Book Review: Dessa - My Own Devices

Dessa's songs are often the most lyrically interesting on each Doomtree album, and the direct connections between her life and her music means that it's not really surprising that this book is so good. The way she picks big topics (what does it mean to be in love with someone? if you could get rid of that love, would you?), neatly expresses them in poetic apothegms, and then wraps them in compelling narratives is right in line with her songwriting style, so if you're a big fan of her on the stage, she won't disappoint on the page. An unhappy love affair is one of the oldest and most compelling stories in the world, and though she's very analytical and contemplative about this huge part of her life, she's never less than heartfelt, even as her mission is to extract a still-beating piece of that heart and cauterize it so that she can never be hurt by it again. She's always perceptive, cheerfully nerding out over her latest insight or discovery, and able to make even the most mundane account of meeting someone interesting by way of a sharp eye for telling detail. No Doomtree fan should miss this.

Not every piece in here is related to her primary subject either chronologically or thematically, but it's the main story that's of course the most interesting: what was it like to fall in love with the person who also recruited you into the band that's defined your identity for decades, unhappily orbit that person romantically for many years, and then be so desperate to free yourself from the moth-flame lethality of obsession that you resort to experimental brainwave feedback therapy to reprogram your neurons to make it stop? Fascinatingly, even though essentially the entire book is about P.O.S., whenever Dessa is discussing their on again/off again relationship, she always quasi-superstitiously refers to him as "X" (as in, "I moved to New York to put some distance between me and my X"), which gives the whole tale of limerance an interesting not-quite-confessional air, of honesty with a very specific limit. At one point, she discusses her attitude towards vulnerability: "In the lyrics and the essays I write, I blow most of the doors open. It's not that I have a particular interest in confessional art - it's just that true stories are boring if you skip all the embarrassing bits." She mentions that P.O.S. gave his approval to her writing about him (and throughout she is unfailingly gracious and at worst merely melancholic towards him), so her distancing from him via a pseudonym for a pseudonym! is all the more notable.

Of course, "confessional" writing is a fiercely contested genre, with part of the contest being whether it exists as a distinct classification at all. Writing in a diary isn't like writing a LiveJournal, which isn't like writing a weekly column, which isn't like writing a book, even though all are different formats in which someone can commit their intimate thoughts to a place where someone else can read them. And in all of those formats, it's perfectly possible to capture thoughts which aren't "confessional" at all, in the sense of unburdening yourself or of revealing a secret. Maybe this blurring of typology goes back to Montaigne, or maybe it's more a product of modern technologies (Jia Tolentino once wrote a good piece titled "The Personal Essay Boom Is Over" in the New Yorker about the rise and fall of the "first-personal industrial complex"), but in Dessa's hands, a piece of her life is never just a straightforward memoir or travelogue, it's an opportunity to make a philosophical connection, puzzle over a problem, or just explore a cool metaphor. In "The Mirror Test", for example, one of the side chapters, she smoothly relates lipstick application, self-recognition in animals, our resemblance to our parents, lucid dreaming, drug-induced memory loss, harmonized singing, whether makeup hides, reveals, or highlights beauty, the dissolving sense of self during psychedelic episodes, selfies, what it's like to hear her mother sing, and which characteristics of ourselves might carry over into heaven. A worse writer would make those connections feel mannered and artificial; in Dessa's hands they're just different facets of the same intuitive gem.

Maybe another aspect of the confessional writing question is whether the end result is supposed to be generalizable or broadly relevant in some way. People LOVE advice columns, or dating stories, or mindless romantic reality TV shows, not just for the gossip, or for the cultural evolutionary benefits of seeing others' mistakes in the hopes of not making them yourself, but because expressions of universal feelings are an ideal way to experience connections to someone else in a way we're all hungry for. It might be true, as Dessa said, that confessional art necessarily involves personal embarrassment; another way of looking at it might be that it's actually honesty and vulnerability that truly interest us, and as George Orwell once said, "A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." Seen in that light, Dessa's use of Helen Fisher's writing on romantic attraction and a complicated MRI-based biofeedback sonic system to medically remove her attraction to P.O.S. presents a real question to the reader: is this whole sequence either a profound failure to cope with the pains of love, or a triumph over personal limitations? At what point do (unfortunately all-too-relatable) feelings of lovesadness shade into a liability, and is there actually anything wrong with doing whatever it takes to get them to go away? Assuming that "the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference" is actually true, shouldn't we be celebrating this science-fictional triumph over malfunctioning neurochemistry, or should we actually be expecting Dessa's future artistic output to be less resonant now that one of the main wellsprings of her material is gone? In "The Fool That Bets Against Me", she hilariously explores the idea of getting her talent for turning sadness into songs insured; should that hypothetical claim now be denied?

By the end of the book, the treatment has by Dessa's account worked splendidly, and she seemingly has the best of all worlds: moving on with her romantic life, continuing to produce art, and retaining fond feelings for P.O.S. Most people probably don't have her sanguine affection for her X with their own exes, anger or indifference being far more common, but even a singularly drastic experiment like hers is still useful to the less-obsessed or less-radical reader out there. I've been listening to Doomtree since 2012, so not nearly as long as more hardcore fans, yet I'm still intrigued by how she's made her personal journey part of her artistic evolution, and I'll keep reading and listening.

Book Review: Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 2

This second volume of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, covering chapters 33 to 63, was just as awesome as the first. The breathlless pace of the action seems to move faster than the story, as each chapter is still crammed with detail, and so it's often hard to judge how much time is passing within or between scenes, but the expansion of the storyline to include the real beginnings of the infamous division into three kingdoms unfolds in a logical and seemingly inevitable way, one stratagem, double-cross, and blood oath at a time. Despite the inclusion of the most epic battles yet, it's a study in decision and indecision as well, as more powerful warlords like Liu Biao and Sun Quan risk repeating the fate of Yuan Shao in the face of Cao Cao's relentless ambition. It starts off with Cao Cao consolidating the north, his son Cao Pi marrying Yuan Shao's widow Lady Zhen, and ends with Liu Bei riding off west into the Riverlands to found his own kingdom, but there's seemingly entire books in between.

This volume made me think more about the problem of leadership, specifically of how the characters attempt to enforce or encourage loyalty. This has been one of the underlying themes of the book from the very beginning, of course, but it's in this stretch of the story that the Emperor fades into the background and the three kingdoms begin to solidify, and loyalty is no less important in the destruction of one regime than in the creation of another. In an environment like the collapse of the Han dynasty, where there's a nominally all-powerful Emperor but in practice a nearly unlimited amount of autonomy for essentially independent petty warlords, individuals are confronted by an extra layer of moral choice that informs their actions. How should one balance allegiance to the sovereign with filial duties, and obedience to liege lords against an oath sworn to brothers? Watching the many characters grapple with their moral compasses in the face of all the momentous decisions they make in life-or-death situations each chapter is a real pleasure, even if they're unsure of the right course themselves, and even through Luo's determined editorializing between the Big Two. Liu Bei, the hero who, we're continually told, draws men to him through his virtuous nature and noble deeds, has the same problem of winning his own place in the world as his duplicitous antagonist Cao Cao, who's universally derided as a crafty yet corrosive force, yet it's often difficult to see a principled difference between them.

For example, towards the end of the volume, at a crucial moment in the balance of power between the north and the south, Zhang Song travels to Cao Cao near the end to offer him the vitally strategic area of the Riverlands, but he gives up because they're each too stubborn and prideful, and he simply offers the territory to Liu Bei instead. This momentous decision is presented as right and proper, a result of the magnetic attraction of Liu Bei and repulsion of Cao Cao, yet it's not so different than Pang Tong's disagreement and reconciliation with Zhang Fei, and in fact it's also quite similar to the many minor instances where a governor will surrender a town, or a general will defect at the end of a battle, and the decision to reward or execute them for their shift in fealty seems arbitrary rather than appropriate. There's probably literature out there on how Confucianist or Legalist ethics, or prestige and dominance leadership styles, could be formulated in game-theoretic terms, and how each individual conundrum of whether to keep an oath or do the most expedient thing fits into a coherent framework of morality; ultimately I decided to just sit back and enjoy my suspense and outrage cycles as the two decided whether the latest hapless provincial commander would be rewarded for switching sides or beheaded for his treachery as the circumstances above and beyond him shifted.

The real breakout star of this volume isn't Liu Bei or Cao Cao, however, but Kongming. The legends of his sagacity are so great that Liu Bei travels three times to convince him to come work for him, to the consternation of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, whose jealousy at Kongming seeming to supplant them in Liu Bei's heart is a nice bit of character development. And the legends are true! If ever there was a character calculated to delight and entertain audiences, it would be the Sleeping Dragon, an impossibly clever advisor who can concoct ruses subtle enough to fool even Cao Cao and has a handy ability to summon up powerful winds to aid in battle. My favorite example of his ridiculous skill was the scene where Sun Quan's henchman Zhou Yu wants to offer Liu Bei a sham marriage to Lady Sun in order to take him hostage and force him to surrender the strategic province of Jingzhou, which Liu Bei was dragging his heels on relinquishing after the death of his kinsman Liu Biao. This is a dangerous trip for Liu Bei, but no worry: Kongming not only arranges matters so that Liu Bei keeps Jingzhou, but that he successfully marries Lady Sun for real, via the hilarious mechanism of literally giving general Zhao Zilong three sacks with instructions to open each one at the right time to get Liu Bei out of each of Zhou Yu's traps. The buddy comedy friendship between Kongming and fellow wizard Pang Tong is also a real highlight, as each occasionally drops in to make fun of the other before revealing their latest scheme.

Of course, Kongming is far more famous for his deceptive prowess at the Battle of Red Cliffs, which takes up a substantial portion of this volume. Once again I was left marveling at the skillful pacing and ingenious plotting: almost more space is devoted to the feints, deceptions, and betrayals leading up to the battle than to the action itself, and yet as Cao Cao's ill-fated expedition to conquer the south is left routed and shattered, thanks to Kongming's wheels-within-wheels ploys and last-minute conjuration of an east wind, you are never lacking for excitement. You're almost spoiled, too, since right before that is an equally-exciting chapters-long running fight as Liu Bei's retreating army and mass of villagers try to cross the Yangtze for safety in the south, and Cao Cao's forces are only barely held off in the Battle of Changban, where the (in my opinion underrated) Zhang Zilong makes one of his many clutch saves by rescuing Liu Bei's son against great odds (and not for the last time). The heroism and dramatic tension don't let up for a bit, and while there are many points where the ratio of clearly fictional "how could he have known?" strokes of impossible genius against more plausible Nth dimensional chess moves that real people might make gets a bit much, it's all so much fun you don't mind for a minute.

Now's no time to stop reading.