I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

 

The white schizophrenics were allowed to ride bikes here. The black schizophrenics huddled under blankets and cardboard on sidewalks against the facades of the skyscrapers. Pieces of paper rolled into jars with scrawled writing facing outward: I am not homeless. This is my home.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home has an absurdist, ironic tone, and although it appears to deal with all the big questions about life and death and love and loss, it ultimately stresses the unknowability of it all: there is nothing knowable about reality, certainly nothing knowable about history, and as we all stumble towards death, life itself might be a bigger mystery than what comes after. Lorrie Moore’s sentences are delightful, her plot is strange and compelling — much like life itself — and I loved every bit of this short novel. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Good this. Good that. After years of teaching, Finn did not believe in good anything. He believed in Interesting, Serviceable, Dangerous, Providential, Unlucky, Cruel, Mercurial, Funny, Unreal. He believed time was a strange ocean through which we imagined we were swimming rather than understanding we were being randomly tossed.

Recently suspended from his job as a high school history teacher and suffering an estrangement from the love of his life — a suicidal therapy clown — Finn drives to NYC to be with his dying brother. At first, Finn seems to be the only rational person in a mad, mad world: despite being an admitted conspiracy theorist (in the sense that history is filled with covered up conspiracies), when Finn explains to his brother why he thinks the first moon landing was probably faked or why it is that mystery surrounds various historical assassins, his arguments are sound. But when he embarks on a cross-country roadtrip involving impossible circumstances, it’s unclear whether he might be suffering from wishful thinking, mentally unstable, or moving through the thin places where time and reality aren’t truly fixed. Intermittently, we are shown excerpts from letters (or is it a diary?) written shortly after the Civil War:

I find people’s ideas are like their perfume — full of fading then dabbing on again — with no small hint of cidered urine. A good scalawag sticks to the late night cipher of her diary.

These letters/diary were penned in the past by the proprietress of a “high cotton boarding house” poised “on the zig and zig of the Mason-Dixon Line”, and in the modern day, Finn comes upon the same crumbling Queen Anne manse and rents a room for the night. If this is a ghost story, this is where the ghosts come in; if this is a history lesson, this is what the textbooks left out; nothing is as it seems and I won’t spoil anything by talking about it.

Lorrie Moore is eminently quotable, and I culled my highlighting to a few tidbits:

• The hospice gave everyone their own room. Dying was private. But perhaps the mortally ill needed company and should all be together sleeping in the same room. When one person died it was a tragedy. But when two or three people were dying together, it had a chance of becoming comedy. Not a big chance, but some. Half. Less than half probably.

• Sickness detached a person from the world and at the end shrank that world down to the size of a room, the walls of which vibrated and stepped slowly, slowly forward.

• He was like a dog, not seeing colors, chasing his own sepia-colored tail, sepia because it was all in the past, one’s own tail when chasing it, was in the past, but hey that’s where everything he wanted was.

• When he looked at other couples, he did not know how they tolerated each other. They had just grown accustomed, he guessed. They had cooked each other. Each was the frog and each was the heated water. Still, he envied them a tiny bit. Their love in pots.

I have a taste for irony and the absurd and I found I Am Homeless If This Is not My Home to be funny and tragic and touching and true. Sometimes, life is just like that.

Bad Cree

I thought that I could leave the bad behind. But I guess the bad isn’t a thing you can run from, because it’s not a thing that can be held. It doesn’t announce itself, there’s no siren or beacon. Instead, it’s a steady beating, like a heart or a drum. It’s a sound that lives in the body and grows down into the ground.

Expanded from an award-winning short story with the same title, Bad Cree is about grief and guilt and loneliness and how one young woman learns to deal with these “bads” by reconnecting with her community. And while this novel opens with a bang and dangles the promise of a thrilling and thoughtful examination of the modern Indigenous experience, with cliché-ridden writing, strange inconsistencies, and a rushed climax, the early promise never felt fulfilled. In an interview, author Jessica Johns explains that the original short story, her MFA project, was not only written as a rebuke to a faculty member who warned her class that readers don’t care about dreams (which Johns took as an affront to her Cree heritage of dream-sharing), but Johns also states, “I was learning a lot of great things during my MFA, but also I learned a lot of things about craft that were very colonial. There were Western ways of storytelling that I had to unlearn.” So, perhaps this wasn’t so much a failure of editing as a pointed resistance to meet my Western expectations of storytelling — which I am happy to have challenged — but still, this didn’t entirely satisfy my tastes. I would be interested to read the author again.

Before I look down, I know it’s there. The crow’s head I was clutching in my dream is now in bed with me. I woke up with the weight of it in my hands, held against my chest under the covers. I can still feel its beak and feathers on my palms. The smell of pine and the tang of blood sting my nose. My pillow feels for a second like the cold, frozen ground under my cheek. I yank off my blanket, heavy like I’m pulling it back from the past, and look down to my hands, now empty. A feeling of static pulses inside them like when a dead limb fills with blood again. They are clean and dry and trembling.

Shit. Not again.

I loved this opening passage: creepy and mysterious — artefacts from nightmares crossing into the light of day! — I sure wanted to know more about what was going on. And while the mystery of this situation kept me reading to the end for answers, this novel isn’t quite the “horror” that it seems to be marketed as. More than anything, this is the story of turning to one’s (female) relatives in order to heal a broken heart/psyche/identity.

The plot: Mackenzie fled her northern Alberta home for Vancouver three years earlier after the death of her beloved kokum; the grief was just too much for her to handle. And although one of her older sisters also died suddenly the year before the novel begins, Mackenzie was unable to bring herself to go home for the funeral; was unable to even share that heartache over the phone with her family. But now she’s having nightmares about her dead sister that are dangerously crossing over into the real world, and with a gang of crows suddenly following her everywhere she goes, and the nightmares morphing into repressed memories, Mackenzie is convinced to finally go back home and seek help and answers.

Johns does a wonderful job with the setting — from Mackenzie’s cheap and squalid Vancouver apartment to a home in High Prairie bustling with family and food and laughter, I believed all of it — and her characters are real and relatable. (But as much as I appreciate the girl-power support offered by Mackenzie’s mother, friends, and aunties, I do want to take a moment to wonder where the men are. Her [white] father has a couple of lines but he isn’t included in any of the action or the healing; he’s forced to “go away” for work shortly after Mackenzie gets home and he isn’t mentioned again. Even her grandfather [moshum] is only referred to a couple of times whereas her grandmother [kokum] is a central character. Johns writes of life at home, “Uncles followed orders, kids made things harder on everyone, but aunties carried the magic that made it all come together.” I didn’t need male characters to swoop in and save everyone, but it felt odd that they never even entered a room where the women were.) And there was something really interesting in the solution to the mystery that I wish Johns had explored deeper. (The community — and Mackenzie and her family in particular — are being stalked by a “wheetigo”; a cannibalistic monster from Cree tradition. In Johns’ explanation, this monster was summoned to the area by the greed of the oil industry, and as the drilling rigs are now rusting in the fields and the workers have mostly moved away, the wheetigo is forced to feed on anyone it can; attracted to those with “bad” energy in their hearts. This is only explained very briefly, but I would have eaten up an entire book exploring just this.) For the most part, this is a story of Mackenzie wanting to reconnect with her family, but every time she decides to tell them what’s really going on in her dreams, she decides to keep it to herself; waffling back and forth, not moving the plot forward, needing help, refusing it, then suddenly asking for it. It’s frustrating and sucks the energy out of such a promising setup.

I still hold a piece of the bad inside me. I used to think enough love was supposed to wipe all the bad clean, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. The truth is, I’m brimming with love. The love pouring from the tip of kokum’s finger when she pointed out wapanewask. The love in Auntie Verna’s eyes when we got a good bingo. In Mom’s hands carrying the other end of a pile of lumber. I have so much love I’m sick with it. But there will always be bad living alongside it, etched under my skin. Living with bad doesn’t make me bad, though, it’s just there like everything else.

In the short story (which can be read here), the crossing-into-real-life nightmares are a neat metaphorical device for dealing with grief and guilt and loneliness. By layering on supernatural elements from Cree mythology in order to draw the concept out to book length, Johns loses some of the literary satisfaction of the metaphorical device, but she is also able to satisfyingly paint a picture of her community’s day to day life. There’s something lost in the transition, something worthwhile gained, and while I still think this could have benefitted from further editing, I’m not disappointed to have read this.

I also liked the following passage because it reminded me of Tomson Highway's Laughing with the Trickster (reviewed here) wherein he explains that it's not just the language that a people speak but how they speak it that expresses and reinforces a people's worldview; Cree children being forced to speak English in residential schools caused those children to lose more than just language; it altered their mindset, too:

Once, I had laughed with my hand over my mouth because my teacher told me an open mouth was a rude mouth. Kokum gently moved my hand from my face and told me to laugh like I was blowing air into a giant balloon, as open and as hard as I could. She said that if my teacher ever told me to cover my mouth again, I should tell her and she’d take care of it. 

Gotta love a kokum for that.

Crooked Plow: A Novel

 

My voice was a crooked plow, deformed, penetrating the soil only to leave it infertile, ravaged, destroyed.

Newly translated into English, Crooked Plow — originally released in 2019 as Torto Arado — won its author, Itamar Vieira Junior, several international literary awards and brings attention to the history of Brazil’s Quilombola population (descendants of enslaved Africans brought to work on Brazilian plantations until the abolition of slavery in 1888). Covering the lives of three generations of the “Chapéu Grande” family, Vieira tells of the hardship of tenant farming, the persistent effects of racism and colonialism, and the meaninglessness of “freedom” when a people have nowhere to go. This is also a story of perseverance, family love, and the spiritual and community supports that keep a people going against incredible odds. With a blend of social and mystical realism — encantados (spirit beings) interfere in the physical realm and have very real effects — Vieira intriguingly captures a time and place that I knew nothing about. I didn’t totally vibe with the storytelling format — there is very little dialogue, just a series of three different narrators telling us that this happened and then this happened — but I am delighted that Torto Arado has been translated into English and that I had an opportunity to learn from it; I hope that many more readers find their way to this tale. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Slightly spoilerish.)

My father was holding the tongue, wrapped in one of the few shirts he owned. Even then, what I feared was that the tongue would cry out on its own to tell on us. That it would turn us in for our meddling, our stubbornness, our transgression, our lack of concern and respect for Grandma and her things. And, worse, our irresponsibility in putting a knife in our mouths, knowing very well that knives bleed the beasts we hunt and the animals in the pen, and they kill men.

As Crooked Plow opens, two sisters — Belonísia (6) and Bibiana (7) — have discovered a beautiful ivory-handled knife under their grandmother’s bed, and entranced by its shining silver blade, first one and then the other girl puts the knife into her mouth, and one of them loses her tongue. Both the knife and Belonísia’s voicelessness are major motifs in the book, and Vieira will take the unfolding of the entire story to explain where the knife came from, and how it will ultimately be put to use. The accident sets the sisters on different paths, but with limited options available (and especially for girls) in their community, it will also bind them together. And in the background, is the unending toil and precarious predicament of their community of tenant farmers.

Zeca Chapéu Grande was a respected healer, his name renowned throughout the region. But here, within the confines of the plantation, under the rule of the Peixoto family — who barely set foot on those fields except to give orders or pay the manager or remind us that we were forbidden from building brick houses — under their rule and that of Sutério, my father was just another loyal tenant farmer, grateful for the opportunity he’d been given after searching so long for work and a place to settle down.

As Vieira describes it, Quilombolas may have been officially freed with the abolition of slavery, but with nowhere to go and nowhere else to work and support their families, people would show up at white-owned plantations and consider themselves lucky if the owners allowed them to work the fields for no pay — just permission to build a mud hut (Vieira tells us probably ten times that tenant farmers’ homes could not be built of bricks or have tile roofs; impermanence was enforced), and while they were allowed to plant a small garden (the only food they had to feed their own families), the owners were owed one third of their harvest, and in fact, could help themselves to as much of their fresh produce as they liked. The tenant farmers (although they worked “Sunday to Sunday”) would also fish in the river and harvest forest fruit in their off hours to sell in town for the cash for small supplies. Despite living on and working this land for generations, the Quilombolas understand that they have no right to their property; and when the plantation is sold and the new owner seems to resent their presence, the community needs to decide whether to keep their heads low or find a way to finally stake a claim. (I couldn’t quite figure out the timeline. A character says at one point: We knew that the land had had tenant farmers on it since at least the arrival of Damião, the pioneer of our community, who showed up during the drought of 1932. And by the end, some huts had televisions and satellite dishes, so it’s recentish.)

As I said, there’s much social realism here — I liked everything I learned about how these people lived, from the traditional healers to the modern activists — and while Vieira wonderfully captured the historical time and place, I appreciated the mystical and spiritual bits that brought this particular community to life:

In moments of heightened emotion, I lose myself, I overflow, unable to hold myself together. If I could still mount a horse . . . but no one remembers Santa Rita the Fisherwoman. No healer calls to me, no house of Jarê. Slowly the people unlearn what they once understood; so much has changed.

This encatado, Santa Rita the Fisherwoman, is the third and final narrator of Crooked Plow (after Bibiana and Belonísia take their turns), and like in many tales of oppressed peoples (I’m thinking Song of Solomon, The Master & Margarita, One Hundred Years of Solitude), sometimes it takes a bit of magical realism to create something like justice in this world.

The blood of history flows like a river. First, it flows through dreams. Then it comes galloping as if on a horse.

Again: I knew nothing of the plight of the Quilombolas, and Vieira’s novelisation of one such family’s history was compelling and enlightening. Certainly worth the read.

Two Old Broads: Stuff You Need to Know That You Didn’t Know You Needed to Know

 

So . . . is a Broad:
Feisty? You bet.
Fun? You bet.
Gutsy? You bet.
Incisive? You bet.
Original? You bet.
Even off color? You bet.
Call me a Broad? Please!
Call you a Broad? Consider this your invitation to join the club!

With a subtitle like “Stuff You Need to Know That You Didn’t Know You Needed to Know”, I expected Two Old Broads to contain some hidden wisdom about ageing from a woman’s perspective; and having Whoopi Goldberg as a coauthor (along with nonagenarian MD, M. E. Hecht), I expected it to have some degree of entertainment value. But I was wrong on both counts. The advice given is very basic, the humour is strained, and the tone is superior and argumentative: more than anything, this seems to be Hecht’s advice for how to remain independent and relevant in the face of one’s family or society’s best-intentioned efforts to put you out to pasture — and as money doesn’t seem to be an object for either of the authors, I don’t see how their advice relates to the average reader — with Whoopi intermittently throwing in her own “two cents” on a topic. Not recommended for anyone. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I’m not inclined to record much more than some passages that annoyed me for one reason or another. I found Hecht (despite having been a ground-breaking female orthopaedic surgeon; all respect for that) to be so unrelatable with her stories of using a personal shopper several times a year at Saks Fifth Avenue to remain fashionable throughout her career (she and Whoopi met at a show during New York Fashion Week) or how she noted when she was a child that the butler always humoured an eccentric old aunt’s quirks or even how she refused to accept patients if they said that they only sought her out because they “found my name on a popular magazine’s list of best surgeons”. Her pearls of wisdom for the reader included:

• You don’t have to retire from fashionable, appealing, or even sexy apparel because you’re over sixty. Beware: if you do, you’ll be asking for a pitying look, slower service, and never a “Good to see you.”

• You can gift your near and dear (especially the younger generation) with your wisdom. You may have to adjust the language you use by sprinkling in some digital mentions, hip phrases, or references to popular phone apps, but speak from the experience you’ve gained.

• Despite my stupidity in evoking the injury, I grant that I had some advantages in this situation: a hospital where I’d been on staff that gave me preferred status to receive an early surgery; a nursing and technical staff that handled one of their own with kid gloves; immediate attention; my choice of surgeon; and a private room.

At one point, when discussing how she shuts down conversations in which she feels the other is being condescending, Hecht writes, “I am known to use so-called ‘genius words’ in English, German, French, or Latin that few people understand. Others don’t have to know exactly what I’m saying to know they’re on the receiving end of my temper.” And that seems to explain why, throughout, Hecht uses vocabulary that doesn’t necessarily add to plain comprehension. She uses phrases like “Skipping a day or two won’t ablate their benefit” and “apelike four-limb ambulation”, but perhaps most tellingly, she uses the obscure word “armamentarium” in four different instances, which really seems to highlight Hecht’s perspective that old Broads are in war against their family and society for respect and independence.

I was also struck a few times by what seemed like plainly bad advice for the senior years:

• There are no worries about unplanned pregnancies. Therefore, there’s no need for condoms or other forms of birth control that may interfere with spontaneity and thought-free enjoyment. However, be sure to have a conversation about any positive (or for that matter, negative) experiences with STDs.

• I can think of numerous ways to resolve situations where the family says, “We don’t want you to,” when you want to. Take, for example, driving a car at an advanced age. You can either prepare for hostility and say, “It’s my car, and I will be its driver,” or take a more accommodating approach: “I have noticed some dings recently, so perhaps somebody should be my copilot.” You could also offer to take a new driver’s test, which should include a test of your vision. It’s bending over backward, but if that’s your relationship with your family, it certainly is a goody-two-shoes solution.

Meanwhile, Whoopi’s contribution is very small and includes such passages as her own thoughts on sex and dating:

I tell my dates, “I will Zoom date you, but I’m not gonna sleep with you. Not because you’re not cute, but because the idea of having to smell someone else in my bed — it can’t play.” That’s just me, and I’m consistent.

Or on the ageing body:

Stop trying to be cute and courageous. It’s time to tell the damn doctor what he or she needs to know. Okay? You’re too old to be futzing around holding things back. Tell them what they need to know — it will make your life easier.

I understand that Dr. Hecht passed away before Two Old Broads was published — and I intend no disrespect to her memory or legacy — but I found little of value (and much of annoyance) here. I’ll end as the book ends, with Hecht’s nightly prayer while falling asleep:

Let me take advantage of the things I’m good at
but minimize frustration at those I’m not.
Let me conquer short-term memory loss with the
practical means of using lists.
Let me convince those who care for me that there
are many things I can do safely, without help.
Let me remember and celebrate my experience and wisdom
purchased at the price of age.
Let me try the new, assuming it is interesting and physically within my ability.
Let me share my knowledge with my near and dear in quiet moments.
And last, I suppose, let me wake to the new day.
And so, lay down to sleep.

WHOOPI’S TWO CENTS
Please, God, let me wake up tomorrow. Amen.

And that I can relate to.

August Blue

 

PARIS, AUGUST

I had left my winter coat in the Express dry-cleaners on Rue des Carmes nine months ago. At that time, I was pale and blue, now I was tanned and the blue was fading. It was a hot day to be wearing the trilby hat.

With time slips, doppelgängers, doublings, and identity crises, there’s an air of unsettled reality to Deborah Levy’s August Blue; and being set in the post-lockdown Covid days of first vaccines and voluntary mask use, there’s certainly something relatable about this questioning of who we are; questioning how we live. With a stream of artists evoked — from Rachmaninoff and Isadora Duncan to Proust and French film director Agnès Varda — who are presented as having used art to explore their own realities, Levy seems to be asking the reader to search for meaning beyond the printed page (and with some [widely noted in other reviews] odd parallels to the movie Frozen and what appear to be mistakes in the timeline, I really don’t think the author wants us to take her at her literal words here). As straightforward storytelling, this is an odd little tale of a young woman trying to figure out who she is (and why she is and why she continues to be), but as an artistic rendering of our (more or less) collective post-Covid experience, Levy captures something very true about the unreality of the time; it feels essential that artists like Levy try to capture what, beyond the base details, most of us have trouble putting into words about the pandemic experience — even if the reader needs to peek behind the words to see it. I loved this. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

She seemed to be about my age, thirty-four, and like me she was wearing a tightly belted green raincoat. It was almost identical to mine, except hers had three gold buttons sewn on to the cuffs. We obviously wanted the same things. My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more than I was. I sensed she had known I was standing nearby and that she was taunting me.

As the story begins, we meet Elsa M. Anderson: a world-famous classical pianist who, after embarrassing herself at a recent concert, has decided to take a break from performing; tutoring some over-privileged children while she decides what comes next. Walking through an Athens flea market, Elsa sees a woman buying some mechanical horse toys and she gets the uncanny feeling that this woman is her double, even if they don’t quite look the same. As Elsa travels from Greece to Paris to London and Sardinia, she’ll cross paths with this woman a few more times (always not quite seeing her face behind a blue medical mask). And as her adoptive father (and piano teacher) lays dying of a lung tumour, Elsa will finally seek some answers about who she is, discover who he really is, and make some decisions about how to live the rest of her life. But that’s just the plot.

I was a natural blue
I am a natural blue
I was, I am.

Perhaps anticipating her encroaching identity crisis, Elsa had recently dyed her trademark waist-length chestnut hair a deep shade of blue (and I say “trademark” because apparently Elsa is so famous that she’s recognised on the street: Of course I bloody know who you are.) But beyond the literally blue hair, coupled with the name “Elsa” (last name Anderson), it would seem that we’re supposed to be put in mind of the movie Frozen (which I have not seen as I have no littles around), and looking deeper than the literal, you might be put in mind of the movie’s source material — Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen — and looking a little deeper than that, you might learn that he had based the ice-hearted main character of that story on the opera singer Jenny Lind, who had not returned Anderson’s affections — Jenny Lind being, like Elsa, a world famous performer who walked away from the stage at a young age. (And then you might learn that Anderson may have been gay, or perhaps bisexual, and different characters from August Blue might click into place.)

Elsa dying her hair blue seems to inspire this novel’s title, but looking deeper, one discovers a nineteenth century painting of that name by British artist Henry Scott Tuke which depicts four boys (three of them naked) swimming in Falmouth harbour — and not only do characters in the novel go skinny dipping, but the painting is noted for evoking both innocence and homoeroticism (again hearkening back to characters in the book). Looking even deeper, we learn that the title of the painting is taken from the poem “The Sundew” by Algernon Swinburne, which includes the lines:

Thou wert not worth green midsummer
Nor fit to live to August blue

These lines, taken as inspiration for Tuke’s “idyllic” painting, might seem to stress making the most of the time we’re given (a worthwhile lesson in pandemic times), but variously googled analyses of the poem assure me that the point Swinburne was trying to make (in his first collection of poems, which was considered scandalous at the time for its many taboo topics) was that one must look beyond the surface (in this case, of what appears on the surface to be a poem about unrequited love) for the deeper truths disguised in art. And if I discovered all of this, there’s no doubt that Levy intentionally hid her kernel of common truths within the Frozen —> Snow Queen —> HC Anderson —> Jenny Lind puzzle, wrapped in the dyed-in-August blue hair —> Tuke —> Swinburne —> sundew enigma. But even if the reader isn’t inclined to drill down on the sources, August Blue truly captures the sense of unreality — the time warpy disconnection to “real life” that I know I went through — and this tone and mood are rewarding in their own right. On and off the page, I enjoyed every bit of this.

It felt as if everything had changed and everything was the same. The roots of the trees under the tarmac of Boulevard Saint-Germain would keep growing. The roots of my hair would keep growing out the blue. The sea levels would keep rising. Two young people standing by the bus stop were kissing. Frantic kissing. As if this devouring of each other was an existential duty. The obligation to keep the life drive going strong when death is our ultimate destiny.

 

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

 

Though Fancy Bear was highly skilled at phishing — the attempt to obtain sensitive information over email from another by impersonating a trustworthy person — its tradecraft was not rocket science. It wasn’t even computer science. It was cognitive science. Cognitive science is the systematic study of how humans think. From this perspective, the phishing emails sent by Fancy Bear to Clinton staffers were perfectly designed, almost as though they had been engineered in a psych lab to exploit multiple vulnerabilities of mental upcode. Fancy Bear caught its phish because its bait was so good.

Author Scott J. Shapiro (a professor of law and philosophy at Yale Law School and the director of Yale’s Center for Law and Philosophy and Yale’s CyberSecurity Lab) explains in the introduction to Fancy Bear Goes Phishing that although he had an early introduction to coding (his Dad had worked at Bell Labs and young Shapiro had access to basic computer parts before there even was a World Wide Web), it wasn’t until recently — with a professional interest in the future plausibility of cyberwars — that he really looked into the history of personal hacking, intranational cyberattacks, and the security measures put in place to protect against them. This book not only explains the history of hacking through the exposition of five different types of attacks over the years, but as a professor of the humanities, Shapiro explains the mental processes — the upcodes and downcodes, the heuristics and biases — that both lead to computer hacking and to our ongoing failure to defend against it. To the extent that Shapiro shares the history of hacking through the stories of true crimes and espionage, this made for quite an interesting read; however sometimes the technical (whether talking hacking code or human cognition) became a little dull and esoteric to me, but I will allow that another reader might want precisely this level of technical data. Overall, a fascinating read on a subject we should all know more about. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The most surprising result of my extended, even feverish, immersion in the technology, history, and philosophy of hacking is that I’m not panicking. On the contrary, I’ve concluded that much of what is said about hacking is either wrong, misleading, or exaggerated. I decided to write this book because I was excited about everything I’d discovered. But I also wanted to write it to correct these misapprehensions.

As a lazy summary, I’ll quote from the publisher’s blurb on the five hacks Shapiro covers: We meet the graduate student Robert Morris Jr., who created the so-called Morris Worm in the 1980s, accidentally crashing the internet, and becoming the target of the first federal prosecution for hacking; a Bulgarian hacker named “Dark Avenger” who invented the first mutating computer virus; a 16-year-old from South Boston who hacked Paris Hilton’s cell phone, and leaked its contents; a Rutgers undergraduate who nearly destroyed the internet in an attempt to take down the online game Minecraft; and the Russian intelligence officers who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network and disrupted the 2016 presidential election. I suppose what I found most fascinating is just how easy it was for each of these hacking attempts to have been carried out successfully (from the surprising success of “mumbling” a password to a telephone agent in order to gain access to someone’s account, to the login information for video doorbells and smart toasters being posted freely online [to the boon of botnet operators]); and maybe not surprising that from Microsoft to Equifax, large corporations don’t put money into cybersecurity until it proves more costly not to. It was interesting to read that — other than the Fancy Bear attack — these (in)famous hacks were carried out by teenaged or young adult males; and that while these young men do appear to conform to a stereotype, hacking seems to be a phase of life that most will grow out of (many even making the switch to cybersecurity). And as for Fancy Bear sending phishing emails to members of the Democratic Party and America for Hillary: by international agreement, it isn’t even illegal to spy on or attempt to hack a foreign government (but it was considered tampering for the exfiltrated emails to have been released through WikiLeaks right before the 2016 election). A few interesting tidbits:

• The name UNIX began as a pun: because early versions of the operating system only supported one user — Ken Thompson — Peter Neumann joked that it was an “emasculated Multics,” or “UNICS.” The spelling was eventually changed to UNIX.

• In 1981, Gates spent $ 75,000 buying a lousy single-user operating system from a Seattle developer known as QDOS (for Quick and Dirty Operating System), adapted it for personal computers, and renamed it MS-DOS. In a masterstroke, he also licensed DOS to IBM for use in all of its personal computers, under the name PC-DOS. *

• Fancy Bear is a cyber-espionage group of the GRU. The GRU has long had a reputation as the most gonzo of the Russian intelligence services. Gennady Gudkov, a Russian opposition politician who served in the KGB, said GRU officers referred to themselves as the “badass guys who act .” “Need us to whack someone? We’ll whack him,” Gudkov said. “Need us to grab Crimea? We’ll grab Crimea.”

(* I didn’t realise that MSNBC was started by Bill Gates and Microsoft, and I sure didn’t know that “DOS” stood for Dirty Operating System.)

When cybersecurity experts are asked to identify the weakest link in any computer network, they euphemistically cite “the human element.” Computers are only as secure as the users who operate them. But the brain is extremely buggy. It is almost tragicomically vulnerable.

Beyond the extraordinary stories of famous hacks, the second focus of Fancy Bear Goes Phishing concerns cybersecurity and “the human element”. From corporations that only invest the bare minimum in keeping our data safe to the heuristics that shortcut individual decision-making, the “black hats” will always find new vulnerabilities to exploit. Shapiro draws the difference between cyber-enabled crimes (traditional crimes facilitated by computers) and cyber-dependent crimes (unauthorised access, spamming, malware), but as we spend more and more of our lives online, we’re becoming more vulnerable to attacks from both groups (who apparently tend to work together and share skillsets: the hacker might need a real world money-launderer, the ransomware attacker might hire a D-DoS service to pressure a target). And while there are those who think that bulletproof anti-hacking tech must be somewhere on the horizon (what critic Evgeny Morozov has called “solutionism”), Shapiro warns against this kind of wishful thinking:

Solutionism not only makes us less secure, it also eclipses our moral agency and sense of responsibility. Treating security and privacy as mere technical obstacles, solutionists delegate difficult political questions to engineers. Engineers do know how computers work. They are technologically literate. But they are also engineers. They are trained to build and operate machines, not to ponder their ethical costs and consequences. Not only are political questions put in the wrong hands; we are left with the impression that there are no interesting moral issues even to discuss. Politics becomes engineering; moral reasoning becomes software development.

Shapiro ends by using a proof from Alan Turing to demonstrate that there is no such thing as bulletproof anti-hacking tech anyway; hackability is built in to computational systems and we need to employ more thoughtful “upcode” to mitigate harm going forward. The good news: Shapiro doesn’t believe that there is an all out cyberwar in our future. The bad news: hacking is a feature of our connected lives — it has been since the very beginning — and we need to get better at recognising danger. The journey to these conclusions does make for an interesting read.

Ironically timely to be finishing this read as the "systems are down" at my own workplace currently due to a "cybersecurity incident". As a small cog in the machine, I have no more information than what has been posted on our (offline) website, but as a customer said to me yesterday, "Not to be cruel, but thank God it's you guys that got hit and not the hospitals or something." Probably a ransomware attack (there must be a profit motive), and I suppose I should be concerned that some black hats could now have access to my personal employee information, but, yeah, thank God it's an attack on a big corporation and not the hospitals or something. What a price to pay for the marvels of the modern world.

My Life as Edgar

 

Before me, I really wonder what there was. Kids often believe that everything begins the moment they’re born, but not your humble servant Edgar. I’m not even sure I could find the place where I lived before without making a mistake, Madame Clarisse Georges. I’m still not all there, but I know how to hide it well. I’m grown up now. I’m still quiet and unassuming too, but I’m not sure that won’t change. Sometimes I want to shorten all this and get right to the train station platform, to the moment we’re going home. I’ll be eleven then.

In a new translation from the French, My Life as Edgar (originally released in 1998 as Ma vie d’Edgar) is a strange little book about a strange little boy and his strained efforts to understand the strange and seemingly unknowable world around him. The novel opens with Edgar describing himself as having the “features of a kid with Down syndrome – a kind of coldness around the eyes, pale lips, big cheeks, a big butt, though my chromosomes weren’t really to blame”; he also has enormous ears, a tongue that won’t stay in his mouth, and at three years old, he drools and moos and growls at people who conclude that Edgar is “not all there”. With a beautiful single mother who doesn’t know what to do with her unusual son, Edgar will be shipped off to a sort of foster home in the country (which he loves) for the next eight years, and when he is finally brought back home to Paris, he will be immediately sent off to a church-run boarding school (which he hates). Throughout, we are in Edgar’s mind as he circles through experiences, mashing up the past and present and the parts he makes up, and even if he thinks of himself as a “noodle” or “the village idiot”, he comes across to the reader as intelligent and self-aware and in need of his Maman. I feel like I’ve encountered this boy-who-is-wise-beyond-his-limitations character before — I was put in mind of The Son of a Certain Woman, The Tin Drum, even in a way Nutshell — and while I suppose it makes some sense for an unfiltered child to use derogatory language when describing himself and others (Edgar frequently thinks in terms like “fatty”, “dago”, and “yid”), it gave me an unsettled feeling (even for 1998, author Dominique Fabre seemed to be pushing the bounds of good taste, but Edgar will repeat what Edgar hears with those enormous ears). Edgar has no control over his situation, thinks more than he is able or willing to communicate, and the interior life that Fabre paints is one of seeking and longing and unquestioned acceptance of a bad lot in life. This short work is more about what happens on the inside than on the out, and overall, it moved me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The waiting room wasn’t full, far from it, yet I wasn’t the only quiet, unassuming child in the Paris area in 1964, and if on top of everything else I weren’t hopelessly lazy, I’d describe to you in one go everything you need to know about 1964, and should the next year rear its head, as soon as I heard the sadistic pop of the champagne corks on December 31st — while hugs and wishes were exchanged — I’d take advantage of the slightest lull to inflict 1965 on you. And so on and so forth. It goes to show I won’t have lived in vain.

The opening scene has Edgar and his Maman (with her dark and ever-traumatized gaze) visiting a psychiatrist at the hospital at Rue d’Avron, and throughout the interior monologue that follows, Edgar will frequently address himself to this Madame Clarisse Georges; as though making up for their only in-person meeting at which he said nothing at all. Edgar then narrates going to the Parc Monceau with his beautiful young mother and it is here that they first meet Bernard: described initially as a doctor who saved an old woman’s life in front of them, and then as an accountant at a baby cereal factory who helplessly watched the old woman die, and finally as a man they later met on a train, it isn’t until much later that Edgar admits, “I made up what I didn’t know. I didn’t know much.” And so, while the narrative mashes up events from different periods in Edgar’s life, and it’s unclear what is real and what is invented, it is clear that Edgar (no matter his cognitive abilities) is doing his best to make sense of his existence.

I said oh, the Seine! to Isabelle, but I didn’t bellow so I wouldn’t hurt her feelings. I didn’t want her to think I was still the same moron from Rue d’Avron. She looked straight at me with surprise, as if there was no doubt now that I was there. There were two Edgars in the dictionary, but there were four Édouards next to them, with their portraits so you wouldn’t mix them up. Maybe there would be three when I was the president. Meanwhile, Maman sighed to give herself courage, Edgar the noodle was coming home.

It seems that it was the suitor Bernard who convinced Isabelle to send her son off to the country, and perhaps it was later paramour, JP, who suggested boarding school when he was old enough; and while Edgar wishes he could express himself more fully than a mumbled “Well yes” when his Maman calls to check up on him, you don’t get the sense that he blames his mother for abandoning him — both the farm and the boarding school are filled with the children of unwed mothers. This might well be a perceptive social portrait of 1960s-70s France (the 1968 “revolution in Paris” plays out in the background and Uncle Jos at the farm has communist sympathies) but its primary value to me was as the story of this little boy who might look and act unusual, but whose heart and mind functioned the exact same as my own; this is the universal story of the quest for love and meaning and the reader roots for Edgar to find them. I was invested, and ultimately, moved.

Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World

 

I’d been trying to figure out what was missing from my life, and that unforgettable walk home from the eye doctor revealed the answer: I needed to connect with my five senses. I’d been treating my body like the car my brain was driving around town, but my body wasn’t some vehicle of my soul, to be overlooked when it wasn’t breaking down. My body — through my senses — was my essential connection to the world and to other people.

I agreed to join Kennedy in the 75 Hard challenge, and among other “critical tasks”, I am committed to reading ten pages of a self-help book every day for seventy-five days — so although I had not read Gretchen Rubin before, Life in Five Senses was the first book I selected for the challenge; and I’m glad I did. As humans we are wired to filter out the stimuli that we're accustomed to, so it’s normal to waft through our lives without really sensing those things that we encounter every day. After a trip to the eye doctor left Rubin concerned about her long term sight, she resolved to really see her surroundings from then on; and being the kind of person who enjoys self-appointed tasks and challenges and recording her findings, Rubin decided to spend a year deeply exploring each of her senses and taking notes. Life in Five Senses is divided into what we commonly think of as our core senses (Rubin notes that others might include our sense of equilibrium or feeling one’s heart racing, but she’s focussed on the “Big Five” of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch), and along with scientific information that Rubin includes from her research, the author shares many stories of her own experiences through the course of the year, often based on training or exploring her senses. This type of intentionality is exactly what the 75 Hard challenge is meant to promote and I did find myself inspired by Rubin’s project; the blend of informal storytelling and scientific research hit the sweet spot of interest for me, and again, I am really glad that I started my own project here. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It was strange to realize that I make the world. In darkness and silence, my brain receives countless messages as my five senses probe my surroundings. In that outer world, there’s no color, no music, no scent until those messages return to my brain — and then the world bursts into life inside my body.

One of the tasks that Rubin set before herself was to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every day for the year; to both find ways to focus on particular sensory experiences and to discover the surprising within the familiar. Acknowledging that the access, time, and freedom that she has for this project makes her “very fortunate”, Rubin jokes: When I told my college roommate about my experiment, she said dryly, “Note to self: move within walking distance of the Metropolitan Museum.” (At the end of the book, Rubin stresses: “I’d chosen a museum, but, of course, someone else might choose a different place. A park, a route through a neighborhood, front stoop — the place doesn’t really matter. With familiarity and repetition, the world reveals itself in an unexpected way.”) So, although living in NYC meant that Rubin could easily take courses on perfumery at the Pratt Institute, attend a Dinner in the Dark restaurant, or handily book a sensory deprivation tank — and these kind of heightened experiences do make for good reading — a walk with the dog through my own neighbourhood over the course of a year, while really being attuned to my senses, does sound like the most meaningful way to live; why waft through life? I was interested in Rubin’s project and appreciated the conclusions she drew and the stories of how she implemented her findings into her domestic life.

As for the researched bits, I was intrigued by the following (about the brain’s focus on finding and studying faces):

According to Roman statesman and writer Cicero, King Xerxes the Great “offered a prize for the man who could invent a new pleasure.” Inventing a new pleasure seems like an impossible task, yet this explains the extraordinary attraction of YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and, of course, Facebook. They give us entirely fresh ways to gratify our desire to look at faces. We can view more faces in a single scroll through social media than during a lifetime in a medieval village.

And I found the following surprising but not surprising:

Because our expectations shape our experience, we respond differently to the same scent if we’re in a context that tells us “Parmesan cheese” vs. “vomit,” or “pine tree” vs. “disinfectant cleaner.” Does gasoline smell good or bad? People disagree. What’s the smell of “fresh” — is it pine, flowers, the ocean? Claims that “citrus is cheering” and “ peppermint is energizing” are based purely on learned associations. Americans find the smell of lavender “relaxing ,” but people from Brazil consider it “invigorating.”

And I found several things very surprising (but not incredible enough to fact-check), as when Rubin writes, Though it seems possible that humans, like other animals, communicate with pheromones, researchers haven’t yet been able to identify a single one or when she notes in an aside Despite the old trick question, the tomato can qualify both as a fruit and a vegetable, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture categorizes it as a vegetable. So, surprising or not, I did appreciate the research that Rubin includes throughout.

Even though I was celebrating my senses as never before, I kept dreaming up new ways to explore them. I knew that by going through my body, I could reach my spirit, and through my spirit, I could reach my body.

And reaching the spirit through the body and the body through the spirit seems to be the point of living more intentionally. The 75 Hard challenge requires that I exercise twice a day, one of those times outside, and while walking my dog in the recent below freezing weather, I have to admit that concentrating on my senses — noting the odd bird call and the squeaking of my boots on the snow, looking for the pops of colour against the hazy white sky, really noticing a smell, even if it’s unpleasant diesel from a passing truck in the otherwise empty scent field — living in the moment and experiencing each one to the fullest, this trumps wafting through the day (or worse: trudging through the slush with my head down just so I can put a check mark on the chart; that’s a terrible metaphor for life.)

Rubin ends Life in Five Senses with many recommendations for ways that a person can enhance their own sensory experience, and whether that might involve adding in pleasant stimuli (artwork or candles or savoury treats) or removing annoying ones (really looking for clutter in the spaces we see every day, turning down [or off!] the jabbering television), there’s plenty here that anyone could implement to create a happier, more meaningful life. This was certainly the right book for me in the moment (even if the biggest challenge was limiting myself to reading just a bit of it every day).