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Pick Your Battle: Your Guide to Urban Foraging, Hollywood Movies, Late Capitalism, and the Communist Alternative
Tells the story of how foraging from neighborhood fruit trees can lead to a radical encounter. Explains psychogeography, which is a way of wandering through urban landscapes and being attracted and repulsed by the built environments you find along the way. Douglas Lain has written a book about urban foraging as a psychogeographic wander. It is a philosophy book, a memoir, and a radical self-help book for people living during an epoch when the self is under siege. This is a book that aims to derail the reader and the author. "Pick Your Battle" was successfully funded through Kickstarter on July 13th, 2010. Using the foraging of fruit trees and blackberry bushes as the jumping off point, this surreal effort towards an event or an act that might change the coordinates of our collective situation shows that, during a time of economic collapse, limitless war, and peak insanity just stepping outside and getting to know the plant life in your neighborhood can constitute a radical break.
174 pages, Paperback
First published May 8, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 12, 2011
Self help today means one of two things: pop psychology or Hermetic magick for dummies. Self help teaches us magickal thinking or nigh psychopathic techniques for patronizing and using our fellow man. Where's the help? In Pick Your Battle, Douglas Lain doesn't tell you how to live your life, doesn't give you easy answers and doesn't candycoat life. Pick Your Battle is a book about foraging and all that it means. Using anecdotes from his own quirky but not impossible life, Lain shows you how he learned to live in today's world of corporate culture and Postmodern numbness. He doesn't make himself or modern man out to be a helpless victim, but at the same time he does not outright tell us everything's going to be okay, and yet, when meditating upon and contemplating Lain's reflections on everything from working at a Cable Company to the noble intent of Mister Rogers you'll feel hopeful and adequately equipped. That's true help, that's foraging and that's a way you can discover survival in every sense of the word. Buy this book and find its treasures for yourself.
June 16, 2012
If there ever was a guide out of lifestyle rebellion and into systematic critique by means of memoir, Douglas Lain has attempted it. The supposed category errors in that description of Lain's ambition are part of its appeal and its fugue-quality. While the book describes itself "Your Guide to Urban Foraging, Hollywood Movies, Late Capitalism, and the Communist Alternative," it is more akin to Doug's guide to how he went from an urban forager to some form of communist from moving from an inchoate leftist writer in a cubicle job at Comcast to a thinker wrestling with Althusser, Zizek, Debort, and Lefebvre.
Critical theory is often divorced from the core of our experience, yet it describes the experiences at the core. In my experience, often people study it as grist for the mill of academic population as merely a rubric for papers in the Ideological Academic Apparatus. Lain does not do this: Instead we get his dealing with his future wife, his cubicle job, losing that job, and dealing with children to foreground the way ideology works. Often Lain does with collage elements of theory cut in and of out the text.
There are some surprising human movements in which theory weaves in and out: the way desire is defined by lack is seen through Lain's interaction with his wife, the way ideological conceptions define space, the way many of us move through periods of conspiracy thinking and frustration, through thinking we can hack it through survivalism, and then to grappling with the theory many of us were exposed to tangentially in college.
Indeed, I feel a kinship to Lain in this book as many of the developments in his life and their reflections in theory. I have also covered conspiracy thinking, post-left anarchism, and all the surrounding dross. It hits a nerve personally having to come to terms that the cube farm world was not remotely meritocratic and that everyone in it, including many of the managers, were playing a game designed to be lost.
As for what the communist alternative might be, the letter at the end of the encapsulates a hope but no means to get there. Lain, however, has achieved something in getting us to travel through this fugue from an inchoate understanding to a more systemic one. The question for Lain, and for myself, is where exactly do we go from here. Marty McFly may see communists in the future, but it's still only a vague outline.
Critical theory is often divorced from the core of our experience, yet it describes the experiences at the core. In my experience, often people study it as grist for the mill of academic population as merely a rubric for papers in the Ideological Academic Apparatus. Lain does not do this: Instead we get his dealing with his future wife, his cubicle job, losing that job, and dealing with children to foreground the way ideology works. Often Lain does with collage elements of theory cut in and of out the text.
There are some surprising human movements in which theory weaves in and out: the way desire is defined by lack is seen through Lain's interaction with his wife, the way ideological conceptions define space, the way many of us move through periods of conspiracy thinking and frustration, through thinking we can hack it through survivalism, and then to grappling with the theory many of us were exposed to tangentially in college.
Indeed, I feel a kinship to Lain in this book as many of the developments in his life and their reflections in theory. I have also covered conspiracy thinking, post-left anarchism, and all the surrounding dross. It hits a nerve personally having to come to terms that the cube farm world was not remotely meritocratic and that everyone in it, including many of the managers, were playing a game designed to be lost.
As for what the communist alternative might be, the letter at the end of the encapsulates a hope but no means to get there. Lain, however, has achieved something in getting us to travel through this fugue from an inchoate understanding to a more systemic one. The question for Lain, and for myself, is where exactly do we go from here. Marty McFly may see communists in the future, but it's still only a vague outline.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews