This took a turn that I did not expect and became about something entirely other than what I needed to write about. Which I do need to write about. But not there. Not right now.
So, here it is. This is what Under the Courtyard looks like most of the time, only with fewer links and more randomly lyrical musings about the places where reading happens.
On the way in
Marissa Jenae Johnson and Leslie Mac are launching the Safety Pin Box, a monthly subscription service for white people working to be allies to actively support change and Black women. The conversations about safety pins are ongoing and complicated. This is another effective way for white people (particularly white women) to put their money where their morals are. (Or, words and links where my morals are).
The setting
Today the world is much in my imagination, and too heavy to carry far into the world. The floor holds my weight as I hold Ethel's, though she offers me warmth, and I do little for the ground but walk upon it.
After the amounts and richnesses of last week, today there is slightly sweetened tea and a handful of barely flavored cookies. A large glass of water also, because it is so easy to forget to hydrate when the world is wet and falling.
To read
Newsletters are a favorite source of new writing and information. They are also challenging. Here is a person, one person, who has chosen to make a list of words in a unique order for a small group of readers who have decided on purpose to read them. Which means that whenever one appears in my inbox, it wants to be read, to be thought about and considered. I do not always send thanks to the writers, but I am getting better at it. Because they don't know, you know? Who reads, who doesn't, what it matters.
Here are some of the things I learned about from newsletters today that made room in my head:
A Man of the People by Helon Habila a short story published in Guernica magazine.
Trump: The Choice We Face by Masha Gessen a piece in The New York Review about the struggle between compromise and conscience.
Zadie Smith talking about friendships, conspiracies and musicals at LitHub.
I am not ready to digest Rebecca Solnit's Guardian essay as yet, but you might be.
Tibeb Girls - an Ethiopian animated superhero television series looks to change narratives and lives.
Developing relationships around a recognized need to do better within and for our communities expresses itself in many ways. Sometimes that way is a reading group:
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is the first book for the newly formed Activist Book Group in St. Louis.
James Baldwin's Another Country is the pick for CAM's group (also in St. Louis)
The Feminists in Love read Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed and have a plan to take time to reinvigorate and refocus in light of recent everythings.
The PoC Travel Book Club will convene in December to chat about Belonging: a Culture of Place by bell hooks.
The bookslut is starting a "radical reading reading group / potluck / anarchic sewing circle in Brooklyn" - their first reading is Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters (available for free online in its entirety).
Let's Read About Feminism is now voting for their December pick - the theme is Children's Classics.
I am reading bell hooks now and hope to attend the CAM group, and a meeting of the Activist group that is not at my old place of work. I am there far too much as it is, but that is where many of my heart are, and there is beauty in being close to the source of your love.
On the way out
Always remembering the power of honoring friendships and supporting people who support you. The pod squad at Another Round encourage each other and honor the work involved in getting the show to us. We should all hold each other up so well.
Thank you for taking the time to make room for my words every so often. It is appreciated.
Newsletters in my inbox: Reading the Tarot, Three Weeks, ...the fuck is this?, #awesomewomen, Another Round, LitHub, Here Be Monsters and others.
What are you reading, anyway?
Monday, November 28, 2016
To Read Nov 28, 2016
I have 16,000 words to write before the end of November. Naturally, I am reading everything I can get my eyes on instead.
It is a gray and rainy day, perfect for the time of year, finally, and the sharp taste of tea plus Beethoven in my ear holes means that all is in something like a kind of good spot for going forward.
President Obama wrote a lovely essay for Lonely Planet during his final foreign trip as president. Publishers Weekly offered an interesting take on why that is important. --- I am frankly, reinvigorated to travel, to read travel writing and to dig around for travel expressions wherever I find them. Go, you, Obama. Travel is a political act.
I have now seen Arrival three times in the theater. It extraordinary. Next up is to read the short story on which it is based, but that will mean leaving the house and there is tea here and also blankets, so no. Here is a piece about the design of the office of Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist.
Clearly, Saladin Ahmed is an author I NEED to read (next year when I am reading books by dudes again).
Dana Levin has a firm hold on a porch in my heart. Here she is rocking back and forth on it.
This TED Talk by Saki Mafundikwa: Ingenuity and Elegance in Ancient African Alphabets is inspiring. Humans do make some wonders, don't we? (the one after this is about African Fractals !!!)
Kimberlé Chrenshaw and the Urgency of Intersectionality. Warning: tears ahead, if yours, like mine, are white, please keep them in an appropriate place. Do your own emotional labor.
Poem from Architrave Press: From a Notebook
Some links from: LitHub, ThreeWeeks (a newsletter), Publishers Weekly, and the gentle magic of clicking around
It is a gray and rainy day, perfect for the time of year, finally, and the sharp taste of tea plus Beethoven in my ear holes means that all is in something like a kind of good spot for going forward.
President Obama wrote a lovely essay for Lonely Planet during his final foreign trip as president. Publishers Weekly offered an interesting take on why that is important. --- I am frankly, reinvigorated to travel, to read travel writing and to dig around for travel expressions wherever I find them. Go, you, Obama. Travel is a political act.
I have now seen Arrival three times in the theater. It extraordinary. Next up is to read the short story on which it is based, but that will mean leaving the house and there is tea here and also blankets, so no. Here is a piece about the design of the office of Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist.
Clearly, Saladin Ahmed is an author I NEED to read (next year when I am reading books by dudes again).
Dana Levin has a firm hold on a porch in my heart. Here she is rocking back and forth on it.
This TED Talk by Saki Mafundikwa: Ingenuity and Elegance in Ancient African Alphabets is inspiring. Humans do make some wonders, don't we? (the one after this is about African Fractals !!!)
Kimberlé Chrenshaw and the Urgency of Intersectionality. Warning: tears ahead, if yours, like mine, are white, please keep them in an appropriate place. Do your own emotional labor.
Poem from Architrave Press: From a Notebook
Some links from: LitHub, ThreeWeeks (a newsletter), Publishers Weekly, and the gentle magic of clicking around
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Rainy election day and I had Some Thoughts
Today, in America, we vote.
Until about 6pm Central Time, my social media feeds are the joyful arrival of folks to a great party that will feed and succor them. And then the returns will start coming in and then everything will be terrible until everything isn't terrible any more. No matter who wins.
Except that it matters very much who wins. The stakes have been getting higher and higher with every presidential election in my lifetime. This year is no different. I am worried.
I spent the morning at my polling place and then at breakfast with my roommate. I went to the library to work on my NaNo novel, and then strolled home in the rain to be greeted by the cat who had just woken up and now is sitting on my desk contemplating stealing my lap.
What a lovely lovely day, I thought as I walked in the door. And how fragile it is.
Not simply the weather, which is intensely fragile and which we are consistently not caring for. Not simply the domesticated critters who we deny are complex living beings and treat as toys or trophies or props. Not simply the privilege to take time off of full-time work to pursue the being of me for a living.
My roommate and I are single women, both college-educated, both hard-working and both with no plans to become parents. Our friends are mostly single women, and of our coupled friends, only one has become a parent. Outside of St. Louis, most of my friends are married people, and only one of those couples has children, although I know that that may change. Among my friends from the various schools I've attended over the years, a huge percentage of us are either childless or single or both.
And we live in a lovely apartment, in an exciting and weird neighborhood. We are not hassled by our neighbors or set up by our acquaintance. No one in our immediate circles shames us for our lives and our choices. In fact, many of my acquaintances are equally uninterested in pursuing any relationship that ends with them not being single. We get served in restaurants. We get left alone when we go as a group to bars. My life-bro and I are frequently mistaken for a couple and seated at nicer tables and treated really kindly by waitstaff.
So life is possible. The anxieties of marriage, childbearing and family duty are not added to the anxieties of living in the world as a person just trying to live. We struggle as whole people. We succeed as whole people.
It is terrifying to look at the record of the GOP's candidate for Vice President and consider what that could mean for our ability to continue living our lives. Our otherwise inoffensive and mostly delightful lives. Our healthcare (which is already compromised as we live in a country where healthcare must be earned not assured) is likely to become even more a minefield of gaslighting and mis-diagnosis. And we're both cis-gendered ladies with no specific health issues or long-term diseases (that we know of) living in a city close to a clinic.
Violence against women has long been men's outlet for everything. What happens if someone for whom that kind of violence isn't violence at all is the person "leading" the country?
Violence against non-whites has long been white people's outlet for everything. What happens if someone for whom that kind of violence isn't violence at all is the person in The White House, leading the armed forces, responding in times of crisis and emergency?
Because to him, to his running mate, to his supporters and to many people drowning in their own concerns, the kinds of violence that marginalized people encounter on a daily basis do not count as violence.
This apartment is so quiet today. The rain makes a kind of distant waterfall effect and cards splash their way through the alley. My lap is warmer because the cat has decided to loaf on it, and these words were given expression.
There shouldn't be anything special about this experience. But there is. It shouldn't be any more fragile than any beautiful natural thing. But it is. This ought to be an available norm, and it isn't.
Many people will be the victims of violence today. Many will stand together and many will make sure that everyone's voices are heard. We will have to address the toll that centuries of oppression and environmental devastation have taken on our land, on our country, on people all around the world. Today's vote will not change that.
It will change how much quiet there is for all of us to sit, to be warm and to heal before the next round.
Vote.
Be aware.
Do better.
This circus is on us. We made it. We need to unmake it. People are dying.
Until about 6pm Central Time, my social media feeds are the joyful arrival of folks to a great party that will feed and succor them. And then the returns will start coming in and then everything will be terrible until everything isn't terrible any more. No matter who wins.
Except that it matters very much who wins. The stakes have been getting higher and higher with every presidential election in my lifetime. This year is no different. I am worried.
I spent the morning at my polling place and then at breakfast with my roommate. I went to the library to work on my NaNo novel, and then strolled home in the rain to be greeted by the cat who had just woken up and now is sitting on my desk contemplating stealing my lap.
What a lovely lovely day, I thought as I walked in the door. And how fragile it is.
Not simply the weather, which is intensely fragile and which we are consistently not caring for. Not simply the domesticated critters who we deny are complex living beings and treat as toys or trophies or props. Not simply the privilege to take time off of full-time work to pursue the being of me for a living.
My roommate and I are single women, both college-educated, both hard-working and both with no plans to become parents. Our friends are mostly single women, and of our coupled friends, only one has become a parent. Outside of St. Louis, most of my friends are married people, and only one of those couples has children, although I know that that may change. Among my friends from the various schools I've attended over the years, a huge percentage of us are either childless or single or both.
And we live in a lovely apartment, in an exciting and weird neighborhood. We are not hassled by our neighbors or set up by our acquaintance. No one in our immediate circles shames us for our lives and our choices. In fact, many of my acquaintances are equally uninterested in pursuing any relationship that ends with them not being single. We get served in restaurants. We get left alone when we go as a group to bars. My life-bro and I are frequently mistaken for a couple and seated at nicer tables and treated really kindly by waitstaff.
So life is possible. The anxieties of marriage, childbearing and family duty are not added to the anxieties of living in the world as a person just trying to live. We struggle as whole people. We succeed as whole people.
It is terrifying to look at the record of the GOP's candidate for Vice President and consider what that could mean for our ability to continue living our lives. Our otherwise inoffensive and mostly delightful lives. Our healthcare (which is already compromised as we live in a country where healthcare must be earned not assured) is likely to become even more a minefield of gaslighting and mis-diagnosis. And we're both cis-gendered ladies with no specific health issues or long-term diseases (that we know of) living in a city close to a clinic.
Violence against women has long been men's outlet for everything. What happens if someone for whom that kind of violence isn't violence at all is the person "leading" the country?
Violence against non-whites has long been white people's outlet for everything. What happens if someone for whom that kind of violence isn't violence at all is the person in The White House, leading the armed forces, responding in times of crisis and emergency?
Because to him, to his running mate, to his supporters and to many people drowning in their own concerns, the kinds of violence that marginalized people encounter on a daily basis do not count as violence.
This apartment is so quiet today. The rain makes a kind of distant waterfall effect and cards splash their way through the alley. My lap is warmer because the cat has decided to loaf on it, and these words were given expression.
There shouldn't be anything special about this experience. But there is. It shouldn't be any more fragile than any beautiful natural thing. But it is. This ought to be an available norm, and it isn't.
Many people will be the victims of violence today. Many will stand together and many will make sure that everyone's voices are heard. We will have to address the toll that centuries of oppression and environmental devastation have taken on our land, on our country, on people all around the world. Today's vote will not change that.
It will change how much quiet there is for all of us to sit, to be warm and to heal before the next round.
Vote.
Be aware.
Do better.
This circus is on us. We made it. We need to unmake it. People are dying.
Monday, November 7, 2016
You Can't Touch My Hair by Phoebe Robinson
Book Review Alert
You Can't Touch My Hair: and Other Things I Still Have To Explain by Phoebe Robinson is the book your book group really needs to read next. It is appropriate for every genre and all interests. People of all ages (maybe not the under 10s) will find much to learn from, to laugh at and to be utterly disgusted by because racism and privilege are monstrous and pervasive and holy cow. The book is a collection of essays that cover a range of horrors available to a young African-American woman living in the world today. Ms. Robinson's writing is crisp, funny and filled with references to enough pop culture that even the most easily offended nit-picker may (probably not) get through with their (his) sense of humor in tact. Also she loves Magic Mike XXL and for that reason alone is worth listening to. Because every women who loves Magic Mike and his adventures has something worthy to say. Except that she's also observant, hard-working and busy living this current iteration of her best life so had the right to even more of our attention. (Also, really, white ladies - what the hell? Why are we ever touching people's hair? Why? Stop it.)
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