great(ish) pt 18: suburban dystopia, Duolingo, lemon cake
Hello! Today, a film and a book about teens, an article about the exploitative capitalism that underpins cheap/free language learning, Amsterdam's circular economy and lemon-y cake.
Article: Who Pays for Cheap Language Instruction? by Yuliya Komska, Alberto Bruzos Moro, Roberto Rey Agudo, published in the Boston Review in July 2020
“Much of language learning is now yoked to the exploitative dynamics of tourism and the predatory extraction of human capital.” This brilliant article looks at cheap language learning tools such as Duolingo and investigates labour conditions as well as underlying questions of value, exploitative capitalism and the myth of disruption through tech: “In the tech world, to which the digital-age language industry belongs, “value” has become a cipher for languages being reduced to translatable, practical, divisible, and monetizable shares to trade, instead of the messy, dissonant, non-standardizable, fiercely individual codes of expression that they are.”
Film: Scenes from the Suburbs (2011), directed by Spike Jonze
I can’t decide if this is an enjoyable deep cut or the inevitable, unsurprising outcome of me recommending films for the past few months, but here we go: this 30 minute Spike Jonze short film is based on the The Suburbs, an Arcade Fire album that I love. The film, too, has various elements that are like catnip to me, but let’s start with the synopsis google spits out when you search for it: “A resident of a suburban dystopia tries to reassemble his fragmented memories of life as a teen.” Memories? Check. Teens? Check. Suburban dystopia? Check. Set in an America where suburbs are ruled by martial law, with towns separated by checkpoints and guards, Jonze focuses on the increasingly fragmented friendship between two teen boys. The dreamlike realism reminded me of Gus van Sant’s films about teens, Elephant and Paranoid Park (both of which I absolutely love and would have recommended already, were they not part of his “death trilogy”).
I saw this film at the cinema in the summer of 2011, and something about it perfectly encapsulated summer for me. I hadn’t been a teen for a while, but I was still aimlessly cycling through my neighbourhood, wondering what was happening to me and the world. If anything, suburban dystopia feels even more apt now. You can watch the entire film on Vimeo and reminisce about 00s indie rock.
Book: Fish Soup by Margarita Garcia Robayo, translated by Charlotte Coombe
Continuing the theme of teens, here’s a collection of short stories and novellas set mostly on the Colombian coast with mostly young protagonists. When I read it a couple of years ago, elements of it reminded me of, and I quote, “Bonjour Tristesse, Ladybird, that 'Girls Doing What The Fuck They Want 2k17' keychain, Y Tu Mama Tambien (for the sex)”. I especially liked the novella Sexual Education: a girl tries to reconcile the sexual mores she is taught in school with what she experiences in her social circle. Just an overall great book and I can’t wait to read Garcia Robayo’s novel Holiday Heart, again translated by Charlotte Coombe.
Learning: Amsterdam’s Circular Economy
Once a week I listen to Norwegian broadcaster NRK’s Urix på Lørdag to get news about the world from a source that isn’t in English or German. That’s where I first learned about Amsterdam’s adoption of the circular economy model. To put it very briefly and perhaps not very accurately, the aims are to reduce, reuse and recycle, but these ambitions are being applied broadly and strategically to food and organic waste, consumer goods and the built environment. I'm interested to see how this works on a city level.
Other: Lemon yoghurt anything cake by Smitten Kitchen
Still not a baker/cook, but I recently made this cake again and it's still delicious. All hail blueberry season. (Dial down the sugar, as usual.)
Finally: I was interviewed by The Publishing Profile about my reading habits. I’ve thought a lot about how much I wanted to fit in when I moved to the UK, and how it took a few years until I realised I had bought into the idea of some kind of cultural supremacy of the Anglosphere. Woof!
That's it for now! Take care!