Dear readers,
For reasons that need not be stated, here are two books that represent an alternative to the pace of the news. Enjoy at whatever speed suits you.
—Molly
“Health and Safety: A Breakdown,” by Emily Witt
Nonfiction, 2024
When I say this book is breathtaking, I am not trotting out a metaphor; it really did alter my respiration! Sometimes in the direction of excited quickening, other times toward a sorrowful (temporary) arrest. “Health and Safety” is a memoir in the form of fieldwork; its topic is a specific pre-pandemic party scene in New York that revolved around music, dance, sex, design and consciousness-altering drugs.
Witt, a staff writer at The New Yorker, takes pleasure seriously in a way that few contemporary American writers do. The book laces strands of history and brain chemistry and auto-anthropology into her account of a lapsed fairyland — a smattering of clubs and illegal venues in 2010s Brooklyn that attracted people who were keen on losing their minds in a specifically connoisseurial way.
Witt writes about the scene with tenderness but without nostalgia, and has a great eye for the telling detail. For example: the lighting at many underground parties is designed by a collective otherwise hired by corporations like Google, which just goes to illustrate the strange economies straddled by “creatives” attempting to stay afloat in expensive cities. (I liked the idea of these lighting designers performing a Robin Hood function — but with the currency of fun, not money. Well, with money too.)
Our own Jennifer Szalai reviewed the book beautifully, if you’d like to learn more than this blurbette can convey.
Read if you like: The writing of Mark Greif, the graphic design of David Rudnick, the art of Paul Laffoley.
Available from: Any good bookstore or library, or perhaps a well-stocked neighborhood dispensary.
“The Spell of the Sensuous,” by David Abram
Nonfiction, 1996
Abram is one of these discipline-bending thinkers for whom books, as a technology, are perfectly designed: only in a book’s roomy format can threads of ecology, philosophy, poetry and anthropology find such graceful entwinement. His thesis (crudely reduced) is that many of us have lost the habit of deep sensory engagement with nature, and that we might be happier and better citizens if we were to become re-enchanted with all forms of nonhuman life. Who could possibly disagree with that?
Abram, needless to say, makes a more detailed case than summary warrants, dancing from Husserl to Berard Haile. I self-administer this book whenever I forget that I’m a mammal.
Read if you like: Simon Critchley on mysticism, Annie Dillard, Ivan Illich.
Available from: Various retailers online or IRL, or direct from Vintage.
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