The Checkout Counter #11
September 2023
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
Collected Fictions
Eugenics in the Garden
Music
- The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, Mitskimitski does it again! i really don't know how to talk about music, but this feels like taking a warm bath and slipping your ears under the water. a no-skip album for me!
Alternative album
Books
- Eugenics in the Garden, Fabiola López-Duránthe writing felt a bit dry, but the content is fascinating. i was particularly interested in a section that touches on the history of photography, and how integral it was to the emergence of criminology. the author wrote an article on the same topic of eugenics and architecture, if you're interested in a brief overview of what the book covers.
Non-fiction, history. Examines the relationship between eugenics and urban planning, tracing how the "science" of race improvement spread from medicine to architecture, and from France to Latin America. - Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
Short fiction collection - The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz"Horatio Alger, similarly, always contrasted his plucky heroes with pretentious aristocratic snobs, who thought they were too good for hard work. Such characters allowed the middle class to differentiate itself from the amoral rich, without feeling any duty to oppose their actions or construct an alternative political morality."
Non-fiction, history. Takes apart the myths and half-truths about historical and contemporary American family structures, presenting facts over the nostalgic fiction of an ideal past.
Short fiction
- The Diary of the Rose, Ursula K. Le Guin
- Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight, Ursula K. Le Guin
- Sleepwalkers, Ursula K. Le Guin
- Uncleftish Beholding, Poul Andersonthere's a wikipedia article about this story. my favorite kind of fantasy/sci-fi is when they play around with the vocabulary and its linguistic roots :)
Articles & essays
- the house is always under construction, bagenzo
- Bad waitress, Becca Schuh"Why don't websites hire service people to write about food? How do 'restaurant journalists' exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, 'a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,' and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it's easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter."
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