Book Review: The Creative Lives of Animals

 

Image: The Cover of the book is a photo of 7 red- throated bee eaters - birds with green and orange bodies,  fanned out tails, long thin black beaks, a black mask line, and red throats- together on a clay wall with several nesting cavities. Weaving in and out of the birds is the title in large white letters. Across the bottom in yellow letters is the authors name: Carol Gigliotti.

I enjoyed reading Carol Gigliotti's The Creative Live of Animals for VINE book club this month. I wanted to wait until after hearing from the author, who kindly joined us, to write this review. Hearing more from her changed some of the ways I thought about this book. 

I love when people reach across fields to write about topics. It can be a mess when done poorly, but when done well, it offers a set of fresh eyes and a different voice- in this case, on animals' ways of experiencing and interacting with the greater world. Gigliotti comes to us as an artist who explores the inner and outer worlds of other animals through the lens of creativity. I believe that this is mostly done well and can create a bridge for people to experience these topics who may not seek out a more academic book. It is not that this is not an academic work. I am struggling to find the words to differentiate this work from the jargony type of text written primarily for others in one's field.

I admit that while reading this book, I found a lot of information from animal intelligence, emotion, language, sexuality, culture, etc that I had already read (though many species-specific things that I had not.) I was struggling to find what made this book stand out specifically as being about creativity itself. Each chapter is full of interesting research, well conveyed, but the descriptions of how creativity fit into the equation were too short for my taste. However, one of the things I liked about this author was the approach of acknowledging how anthropocentric definitions of various terms- including creativity and all others in this paragraph- limit us in understanding what creativity really means for other species. Looking at it that way, I could see her point that things like "intelligence" and other attributes have great overlap with creativity. The various things she chose to combine in this book also make it stand out from others in similar fields.

In terms of studies discussed, I really loved the section on prairie dog language and culture. I know I had read something about this elsewhere, but barely remembered it and it was a joy to read all of the research about these complex communication systems. I also enjoyed learning about the Moscow stray dogs who learned to use the subway systems. As a birder, my most favorite sections were on the languages and creativity of brown thrashers and gray catbirds. I've had the pleasure of listening to and watching the serenades of brown thrashers and catbirds, but had no idea how complex these songs were until this book. We often learn of these birds as "mimics" because they incorporate songs of other birds (and animals, car alarms, etc.) Would we call a composer a mimic for using notes and instruments created by others before them? These were the places I could see very clearly how "creativity" as I understand it came into play. That is not to say bird song is the same as human music- it is far more other-worldly than that in ways we will never be able to truly understand, which is part of why it is so lovely to witness. Field guides will say a species sings to "defend territory" or "attract a mate" which is in part true, but only a small part of the equation. After all, the colonizers running around shooting birds to draw them before returning home to their enslaved house mates (*cough* Audubon *cough*) used to think only male birds sang, which we now know is completely false, as is the notion that there are singular reasons why birds sing and communicate. A book written by an ornithologist might gloss over the creativity aspect which is one of many ways this book shines.

One of the best things about how research was discussed in this book was how the author never shied away from ethics. I complain frequently of how even the most animal liberation minded authors will sometimes include information from gnarly animal studies without comment, I suppose to be more accessible to the fragile colleagues who can't bear to think of a world without animals suffering in laboratory cages. Gigliotti manages to share results while adding something I have not seen said quite the way she did. She not only comments about the ethical issues with the research, but that the research itself hides results from us. Mainly, what would this creativity (or intelligence, etc) that we are studying look like if it were not forced by human hands and defined solely by us?

While listening to the author in book club, I appreciated the discussion of the creativity metric being used as a bridge to bring this information to a wider audience. People put off by words like "agency" might be more willing to read about "creativity." That made me more comfortable with some of my early confusion about what was creativity and what was not. She also shared an anecdote about another author saying something about how the greater than human world is inextricably linked with human creativity. I tried imagining the history of all creativity mediums if other animals were never present and I realized just how intricately they are woven throughout human creative mediums (in some good and not so good ways.) 

All in all, I think this book adds something useful to the shelf of animal studies. I would have liked a tighter grasp and focus on creativity as it branches further away from things like intelligence, but I still learned a lot and, more importantly, learned new ways to think about the lives of myself and other animals. I would love to read a full book by the author on creativity of birds specifically in the future.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Open Throat

 

Image: cover of the book is an ivory background with a stencil like image of the face of a mountain lion. The stencil is all black except for the eyes which are shades of pink orange and yellow. Across the top is the title open throat written and streaks like a marker made up of black, pink, Orange, and yellow. Along the bottom is the author's name Henry hoke in the same style. And small letters along the left side are the words "a novel."

This will be a short review for a short little book. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect from Henry Hoke's novel Open Throat. I have had a range of experiences with anthropomorphized accounts of other animals. Let me be clear, when I say anthropomorphized,  I'm not saying that acknowledging that other animals have feelings and inner thoughts is anthropomorphism. I mean a lion speaking a human language in a fantasy-like book form to be read easily by us is. 

Anyway, reading the description about a queer mountain lion romping through California made me think I would be humorously entertained. I did not expect to be brought to tears. I don't know if everyone would have that reaction, but as someone who has dealt with a lot of animal rescue and also tries to create a bridge between humans and other animals to better understand one another, I felt that this author captured something quite real in the way that they wrote about the mountain lion and his life. This mountain lion is no doubt a wild being, but like many animals with lots of interactions with humans such as hikers and campers, there is a level of domestication that happens. There are tons of things in this book that are completely outlandish, but the feelings and thought processes are there, described in ways that humans can digest.

The two particular points in the book- a section about a highway and the ending- were the most emotional for me. I hope that people come into this book looking for entertainment and come out thinking a lot more about what may be going through the minds of other animals that we see as nuisances, pests, dangerous, or any other number of one-dimensional, anthropocentric descriptions. 

This book was a surreal experience of many all too real things.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Practicing New Worlds

 

Image: The cover of the book is a color block illustration of a landscape with reddish brown mountains in the distance and a river of shades of blue cascading down toward the bottom. The river turns into a pathway going up the mountains. It is bordered by yellow mushrooms and turquoise leaves and vines.  In the foreground, the strands of the river are held by two feminine people with their backs to the viewer. One has medium brown skin and long dark hair and the other has darker brown skin with black curly hair. Both have yellow earrings and clothing and a purple butterfly in their hair and on their shoulder. Moving up the path are many figures with a variety of skin tones all clad in light turquoise walking or rolling (via wheelchair or walker) up into the mountains. The sky is a dark blue with speckled stars and a large moon obscured by the mountains.

The non-fiction entries of the emergent strategy series have been a real mixed bag for me. Strangely enough, many entries by the creator herself have left me unsatisfied. For that reason, I'm very glad that she has communicated with so many other contributors to the series, including Andrea J. Ritchie. I'm a big fan of Ritchie's work, so when I saw that Practicing New Worlds was coming out, I was excited to see what her contribution would look like. In the intro, adrienne marie brown mentions thinking she and Ritchie were both part of the same struggle but in very different ways: in essence, Ritchie was doing the practice of legal struggle and systemic change while amb was involved in the imaginative side of things. Ritchie herself is more accustomed to organizing and writing that is very praxis based, always with a "10 point plan." However, two of them found that there was great overlap between these two things, emergent strategy being a huge influence on just how those plans and practices came to be. This, in my opinion, has resulted in one of the best- if not the best- entries in the nonfiction realm of the ES series.

If you are familiar with Ritchie's work, it will come as no surprise that this book provides a very well researched account of various conferences and practices of recent years. It is chock full of excellent quotes from a variety of artists and organizers. The emergent strategy side of things allows Ritchie to be more imaginative in her writing of this. I enjoyed seeing more of the creative side of Ritchie's work in this book. It resulted in the expression of many ideas about tactics that could be tried based on the wisdom gained from things that already have been. The abolitionist goals expressed in this text are equal parts ambitious and idealistic, while also being grounded and rational. 

To offer one of many examples, I really enjoyed the way she talked about decolonization. I have found myself frustrated at how some of the discussions around decolonization seem to convey a falsehood that there are two poles: a complete return to exactly the way things were in the past or strict adherence to everything the way it is now. Ritchie discusses the importance of decolonization being a new world- not a return to some specific (often incorrectly homogenized) culture. Decolonization means creating a culture based on all experiences to date. I like this framing of it much better as it creates more space for healing and it makes much more sense to me as something that can actually happen. It is an idea of a world that indigenous people deserve including their whole selves.

Something else that stuck out to me was something that I really needed to hear at this point in my life. It's not a new idea, but the way Ritchie said it helped me to internalize it more. You may have heard the phrase, "kill the cop in your head." Ritchie talks about how the way we internalize things and speak to ourselves bleeds into the rest of culture. The voice in my head can be one of the cruelest things on the planet and I never want to treat others the way that voice sometimes treats me. This got through to me the importance of me combating that voice not only for my own wellbeing, but to prevent myself from becoming that voice and enacting that mistreatment on others.

Throughout all of the practices, there is a great deal of humility and space for mistakes. This is also extremely important and welcome in a culture where there can be a current a fear that any mistake is a death sentence for one's ability to be a "good" radical. We can make space for mistakes and growth without sacrificing accountability.

Ritchie also includes two visionary fiction stories, this is a really cool exercise. I may try it myself even though I am not a good fiction writer. The point is not to write a masterpiece but to see how creativity gives you ideas that you may not come up with in a strictly real world based thought process.

It was truly enjoyable to see Ritchie's strict attention to detail, organization, and research be combined with exercises of creativity and art. The entire thing is truly a labor of love and one of the biggest assets to the entire emergent strategy series.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Working It

Image: the cover of the book is an illustration/digital painting of a 1983 court photo scene where a dancer charged with obscenity bent over in front of a judge to prove that her clothing was not a violation. The background is light yellow with streaks of oranges and pinks darting out from the center where the woman, drawn in a pinkish hue is standing with her abum pointed away from the viewer. She has a long sleeve shirt on and a pair of very short shorts and high heels. She is bent over at the waist with her curly hair obscuring her face. Across the top in red letters is "working it" and below that in black letters "sex workers on the work of sex." On the bottom left in small black letters is "edited by matilda bickers with peech breshears and janis luna." On the right side is "foreword by Molly Smith."

Content warning for all kinds of trauma and harm you might expect regarding this topic.

I would describe my personal relationship with sex work as... Complicated. I've been sober for almost 19 years (Jesus, really? Seems like yesterday.) In both my years in the grips of a variety of chemicals and those in recovery, the line between sex work and trafficking was not very clear at times for me and for many women I've met. Some were straight up trafficked, but many were in a state of desperation where the drug withdrawal or the desperate need to forget were the ones doing the coercing. I've met women with rapist pimps who would sob in meetings with other women and others whose shame and trauma destroyed all of their relationships. I've had my own less extreme experiences with dealers taking advantage of dope sickness, being a minor around gross adults, or men misleading me into "acting/modeling" for their project that they would turn into porn once I was intoxicated with the substance they paid me in. Men (and sometimes others) lie to and exploit vulnerable women and girls (and marginalized genders and sometimes others) which is not news to most people. As a patron, I had been to a strip club a couple of times while I was using but not often and I don't remember anything extreme in one direction or another. I never encountered a positive or neutral story from a sex worker for many years. So, in my feminist evolution, when I discovered many of the second-wave feminist iterations of sex workers as victims, that made sense to me.

In time, both my understanding of addiction, drug use, and treatment as well as my understanding of sex work evolved quite a lot. (The addiction side will take another far too long post.) I met sober women who decided to continue sex work, often of a different kind, despite other job prospects. I met many trans people across the spectrum who found sex work to be the only, or just the best, employment prospect. I read about many people choosing a variety of kinds of sex work without victimization or coercion aside from the financial coercion of survival that we all have. But, I couldn't get behind much of the sex work activism messaging I'd see from mostly white, non-full service, sex workers which this book refers to aptly as "empowerment narratives" and "girl-bossification." I would think about my life and that of many people I've known and would think, "you all have no idea... Like I'm happy for you, stereotypically attractive fetish model/camgirl, that's great you feel so empowered but that's not most people." Then I'd feel bad, why couldn't I stop having these oppressive, dismissive responses to sex worker voices? I would encounter this again and again in a way that reminds me oddly of how people who I talk to about veganism sometimes understand it- this rich white people health craze, not a diverse collective liberation movement where wealthy and/or white people are actually the minority worldwide. Someone would eventually just say "sex work is work like any other job" without explaining what that even is supposed to mean. It seemed pretty different than other jobs to me.

When I saw this book come out, I figured I'd give it a shot but went in with low expectations. I didn't know the creators or the zine history. I'm really glad I went for it because this was the exact book I have been looking for.

Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex includes a wide variety of (I think mostly or all women) sex workers from many backgrounds, races, histories, types of work, and so on. Most but not all are from North America. Many of the entries are interview formats with the same questions for each person. They are well crafted and in depth prompts for discussion. Others were essays or other formats. Each entry is paired with an image of the worker's choosing which ranged from photos to drawings and more.

Right from the start, I knew this book was speaking my language. The discussion of white girl-bossification of sex work messaging and the wide range of reasons why people do it was at the forefront. Almost everyone discussed the louder voices of a few white sex workers with a hierarchy of sex work types they found respectable or not being a consistent problem. Black and indigenous women discussed the complicated forays through different types of sex work and non sex work jobs and the cultural complexity involved in their lives and choices. The entry on indigenous women drug users who were doing full service work or being trafficked was what I related to most despite being white and they didn't shy away from the reality that most of them wanted out. Trans women discussed dealing with the danger of fragile straight men's fear of being gay. One entry by a woman describing her desk job vs her sex work jobs really helped me understand "sex work is work" on another level. Her artful description of how she experienced the daily grind of each made a ton of sense. Another entry where a worker compared doing full service sex work to doing care work was really great as was the article critiquing enthusiastic consent narratives in regards to sex work. That last one has always bothered me, if you don't want to perform a sexual service but have to to keep your job, is that consensual? The entry was a really frank and helpful discussion regarding the complexity of consent in different situations.

There were also frank discussions of rape, abuse, entitlement of customers, exploitation by clubs and other businesses, and all of the ways sex work is very unsexy. There were discussions of intercommunity trauma and struggle. There were stories of workers making strides by coming together to support one another, stories of the solidarity of groups of people who only really have each other, and the varied ways and tactics that may or may not work to protect sex workers in various industries. Everyone who discussed safety or liberation called for decriminalization. There was a lot more than this, too, that I'm sure will pop into my head after I submit this review.

My only gripe about this book is that there are a few instances of gnarly fat and body shaming. Descriptions of a few men who were god-awful narcissistic customers didn't require me knowing their body size or atypicality to understand that they were really gross, shitty human beings. The idea that fatness was relevant, in a book with frank discussions about whose bodies are most valued in dominant culture, was disappointing. I get what they were trying to say- the entitlement that men have and how they view sex workers as another species practically leads them to treat sex workers in ways they'd never treat other people. There were just details that weren't necessary or even relevant.

Overall, this book really opened my eyes to what sex work is like for people who choose it and why they continue to. It taught me a lot about what "sex work is work" really means at a deeper level and allowed me to hear the voices of women I never get to hear from. I'm going to continue reading and learning more, but at my current level of understanding, this is the best writing I've read about sex work. So, I definitely recommend it to a variety of audiences who want to know more or to relate to the contributors.

This was also posted to my goodreads.

Book Review: Counterweight

 

Image: the cover of the book has an ombre sky that fades from orange upwards to  a pinkish red. There are a few sparse white clouds. Across the center are 8 black butterflies flying across at different distances. In the center is a cable hanging down that holds an eyeball with a blue iris. Across the top in black bold letters is the title Counterweight. Below the eyeball on the left is "a novel, translated by anton hur," and to the right, "Djuna" in large black letters. There is a blue butterfly on the bottom right of the title.

Counterweight found its way into my life by catching my eye with its bizarre cover as I scrolled through my feed. The mysterious author, Djuna, is not someone I was familiar with before this. After reading this book though, I want more.

I have a great love for cyberpunk as a genre, no matter how close its futuristic predictions come to be mere descriptions of our dystopian present. People have claimed that the genre is dead for decades, yet people like me continue to find dismal enjoyment in a variety of mediums from books to games to music to fashion. That said, a lot of cyberpunk can be repetitive cloning of the exact same story or by slapping some neon on a misogynistic diatribe and calling it art. What I like about Counterweight was how it navigated pieces of the genre, complete with plenty of high tech, low life characters and plots points, in a way that felt fresh and classic simultaneously. The biotech-infused identity crises of an unlikable narrator and the noir saga woven throughout was complex and engaging.   

My biggest issue with this book is that it should be longer. I don't mind fast moving stories that require hardcore attention to follow, but I had to skip backwards and reread parts of this book more than usual. I can be a slow processor and reading does take me more time than average. But, I really would have enjoyed a bit more world building and drawing out of this grotesque and fascinating story.  

Counterweight requires intense attention, but it pays off and is an enjoyable read for cyberpunk and other scifi fans out there. I admit that the author's mysterious identity is a draw as well. I tend to read about every author online after finishing a book and could not find much at all about Djuna. A surreal biography for a surreal book. 

This was also posted to my Goodreads.