Matthew Bizer > Recent Status Updates

“What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.”

I’ve read the first essay of this 2016 edition before — I even quoted it in my dissertation defense — but it only ever rings truer and I’m glad I’m finally reading the whole collection.

“Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.”

This is soooo dense. It’s like if the Dorktown guys wrote a book. It’s amazing. I love it.

"I don't care about no outer space. You can keep that part of it. But if you want to put together some kind of community where people look out for each other and don't have to take being pushed around, I'm with you.”

Okay, I mostly like this. It’s a compelling, moving story about finding purpose and community when both the systems and the population are oppressors.

But I am starting to develop objections to it, and the strongest one yet is to this “dogs have become wild beasts who will steal and eat babies” bit. That’s just gratuitous and threatens to turn the world-building into a generic “everything sucks now.”

“Any Change may bear seeds of benefit.
Seek them out.
Any Change may bear seeds of harm.
Beware.”

I am not the type of person that usually devours this many pages in the first two sittings with a book. Granted there have been unusual circumstances allowing me to do so here. But Butler’s prose is just so captivating, immersive, and undeniable, and it hooked me immediately.

I devoured the entire 2024 and 2025 sections in one sitting. The oft-claimed “prophetic” nature of this book is a little overrated. I also find myself thinking that the idea of Parable of the Sower as “prophecy” undermines Butler’s world-building and immersive prose that make her work truly captivating.

This was promising but slow-going for a while, but that chapter on the famous 1951 NL pennant race… oh man, that’s the good stuff.

“What does it mean to hate a country, or love one? […] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?”

“It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have.”

An unlikely centerpiece of this essay collection is Joseph Masco’s critique of US national security policy since 1945, which he argues made public health (especially with mental health considered) both impossible and overly individualized. While the other mental health essays in this book are quite disappointing, Dr. Masco’s intertwined history of geopolitics and mental health is compelling and educational.

I don’t know how I feel about the mental health essays by Christopher Lane and Lennard J. Davis in the middle of this book. While the preceding writers featured all made great points (though with language at varying degrees of accessibility) about ableism, fatphobia, repressive societal moralism, propaganda, and Big Pharma, this book’s turn toward issues of the mind and brain misses the mark quite a bit, I think.

Oh I am HOOKED.