Tagged: literature
‘Sorta Like a Rock Star’ (Quick, Matthew. 2010.)
chris. | 24 July 2010 | 6:13 pm | (consuming) 2010, (deconstructing) class(ism) | Comments closed

I was inclined to pick up this book based on Karen Healey’s quick review on her LiveJournal (you’ll have to scroll down to find it in the list):

It’s about the difficulty of hope, how terrible things happen for no reason, how the mechanics of poverty and oppression keep great people down, how they can be combated, and how faith – of many kinds, including in one’s God, in one’s self, and in one’s friends and allies – can be maintained, lost, regained, and blaze like a beacon for others. There’s barely any hints of romance.

Unfortunately, for me, it’s told in 1st person point-of-view, and i’ve found that with 1st person you have to actually like the narrator’s voice well enough to keep on.  And i didn’t.  Perhaps if i’d pressed on i’d have gotten past Amber’s irritating narrative stylings, but these days i don’t waste more time on a book than i have to.  Sorry, book!

why talk about institutionalized racism, sexism, classism
chris. | 5 June 2010 | 10:25 am | deconstructing bigotry | Comments closed

From Invisible Privilege: A Memoir About Race, Glass, & Gender, by Paula Rothenberg.  (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000.)

But how is it possible to separate the impact of race, class, and gender on individual lives, and why do some people think it desirable to do so?  Perhaps there is a strong desire to deny the impact of racism because recognizing it might demand that we talk about white responsibility, white complicity, white privilege.  Many are more comfortable looking at economic inequality because in their mind it fails to imply such clear responsibility.  If racism is the issue, then white people will have to ask how they have, perhaps inadvertently, benefited from it.  If economic inequities are at fault, then many whites can point to their own humble origins as children or grandchildren of poor immigrants as proof that anyone who works hard can succeed.  In this way, they fail to understand the difference between the ethnic or religious prejudice that their families fought to overcome and the racism that pervades our society.

Many white people continue to believe that racism and sexism, like ethnic prejudice, are simply hateful attitudes toward people.  They look inside themselves and cannot find either the feelings or the beliefs they associate with prejudice and so conclude that they are not prejudiced.  Because they are committed to treating people fairly, they believe they do so.  They teach their children not to judge others by the color of their skin, and they contribute to various charities that address issues of equity and civil rights.  Because they have never been taught the difference between simple “prejudice” and the more complex and recalcitrant forms of oppression signified by the words “racism” and “sexism,” they cannot understand why some people want to talk about “racism” all the time instead of individual initiative.  They do not understand that racism and sexism are perpetuated every day by nice people who are carrying on business as usual.  They do not recognize that what passes as “business as usual” already institutionalizes white skin, male, and class privilege.  They honestly believe that what separates them [...] are intelligence and hard work.

A long quote, but as i read these 2 paragraphs in the book my brain kept punching the air and saying, “Yes.  Yes, that’s it.  That’s it exactly.”  It covers the myth of “you just have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and also hits hard on what Jess/raanve and i have called the “but let me tell you about my poor Irish immigrant grandparents” problem.

Racism, sexism, and classism are problems in the institutions of society and not just prejudices held by individual people.

‘Invisible Privilege: A Memoir About Race, Class, & Gender’ (Rothenberg, Paula. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000.)
chris. | 3 June 2010 | 9:09 pm | (consuming) 2010 | Comments closed

It is difficult to adequately wrap-up this book because i read it slowly over a 2-month period.  Perhaps that’s the 1st thing to say about it: This is not the sort of memoir that i was able to breeze thru’ because it was engaging and consuming and whisked me away.

This is a very, very thinky memoir.  Rothenberg is analyzing and deconstructing the framework of her personal history while she is recounting it.  The thoughtfulness of her narrative is very rich and dense, and i found it somewhat hard going at times.

That said, i think her memoir has the potential to be a very important piece to understanding the institutional nature of racism, classism, and sexism.  I found it helpful to have someone note the framework of these -isms  every step of the way as they told the story of their own life.  Tho’ i think that it will speak best to people who have grown up under similar circumstances: white, educated, middle-to-upper-middle class.

(Note:  Rothenberg does touch on why she writes about herself as white altho’ she is the child of Orthodox Jewish parents.)

There were instances where i wished Rothenberg would have more thoroughly investigated her class privilege — for example, in the last chapter where she speaks about her love of travel and how much of it she’s done.  I also distinctly remember the phrase “dead-end job” that leaped out and startled me with its implicit classist assumptions.

Overall, tho’, i would still give this a recommendation for people who are interested in an examination of how race, class, and gender can impact an individual life.

‘The Graveyard Book’ (Gaiman, Neil. 2009.)
chris. | 22 January 2010 | 11:32 pm | (consuming) 2010, Mithlond | Comments closed

Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is the january selection for Mithlond.  In a surprising turn of events, i’ve actually managed to read it — the whole thing! — before the meeting! Read more »

Mithlond book group
chris. | 1 January 2010 | 3:44 pm | Mithlond | Comments closed

about

Mithlond is the Pugetopolis (i.e., Seattle area) discussion group of the Mythopoeic Society. We meet once a month at a member’s home and discuss topics pertaining to literature of the fantastic. In theory, each month we make one book the topic of discussion, tho’ in practice we typically discuss said book for anywhere from 10 – 30 minutes before chasing down any old rabbit hole that presents itself. The Mythopoeic Society is an organization dedicated to the discussion of the Inklings (especially J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams), so we try to select one of their books at least once a year. The rest of the year is always up for negotiation; our group leans toward the fantastic (some Mythopoeic Society discussion groups go a little farther afield into science fiction, et cetera), and we frequently select “classic,” pre-Tolkien works as well as epic sagas and fairytales. Mithlond re-started in the spring of 2002 after a hiatus. The following list covers the books we’ve read since re-forming (leaving out meetings where we did not select a particular book for discussion). I pulled the list together from Matt’s original Mithlond list and from the Mithlond Yahoo! group.

2010:

  • January: The Graveyard Book.  Gaiman, Neil.
  • February: “Prince Caspian” (film).
  • March: The Lightning Thief. Riordan, Rick.
  • April: “Paradise Lost”. Milton, John.
  • May: “Tales of the Knights Templar.”  Kurtz, Katherine (ed.).
  • June: The Summer Tree.  Kay, Guy Gavriel.
  • July: Summer Hiatus Part I
  • August: Summer Hiatus Part II
  • September: Wicked.  MaGuire, Gregory.
  • October: Eragon.  Paolini, Christopher.
  • November: “The Silmarillion” — The Beren & Luthien and Turin stories.  Tolkien, J.R.R.
  • December: Choose more books!

2009:

  • January: Lavinia. LeGuin, Ursula.
  • February: Postponed until march.
  • March: Twilight. Meyer, Stephanie. AND, All the Windwracked Stars. Bear, Elizabeth.
  • April: Foucault’s Pendulum. Eco, Umberto.
  • May: Gene Wolfe’s pirate book
  • June: Beadle the Bard. Rowling, J.K.
  • July & August: No homework. ;)
  • September: Greater Trumps. Williams, Charles.
  • October: The Charles Dexter Ward. Lovecraft, H.P.
  • November: Anathem. Stephenson, Neal.
  • December: The annual holiday-gathering and picking-next-year’s-books tradition.

2006:

2005:

2004:

2003:

2002:

it doesn’t get good until 100 pages in
chris. | 9 April 2009 | 5:00 pm | (culture) consuming | Comments closed

The older i get, the less patience i have with books (or movies or TV shows) that take awhile to get good.  When i was 17 i read straight thru’ Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair in a whirlwind of pages.  Fifteen years later i tried to re-read it and couldn’t even get up to page 50.  I mentioned this to some Tad fans who said, “Oh, yeah, it doesn’t really get good until 100 pages in.”  I weighed the possibility that it wouldn’t get good until 100 pages in against the possibility of setting it aside and reading something that was good on page 2.

I set it aside and haven’t bothered picking it up since.  Why waste 100 pages on dreck when i could read 100 pages of something i was enjoying?

This year, as i’ve been super busy keeping up with my certificate program, i’ve found i’m even more pressed for time and am putting books down left and right if they don’t snag me pretty quickly.

The United States of Poetry.  This was a PBS special (that’s a somewhat broken website, btw) back in 1995.  I really loved it — recorded it on VHS and watched it several times.  I’ve been meaning for years to take a look at the book.  So i was pretty disappointed when i did to discover that visual elements of each page were such a distraction to the poems that i really couldn’t read and enjoy any of them.  After skipping around in the book and giving it the old college try, i gave up and sent the book back to the old college library.

All the Windwracked Stars (Bear, Elizabeth.  New York: Tor, 2008.)  I picked this up because it was the march selection for book group.  I put it down again after the 1st chapter.  Please don’t throw 4 brand new species/races/whatevers at me in the 1st 2 pages of the novel (valraven, waelcyrge, einherjar, sdadown).  I think this marks my official break-up with epic fantasy.

Lavinia (Le Guin, Ursula.  New York: Harcourt, 2008.)  Okay, this one actually hurt when i put it down.  I mean, it’s Ursula Le Guin.  I love Le Guin!!  But what i’ve come to realize i don’t love is fiction told in the 1st person.  It really needs to grab me — quickly and completely — or else i just can’t stand having this other person in my head.

Right now i’m re-reading Foucault’s Pendulum (Eco, Umberto.  New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.) because it’s the april selection for book group.  I read it back in ‘90 when it came out and loved it.  This time around i’m finding it a little slow-going because it’s just so dense.  I’m giving it a little while longer to see if it’s dense-rich or just dense-impenetrable.