#40days40books entry 40
It is time to have a stretch. Take a deep breath. Let it out slowly.
Take another one.
For your health.
Because my home is sacred and it is where I live, I do not have to define my library according to anyone else's standards.
So you won't find ...
... the Song of Ice and Fire books here because I am not inclined to encourage the reading of that messy misogynist garbage.
... the Foundation books either because I don't believe in the good of empires.
... books idolizing the Roman empire (see above)
... Amy Schumer or any of her ilk on account of racism is deadly and I don't support it.
... Paulo Coehlo on account of I outgrew him and also the public library.
... Patrick Rothfuss, Lev Grossman or that sort because I don't have to. I don't have to accept that medieval Europe is the only place for fantasy and I don't have to accept that magicians are more interesting when they fuck or swear - also because get better at writing women. Honestly.
... memoirs. just no.
Some of these were physically removed from my shelves. I felt it - oddly. Not because I was sad to see them go, but because there's something about what a set of shelves is supposed to look like that has existed in my imagination for my entire life.
Representation matters.
I don't have to have Roald Dahl on my shelves and I won't, but that doesn't mean I don't feel the break from Normal or Expected. I don't have to have Robert Heinlein on my shelves, and I don't, but still. Jodi Picoult has never had a place in my home. And she never will.
Bookshelves are medicine cabinets that you are expected to peer into. They can be incredibly informative. They can offer less thoughtful people a way to offend with suggestion or comment about what books should be there that aren't as an opening statement rather than an answer to a question. So the absences are openings for assholes.
This is the not the first time my library has known a purge. The last time was less deliberate and more desperate. Now, it is about finesse and understanding. I am challenged daily by the books in this home to live carefully, artfully, with love and courage. If it is so possible to restructure my books, restructuring my life is also, and again, possible.
So the last book to leave a shelf is me. I hopped my elf self down from the bookstore and cycled away to some other waiting station, a different set of stories. Something a little less ... expected.
Be brave, my readers. Shape your own shelves. Stories are not meant to be funnels, but doors. And we make our own keys.
#40days40books list
Monday, October 31, 2016
Rosemary Mahoney makes pilgrims of us all
The Singular Pilgrim is a book about being a pilgrim in the most well-known and also not-so well-known pilgrimage places in the world. Rosemary Mahoney walks one of the Caminos in Spain, she goes to Lourdes, Varanasi and the Sea of Galilee. Her journeys are spiritually and physically challenging. She meets believers and skeptics alike. Each of the places she goes holds significance both sacred and mundane in the lives of people who live on or near the sites. She meets people who return again and again. It is not possible to read this book and come away unchanged.
There is something so purely focused about travel as a pilgrim that is nowhere to be found in our day to day lives. We generally don't seek out the sacred in our offices, or stores, or local coffee shops. The focus on every act as having something to offer the soul is non-existent in most secular lives. Mahoney's book offers readers something more complicated than a long walk across a country with many others going in the same direction. It offers a long conversation about the nature of living while sacred in a world that doesn't let anything alone.
This was another used book find that got gobbled right up. It was that acquisitive a buy. I have literally no reason to walk any of the Caminos across Spain, but now I have to. No idea when. No idea how. Not worried about it yet.
Rosemary Mahoney undertook all of these pilgrimages alone and fulfilled them. She was dunked in Lourdes, rowed herself across the Sea of Galilee, spent time in Varanasi, walked the 500 miles to Santiago de Compostela and spent three grueling days in circuit on Ireland's Station Island. The people she walked and ate with are as fascinating as you could expect - and they are so very familiar and so very human.
I love that this book is so focused on the travel. There is nothing but relief in the reading of it. It's dusty and grimy and smells kind of ... much from time to time. Everything in my day looks gray and meaningless when I've come out of this book. That doesn't seem to be its aim, and it doesn't last long, but it is powerful.
This book is everything that I love - being alone, walking, being tired, talking to people as they happen along, thinking about things entirely other than "real life" and being totally immersed in the strangeness of faith and consumerism. It's that total exhaustion after a day of hiking when you fall into your sleeping bag and know that dreams will be no refuge, only more adventures. That first glass of water that tastes like nothing so much as champagne you're so sore and parched.
You feel sort of scarred and magnified before getting to the kindness of the end.
I want more. Like this. Less armchair, though. More boots and backpacks.
Read this with tea and good bread and butter or jam.
#40days40books list
Olivia Laing walks us To the River
To the River is Olivia Laing's book about a week she spent walking the length of the River Ouse in Sussex. It is steeped in the rhythms of walking, history, bloodshed and modernity. Laing's stops and starts and storytelling are engaging and lyrical. She brings her readers to her side, points out and then backs away, letting the story of the place, of the observers and observed take center stage.
The stories she tells are quite frequently awful ones about wars and despair and unchecked eccentricity. Many lives have been lived and lost on the banks of this and every other river in England. The River Ouse is the one that Virginia Woolf drowned in, though, and that story never leaves the book, or our awareness. Reading this is not unlike walking in the world on an uncomfortable day - exhilarhating and exhausting. Like all the best travel is.
This one I found in used, because travel writing is one of my sets of shelves, and finding travel writing written by women is not for the lazy. Finding travel writing by women of color is for the focused and determined and shouldn't be as difficult as it is. However. This is what comes of institutionalized racism, sexism and the desperation of publishing houses to keep selling the same kinds of books to their reliable customer bases in an age of predation and global e-tailers. Bastards.
My goodness, she's good, though. Olivia Laing writes beautifully of the river, of walking, of the strangely euphoric melancholy of walking along the river, of the histories of the places on its banks and fields and with an understanding of the capacity of understanding to effect real change in people's lives.
And yet, this book is catagorized as nature writing and she herself as a nature writer. Her book The Lonely City, which purports to be about being lonely in a city and finding her way through art, gets put in Art history and biography. Her book A Trip to Echo Springs, though, that ended up in Belle Lettres, which makes sense as it is about writers and drinking.
So, even though To the River reads like many of the great travel narratives I've come across, it is shunted off to Nature or to memoir, because women don't write about travel, or about travelling or about the history of places to which they have traveled. Women write about themselves. They write about how their stories intersect with the world outside of them, but mostly they write about themselves. Particularly white women. Women of color must write about themselves in the context of struggles they have encountered on account of being women of color in a world that is built to benefit white men.
Laing's book is more than confessional. Her walks are exhausting, informative, despairing and beautiful. You leave her book tired, feeling like you have to wash unearned road dust off of your face and perhaps find a good pair of shoes for feet that are not sore enough for what you've just imagined and read. Her specificity about nature feeds the illusion. Her thorough research and storytelling feed the illusion. The book is a wonder.
Read it with a glass of water and some hummus and pita.
#40days40books list
Salt-water and other painful cures
The Veins of the Ocean is Patricia Engel's third novel. Set in Miami, the Keys, Cuba and Colombia, the story follows Reina Castillo from a life of terrible routine to something less predictable, less safe and far more open to possibility. After her brother's death in prison, Reina leaves her mother and childhood home of Miami and moves to a small place in the Florida Keys. There she meets Nesto, a refugee from Cuba trying to find a way to be reunited with his children. Their friendship offers Reina something she did not believe she would ever have: a chance to live and to breathe freely.
Nesto's understanding of the ocean brings Reina closer to something that is fundamental to her living, to her life - the water is her balm, it is her refuge. Her travels to Colombia and Cuba to find her family and his give the story breadth and complication. Together, they learn more about survival and living than either had imagined they would.
I loved reading this book. It was quiet, well-organized, surprising and in some ways a relief. Generally speaking, men are offered stories of redemption and women get stories of healing. In this book, it is the other way around. Reina has done wrong and must find a way to live with it. Nesto is living with the pain of separation from the people that he loves and must find a way to carry on for them.
Reina is a working woman. She does nails for a living - customer service work that is paid hourly and has high expectations for performance. Her work is easy enough to find, but the novel does not trivialize or romanticize it. Throughout the book there is little in the way of decoration or unearned romance. Everything is fairly sharp, even the warmth of the ocean air when Reina finally moves to her little perfect cabin near the beach. Nesto brings her awareness out of the walls of her youth and her brother's prison cell to something less definable, more magical. He tells her stories of the spirits of ocean, and she eventually does open her heart and her mind to the possibilities.
The thing that troubles me is something that is troubling in depictions of women in general - they always need saving. Yes, her distress is different, and yes the love story is not at all gooey, and yes she is her own person entirely and yet ...
The barricaded woman is more and more apparent of late. She is socially awkward, abandoned, terrified, home during war, trapped in a world that hates her, etc. She has so many stories. Someday, perhaps, the story will be of healthy solace in that quiet place, rather than basic survival.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we will no longer be the subject of some man's heroism.
#40days40books list
Sunday, October 30, 2016
Ways to remember
#40days40books entry 36
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is Joy Harjo's latest book of poems. She writes of time, of living, saxophones, hotel rooms and remembrance. The work is living, changing from piece to piece and creates a whole that moves within itself as well as on the heart of the reader.
Harjo is a working musician and brings the depth of that life and the depth of history into view in these poems. There is loneliness and love, as there is always, and there are moments of transcendent understanding, but those do not have to be the focus. Sometimes the focus is what limits - the unrecognized treaties, the disenfranchisement of millions of souls, colonizers and the perpetual work they have to do to maintain "control" of land that has been usurped and lives that have been sidelined. Sometimes the focus is the music, the rhythms and voices that carry humanity from one person to the next and also that are tiring and a challenge as they are a call. Every so often we hear from a different voice, a voice that is around, within, without and beyond. It speaks in between and gives what is not a frame, but a foundation for the approach to the conflict, and the recognition of holiness in beings.
Joy Harjo writes such whole works of poetry - the poems all work together as a kind of guide taking readers along a path they would never have seen or imagined on their own. She tracks the world with our feet and then bends all the laws we think we know to make something else possible.
I picked up this book because I really like hardcover poetry books - it's a thing that came with the job and may not leave with it gone. I'd read A Map to the Next World in a class on Native Women writers back in my (extremely long) undergrad career, and knew that her writing is a very real and very deliberate journey. She writes of travel - this is how I walk in to her work. The feel of new roads, of a new/known bar or hotel. She does not travel to get home, she travels to be home.
And home is never uncomplicated, and it is never un-holy.
#40days40books list
Approaching the work with art and Tarot
Jessa Crispin's inspired guide The Creative Tarot is an amazing amalgam of the arcane, the artistic and the delightful. It is as it suggests, a guide to getting familiar with and reading tarot cards for fun and other kinds of profit.
Every card gets its own detailed description along with works from different disciplines to flesh out its definition. Crispin writes from a foundation of respect for work and understanding that the more you put in, the more likely you are to get out - so put in everything you can fit. This book is informative and fun to read. It is also filled with compassion and history and the recognition that there is only so far any one person can go on the coattails (or mystical meanings) of someone else.
Women, generally, tend to be brand loyal. At least, that is how marketing people put it. We find an author, a soap, a makeup line, a department store, and we want to stick with it - we want to find a routine that feeds our lives. You know. Like humans. *cough*
Crispin's book The Dead Ladies Project basically fell off the shelf into my hands, and so, brand loyalty was born. I discovered that she'd written a guide to tarot, and was frankly surprised and also a little dismayed on account of I'd moved out of that phase of my life. I mean, I have the requisite desk in a box that is gorgeous and all, but I'd never done a reading with it. This book was such fun to read, and it offers so much in the way of understanding that work is important and that work is hard that it was not possible to leave the deck on the shelf. So, now there's that fun party moment.
Which lead to probably the best party moment ever. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child released at the end of July (in time for Harry's birthday, natch) and the bookstore threw a party. Because listen, those midnight release parties were a big deal for bookstores back in the day. What fun would it be to live in a world where launch parties were less polite and more magical? Hm.
My roommate saw me reading the book, had me read her cards once and said, "So, you're okay with reading tarot for the Harry Potter party, right?" I love my roommate and so thoughlessly said yes.
And immediately started making notes in the margins of the book about which characters were more like what cards. For an English major, this is like the best honeymoon idea ever - seriously. Not every card got a character because I didn't spend enough time to do it, and will finish it, I think.
I made a very simple 3 card spread that was based on fan fiction themes. And I totally got to tell this little girl about how her summer camp experiences at winning a sport would help her be a good friend in the world. It was like watching someone read a whole book about friendship and volleyball all at once. It was the best. The absolute best.
Jessa Crispin has a newsletter where she writes about tarot, life and other tragedies, and also she is on twitter and has another book coming out in 2017. (but for real, if you like travel, please to read The Dead Ladies Project it is extraordinary)
#40days40books list
Monday, October 24, 2016
The beautiful lectures - Shakespearean Tragedy
This collection of lectures by A.C. Bradley was published in 1904. It was based on talks he gave to students and has been reprinted as a Penguin Classic.
There are eight lectures total, I think. They establish the definition of tragedy that Bradley uses and the history of the plays as they were then knows. Each tragedy that he discusses gets 2 lectures apiece: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. The lectures range from discussion of the individuals at the heart of these tragedies to larger themes that WS addresses, sometimes with conclusions, and sometimes without.
They are informed, informative and delightful.
So, I'm in this Shakespeare Festival Reading Group, and we decided to read this book for our January meeting. We are not always super thoughtful about how much time these books will take to read, but here's the thing - we read them.
I loved this book. It is dense. It is insistent. It repays close attention. It is funny. The lectures are mind-blowing and also - they are incredibly well-organized. You could, with a little bit of time and effort, turn one of them into an interesting twitter thread or tumblr post. The points are succinct and related and flow one from the other. I think that might be a cool way to get into them, actually - to pull out the main ideas and connect them via supporting claims, etc. Ah, social media, how you can inspire closer thought!
Also we're reading Hamlet for November, so I'm totally dipping back into this. There is something very grounding in the experience of thinking through his thoughts on the character of Hamlet - it can help when, as a not-an-actor, I'm faced with words meant to be spoken by someone who knows how.
I think that anyone looking to understand how to craft a good argument about literature should add this book to their list. Along with Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison.
#40days40books list
Saturday, October 22, 2016
The arrow toward What Even is Femininity points this way
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano is a thorough examination of all of the ways sexism and cissexism work in our culture to diminish and demean people who are feminine.
She shares her own experiences in this highly thoughtful and well-researched book that examines the bases for cissexism against transwomen, and its connection to sexism and its constant need to rate femininity and/or its expression as 'less than' masculinity. She uses her background in biochemistry to organize her thoughts and build arguments about and against the kinds of discrimination that target transwomen. It is a book that ought to be read and read again.
We read this book in our Feminists in Love reading group and I am so glad that we did. Serano's arguments are fascinating, yes, but more importantly, they are accurate and intriguing. I was left with a ton of questions that were in no way part of the scope of this book, but that I think are correct to ask. The biggest one that I've had is about how femininity is defined, determined, and disseminated in the larger culture. We see constant depictions of feminine women and men, but masculinity is more specifically named in my culture consumption and that is of interest to me.
Serano is also the person whose definition of the supposed goal of femininity (to be sexually appealing to men) struck me as coherent and unique in my experience. She, of course, complicates that expectation throughout the book.
I still haven't sent my copy to my niece. At some point I will just buy one for her. This book is incredibly important reading. The conversations left in its wake are difficult and messy and go to uncomfortable places, and those are needed places. My own perceptions of how to be a woman are unexamined, and that's not how I want to move through the world. Who even knows what it would be to be a woman in a world that didn't hate us. Asking the question sparks a lot of anger and despair. The anger is motivating; the despair gets a cookie and vitamins and hydration.
#40days40books list
Friday, October 21, 2016
Kingdoms and Gods all turned on their heads
The Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin includes The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, The Kingdom of Gods and the novella The Awakened Kingdom. The world of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is one rich with magic, trade, lore and upheaval. For two thousand years, the Arameri have ruled using the power of four enslaved gods.
Yeine Darr, a grand-daughter of the ruling Arameri, arrives in Sky after her mother's death. She is a grandchild of the current ruler who has never before met her mother's family. With her comes something entirely new and unexpected. Will she survive her family? Will she survive the gods? Will the gods survive her? The story is riveting, strange, familiar and grand. It ranges over centuries by the end of the novella and is ultimately an incredible portrait of a world built on suffering trying to move towards something more like grace.
If you are N.K. Jemisin - I'm a bit in reader-love with your books and your words, just so you know. This is entirely biased and unapologetic.
I read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for a reading group and thought it was really clever and well-developed and a good book. And then I didn't read further in the series because I read another 'clever' book for the same group at about the same time and -
Let's talk about how one book affects another, shall we? Let's talk about how the cynicism that lands when you read books by mediocre authors who use sex, gender, sexuality, race, religion, birthplace, etc. as narrative devices rather than descriptors of people who live in a world that doesn't actually have to be genitally connected to the patriarchy and its pathetic excuse for fantasy (derivation only goes so far before you end up with a straight line) can, in fact, limit the range of your response to a well-written book that is doing something entirely different.
That is what happened. I read a derivative book and it affected how I read Jemisin's novel. I labeled it good, but not great, and shied away from its sequels.
When, a few years later I picked up the gorgeousness that is the Trilogy, I was utterly transfixed by the exploration of the world, the discussion of culture, of survivors, and of what is probably the most amazing and complicated and interesting and not-at-all-gross Dark Lover character EVER WRITTEN IN WORDS THAT I CAN READ.
You know how you don't know you're parched until someone gives you water? That's how I felt reading these books.
Hydrate.
It's good for you.
#40days40books list
Booksellers do not read all day
#40days40books entry 31
This entry is labeled #will someone ever write a bookseller I recognize
Because I have yet to watch a movie, and rarely to read a book that features a bookseller doing a job that I recognize as the job(s) I have had selling books. In point of fact, I've not see someone I know who sells books, either.
Aaliya Saleh of An Unnecessary Woman is the person I most recognize as a bookseller. She is compulsively surrounded by books and lives in them in a personal but distant way. She works hard and walks a ton. Her relationship to the written word is lively but not arrogant.
I tend to cringe at novels featuring booksellers. They tend to be emotionally deficient, reading all the time, and never seem to do much actual work. Books magically shelve themselves (?) and no one ever has to negotiate this ridiculous conversation: "Oh, I'd love to be a bookseller! Just to read all day, how wonderful!" the person says as you have just spent 10 minutes with them clearly not engaged in the act of reading.
Listen. It's a good job. The work is solidly demanding and fulfilling. Books are great and readers tend to speak a secret language to each other that is really wholesome for the introverts that bookstores tend to hire.
And we work. Boxes of books are heavy and must be lifted. Questions of shelving are thorny and must be answered.
Give me a television show about a community made of stores in a strip mall trying to get out of some edge of town hell-mouth and into a derelict building just off the town square - give me the weird politics and social justice issues of local economics. I want to see someone struggle with the decision to keep selling their crafts on-line or throwing in with other folks and setting up as a brick-and-mortar.
Put Kim Fields in charge of the city council, Alison Janney on whatever fence she chooses, and because she's (obvi) the cool garden shop lady, there are a bunch of folks who are waiting for her to make up her damn mind until bffs Traci Ellis-Ross (architect) and Sandra Oh (ecologist) have coffee with bookstore owner and over-worked genius Andrea Navedo whereat they all pick their flags and their sides and Season One ends with a City Council meeting after the old building has been acquired and the city has decided to back the rehab. Season Two is all about the contractors and Season Three follows the first year of residence. Through it all are conversations between folks about the need to shop locally, how to run a business, how to be friends in business with each other. We see mistakes and learning and specificity and loss and the booksellers shelve books. They take inventory. They struggle with figuring out how to deal with a shoplifter in the strip mall. They learn new layouts of stores. They find themselves in constant combat with publishers and distributors and do-gooder community members. You know. Like real damn people living in a world whose global online economy is turning into a malignant tumor.
I know that there was a time when bookselling was not the same as working retail. I know that there are bookstores where that is, in many ways, still true. But that is not my experience and it is not the experience of many people of my acquaintance. If we took the gentility out of the expectation, I think, maybe, our stories could be vital rather than reassuringly old-fashioned.
#40days40books list
This entry is labeled #will someone ever write a bookseller I recognize
Because I have yet to watch a movie, and rarely to read a book that features a bookseller doing a job that I recognize as the job(s) I have had selling books. In point of fact, I've not see someone I know who sells books, either.
Aaliya Saleh of An Unnecessary Woman is the person I most recognize as a bookseller. She is compulsively surrounded by books and lives in them in a personal but distant way. She works hard and walks a ton. Her relationship to the written word is lively but not arrogant.
I tend to cringe at novels featuring booksellers. They tend to be emotionally deficient, reading all the time, and never seem to do much actual work. Books magically shelve themselves (?) and no one ever has to negotiate this ridiculous conversation: "Oh, I'd love to be a bookseller! Just to read all day, how wonderful!" the person says as you have just spent 10 minutes with them clearly not engaged in the act of reading.
Listen. It's a good job. The work is solidly demanding and fulfilling. Books are great and readers tend to speak a secret language to each other that is really wholesome for the introverts that bookstores tend to hire.
And we work. Boxes of books are heavy and must be lifted. Questions of shelving are thorny and must be answered.
Give me a television show about a community made of stores in a strip mall trying to get out of some edge of town hell-mouth and into a derelict building just off the town square - give me the weird politics and social justice issues of local economics. I want to see someone struggle with the decision to keep selling their crafts on-line or throwing in with other folks and setting up as a brick-and-mortar.
Put Kim Fields in charge of the city council, Alison Janney on whatever fence she chooses, and because she's (obvi) the cool garden shop lady, there are a bunch of folks who are waiting for her to make up her damn mind until bffs Traci Ellis-Ross (architect) and Sandra Oh (ecologist) have coffee with bookstore owner and over-worked genius Andrea Navedo whereat they all pick their flags and their sides and Season One ends with a City Council meeting after the old building has been acquired and the city has decided to back the rehab. Season Two is all about the contractors and Season Three follows the first year of residence. Through it all are conversations between folks about the need to shop locally, how to run a business, how to be friends in business with each other. We see mistakes and learning and specificity and loss and the booksellers shelve books. They take inventory. They struggle with figuring out how to deal with a shoplifter in the strip mall. They learn new layouts of stores. They find themselves in constant combat with publishers and distributors and do-gooder community members. You know. Like real damn people living in a world whose global online economy is turning into a malignant tumor.
I know that there was a time when bookselling was not the same as working retail. I know that there are bookstores where that is, in many ways, still true. But that is not my experience and it is not the experience of many people of my acquaintance. If we took the gentility out of the expectation, I think, maybe, our stories could be vital rather than reassuringly old-fashioned.
#40days40books list
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Women and their barricades
#40days40books entry 30
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabin Alameddine follows the story of Aaliya Saleh, a 72 yeard old retired bookseller living in Beirut. She is a single, childless women living alone in her apartment. The book opens with her drunk on New Year's Eve having accidentally dyed her hair blue. Her memories span marriage, divorce, conflict, struggle, loneliness and now old age. It is compassionate, funny, brutal and deeply affirming. I have a lot of love for Aaliya. She is kindred in many ways.
A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa is a novelized account of a women who, in real life, bricked herself into her brother-in-law's apartment during Angola's successful bid for independence from Portugal. She lived there for 28 years. The novel follows many other people from that day to the present, and, like many war stories, addresses the complications of survival and success and how those are measured differently. Ludovico wrote on the walls with charcoal when she ran out of books to write in. She burned books for fuel. She trapped pigeons for food. Her success at living behind her bricked wall is nothing short of tremendous.
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett is a novel that follows an unnamed woman living in mostly solitude around her life for several months, perhaps a year. There is very little that is concrete in this book. It is an internal monologue that veers from absurd and delightful to cringe-worthy in the space of a sentence. The woman is not much in company and deeply uncomfortable after. She lives with the constant threat of depression, a reality that is finally and troublingly manifested in toward the end of the book.
Eggshells by Caitriona Lally (not yet published, look for it in February of 2017) is about a young woman called Vivian who has moved into her dead great-aunt's house in Dublin and who sets about ordering her life according to her own terms entirely. She's decided she needs a friends called Penelope, puts up signs advertising for her and then is somewhat surprised when Penelope calls and they begin a gentle friendship. Viv walks the streets of Dublin regularly and each chapter has a line drawing of the shape of her journey.
Every woman in these books has deliberately barricaded herself from the world. Sometimes that choice is made easier by mental illness or war or the inertia of circumstance. That said, they all survive, and do so pretty well. There are no tragedies here, no grand passionate outbursts or despairing destruction.
It's something I'd like to write more about, because the type of woman who generally is seen on her own is a woman who has become somehow violent or stronger. She is Circe, plotting and planning and cursing men, rather than Penelope who ran a kingdom for 20 years in the absence of her husband. I love Penelope. She made the choice to live behind the wall of her marriage and her bedroom rather than join attempts to marry her off. She made that choice. And she did well there. Ultimately, all of these women (all of them) are brought back into the world by a community or the love of a friend.
There have to be more of these women. There just have to be. Someday I'd like to find their stories, because they are so moving.
Also I should like to more carefully define what I mean by self-barricaded so that I can have that folder in my critical analysis brain for future reading.
#40days40books list
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabin Alameddine follows the story of Aaliya Saleh, a 72 yeard old retired bookseller living in Beirut. She is a single, childless women living alone in her apartment. The book opens with her drunk on New Year's Eve having accidentally dyed her hair blue. Her memories span marriage, divorce, conflict, struggle, loneliness and now old age. It is compassionate, funny, brutal and deeply affirming. I have a lot of love for Aaliya. She is kindred in many ways.
A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa is a novelized account of a women who, in real life, bricked herself into her brother-in-law's apartment during Angola's successful bid for independence from Portugal. She lived there for 28 years. The novel follows many other people from that day to the present, and, like many war stories, addresses the complications of survival and success and how those are measured differently. Ludovico wrote on the walls with charcoal when she ran out of books to write in. She burned books for fuel. She trapped pigeons for food. Her success at living behind her bricked wall is nothing short of tremendous.
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett is a novel that follows an unnamed woman living in mostly solitude around her life for several months, perhaps a year. There is very little that is concrete in this book. It is an internal monologue that veers from absurd and delightful to cringe-worthy in the space of a sentence. The woman is not much in company and deeply uncomfortable after. She lives with the constant threat of depression, a reality that is finally and troublingly manifested in toward the end of the book.
Eggshells by Caitriona Lally (not yet published, look for it in February of 2017) is about a young woman called Vivian who has moved into her dead great-aunt's house in Dublin and who sets about ordering her life according to her own terms entirely. She's decided she needs a friends called Penelope, puts up signs advertising for her and then is somewhat surprised when Penelope calls and they begin a gentle friendship. Viv walks the streets of Dublin regularly and each chapter has a line drawing of the shape of her journey.
Every woman in these books has deliberately barricaded herself from the world. Sometimes that choice is made easier by mental illness or war or the inertia of circumstance. That said, they all survive, and do so pretty well. There are no tragedies here, no grand passionate outbursts or despairing destruction.
It's something I'd like to write more about, because the type of woman who generally is seen on her own is a woman who has become somehow violent or stronger. She is Circe, plotting and planning and cursing men, rather than Penelope who ran a kingdom for 20 years in the absence of her husband. I love Penelope. She made the choice to live behind the wall of her marriage and her bedroom rather than join attempts to marry her off. She made that choice. And she did well there. Ultimately, all of these women (all of them) are brought back into the world by a community or the love of a friend.
There have to be more of these women. There just have to be. Someday I'd like to find their stories, because they are so moving.
Also I should like to more carefully define what I mean by self-barricaded so that I can have that folder in my critical analysis brain for future reading.
#40days40books list
Monday, October 17, 2016
How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
Another book from 1983. How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ is a scathing tutorial in systemic sexism. The book is broken up into chapters that address many of the statements seen on the cover and their overall power to erase women from the narratives of publication and existence.
The writing is clear and undecorated, and the citations are rich and varied. The last chapter, particularly, is filled with projects and writers working to bring the work of women of color back into focus. The sting of satire here is pretty strong.
Probably this had a more profound effect on me because I am a writer, and so closely identify with the work that is here discussed. Representation matters. Sadly, every profession in which women have participated has a story that is similar, and everything that is listed in this book is that much more pronounced when the women writing are in any way marginalized.
Have you ever noticed that as soon as someone finds out that one woman was involved in a project whose public face was all men, there are suddenly two or three or twenty more? This book challenges me to look harder at who was writing when, and also I maybe decided to not read men during 2016 (except for reading groups, because duh) and that may have been one of the best reading decisions I made since I rediscovered children's picture books.
#40days40books list
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Angela Davis takes us to school
#40days40books entry 28
Angela Davis's 1983 book Women, Race & Class is a masterwork of cultural commentary. Davis tracks the Women's Movement from its earliest days chronicling the involvement and contributions of Black Women and the frequently dismissive and racist attitudes White Women held toward them, but not their work.
The book is fast-moving and filled with citations from a bibliography that would make any library jealous. Speeches, letters, prison records all contribute to give more texture to a story that many of us are only barely taught, if at all. Here are examples of women working to better the entire world and women working to improve only a very small, very white section of that world.
I cannot emphasize the importance of this book enough. It should be required reading for anyone in these here United States of America.
White ladies who are feminists frequently fall into traps of white feminism (they get racist). This book is a lifetime's worth of history about how and why that happens. Not the racism part, that's the part about living in a society that denegrates all non-white people in order to extend specific privileges to white people and everything that entails. No. This is about the role of racism and classism in the Women's Movement.
Davis's writing is so sharp and fast - her examples and citations come thick and fast. She is a thorough researcher and excellent writer. It is not possible (or desirable) to hide your critical awareness in the craft of this work, and it is something she uses to good effect. While I will have to read it again to have a better grasp of the relationships of the people involved, the network of privilege and its corrosive effects on social justice movements is absolutely secure in my thinking.
It is a simple thing to be a White Woman claiming that being empowered as a women helps raise the bar for all women. It is also an egregious and deadly lie. Davis does not, in this book, ask for guilt or shame. She offers questions about complicity and ambition instead. Her work is pointed and purposeful. It is troubling and necessary.
This book is what I measure my decisions against - this is where I go when I have questions about how to feminist while white. Or, more accurately, how Not to feminist while white.
It's short. Shouldn't take long. Will change everything. Go for it.
#40days40books list
Angela Davis's 1983 book Women, Race & Class is a masterwork of cultural commentary. Davis tracks the Women's Movement from its earliest days chronicling the involvement and contributions of Black Women and the frequently dismissive and racist attitudes White Women held toward them, but not their work.
The book is fast-moving and filled with citations from a bibliography that would make any library jealous. Speeches, letters, prison records all contribute to give more texture to a story that many of us are only barely taught, if at all. Here are examples of women working to better the entire world and women working to improve only a very small, very white section of that world.
I cannot emphasize the importance of this book enough. It should be required reading for anyone in these here United States of America.
White ladies who are feminists frequently fall into traps of white feminism (they get racist). This book is a lifetime's worth of history about how and why that happens. Not the racism part, that's the part about living in a society that denegrates all non-white people in order to extend specific privileges to white people and everything that entails. No. This is about the role of racism and classism in the Women's Movement.
Davis's writing is so sharp and fast - her examples and citations come thick and fast. She is a thorough researcher and excellent writer. It is not possible (or desirable) to hide your critical awareness in the craft of this work, and it is something she uses to good effect. While I will have to read it again to have a better grasp of the relationships of the people involved, the network of privilege and its corrosive effects on social justice movements is absolutely secure in my thinking.
It is a simple thing to be a White Woman claiming that being empowered as a women helps raise the bar for all women. It is also an egregious and deadly lie. Davis does not, in this book, ask for guilt or shame. She offers questions about complicity and ambition instead. Her work is pointed and purposeful. It is troubling and necessary.
This book is what I measure my decisions against - this is where I go when I have questions about how to feminist while white. Or, more accurately, how Not to feminist while white.
It's short. Shouldn't take long. Will change everything. Go for it.
#40days40books list
The Marys Wollstonecraft and Shelley
#40days40books entry 27
Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon is a dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft died ten days after Shelley was born, and this is the first biography to treat their relationship, distant as it was, as a viable force in the lives of both women.
Gordon contends that Wollstonecraft spent much of her writing life thinking about how to make the world better for girls and women. She developed curriculum to teach young women so that they could become full humans and not simply reproductive members of society. Mary Shelley lived in the pages of her mother's writing, never not aware of her importance or of the extraordinary expectations people placed on her intellect and behavior because both of her parents were radical philosophers of one kind or another.
The book's structure follows each woman through the same ages of their lives in alternating chapters, which steeps the reader in the ebb and flow of obstacle and understanding that was such an important part of both women's lives. It is an absolute treasure and enlightening reading.
This is a book that I picked up because of the title, to be honest, and just never put back down. I'd read Joanna Russ's brilliant skewering of patriarchal publishing How to Suppress Women's Writing and was ready to learn and ready to be furious at the silencing of so many women's voices over the last 200 years, much less the millennia that came before.
Both women railed against institutionalized sexism in philosophy and fiction. Both women were keenly aware of their relative (but Not total) uniqueness as women in letters. They thought about each other constantly - equally unknown, almost entirely unknowable. There were many times that I had to put the book down and take a deep breath to plunge back in to the terrible waters of blatant male privilege.
I loved it. Charlotte Gordon did an event at the bookstore when the hardcover was released and it was a pleasure to meet her and chat about the role of love in Wollstonecraft and Shelley's writing lives and frameworks.
Added to the bookshelf: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft. I already had A Vindication of the Rights of Women and still haven't finished it on account of constantly feeling the need to put the thing in the freezer.
#40days40books list
Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon is a dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft died ten days after Shelley was born, and this is the first biography to treat their relationship, distant as it was, as a viable force in the lives of both women.
Gordon contends that Wollstonecraft spent much of her writing life thinking about how to make the world better for girls and women. She developed curriculum to teach young women so that they could become full humans and not simply reproductive members of society. Mary Shelley lived in the pages of her mother's writing, never not aware of her importance or of the extraordinary expectations people placed on her intellect and behavior because both of her parents were radical philosophers of one kind or another.
The book's structure follows each woman through the same ages of their lives in alternating chapters, which steeps the reader in the ebb and flow of obstacle and understanding that was such an important part of both women's lives. It is an absolute treasure and enlightening reading.
This is a book that I picked up because of the title, to be honest, and just never put back down. I'd read Joanna Russ's brilliant skewering of patriarchal publishing How to Suppress Women's Writing and was ready to learn and ready to be furious at the silencing of so many women's voices over the last 200 years, much less the millennia that came before.
Both women railed against institutionalized sexism in philosophy and fiction. Both women were keenly aware of their relative (but Not total) uniqueness as women in letters. They thought about each other constantly - equally unknown, almost entirely unknowable. There were many times that I had to put the book down and take a deep breath to plunge back in to the terrible waters of blatant male privilege.
I loved it. Charlotte Gordon did an event at the bookstore when the hardcover was released and it was a pleasure to meet her and chat about the role of love in Wollstonecraft and Shelley's writing lives and frameworks.
Added to the bookshelf: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft. I already had A Vindication of the Rights of Women and still haven't finished it on account of constantly feeling the need to put the thing in the freezer.
#40days40books list
Friday, October 14, 2016
Love, InshAllah and the power of possibility
Love, InshAllah is a collection of stories by American Muslim Women talking about love and their love lives. The book and website are a wealth of wonderful writing about every aspect of loving relationships.
Here are stories of lost and found love, unexpected love, unrequited love, that one guy who was a terrible idea but oh well love - all of it. The women are from all over the country and world and their stories are in no way same from one to the next. They share labels and it is in the context of those labels that this collection finds its connections. It is well edited, well organized and engaging.
I'd learned about the website (which is wonderful and which should be required reading at least once a week) from the podcast Good Muslim Bad Muslim with Taz Ahmed and Zara Noorbakhsh (both are anthologized in this book). The podcast is produced monthly and is incredible and everyone should listen to it.
Love stories are important. Not the force fed ones with terrible gender politics and classism and racism, etc. and ad stupididem. The ones that we tell each other about our own lives - how many of us know the stories of how our parents met, how Stephen Colbert met his wife, that one time when you just stopped breathing because someone walked in the room. We fall in love. We love our friends. We love our families. We love our cities and our gardens and the furry/feathered ones who live in our houses. Love is daily. We tell its stories because it is our stories.
This collection reminded me.
#40days40books list
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Between the World and Me does not need my introduction
Between the World and Me from Ta-Nehisi Coates is a letter written to his son that is a monologue about what it means to be a Black man in America. Coates talks about his education, his professional and personal decisions and his responses to the world. He also relates stories of public expressions of racism that his son was present for, but may have missed or remembered differently because of his age.
It is not an easy book. Open it anywhere and there are hard words and uncomfortable truths from someone who is seemingly forever sharing hard words and uncomfortable truths.
Honestly, if you are reading this blog, you already know about this book. I have nothing of meaning to add, so will offer instead a couple of links.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Another Round
The Year of Black Memoir by Imani Perry for Public Books
A Matter of Words by Jarek Steele (in response to BLM signs and white privilege)
Also, if you get the chance to listen to the audio book, I recommend it. Reading the words after will be even more of a gut punch, but it is incredible to hear Coates speak his words to 'you' who is, in my case, definitely not 'me.'
#40days40books list
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Finding what troubles me in Trace
Lauret Savoy is a geologist of mixed heritage. Her book Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape is a study in finding the stories that wind, water, time, and discomfort have eroded. She begins with a memory of traveling as a child to the Grand Canyon. The beauty of the landscape and the sting of casual racism in the memory of a woman who once was seven years old set the tone for the whole book.
Her specificity and understanding of how to tell the story of the land evoke clear images of places I've never seen. She travels along the border with Mexico and interacts with a man on patrol there. She and a friend tour a plantation in South Carolina and have questions about the absence of enslaved people in the narratives shared about the house. In the desert she goes looking for an army base and finds remnants. Ragged threads and bits of stories put together to work out the layers of her life before, the layers of the people who made her, who came before her, who lived, and left traces of themselves in the land. It takes sharp eyes and ears to pick them out, and she has both.
I grabbed this off the new release shelf the day that it came out. The cover is intense and intriguing, the subtitle is inviting and the author's background in geology was like a door opening up to some unimagined library. I love how scientists write about the world. Their specificity and ability to see the story of a place, of a tree or insect or weather pattern is captivating. And I wasn't disappointed. There is no place in this book for me to put my own memories over any of her landscapes - they are so sharp and clear and rooted that all the imaginative work reading this is in keeping up with her.
And it's hard work. There is loss and erasure. There are vast scopes of time, human and geologic, to cope with. There is the personal damage of racism, the psychic amputation of foiled creativity, the injustice of the forgotten. No landscape can lie about its origins in her gaze. I get poetic talking about the book, and that is how it should be.
This was also the first book I reviewed for WomenArts Quarterly.
People of color travel. People of color write. They photograph, draw, science, music, food, paint, sculpt, plant, shape, sew, etc. So where are the travel books? The answer is too obvious to warrant the question, and yet - we ask.
There are growing movements of people working to encourage change in the travel industry and in the world. Here are a few:
Nomadness Travel Tribe
TravelNoire
Vagrant Anonymous - in particular Decolonizing Travel
Bani Amor - also on twitter
#40days40books list
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Hair and the processing of privilege
#40days40books entry 23
Women's hair is big business and big fashion. There are not enough pages in the world to deconstruct the relationship between our dead scalp strands and ourselves. These two books are part of what happens when women take each other seriously and start to look at how hair molds and defines us and our journeys in the world.
Me, My Hair, and I is an anthology of 27 essays by women from a variety of backgrounds. The essays range from personal to political, and from dye jobs to pubic hair. Hair Story is a more historical work that chronicles Black Hair in America from the time of slavery to the present. The 2nd edition was published in 2014.
Both books are thought-provoking, intimate and engaging.
I grabbed Me, My Hair, and I off of the galley shelves in a flurry of passion. I love to listen to women talking seriously about hair, and how wonderful to find a book whose cover promised an incredible range of voices and experiences.
And a white lady with dredlocs. You know.
At first, I had decided not to read that essay. And then, after being blown away by the politics and culture exposed and discussed so eloquently in some of the other essays, two things happened. I read a review of the book that pointed out the abundance of women of color on the cover as opposed to their words in the book. And then I heard Dr. Adrienne Keene's interview on Another Round, in which she talks about her hair for a moment.
Suddenly, clarity.
There are no veiled women in this book. Or Native women, or women discussing the struggles of Asian hair, and the Black women write about the politics and pain of hair only. And that one about the dredlocs? Listen. I read it and almost threw the book across the room.
I ordered Hair Story the next day. I found it because in my quest to find Black Women Travel Writers I found Lori Tharps (and Lauret Savoy.)(and that is all)(which is a conversation I will have later) who co-authored the book. The bibliography is like a candy store of information.
It is important that the things women do to ourselves to exist in the world are acknowledged as having meaning. The business of hair is huge, it has far-ranging cultural weight, it has environmental weight, and it isn't going away.
Benedict's book shares important stories, and you do have to deal with the blanket of white privilege to get at them. It's sticky and gets everywhere. Looking beyond privilege and discomfort with it is work. Seeking out stories in different voices means understanding the range of difference in voices. It means listening without response. It means being uncomfortable with ourselves. It means that we look harder when hair is used as a tool of abuse. It means we stop apologizing for the women who appropriate.
White women are not taught that we are complicit in the culture of oppression. So we have to learn to identify it. Naming for each other the places where we must do better is part of that learning.
Meanwhile, have this from the Guardian. It is glorious.
#40days40books list
Women's hair is big business and big fashion. There are not enough pages in the world to deconstruct the relationship between our dead scalp strands and ourselves. These two books are part of what happens when women take each other seriously and start to look at how hair molds and defines us and our journeys in the world.
Me, My Hair, and I is an anthology of 27 essays by women from a variety of backgrounds. The essays range from personal to political, and from dye jobs to pubic hair. Hair Story is a more historical work that chronicles Black Hair in America from the time of slavery to the present. The 2nd edition was published in 2014.
Both books are thought-provoking, intimate and engaging.
I grabbed Me, My Hair, and I off of the galley shelves in a flurry of passion. I love to listen to women talking seriously about hair, and how wonderful to find a book whose cover promised an incredible range of voices and experiences.
And a white lady with dredlocs. You know.
At first, I had decided not to read that essay. And then, after being blown away by the politics and culture exposed and discussed so eloquently in some of the other essays, two things happened. I read a review of the book that pointed out the abundance of women of color on the cover as opposed to their words in the book. And then I heard Dr. Adrienne Keene's interview on Another Round, in which she talks about her hair for a moment.
Suddenly, clarity.
There are no veiled women in this book. Or Native women, or women discussing the struggles of Asian hair, and the Black women write about the politics and pain of hair only. And that one about the dredlocs? Listen. I read it and almost threw the book across the room.
I ordered Hair Story the next day. I found it because in my quest to find Black Women Travel Writers I found Lori Tharps (and Lauret Savoy.)(and that is all)(which is a conversation I will have later) who co-authored the book. The bibliography is like a candy store of information.
It is important that the things women do to ourselves to exist in the world are acknowledged as having meaning. The business of hair is huge, it has far-ranging cultural weight, it has environmental weight, and it isn't going away.
Benedict's book shares important stories, and you do have to deal with the blanket of white privilege to get at them. It's sticky and gets everywhere. Looking beyond privilege and discomfort with it is work. Seeking out stories in different voices means understanding the range of difference in voices. It means listening without response. It means being uncomfortable with ourselves. It means that we look harder when hair is used as a tool of abuse. It means we stop apologizing for the women who appropriate.
White women are not taught that we are complicit in the culture of oppression. So we have to learn to identify it. Naming for each other the places where we must do better is part of that learning.
Meanwhile, have this from the Guardian. It is glorious.
#40days40books list
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Shh! We Have a Plan or the fragility of bad ideas
Shh! We Have a Plan is Chris Haughton's cautionary tale about the dangers of bad ideas and over-reaching.
Four un-named characters wearing hats spy a bird and while one of them is interested in greeting the flying creature, the others urge silence, saying that they "have a plan" to catch it. The plans fall apart, of course, each one more ludicrously than the last.
The littlest one never varies in kindness, kindness and stillness which are repaid handsomely by the birds during the course of the story. The hunters, though, they do not fare quite so well, never learning the power of kindness and friendship.
The images are bright and minimal, and carry the story along with ease and interest.
Storytime is the place where I get to make all the goofy mouth noises. This book is an enormous amount of fun to read because there are not so many words to read upside down and backwards (think of me when you next read Dr. Seuss). Also because as a reader, you get to make your voice loud and soft, tense and kind, hopeful and defeated. It's so fun and the kids never don't love it.
The humor in it is the kind of thing that seems to translate well for children. The people who are laughable are, indeed, doing something that is wrong, and that we know is wrong. We know it because an alternative has been presented - one that is kind and quiet and likely to work. All of the plans the taller three characters have involve trapping the bird. Kids are thrilled when they end up falling out of trees, over each other and into water. They gasp at the crowd of birds that surrounds the littlest one whose only attempts have been at gentle friendship.
We can only hope that the three taller characters learn from their friend that saying hello and offering a bite to eat is a much better way to interact with the world than trying always to catch a thing. Simple community building with a good dose of actually funny humor.
#40days40books list
Shifting out of first gear
#40days40books entry 21
You have to know. To understand. Nothing happens in a vacuum.
On August 9, 2014 everything changed. The World Changed. Every word written here, every book listed, every reason for this list, all of it happens in a world that is not what it was before. Before Ferguson. Before Gamergate. Before all of the conversations that stripped complacency from awareness and left me grasping for some kind of sedative that would keep me from falling back into the abyss, but that had room for laughter and romance and silliness. And, yes, those are resistance and they are needed. Reading quiets the storm in my head. Gives me a map, a way toward something better. There are whole lists of books for anyone interested.
Here is the shape of my on-ramp:
Bad Feminist is a collection of essays that catapulted Roxane Gay into think-piece stardom. Her social media presence is inimitable and intimate and her essays are no different. They range from the questions that women have about enjoying pop culture in a world where all pop culture uses our bodies as objects, sometimes violently, to just how competitive a person can get about Scrabble. Her work is complicated and wide-spread. She sees much and writes with the awareness that brings her. It is not an easy collection. There is rape and there are terrible repercussions of rape. There is discomfort and bad decision making. All of the things that make adulting such a you-tube phenomenon.
Unspeakable Things comes from a young woman who brings something utterly troubling to the table: a picture of life on the ground floor of revolution and exactly how full of shit it is. Laurie Penny writes about the realities of sexual politics in activism and the presence of rape culture in the Occupy movement. She writes about the effects of the recession on the men in her life. She writes about the growing awareness of young men that the patriarchy doesn't care about them anymore than it cares about women. She, also, writes about rape.
The thread that binds.
Roxane Gay's book came out in August of 2014, Laurie Penny's in September. They signaled the beginning of a different kind of feminist bookshelf - one explicitly connected to the world of pop culture and social media. This is not to say that feminists and social justice activists have not used social media for years - quite the opposite, in fact. Publishing and bookstores in the white majority main stream book world are finally catching on. It takes a while. The status quo is heavy and persistent. Or so we are told.
More than one person I talked to read bits of these books and put them down, saying that it wasn't like they disagreed with anything in them, but that the conversations are 40+ years old and shouldn't we have stopped having them by now.
I overheard a deeply privileged woman expressing a common theme among white ladies: Gay's feminism is fine, but too much in the world of pop-culture.
Penny's book was criticized by a friend of mine for not seeing how dangerous the world is for women of color. She pointed out that the kind of revolution that many white activists think they are advocating for puts many marginalized people in grave and immediate danger.
We do not get to choose the revolutionary narrative. It is not our right. Or our privilege.
These books were the place I began. I am working to read more, to think more, to be unwilling to turn off my brain in order to laugh or be transported. I like my brain. It thinks things. Turning if off or walking away from is simply good practice for collusion with oppression.
#40days40books list
You have to know. To understand. Nothing happens in a vacuum.
On August 9, 2014 everything changed. The World Changed. Every word written here, every book listed, every reason for this list, all of it happens in a world that is not what it was before. Before Ferguson. Before Gamergate. Before all of the conversations that stripped complacency from awareness and left me grasping for some kind of sedative that would keep me from falling back into the abyss, but that had room for laughter and romance and silliness. And, yes, those are resistance and they are needed. Reading quiets the storm in my head. Gives me a map, a way toward something better. There are whole lists of books for anyone interested.
Here is the shape of my on-ramp:
Bad Feminist is a collection of essays that catapulted Roxane Gay into think-piece stardom. Her social media presence is inimitable and intimate and her essays are no different. They range from the questions that women have about enjoying pop culture in a world where all pop culture uses our bodies as objects, sometimes violently, to just how competitive a person can get about Scrabble. Her work is complicated and wide-spread. She sees much and writes with the awareness that brings her. It is not an easy collection. There is rape and there are terrible repercussions of rape. There is discomfort and bad decision making. All of the things that make adulting such a you-tube phenomenon.
Unspeakable Things comes from a young woman who brings something utterly troubling to the table: a picture of life on the ground floor of revolution and exactly how full of shit it is. Laurie Penny writes about the realities of sexual politics in activism and the presence of rape culture in the Occupy movement. She writes about the effects of the recession on the men in her life. She writes about the growing awareness of young men that the patriarchy doesn't care about them anymore than it cares about women. She, also, writes about rape.
The thread that binds.
Roxane Gay's book came out in August of 2014, Laurie Penny's in September. They signaled the beginning of a different kind of feminist bookshelf - one explicitly connected to the world of pop culture and social media. This is not to say that feminists and social justice activists have not used social media for years - quite the opposite, in fact. Publishing and bookstores in the white majority main stream book world are finally catching on. It takes a while. The status quo is heavy and persistent. Or so we are told.
More than one person I talked to read bits of these books and put them down, saying that it wasn't like they disagreed with anything in them, but that the conversations are 40+ years old and shouldn't we have stopped having them by now.
I overheard a deeply privileged woman expressing a common theme among white ladies: Gay's feminism is fine, but too much in the world of pop-culture.
Penny's book was criticized by a friend of mine for not seeing how dangerous the world is for women of color. She pointed out that the kind of revolution that many white activists think they are advocating for puts many marginalized people in grave and immediate danger.
We do not get to choose the revolutionary narrative. It is not our right. Or our privilege.
These books were the place I began. I am working to read more, to think more, to be unwilling to turn off my brain in order to laugh or be transported. I like my brain. It thinks things. Turning if off or walking away from is simply good practice for collusion with oppression.
#40days40books list
no more lady novels for me, thanks
#40days40books entry 20
Somewhere along the way, I realized that I don't read a lot of fiction written by women. Specifically I don't read romance novels and I don't read domestic fiction.
There's a reason.
What I mean by 'lady novel' and 'domestic fiction' is this story line: Amy and Betsy have been married for 14 years and everything seems perfect. Until Now. A family tragedy opens old wounds and Amy struggles with a dark secret that threatens everything she's worked for. And what happens with Betsy has to confront her own doubts and questions?
The dark secret is: adultery, incest or rape (sometimes all of them). The doubts are usually sexuality or trust. The family tragedy is either a terminal illness or the death of a child.
You've read this book. You've read a bajillion of this book. Someday I would love to write about how global on-line etailers have directly contributed to the rise of this specific kind of book.
For now it is enough to say: enough.
As a woman who writes things and who loves to support women who write things, I read women's writing. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, blogs, essays, tweets and listicles.
But not this. Not this limited, classist, homophobic, sexist, lazy narrative promoting nonsense.
There are books that do not, by the way, conform to this obnoxiousness, even as they look like they do.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng is a story about a family reeling from the death of a child. The dead girl's parents and older brother struggle to face what that means in their own ways, and that involves dredging conversations out of long-held silences. There is adultery. There is racism. There is a kind of internalized sexism. There is hero-worship of the golden boy. But it works. It is never easy. It is never convenient. It never panders to privilege.
And it could be the norm.
Until then, I will stick with my barricaded ladies and Irish internal monologues.
#40days40books list
Somewhere along the way, I realized that I don't read a lot of fiction written by women. Specifically I don't read romance novels and I don't read domestic fiction.
There's a reason.
What I mean by 'lady novel' and 'domestic fiction' is this story line: Amy and Betsy have been married for 14 years and everything seems perfect. Until Now. A family tragedy opens old wounds and Amy struggles with a dark secret that threatens everything she's worked for. And what happens with Betsy has to confront her own doubts and questions?
The dark secret is: adultery, incest or rape (sometimes all of them). The doubts are usually sexuality or trust. The family tragedy is either a terminal illness or the death of a child.
You've read this book. You've read a bajillion of this book. Someday I would love to write about how global on-line etailers have directly contributed to the rise of this specific kind of book.
For now it is enough to say: enough.
As a woman who writes things and who loves to support women who write things, I read women's writing. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, blogs, essays, tweets and listicles.
But not this. Not this limited, classist, homophobic, sexist, lazy narrative promoting nonsense.
There are books that do not, by the way, conform to this obnoxiousness, even as they look like they do.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng is a story about a family reeling from the death of a child. The dead girl's parents and older brother struggle to face what that means in their own ways, and that involves dredging conversations out of long-held silences. There is adultery. There is racism. There is a kind of internalized sexism. There is hero-worship of the golden boy. But it works. It is never easy. It is never convenient. It never panders to privilege.
And it could be the norm.
Until then, I will stick with my barricaded ladies and Irish internal monologues.
#40days40books list
Friday, October 7, 2016
The Odyssey takes its shape
#40days40books entry 19
The story of Odysseus is part of a larger cycle of epic tales of warriors, travelers and the ancient world. Odysseus left home to go to war. 20 years later he returned home. This is the story of that journey.
Telemachus, at age 21, leaves home to find news of his father.
Penelope, presumed widowed after 20 years, is occupied outwitting her impertinent and dangerous suitors.
Okay. I own eighteen translations of this book. They are all in English and most of them are in verse. I had to make a decision early on in order to control the number of copies that would find their way into my home.
What happened is NaNoWriMo 2011. That year's novel idea was based around the production of a mini-series of The Odyssey starring Sean Bean. It hadn't been quite ten years since Troy was released, and it seemed a good source for varied and challenging storytelling. Word counts are at the heart of NaNo and it's tough to write when you have no idea what you are going to write about, yeah? So. Follow an actor, a character, a scene, a difficulty with translation, Athena showing up and messing with things - all of those provide enough prompt to get one or two thousand words out of. Nothing has been done with the work since then.
Except this - 18 translations of The Odyssey. 8 translations of The Iliad and 5 of The Aeneid (because folks usually translate these three as a set, so why not?).
Penelope is forever my favorite character - she of the woven barricade and sharp business skills. Telemachus is deeply interesting and at a crucial place in his life. Odysseus is kind of a dick, and an excellent storyteller. There are days of conversation in that connection. Proteus, Nausikaa, Kalypso, Kirke, Menelaus, Helen and Nestor all hold the edges of this crazed quest in shape.
Different translations and verses outline the people differently - something I find endlessly fascinating. The story has lived for so long that any attempts to force it into one or another shape are constantly thwarted. Translations can only force so much, something I find deeply satisfying and troubling with every read.
So far the Cowper translation is my favorite, but as it is out of print and impossible find - the Fitzgerald translation is my favorite that is on my shelf.
At some point, I'll share the catalog of that collection with commentary.
Not yet, though. This is about what happened to my library on account of Left Bank Books.
It's a map, not the journey. Not as yet.
#40days40book list
The usage of a coffee table
#40days40books entry 18
Monasteries and Monastic Orders: 2000 Years of Christian Art and Culture is a survey in photos, maps and explanatory essays of monasteries in Europe and the orders that built them. It is organized chronologically by order. Within every order's section there are 2 to 4 pages devoted to each monastery and its landscape. There is a section for women's orders. Not beguines, but that's hardly surprising.
The focus is entirely academic and artistic. Organizing the book chronologically allows the author to frame developments in architecture, decoration and communal living as they follow one from the other. The text is informative and rich in fact, of course, although not without humor and a real sense that the audience is someone who is interested in understanding and can read the imagery and design choices in the photographs. It is a thoroughly gorgeous book.
This book is almost exactly the size of the coffee table. And the coffee table is not small.
There are always books that sell much better than anyone could have predicted. We're always surprised. Partly because, as said, no one predicted it. That was the case with this one. Everything about the experience of reading this book is appealing. The colors on the cover are muted and invite contemplation. The book weighs more than 8 pounds. So bringing it home on public transport was fun.
I used to go and visit it on random Sundays off. Because I knew how to Sunday afternoon in St. Louis.
Itinerary for a Winter Sunday in early 2014:
Brunch at Mokabe's unless you are feeling flush and have a new book in which case brunch at Cafe Madeline.
Walk in the park. Pick a park. There are a gagillion.
Bus and train downtown - leave the train at the convention center and stroll back to Central Library.
2pm concert at the Cathedral with a small crowd of 40. Let the carving and the storytelling of the cathedral and the music shift your focus and astonish your senses. Have faith for a moment or two. Breathe differently the reverential air and let it be in your body.
Walk outside.
Read the buildings. Read the sunshine. Read the air and the sidewalk and the sounds of the city.
Feel your footsteps as lines of rhythm adding to history. Go slow.
By the time you get to Bridge, the brightness will have mellowed and your sight will have moved back into this century. The darkness of the bar will soothe.
Order something dark and spicy. Ask to have it in a pretty glass.
Head through the door into the bookstore - rather the opposite of heading into the Wardrobe - it is all golden wood and sunshine and open space.
Put the beer down on the counter - you need two hands for this.
Head to the Architecture section and gently, oh so gently, slide the book off the shelf.
Cradle it as you walk back to the counter. Remember - this book is not lightweight.
Be silent as you stand over the open pages. Do not spill your beer. Do not gulp it. You are surrounded by the work of work. It is sacred and deserves care.
Walk the corridors and colonnades of centuries gone charming and culture made oppressive. Consider the quiet of a faithful life, the struggles and work and rites and lights. Remember the air of the cathedral you just left and push it forward four hundred years until your lungs hurt and you are not sure if it is the beer clouding your awareness or the book.
Stay there. Until your eyes see the dust moving in sunbeams trapped in photographs thousands of miles and several years away. Until you hear chants you cannot know and the shuffling or striding of feet under robes. Move through the centuries as you turn the pages. Move around the Continent and up and down naves and around chapels. Say prayers in a voice that is not your own.
Take a breath.
Close the book.
Put it back, and go read the world anew.
My Sundays look very different now. The counter in a sun-filled space is replaced with a coffee table at home. I am more likely to have a glass of water than a glass of beer and do not need to travel so far to scour the distractions of modern life from my eyes. But the book remains. And transports. Every time.
#40days40books list
Monasteries and Monastic Orders: 2000 Years of Christian Art and Culture is a survey in photos, maps and explanatory essays of monasteries in Europe and the orders that built them. It is organized chronologically by order. Within every order's section there are 2 to 4 pages devoted to each monastery and its landscape. There is a section for women's orders. Not beguines, but that's hardly surprising.
The focus is entirely academic and artistic. Organizing the book chronologically allows the author to frame developments in architecture, decoration and communal living as they follow one from the other. The text is informative and rich in fact, of course, although not without humor and a real sense that the audience is someone who is interested in understanding and can read the imagery and design choices in the photographs. It is a thoroughly gorgeous book.
 |
| Opening this feels like walking into church |
This book is almost exactly the size of the coffee table. And the coffee table is not small.
There are always books that sell much better than anyone could have predicted. We're always surprised. Partly because, as said, no one predicted it. That was the case with this one. Everything about the experience of reading this book is appealing. The colors on the cover are muted and invite contemplation. The book weighs more than 8 pounds. So bringing it home on public transport was fun.
I used to go and visit it on random Sundays off. Because I knew how to Sunday afternoon in St. Louis.
Itinerary for a Winter Sunday in early 2014:
Brunch at Mokabe's unless you are feeling flush and have a new book in which case brunch at Cafe Madeline.
Walk in the park. Pick a park. There are a gagillion.
Bus and train downtown - leave the train at the convention center and stroll back to Central Library.
2pm concert at the Cathedral with a small crowd of 40. Let the carving and the storytelling of the cathedral and the music shift your focus and astonish your senses. Have faith for a moment or two. Breathe differently the reverential air and let it be in your body.
Walk outside.
Read the buildings. Read the sunshine. Read the air and the sidewalk and the sounds of the city.
Feel your footsteps as lines of rhythm adding to history. Go slow.
By the time you get to Bridge, the brightness will have mellowed and your sight will have moved back into this century. The darkness of the bar will soothe.
Order something dark and spicy. Ask to have it in a pretty glass.
Head through the door into the bookstore - rather the opposite of heading into the Wardrobe - it is all golden wood and sunshine and open space.
Put the beer down on the counter - you need two hands for this.
Head to the Architecture section and gently, oh so gently, slide the book off the shelf.
Cradle it as you walk back to the counter. Remember - this book is not lightweight.
Be silent as you stand over the open pages. Do not spill your beer. Do not gulp it. You are surrounded by the work of work. It is sacred and deserves care.
Walk the corridors and colonnades of centuries gone charming and culture made oppressive. Consider the quiet of a faithful life, the struggles and work and rites and lights. Remember the air of the cathedral you just left and push it forward four hundred years until your lungs hurt and you are not sure if it is the beer clouding your awareness or the book.
Stay there. Until your eyes see the dust moving in sunbeams trapped in photographs thousands of miles and several years away. Until you hear chants you cannot know and the shuffling or striding of feet under robes. Move through the centuries as you turn the pages. Move around the Continent and up and down naves and around chapels. Say prayers in a voice that is not your own.
Take a breath.
Close the book.
Put it back, and go read the world anew.
My Sundays look very different now. The counter in a sun-filled space is replaced with a coffee table at home. I am more likely to have a glass of water than a glass of beer and do not need to travel so far to scour the distractions of modern life from my eyes. But the book remains. And transports. Every time.
#40days40books list
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Luke Cage reading
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/mike-colter-luke-cage/
http://www.salon.com/2016/10/05/luke-cage-and-the-racial-empathy-gap-why-do-they-talk-about-being-black-all-the-time/
http://www.refinery29.com/2016/10/125108/luke-cage-black-characters-saying-n-word
http://fusion.net/story/353229/luke-cage-review/
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/mike-colter-interview-luke-cage-marvel-netflix-the-defenders-black-lives-matter-terence-crutcher-a7344931.html
http://fusion.net/story/348066/luke-cage-hoodie-trayvon-martin/
https://www.fastcocreate.com/3064174/a-love-letter-to-black-women-cheo-hodari-coker-the-gender-dynamics-of-luke-cage
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/creating-luke-cage-the-first-woke-black-superhero-show
http://www.salon.com/2016/10/05/luke-cage-and-the-racial-empathy-gap-why-do-they-talk-about-being-black-all-the-time/
http://www.refinery29.com/2016/10/125108/luke-cage-black-characters-saying-n-word
http://fusion.net/story/353229/luke-cage-review/
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/mike-colter-interview-luke-cage-marvel-netflix-the-defenders-black-lives-matter-terence-crutcher-a7344931.html
http://fusion.net/story/348066/luke-cage-hoodie-trayvon-martin/
https://www.fastcocreate.com/3064174/a-love-letter-to-black-women-cheo-hodari-coker-the-gender-dynamics-of-luke-cage
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/creating-luke-cage-the-first-woke-black-superhero-show
bell hooks and the challenges of loving
#40days40books entry 17
In All About Love, bell hooks takes her readers on a deeply felt journey into the heart of what it means to be a human who feels love. She digs through book after book about relationships and love to find definitions, perceptions, examples and possibilities for love in and out of relationships. It is not an easy journey to take, and it is not certain what will await us at the end. Her language is conversational and intimate, providing a kind of linguistic safe space for when the words come perilously close.
What is it to love as a verb rather than as a noun? What is it to look at the relationships in our lives and stop saying love where there is none? How does love love? Where is it, how is it, what does it bring to our lives at home and in the world? This book is a call to live in love actively and deliberately. hooks offers a challenge that is not about winning, rather about shifting perspectives and with them our lives.
I was introduced to this book by a co-worker over Valentine's Day one year as part of our Staff Pick display.
Loving relationships, particularly long-lasting ones, are complicated and living. Some of them need lots of thick and dense time and emotion to maintain, and some are less high-energy, though no less important or honest. Friendship is, to me, the bedrock of all loving relationships outside of family (although there is a ton of overlap), so deep contemplation of what that means is welcome.
It turns out that I'm deeply romantic, which does not translate easily as a consciously single person with extremely intense friendships. It's not impossible or improbable or anything, but it's not normalized, so it's not normal. Spending time pondering questions like "What does it mean to do my dishes in a loving way?" is not regular for many people, and yet the question is asked and it remains because every now and then I need reminding of it.
bell hooks is a writer whose work I came to unpardonably late. She asks questions that are frequently found floating at the edges of patriarchal discourse but that whiteness finds uncomfortable, so doesn't ask. We all have that gateway author whose work opens up the library, the internet, the world to further research and possibility, and hooks is that writer for me. Specifically this book, which brought back work I'd begun years ago during a time of high stakes healing - which is usually when we start thinking about Love in our lives, no?
Thinking back on it reminds me of that shift - the one from noun to verb. It's a simple key change with drastic and marrow deep consequences.
Like the breaths on either side of falling in love.
#40days40book list
In All About Love, bell hooks takes her readers on a deeply felt journey into the heart of what it means to be a human who feels love. She digs through book after book about relationships and love to find definitions, perceptions, examples and possibilities for love in and out of relationships. It is not an easy journey to take, and it is not certain what will await us at the end. Her language is conversational and intimate, providing a kind of linguistic safe space for when the words come perilously close.
What is it to love as a verb rather than as a noun? What is it to look at the relationships in our lives and stop saying love where there is none? How does love love? Where is it, how is it, what does it bring to our lives at home and in the world? This book is a call to live in love actively and deliberately. hooks offers a challenge that is not about winning, rather about shifting perspectives and with them our lives.
 |
| Valentine's Day gets an upgrade. |
I was introduced to this book by a co-worker over Valentine's Day one year as part of our Staff Pick display.
Loving relationships, particularly long-lasting ones, are complicated and living. Some of them need lots of thick and dense time and emotion to maintain, and some are less high-energy, though no less important or honest. Friendship is, to me, the bedrock of all loving relationships outside of family (although there is a ton of overlap), so deep contemplation of what that means is welcome.
It turns out that I'm deeply romantic, which does not translate easily as a consciously single person with extremely intense friendships. It's not impossible or improbable or anything, but it's not normalized, so it's not normal. Spending time pondering questions like "What does it mean to do my dishes in a loving way?" is not regular for many people, and yet the question is asked and it remains because every now and then I need reminding of it.
bell hooks is a writer whose work I came to unpardonably late. She asks questions that are frequently found floating at the edges of patriarchal discourse but that whiteness finds uncomfortable, so doesn't ask. We all have that gateway author whose work opens up the library, the internet, the world to further research and possibility, and hooks is that writer for me. Specifically this book, which brought back work I'd begun years ago during a time of high stakes healing - which is usually when we start thinking about Love in our lives, no?
Thinking back on it reminds me of that shift - the one from noun to verb. It's a simple key change with drastic and marrow deep consequences.
Like the breaths on either side of falling in love.
#40days40book list
Wednesday, October 5, 2016
Important stuff for October 5, 2016
Olives and the voices in my head
#40days40books entry 16
A.E. Stallings is a poet from Georgia who lives in Greece and writes the most gorgeous poetry in relatively strict form. In Olives, she treats the structure of fairy tales, myth and that odd comfort of nostalgia and loss with clarity and compassion. Her humor is made of knots and bone-deep discomforts, and she has impeccable timing. Here there are rocking lines and sharp phrases filling the trees with fruit and life.
The craft of this collection is astounding and easy to miss because she isn't drawing attention to it needlessly. Where it matters, she does. Fairy tales tend to be the province of women to draw out, turn upside down and make less sugary. Stallings does not shy away from that history, nor does she capitulate to it, a neat bit of work in measured lines and high stakes metaphor.
Read with water and bread on a day that has less room to breathe than at first you thought.
This was a reading group pick in 2014. I stared at the cover a bit, chatted with my poet friend who is in the group and bought it. Anyone who went through the Greek Myths phase recognizes the pull and lure of vase paintings. My own The Odyssey phase (unending) adds to that gravity. It was a welcome addition to the holiday season: a retail worker's roller coaster of high and low energy, sore feet, giddy laughter and constant presence.
The book was in my holiday reading pile this past New Year's, and while it was as good and deep and troubling and familiar as ever, something else happened last year that changed this for good. I got the Hamilton: An American Musical original cast recording and listened to it like it didn't break me into tiny pieces.
These two things should not be related.
Outside of having been written by MacArthur Foundation Geniuses who excel in form and the unexpected, I mean.
It was an absolute shock to read the first poem in the collection and hear Lin-Manuel Miranda's voice unbidden, reading it to me. It is important that you know that this was not the plan. I didn't connect the two before. I cannot unconnect them now. If ever the original cast of Hamilton is asked to read these (or any other) poems for recording for a reason that they are good with, it will introduce worlds to worlds already knitted only unseen.
In my head, Anthony Ramos and Phillipa Soo read this:
copied from the Poetry Foundation website
A.E. Stallings is a poet from Georgia who lives in Greece and writes the most gorgeous poetry in relatively strict form. In Olives, she treats the structure of fairy tales, myth and that odd comfort of nostalgia and loss with clarity and compassion. Her humor is made of knots and bone-deep discomforts, and she has impeccable timing. Here there are rocking lines and sharp phrases filling the trees with fruit and life.
The craft of this collection is astounding and easy to miss because she isn't drawing attention to it needlessly. Where it matters, she does. Fairy tales tend to be the province of women to draw out, turn upside down and make less sugary. Stallings does not shy away from that history, nor does she capitulate to it, a neat bit of work in measured lines and high stakes metaphor.
Read with water and bread on a day that has less room to breathe than at first you thought.
 |
| There's a poem on the back, too |
This was a reading group pick in 2014. I stared at the cover a bit, chatted with my poet friend who is in the group and bought it. Anyone who went through the Greek Myths phase recognizes the pull and lure of vase paintings. My own The Odyssey phase (unending) adds to that gravity. It was a welcome addition to the holiday season: a retail worker's roller coaster of high and low energy, sore feet, giddy laughter and constant presence.
The book was in my holiday reading pile this past New Year's, and while it was as good and deep and troubling and familiar as ever, something else happened last year that changed this for good. I got the Hamilton: An American Musical original cast recording and listened to it like it didn't break me into tiny pieces.
These two things should not be related.
Outside of having been written by MacArthur Foundation Geniuses who excel in form and the unexpected, I mean.
It was an absolute shock to read the first poem in the collection and hear Lin-Manuel Miranda's voice unbidden, reading it to me. It is important that you know that this was not the plan. I didn't connect the two before. I cannot unconnect them now. If ever the original cast of Hamilton is asked to read these (or any other) poems for recording for a reason that they are good with, it will introduce worlds to worlds already knitted only unseen.
In my head, Anthony Ramos and Phillipa Soo read this:
Fairy-tale Logic
Related Poem Content Details
Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—
You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.
Sorry, not sorry
Monday, October 3, 2016
Coriolanus and the power of casting
#40days40books entry 15
Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's history plays. It follows the story of an ancient Roman called Caius Martius, who, legend told someone, took the city of Corioles single-handed after his soldiers ran away in cowardice. He was given a new name to commemorate his victory and invited to ascend to the position of consul. Instead of becoming consul, however, he was banished owing to a rather unpolitic personality. He ran off to join forces with his longtime nemesis and they set about pillaging the countryside on a direct course for Rome. Once he had got outside the walls of the city and was threatening to take it, his mother, wife and child appeared in supplication for their city and its inhabitants. Coriolanus relented, the attack was called off, and he was duly dispatched by hew new comrades as a traitor to the people he'd betrayed Rome by going to even though Rome had, in fact, just betrayed him by demanding that even though he was strong enough to die for the city he wasn't mild enough to rule it, but, really. Semantics, eh?
It's a later play and a very uneasy one. There are no real subplots. None of the supporting characters has a story of their own. The poetry is specific to each speaker and there are some gorgeous lines in this for anyone who takes the time to read it.
This isn't fun to watch. The history is ancient, but not so ancient as to be mythical. The story as Shakespeare creates it is uncomfortably resonant and personal. It is glorious.
 |
| Unexpected and brutal, this one. |
In performance, of course, it is seething, sweating, bleeding, unyielding and uncomfortable.
At one point in the action Coriolanus is expected to stand in a public place wearing a gown of modesty and baring the scars he has won in action to any of the plebians who ask. It is an act intended to foster goodwill. There is a specific area of my gut that is set aside for moments of physical vulnerability, and it was on fire the entire time.
We left gutted and babbling and deeply grateful to the folks at that theatre for casting the way they did - if Hiddleston hadn't been in it, we wouldn't have read the play.
And that would have been terrible.
#40days40books list
*before we discovered he is super basic
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