What's the name of this blog again? Something about Gods. What's my name? Oh, I know this one! My name is Miss. Pretty sure of that. It's a very common teacher name.
So for Xmas my husband (I forget his name) gave me a book called The Dawn of Everything. It's a heavy book. I mean heavy as in it hurts your hands to hold it. Don't quote me on this, but I think it's over 700 pages, including exhaustive footnotes and bibliographies.
I've been reading this book with teacher brain since early March. It was interesting, I think.
Long story short, this book is about, em ... everything? First thing in the morning? Well, I am an absolute expert on that! I have to be everything to everybody at 7:15 a.m. every weekday! Heck, it's dawn or near dawn or before dawn when I wake up, ten months of the year. So I know me some dawns.
The book. It's about ancient cultures, and Indigenous Americans, and whether or not human history leads in a straight line from little bands of hunter-gatherers to Elon Musk buying Twitter.
Now, I would absolutely hate to ruin this important and fascinating book for you, so I'm not going to offer up any spoilers here. Mostly because I can't. I read this book with teacher brain. I think I got the message of it, but I won't be sure until mid-July when the fog clears and I'm no longer chronically sleep-deprived.
It's not just The Dawn of Everything that eludes my fried-egg-in-the-pan brain. It's the Sunday New York Times, the cookie recipe on the side of the oatmeal box, the exit signs on the New Jersey Turnpike, the laundry directions on a pair of blue jeans. I can't comprehend basic syllables, let alone sentences.
Well, it's 8:12 p.m., my bedtime. I feel like I could sleep for 15 years.
I have not used The Dawn of Everything as a book to fall asleep while reading. It's too heavy for that. Plus, my cat Gamma bats books out of my hands when I read in bed.
I liked The Dawn of Everything? Ask me again in August.
6 comments:
I hope you'll be able to take the summer off and catch up on your sleep, Anne!
sleep my friend...get your ass some sleep
Rest now. Read giant books that start in the beginning of time through today while sitting on a beach drinking something yummy with an umbrella.
It's the countdown to the end of the school year... Hang in there!
Re "The Dawn of Everything"
"The Dawn of Everything" is a biased disingenuous account of human history (www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity ) that spreads fake hope (the authors of "The Dawn" claim human history has not "progressed" in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system... so there's hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book's dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavor geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history has "progressed" by and large in linear stages, especially since the dawn of agriculture (www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This "progress" has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html ) which the fake hope-giving authors of "The Dawn" entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we've been "stuck" in a destructive hierarchy and unequal class system (the "stuck" question is the major question in "The Dawn" its authors never answer, predictably), and will be far into the foreseeable future.
A good example that one of the authors, Graeber, has no real idea what world we've been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn't know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they've been wanting that for thousands of years (and that's not the only ignorant notion in the title). Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
"The Dawn" is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked "science," served lucratively to the gullible ignorant underclasses who crave myths and fairy tales.
"The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” ... just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm." --- Unknown
Well, I read the whole thing, and I did come away with some points that I think hold true.
1. human history before the advent of writing and widespread archeological evidence is highly complex.
2. There's no reason to believe our paleolithic ancestors were any less imaginative and intelligent than we are, therefore
3. Many possibilities exist regarding "early" human societies.
4. I also found it quite plausible that the Indigenous Critique played a role in Enlightenment writings.
5. The prehistory of the Western Hemisphere kind of supports their point that some cultures spring up in opposition to the ones around them.
6. One of those elephants was in the Occupy movement. I thought the book was a polemic against oligarchy, actually.
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