are trying to find a sense of order, a reason for creation and everything that has come to be since, a set of rules or laws that should be adhered to in order to ascend to a new station, in life or in death or in what follows. 

But the words collected in holy texts are dense and complex. Trying to gauge the veracity of both the original texts (the Talmud, the Zohar, Testaments Old and, if you’re into that kind of thing, New) and the subsequent interpretations can lead to a lot of disagreement. We’ve seen this. People don’t agree on these things. It gets complicated!

Thankfully, every so often someone comes and proclaims himself the Messiah. If you’re charismatic enough, and people want to believe hard enough, you can get a little following going. Jesus of Nazareth did it, Sabbatai Zevi did it, and now this young, convincing guy named Jacob Frank is giving it a go.

And over the course of the novel, you see why a wide cast of secondary characters are able to fall into the Frankist/anti-Talmudist denomination. You can see why a portion of a severely insecure, disenfranchised group would turn away and go looking for something else. Here, in a quasi-assimilation to Christianity in baptism and in disregard of Jewish customs, we can understand why the rank-and-file Frankists might have been susceptible to a suspect “Messianic” mvement, even if it called for behavior that seemed against their best interests. A leader to rally around and the promise of an alternative can go a long way!

The modern implications for this are obvious, and emphasized in the present-tense retelling of the whole ordeal. A good deal of the novel has a farcical tone, and exploits the absurdity and hypocrisy of the characters’ actions or beliefs, with moments of lyricism and deference to a character’s theological position interspersed throughout. I was admittedly nervous when the initial tone wasn’t to my taste, but I found it more palatable as I got deeper.

In any case, the scope and size of the novel allow for the full weight of Frank’s eventual fall when, spoiler, he is revealed to be mortal. Disgusting behavior, once rationalized by his followers as having some higher purpose, is revealed to just be repugnant or pathetic, particularly in his dealings with women. There’s something poignant and relevant about this quasi-Messianic figure’s overwhelming reliance on women, both physically and domestically, but also in the positing of a divine Shekhinah and in Jacob’s implication that Sabbatai and David had feminine qualities and/or were women themselves.

It’s a throughline for the novel, and not just in Jacob’s exploitation and violation of the bodies and labor of women and in his purely self-serving relationship with his wife and daughter. Chmielowski’s correspondence with Druzbacka is similarly dismissive, in a kind of unknowing, quiet misogyny to contrast with a more explicit contempt for women seen elsewhere. You might think this would be irreconcilable with the idea of women as the sole source of divine salvation in Frankist thought, but, as is the case with many religions (or, more broadly, guys), that kind of extreme veneration is another kind of over-reliance and prescription without any regard for women outside of their utility.

Eventually, Jacob Frank is betrayed by the written word - a self-serving, dishonest accusation from Pinkas. Just as he furthered the false accusations levied around orthodox Jews (including the “passover blood libel,” the claim that Jews were using Christian blood in Passover matzo!), he too is condemned. Even his imprisonment and condemnation is rationalized by his followers, who feel that the descent is necessary for eventual salvation. From the vantage point of history and in The Books of Jacob, we rationalize their rationalization as part of a larger theological or sociopolitical framework that extends to the present day.

Yente, a character left in a state of not quite death earlier in the novel, hovers over the novel and lends her perspective throughout. She is able to see a sense of order and rhythm - of interconnectedness - between each moment, each person, and each word. She, like the reader, is able to see the whole, the unity of the seemingly disparate theological and geographic strands recorded here.

“The written word lasts forever, while colors - even the brightest ones - fade. The written word is sacred, and every letter will eventually go back to G-d, nothing will be forgotten.”

As with any other, the person delivering the eulogy here is just as embedded in the text as the deceased. Here we read Magda's attempts to understand Emerence as a person; her sense of pride and her fears, her values, her moral code, her own political inclinations (as "apoliticism" has its own political ramifications), etc. 

Magda and readers both come to "understand" Emerence in the glimpses of her backstory revealed gradually throughout the novel. Of course, Magda's analysis of Emerence is rooted in her own background as an "intellectual" that would hire a housekeeper in the first place. Magda earnestly tries to understand this person, even if she writes her off as "anti-intellectual" or senselessly proud and private, but it's clear to the reader that Emerence has a (relatively) consistent character justified in her past experiences and traumas.

If this is clear to Magda, she fails time and time again to act in accordance with Emerence's wishes. The later half of the novel becomes an attempt at rationalizing or justifying these actions. Even in her expressions of deep regret retroactively, Magda struggles to really understand this person, despite the near-authoritative tone in her narration. For all the discussion of "power" between the two, and it's clear that Emerence does hold power over Magda to a degree, the novel's climax comes when Magda's actions make a grave decision on Emerence's behalf. If Magda feels guilt and ownership over this, as she reveals in the opening chapter, the unspoken focus of the novel is in her failure to ever truly understand this person or their relationship over the pages that follow.

This book traces how the trans community has navigated and operated within different microeras online. Obviously the zines, physical literature, and in-person groups of yesteryear have given way to the more direct/rapid communication and dissemination of info online. The forums have changed quite a bit over the years - from BBSes and message boards, to chatrooms, to blogging networks, to the current situation within larger social media platforms, and each forum necessarily affects the conversations held within.

The larger conversation has expanded (good!) and allowed access to information for questioning individuals as they begin their journey (great!), but we also see the rise of context-less (mis-)information returned in search results via algorithm (bad!), and the datafication and commodification of specific identities and the labels/language used to approximate those identities by advertisers (horrible!). 

The development of the language around these identities is interesting - particularly funny is the popularization of  "cisgender" as a term driven by one dedicated, overzealous poster. The final section on the tagging/indexing of identifiers in Livejournal and Tumblr was also interesting - the increased visibility in certain circles comes with the codification of these terms and some potentially harmful gatekeeping, as has been the case historically. I was more of a message board and blog person back in the day, but I imagine this section would be super interesting for those that actually kept a Livejournal/Tumblr at the time.

Also interesting is the larger question of archiving these conversations and preserving these histories. Obviously private interests can't be trusted to handle things with any level of care (as we see time and time again), but some personal accounts likely carry with them identifying/sensitive information, deadnames, etc, and the larger digital context is necessarily lost with the passage of time. The language and the ideas have developed, and the conversations have as well (both within the group and outside it), in some cases for better, in others possibly not. The inter-group "flame wars" of BBS & message board-era conversations seems to have mostly fallen away, but some of the nuance of those discussions might be lost in today's larger microblogging/social media landscape. The terms have been created, redefined, and reexamined as we've come to understand their implications (and ourselves) more, and the acceleration of communication (and the commodification of that communication and identities more broadly) threatens to undermine real progress in understanding these things at a deeper level.

And these are very complex things! We're all just trying to find and understand ourselves, trans or otherwise. The journey to understanding is a long one, and I'm not sure there's a real endpoint, even when one finds the specific term(s) that resonate at a deeper level. Even with the wealth of easily-accessed information available to us now, I know I still have questions. I hope the extremely-online kids today are able to wade through the algorithmic "suggestions" with skepticism and find their way forward. 

Anyway, good book! Check it out if you're interested!