Books

Favorites

• L'Étranger (Albert Camus). Ennui, the sun, a revolver.
• Faithful and Virtuous Night (Louise Glück). A journey, a winding path.
• La muerte de Artemio Cruz (Carlos Fuentes). Ambition and revolution.
• Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë). Hardship, freedom in the Moorlands.
• L'Homme-au-Bâton (Ernest Pépin). Guadeloupe, haunted by violence.
• Eichmann in Jerusalem (Hannah Arendt). Banality of evil, tout court.
• Les misérables (Victor Hugo). Injustice, redemption, sin, sewage.
• Salón de belleza (Mario Bellatin). Epidemic, fish tanks, and limbo.
• Madame Bovary (G. Flaubert). Naïvité, caprice, existential angst.
• Space Invaders (Nona Fernández). Childhood and dictatorship in Chile.
• The Passions and the Interests (A. Hirschman). Sin, virtue, capital.
• La casa de Bernarda Alba (F. García Lorca). The grip of conformity.
• Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison). Exile and personhood in Black America.
• King Lear (William Shakespeare). Folly, tempests, and responsibility.
• Den allvarsamma leken (H. Söderberg). Love in Dear Old Stockholm.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (R. Pirsig). Chautauquas.

Log Entries

Recently, I finished up Donald Norman's An Invisible Computer. It's a fantastic book, probably one of my favorite books, and it starts off with a powerful quote:

The personal computer is perhaps the most frustrating technology ever. The computer should be thought of as infrastructure. It should be quiet, invisible, unobtrusive, but it is too visible, too demanding. It controls our destiny. Its complexities and frustrations are largely due to the attempt to cram far too many functions into a single box that sits on the desktop. The business model of the computer industry is structured in such a way that it must produce new products every six to twelve months, products that are faster, more powerful, and with more features than the current ones.

As much as I like it, however, one concept I disagree with is what he concludes and also titles the book, that technology should be completely invisible. By invisible, he means that technology should blend so seamlessly into our everyday life that we do not notice it is there.

[.. talking about the goal of technology] The end result, hiding the computer, hiding the technology, so that it disappears from sight, disappears from consciousness, letting us concentrate upon our activities, upon learning, doing our jobs, and enjoying ourselves.

Sounds great in theory, in practice of course what we find is that companies make something that is easy to use, and then do not necessarily act in the users' best interest, but the user is stuck with what the company provided and is neither empowered to seek out other options nor fix it. I think this is an anti-pattern, and I talk about this in depth in my essay, The Curse of Convenience.

However, there is also another section that I found particularly interesting and shines a light on where I think technology should go, which is Norman's idea about what makes a good tool. Norman has this to say:

Good tools are always pleasurable ones, ones that the owners take pride in owning, in caring for, and in using. In the good old days of mechanical devices, a craftperson's tools had these properties. They were crafted with care, owned and used with pride. Often, the tools were passed down from generation to generation. Each new tool benefited from a tradition of experience with the previous ones so, through the years, there was steady improvement.

I do not feel like modern phones and computers are like this kind of tool. A good retro camera is something we learn inside out, with its quirks and unique abilities, and becomes part of our hobby and personality. This is not so much the case with a modern iPhone. Modern technology removes as much personalization as possible and makes it hard to repair for the sake of convenience, looks and ease-of-use. That means that you do not put effort into learning your tool nor personalizing it, and so as a result do not appreciate it as much. Instead of customizing and learning about your unique device, you buy a new one, that acts just like the old one. Devices become impersonal and invisible.

In a recent interview, Norman laments the fact that his all time best-seller, Design of Everyday Things, did not cover that tools should be designed to be repairable too. To me, repairability is in opposition to his idea of technology becoming invisible. At the same time, I think repairability and customization goes hand in hand with his idea that you should feel pride in owning a tool, and that that is what makes a good tool. A device that you tweak and make truly your own, you will care for more and want to repair as well. As I replace parts of my Thinkpad and change the way it looks and feels, I find it becomes more personal to me.

- Marc

Today we are in Lofou, a small village located 20 minutes north from Paramytha. It is another dreamy place that has preserved its beautiful stone architecture. In the café-restaurant that we sit at, a calm and cool atmosphere gives peace. We are surrounded by books, ceramics, dried plants, wood, art, the blue sky and a green garden.

I have Javier Darío Restrepo’s Pensamientos: Discursos de ética y periodismo with me, which I read from a beautifully and simply designed armchair. Pensamientos reminds me of home. Life feels joyful.

And yet, whenever I pull up a map, I am reminded that we are now just off the coast of Lebanon. Perhaps an hour-long flight from Gaza. If I zoom out, I notice that we are on the same longitude as Ukraine, we share the same time zone.

I was born surrounded by violence, but in Bogotá, you are always on your guard, even if the city is safer now than what it used to be, and a lot safer than what other parts of Colombia are still like today. Here, in this idyllic village, however, the contrast feels starker, somehow.

During a brief period in my early adulthood, (outright) war between nations went from feeling unthinkable to almost inevitable. I know this isn’t true, violence and injustice have been and continue to be ever-present. The turn of the century was incredibly bloody for Colombia with the "war on drugs." But it does feel that now there has been a broader mental shift: that before war and violence were somehow more unacceptable globally, and so different actors undertook violence in slyer and stealthier ways. Political discourse around military attacks and violent action was not so forthright. Some people may say, as has been said about Trump, “at least they’re being honest now, showing their true colors.”

However, I don’t agree. I think that the fact that a full-scale war was “unthinkable” for many people was a good thing. The fact that we have mental red lines is important, even if humanity does not always live up to these standards. To me, the goal should be to denounce and expose the ways governments, businesses, and individuals get around what is deemed right and the ways in which they have been hypocritical. We should hold them accountable for that lofty discourse on peace and tolerance, make them meet the standard, instead of giving in and making war and violence an “acceptable” and “inevitable” part of our everyday in the name of "honesty".

For a long time, I’ve felt a natural pull towards pacifism. However, I understood well the people who critiqued it, we need to defend ourselves from those who commit harm after all, don’t we? We need to be able to fight back, right? What’s the alternative?

While I don’t have any answers, I have realized I need to listen to that instinct that protests against violence, conflict, and war. It is an instinct that has been coupled with a life-long interest in literature and art that expresses and describes the ravages of violence, systematized: from Primo Levi, Tim O’Brien and Harper Lee to Maryse Condé, Alain Resnais, and Isabel Allende. It was first the memoirs from Holocaust survivors followed by the accounts of the military dictatorships in South America and then the testimony of the brutality of slavery in the Caribbean that have over time constructed my conviction for justice and accountability, but also at the same time, for nunca más.

“Never again” is always associated with World War II, but in Colombia, never again continues to be called for even as Colombians continue to suffer and die every day due to ongoing violence. Our “armed conflict” is unique in the way that the categories of victims and victimizer are not always so neatly separated. As the writer Rodolfo Celis Serrano describes in his autobiographic shorts on life in the Usme neighborhood of Bogotá: the things that he did while living under the threat of violence bring him shame and guilt. Celis was displaced from his home, a victim of the armed groups that took over the territory, and yet he himself complicates the category of “victim” by highlighting his own guilt. In Colombia, we have to reckon with reintegrating combatants and civilians of all types into peaceful communal living, while at the same time trying to balance this with the pursuit of justice and accountability.

And there are so many Colombian thinkers and artists and activists that have been working through the inherent paradoxes of prolonged and systemic violence for years.

One of them was Javier Darío Restrepo, who I am currently reading. For my next log entry, the “September Reads” entry. I want to reflect on Restrepo’s writing along with the work of Jean Giono, another author who I also read and rediscovered this month.

Their writing has given much to think about what peace means, as real action and not just a “utopian” concept. In their writing, I’ve found that same visceral rejection to war and violence—that it is senseless at its core, even with all the justifications that we try to dress it up with. In their writing, I’ve also confirmed that this rejection of war does not entail sacrificing strong convictions about rights and wrongs, it doesn’t equal apathy or “neutrality” in the face of cruelty, injustice, and inhumanity.

“El carácter del conflicto, su prolongación en el tiempo, la complejidad y multitud de los elementos en juego, el constante juego de la desinformación—que no es accidental sino parte de la táctica guerrera—, crean una atmósfera de confusión tal que la gente muere todos los días sin saber por qué muere”. – Javier Darío Restrepo, Pensamientos (p. 221)

« Il faut sinon se moquer, en tout cas se méfier des bâtisseurs d’avenir. Surtout quand pour battre l’avenir des hommes à naître, ils ont besoin de faire mourir des hommes vivants ». – Jean Giono, Refus d’obéissance (p. 14)

- Andrea

Currently I am reading the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and it is divided into several Chautauquas. Chautauquas began as part of a social movement during mid-20s America and they consisted of educational events full of "entertaining lectures, performances and/or concerts". The story of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance uses this concept to deliver philosophical insights in a way that is more entertaining to the reader, and uses, as you might guess, motorcycle maintenance to talk about what is the meaning of quality and why quality matters.

- Marc

While we are now well into September, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some memorable August reads, books that I still think about and will be thinking about for a while.

I read two books last month, one poetry and one prose (very unconventional prose, however).

El oficio de vivir, or (roughly) The craft/work of living, is a collection of poetry by María Mercedes Carranza. Compiled posthumously and prefaced by her daughter, the collection sinks, poem by poem, deeper into the despair that plagued Carranza, especially in her final years. Despair about aging, despair about Colombia’s endless violence, despair about injustice, meaninglessness, despair about despair. Death weighs heavy on almost every page. It is so well-written that her words manage to covey the hollowness of depression in a way that I have not seen captured in any other piece of writing (even books and memoirs about war or genocide). It is grim, very grim.

El libro uruguayo de los muertos, or The Uruguayan Book of the Dead, on the other hand was much less grim, despite of the title. It did take me a very long time to read. Along with García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca, it might be one of the toughest books I’ve ever gone through. In short snippets destined to a mysterious correspondent, Mario Bellatin melds fact and fiction to speak about everything and anything. Some themes do stand out: writing, publishing, illness, death, family, truth, falsehood and mysticism. Like the Twirling Dervishes he describes, cyclical snippets of narrative appear, disappear, only to reappear later, the same or almost the same or altered incomprehensibly. Temporality is warped, contradictions appear, and, as a reader, offering resistance only makes the read more painful. At some point you just have to let go and let Bellatin take you on a trip that goes round and round. And in the end, I was left a bit dizzy, I must admit.

El oficio de vivir was close to making it on my favorites list—it is a work of art. But the art that resonates with me the most is that which peers into the void, but with defiance. There is a will to live and an affirmation of life, the renewal of life. With Carranza, we succumb to the void, even if the last poem of the collection offers a glimmer of hope.

Mario Bellatin’s Salon de belleza (Beauty Salon) is one of my favorite books, but I can’t say the same of El libro uruguayo de los muertos. There are very interesting ideas about the nature of truth and fiction, about the pain of creation, and about life, death and creation as cyclical. The unconventional form resonated with these themes, but maybe it went on for too long. But then again, watching Twirling Dervishes perform is fascinating, but it can also feel eternally long after a while. But isn’t that what we’re all after, eternity? Reading El libro uruguayo de los Muertos definitely felt like it took an eternity too, but maybe that's what Bellatin was trying to do—approach eternity, which also means to approach death.

Other Interesting August “Reads”

• “Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic”
• “The Betrayal of American Border Policy”
• “The Funeral: At a Loss” (recommend reading this only after watching Itami Juzo's film)

- Andrea