First Thing In The Morning Reading List

 The Guardian's book review newsletter came in this morning, and so went my first hour of today.

I read a book about the Vatican Bank while in prison, whose title I forget now, but it was almost a history of the Vatican in the 20th Century. Now, there is Vatican Spies by Yvonnick Denoël review – a head-spinning history of saints and sinners. Plenty there to scare those people I know who still think the Pope is trying to take over the world.

The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen review – smartphone nation reminds me why I do not have a smartphone:

The problem with the critique of technology’s effect on modern experience offered here, indeed, is that it assumes that such bad behaviour is technology’s fault, rather than entertaining the idea that perhaps tech is just enabling people to act out the selfishness that has been inculcated in them via decades of neoliberal propaganda, according to which human beings are no more than individual, atomised consumers in a merciless ambient marketplace. That thought, though, might not come so easily to an author who is a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a thinktank noted for its historical global-warming denial and free-market extremism. But then that is the irony of modern conservatism: it denounces the social changes that its own economic policies promoted.

Several reasons I could not write the novel reviewed in American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman review – thoughts for the day - mostly I have neither the experience nor imagination for the task - but these paragraphs rang some kind of bell for me:

Helen’s dermatological fixation figures in American Genius as an allegory of our hypermediated, death-denying age. The sensitivity of Helen’s skin reflects how impossible (and paradoxically desirable) it is to live as a sensitive soul, with your psychic borders incessantly breached by forces – history, other people, memories of dead cats – beyond your control.

But the skin trope is also to do with America. In one passage, Helen recalls teaching the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s discredited frontier thesis, whereby his nation’s character was moulded by its westward expansion, giving that oxymoron, American civilisation, a roughness unlike that of its European forebears. That thesis, for Helen, encodes the desire to reincarnate in fresh new skin. Helen writes of “the common but unique American fantasy of life as an entirely different person with a virgin’s body whose hymen, a membrane of thin skin protecting an essential orifice that… is also just another frontier”.

I have a little less than 90 minutes allotted for blog posts before I need get ready for church. Do check out the reviews.

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