The beautiful lectures - Shakespearean Tragedy

#40days40books entry 34

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.

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The arrow toward What Even is Femininity points this way

#40days40books entry 33

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.

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Love, InshAllah and the power of possibility

#40days40books entry 26

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.

A bunch of us got together in the fall of 2014 to start a book club called Feminists in Love, in which we read about loving relationships and feminism and talk about how it all fits together in narratives, rhetoric and our own lives. It's been challenging, building, and transformative. This book was the first anthology that we read. It's been a bit since we all chatted about it, but a thing that I remember noting is that while many of us are well-read and progressive, none of us had read so many different Muslim voices before (Representation Matters!).

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.

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