Review by Choice Review
Who hasn't imagined themselves as an invisible witness to goings-on, perhaps eavesdropping on others' conversations? Is a desire to be aware of the world, without the world's noticing us, an essential aspect of defining our own identity? Is being an undetected observer still even a possibility in a media-saturated and connected world of self-promotion and self-revelatory blogging? Here Busch (School of Visual Arts, New York) describes many different ways of living--at least temporarily--a less scrutinized, less public life, and details the elusive pleasures that doing so can bring. Each of the eleven chapters is almost an independent essay, exploring for example literal invisibility (whether achieved by magic or through the use of technology-enabled cloaking devices), transient creations, practicing calm and quiet observation, forms of connection to past acquaintances real and imagined, and spiritual invisibility. This book is not a practical guide to protecting one's online privacy. Instead, Busch uses myth, personal and political history, literary narrative, and observation of nature to illuminate the possible meaning of a self-fulfillment that is not reduced to social dominance. In other words, through this book Busch explores the importance of privacy in today's world. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates through faculty. General readers. --David Bantz, University of Alaska
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Ours is A noisy country. We've been rebellious, insolent shouters since the beginning. We invent freak shows and circuses and casinos. Talk too loud. Our public spaces honk and whistle at us. We believe ourselves stars just awaiting a stage. We're a people, Walt Whitman crooned, "singing, with open mouths," our "strong melodious songs." We chew with open mouths, too - we're without pretense or much regard for personal space. Our latest, greatest gift to the world is a computer for your pocket that chatters at you all day long. And then there's the past two years: political and technological churn, offense and outrage. Noise incarnate. It would be easy to forget, especially these days, that American DNA contains another trait - though clearly a recessive one: the desire to disappear. There's Thoreau's pond and Kerouac's road and Cheryl Strayed's Pacific Crest Trail, places that couldn't be farther away from Times Square. There's the silent man (it's almost always a man) who must go off alone to discover himself, lose himself, away from the noise, sailing down the Mississippi on a raft. "1 am reduced to my irreducible self," the poet and essayist Wendell Berry wrote in "An Entrance to the Woods," after camping alone along Kentucky's Red River Gorge. "As 1 leave the bare expanse of the rock and go in under the trees again, 1 am aware that 1 move in the landscape as one of its details." Are we still capable of such smallness? The minuscule human figures in a Thomas Cole painting, dwarfed by overwhelming mountains and an engulfing sky, once embodied an American ideal, the purposeful melting away of individuality in order to attain some higher awareness, or to join in a collective or simply to find space to think. With our societal volume dial turned all the way up (and possibly broken), so many of us overexposed and all too present, does quiet any longer have this pull, or does it just make us itch for our phones? And if we can still shut our eyes and cover our ears, become details of the landscape, should we? Is it morally acceptable at this moment? What's waiting for us beyond the noise if we try? Two new books on the value of invisibility and silence seem like a clever bit of counterprogramming. Coming upon them was like finding the Advil bottle in the medicine cabinet after stumbling about with a headache for a long time. They are both, perhaps purposefully, slow reads. They demand patience from addled minds primed to see such subject matter as a result of subtraction, the blank pages between chapters. Akiko Busch, the author of "How to Disappear," a collection of essays, disputes this premise. For her, invisibility is not simply a negative, the inverse of visibility. Going unseen, undetected, overlooked: These are experiences with their own inherent "meaning and power"; what we need is a "field guide" for recognizing them. And this is what Busch offers, roaming from essay to essay in a loose, associative style, following invisibility where it takes her - from childhood and the comfort of imaginary friends to middle age and the feeling of disappearing as a sexual object: a sensation, she argues, that can form the basis of a new, and positive, form of selfhood. She regards some contemporary art, like Cindy Sherman's distorted self-portraits and Alec Soth's "Unselfies," as signals of our deep desire to smudge our identities and keep them at least partly hidden. One essay considers the "improvisational choreography" of rush hour in Grand Central Terminal, the crowd a thing of pleasure to get lost in, she writes, our pace "quickening and slowing in sync with those around us." Inconspicuousness can be powerful - this may be Busch's most radical point, especially at a moment when we're conditioned to think power means yelling louder than everyone else in your Twitter feed, or showing the world on fnstagram how you're living your best life. Consider the arctic fox or the Indonesian crab, animals that deploy camouflage to survive. For them, "becoming invisible is not the equivalent of being nonexistent," Busch writes. "Invisibility is a strategy for attracting a mate, protecting home and habitat, hunting and defense. Camouflage in the natural world is not some exotic and picturesque trait, ft is nuanced, creative, sensitive, discerning." Humans use it in this way, too. In one essay Busch goes scuba diving and makes her best case for giving invisibility more room in our lives. Underwater, she is enchanted by the sensation of being completely ignored: "Forty feet beneath the surface, the striped parrotfish are oblivious to me. The yellowtail damselfish and flurry of silversides couldn't be less interested." This feeling of superfluousness combined with weightlessness and the meditative sound of her own breathing allow her to hold her ego at an arm's length: "We all know that sensation of life slowing down, of being suspended in time, of being outside the rhythm of ordinary life, but underwater, that is the way things really are." As much as anyone else, 1 fantasize about checking out. 1 would love to remove the pinging notifications from my days, for my mind to wander without being thrown askew by each incoming tweet. But visions of total unplugging also seem a bit grotesque. Think of Erik Hagerman, a former corporate executive at Nike, who decided shortly after the 2016 election to blockade the outside world, rigorously avoiding all news as if it might kill him. A New York Times profile last year followed him to a cafe where he plugged into white noise and read only the weather report. He watched basketball games on mute. His life seemed sad and lonely, not exhilarating. His decision to disengage was also, particularly now, the height of irresponsibility, an abdication of that most basic duty of citizenship : staying informed. Or consider the unnamed protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh's recent novel, "My Year of Rest and Relaxation," who decides to take enough drugs to, literally, sleep for a year: "If 1 kept going, 1 thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream." But there is nothing hopeful about her hibernation, ft is the act of a vacuous narcissist. How much silence is too much? Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who was among the most influential Catholic thinkers of the 20 th century, pondered this question intently. What drew him to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky was the opportunity for a life of quiet contemplation. His greatest fantasy, he wrote, was "to deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light." When his popularity as an author made it more difficult to achieve solitude, he retreated even further, living for long stretches by himself in a toolshed in the hills of the monastery grounds. But the world intruded, particularly in the 1950s and '60s, as the Cold War ramped up and a nuclear standoff seemed imminent. He began to wonder whether the life he had constructed for himself, so sustaining to his soul, justified the disengagement. Merton's dilemma is central to Jane Brox's "Silence," her meditation on the pain and the joy of being quiet. "When is silence power?" Brox imagines Merton asking himself. "When is it an accomplice to fear?" Merton did not want to contribute to what he repeatedly called the "noise" of American society ("the noise of slogans or the repetition of clichés"; "the amplified noise of beasts"). But he also knew it wasn't right to ignore his own stake in the world's problems. What he sought instead was a "genuine and deep communication," one achieved, he insisted, only through a continuous recharging in silence. The very element that might seem to make us bad citizens or antisocial is at the same time a prerequisite for thoughtfulness and more profound connection with others. Since most of us can't yo-yo in and out of solitude (despite the meditation apps that promise to help us do just that), we have to live with this paradox. If in her book Busch meanders, pulling from her array of examples a generally positive appraisal of invisibility, Brox hunkers down in two institutions dominated by the absence of noise - prison and the monastery - and leaves us with a much more ambiguous sense of silence: oppressive under certain conditions, liberating under others. For her prison, she chooses Eastern State, opened in 1829 just outside Philadelphia as a new, idealistic sort of penitentiary dreamed up by Benjamin Rush, a reformer and friend of Benjamin Franklin, who wanted to deploy solitude as a means to redemption. Brox alternates sections on the prison's history with ones on the medieval order of Cistercian monks, who structured their lives around silence, which they too saw as a means to redemption. These two settings, scrutinized intensely, present silence as many textured. The inmates of Eastern State were condemned to individual cells, with only a small window in the barrel-vaulted ceiling letting in a circle of sky - a design thought to be a vast improvement over the prisons of the day, crowded and disorderly spaces associated with violence. Everything was done to avoid sound. The wheels of the meal carts were covered in leather and guards wore socks over their shoes. This silence, meant to be restorative, became destructive. Although the inmates left little record of their time there, Charles Dickens, who took a tour in 1842, deemed the enforced silence "immeasurably worse than any torture of the body." Brox also quotes an eloquent inmate of the Soviet gulag, Eugenia Ginzburg, on the sensation of an annihilating quiet: "The silence thickened, became tangible and stifling. Depression attacked not only the mind but the whole body. Even my hair seemed to bristle with despair. I would have given anything to have heard just one sound." Contrast this with Merton, for whom total silence is the prerequisite for real thinking, for communion with God. "1 had entered into a solitude that was an impregnable fortress. And the silence that enfolded me, spoke to me, and spoke louder and more eloquently than any voice." Brox writes beautifully about the silence woven through daily tasks and between prayers in the medieval monastery, its varying qualities and duration, sometimes "as brief as a handful of heartbeats." Silence for her is a force of nature, awe provoking, like lightning, capable of electrocuting us and of illuminating the night. But her tone is also elegiac. She speaks of these spaces where silence reigned as now being in ruins, both the monasteries and the prisons. (As for the estimated 80,000 inmates currently in solitary confinement, Brox reports that they are likely to hear not silence but near-constant screaming, banging and shouting.) In our own lives, achieving silence feels so hard that people pay good money to float in sensory deprivation tanks. Even the underwater idyll that Busch enjoys is at risk - the oceans have apparently become so noisy with the sound of tanker traffic and air guns that it's causing chronic stress in whales. There's not much mention in either of these books about Eastern religions like Buddhism or Taoism and their ideas about dissolving the ego. Even our homegrown Transcendentalism doesn't appear. At first these seemed like strange omissions. But Busch and Brox aren't interested in abstractions and philosophizing. Silence and invisibility, they insist, are part of our everyday lives - the place our mind wanders when we're in the shower or out jogging, the feeling we get looking out the window of an airplane, the pleasure of becoming a stranger on a bustling city street. We take these pauses, these moments of exhalation, for granted, but we should clutch them close. They are our armor against the onslaught. Gal beckerman is an editor at the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Busch (The Incidental Steward, 2013) writes about nature and culture with delving curiosity and fresh thinking, offering here a unique engagement with the phenomenon and concept of invisibility. This supple and surprising inquiry was prompted by contemplation of the many modes of digital visibility, from social media and zillions of websites to the harvesting of pervasive forms of surveillance to the constant mining of personal data. What does all this exposure and our obsession with optics reveal about our sense of self and society? What might be gained by a reclamation of privacy and discretion? What might invisibility grant us? Busch investigates the divide between our visible and inner selves in this zestfully perceptive field guide to invisibility. She describes wondrous strategies for concealment in the natural world, considers the role of invisibility in myths and the arts, shares personal experiences, and notes various ways in which we are rendered invisible for better or worse. Ultimately, Busch elegantly advocates for elective invisibility as a way of acquiring a more humanitarian view of the larger world. Eye-opening and inspiring.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Essayist Busch (The Incidental Steward) meditates on how the human need for privacy and anonymity has reasserted itself with new urgency amid the exhibitionism of the technology-imbued modern world. With many seeking an "alternative to a life of perpetual display," she offers a "field guide to invisibility," with examples from science, literature, and visual art. The book draws from J.K. Rowling and Hans Christian Andersen to explore how children yearn for the ethereal, and shows how "erasure books," like those of poet Mary Ruefle, create something new by obscuring the old. Astutely noting the significance of contemporary language like "ghosting" and "unseeing" things, Busch suggests absence can become a presence in its own right. Elsewhere, she visits Duke University's engineering department to experiment with a real-life "cloaking device" and goes scuba diving to "become a refugee of the visible world." Busch's exploration of her subject is free-associative, wide-ranging, and poetic in its own right. Her description of visiting New York City's Grand Central Terminal is particularly striking, as she is "swept along by the stream of humanity" amid the seemingly choreographed "gorgeous multitude." Busch offers a path to quiet dignity that is rich and enlightening. Agent: Albert LaFarge, Albert LaFarge Literary Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In an age of social media and constant surveillance, Busch (faculty, Sch. of Visual Arts; Nine Ways To Cross a River) explores the many facets of invisibility in nature, science, and the arts. Her essays run the gamut from children's invisible friends to items in literature, such as rings and cloaks that make the wearer disappear, to the science of making objects appear invisible. The author also shares how plants such as the pebble plant blend into the landscape, how camouflage and countershading protect animal species, and how ocean divers are unperceived and ignored by ocean fauna. Artists paint human models to blend into various backgrounds and photograph them. Marginalized populations and women of a certain age seem to disappear to the rest of the world. The author explains how, in Iceland, spirit beings, the Huldufolk or Alfar, are real to many. Busch also investigates augmented reality; for example, artist Mark Skwarek digitally restored the natural landscape of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, deleting the military installations. VERDICT An impressive look at myriad, diverse examples of invisibility that will appeal to those interested in social sciences and the arts.-Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The joys of hiding from a cyberculture seeking to monitor your every move.Despite the subtitle, these are by no means "notes" but rather fully formed and often powerful explorations of the many realms and levels of invisibility to which one might aspire or withdraw. Busch (Design Research/School of Visual Arts; The Incidental Steward, 2013, etc.) starts in the woods, the narrative beginning like a meditation on going "off the grid." Yet she veers in less predictable directions, abandoning Alexa and the like for an inquiry into children's literature, the persistence of invisibility within it, and the value of having an imaginary friendwhich, it turns out, may not be that different than the digital friendships adults cultivate. This analysis inevitably leads to social media and the persistent pressure to be noticed by others, to risk "Facebook depression, one result of this ceaseless exposurethe anxiety induced by social comparisons and the feeling of being less attractive or accomplished than other users." The author expounds on her suspicion that we're doing things wrong, overemphasizing visibility and self-promotion and undervaluing the opposite, and she surveys the invisible in nature, the arts, identity, and soul. It "is not the equivalent of being nonexistent," she writes, and subsequently elaborates, "it is nuanced, creative, sensitive, discerning." Busch examines how erasure has functioned in art, from "erasure books" that add to the texts by subtracting words, to the ability of the flamboyant David Bowie to appear invisible as a public persona while walking the streets of New York and the refusal of the popular, pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante to use identity, biography, and personality to market her novels. Where the assertion of one's identity is concerned, Busch argues that less is more: "The measure of our humanity may be derived not from how we stand out in the world, but from the grace and concord with which we find our place in it."With a tone that is more evocative than provocative, Busch meaningfully celebrates value where it goes unseen by others. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
