Reading Is Protest

Racism is comprised of countless facets. Facets of oppression, power, controlled infrastructure, restricted and limited opportunities and resources. Protesting against all its abhorrent angles is also dimensional. As we witness an unsettling, hideous history unfold in all of its cacophony of confusion and brutality, it's evident that the display of resistance and solidarity isn't a one-size fits all, and that accentuating all the positives becomes key in a time of crisis and division. 

Toni Morrison notes in her excellent essay "Peril" (from 2019's The Source of Self-Regard) that there are three human responses to the perception of chaos: naming, violence, and stillness. The latter is not to be confused with passivity, but the stillness in art, in the creation of. Being a writer, I'm aware of the power the pen and keystrokes posses, but the reading of such words is just as potent and proactive as taking to the streets to raise fists skyward. 

Reading --- of books, of newspapers, of websites, specifically --- allows us to respond with stillness. To sit, absorb, and apply words for tangible thought. No comment boxes, no click-bait headlines, just you and lines and lines of words, words that cultivate ideas, histories, and worlds. Flip pages, scroll, swipe left, and curiosity and knowledge are ignited. Reading is an constant ignition switch for knowledge and for change. Its why autocratic governments despise and dispel the practice of reading and spreading information, why the free press and free speech are often the first causes of contention as these practices derail their game plans for systematic oppression and controlled conformity. The ol' 'you speak what I say you should speak, you act as how I say you should act'. Once you find different ways to speak, its difficult to fall in a singular line.

It isn't lost on me how my ancestors, slaves, were barred from and were brutalized for reading, and acquiring an education. It was nothing short of a crime to even posses a book, much less write one. The methodical execution of racist laws, the instillation of fear of the written word was all to hinder generations of being educated and aware of their existence. The effort was to have them "not exist", to erase them as a culture, as a people, all to maintain one kind of supreme racial, social, and economic control. Placing books in the hands of slaves was a defiance to their captivity. Books signified freedom. Reading a book taught one how to learn and say words, and use them to free and reclaim themselves. 

As the decades go on, where the 19th Century still bleeds into the 21st Century, interest in the preservation and practice of reading in the United States has dwindled. America (in muddled fashion) "elected" a treasonous, bigoted bunker-dwelling creature of ill-intelligence to reinforce such a decline, almost as a chest-thump affirmation for ignorance and illiteracy. It used to be shameful to say you couldn't read, now it's a source of some weird alter-pride where the abuse of words, the abuse of books, even sacred texts, using them as (upside down) props for nefarious and narcissistic gains is almost lauded. You'd raise eyebrows over some of the individuals I've come across who've proudly told me they don't read, never liked reading, or find it a "boring intrusion". A surprising number of them proclaimed they wanted to --- get this --- write books. Stephen King has some things to say about that dizzy contradiction (see point #8).

Reading, books, language, writing --- these are treasures to be persevered and practiced, used as mechanisms of human connection, survival, and resistance. Now more than ever we need to engage in reading, in the creation and stillness of art. This to comprehend and understand where we're coming from --- and where we're going to. Reading has been the one thing to keep my head above the swill of raging waters as a pandemic persists, political chaos commences, revolutions are televised, and America addresses for the umpteenth time its original sins of racism, and the denial and unjust extermination of Black lives. 

Reading, writing, and creation --- these are my contributions that maintain my existence as a Black woman in America. It's my response, my protest, my resistance towards the powers, and the ills that be.

...and yet we all must be thoughtful what we read and consume in this time of turbulence. Amid chaotic uncertainty, where a lot of words, ideas and opinions are thrown around, the challenge is to carve clarity and positive productivity from them. Thus, read widely and diversely. Read authors of different races, genders, sexualities, from variant cultures, religions, and regions. Read fiction. Read non-fiction.  Read what speaks to you, read what speaks up for you. Read to practice self-care. Read out of your comfort zone. Read to be aware of where you stand in these moments, in this life.  

Stay safe. Stay informed. Stay protesting. Stay reading. 

✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽

Language of the Unheard

And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? ... It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity. 

--- Martin Luther King Jr.

George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. David McAtee. Ahmaud Aubry. 

Black Lives Matter

Secondhand Gold Dust Woman

"I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else's muse. I am not a muse. I am the somebody. End of fucking story."

Side One

Track One: "Intrigue"

I wasn't drawn to Daisy Jones & The Six by hype. I enjoyed what Taylor Jenkins-Reid did with 2016's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo as it was smarter than the beach read label it was stamped with. It began as a frothy, fictionalized champagne swig of 1950s Hollywood, but unfurled into a layered and sensitive narrative of women and men navigating the rigid sexual and social expectations of the film industry, and the era at large, all of this entertaining, keeping me turning pages. For Daisy Jones & The Six, Reid takes a detour to the 1970s California rock music scene to focus on the quick rise and crashing fall of a fictional rock group, and with that synopsis alone I was expecting such a tale to be in capable hands.

As a music fan, I'm also a fool who believes writing about music isn't akin to "dancing about architecture". That there is more to music, its impact on our culture than just an infectious melody and it should be written as so. Still, so few can capture the pulse and flow of music in text, and so few do it within fiction, so whenever I see a book associated to music on such a level, I'm a moth to a flame, hoping that someone will get it 'right'.

Track Two: "The Shape Of You"

Instead of a straight shot of a biography, Daisy Jones is akin to reading the transcript of a (disjointed) Behind The Music episode. Nestling into a documentary series binge session is how I spend my dross weekends, so this wasn't a deal breaker, in fact, I found it a rather interesting way to set up a story and it fit realistically with the usual payoff of interviewing of a rock band: how everyone would view a person or a situation differently, adding to band lore. As I read thorough Daisy Jones, I began to notice that such a structure lent to some prose limitations.

A cardinal sin of telling instead of showing leaves this book in a limbo of character development. We don't feel these characters, we're told how to feel about them. Motivations for particular actions with our central characters aren't clear, as external characters are just named dropped without much explanation as to who they are. Each voice tends to blend together, they could all be the same person if we weren't told. Without exposition or sensory details, we speed through the band's formation and their rise to fame, all without feeling the struggle. One day they're playing at weddings, the next they have a hit album. The whole thing feels like an thin outline of an idea, a gimmick. None of it feels natural.

Oh, and that weird 'twist' to discover who the interviewer is? Unnecessary.

Track Three: "You're The Inspiration"

Daisy Jones is a captain obvious veiled ode to the turbulent ride of the band Fleetwood Mac with numerous characters that resemble choice band members. Stevie Nicks' drug-addled wild child sprite is reincarnated in Daisy Jones. Lindsey Buckingham begat Billy Dunne as a disgruntled visionary artist who's in an emotional tug-of-war with its enigmatic lead singer. Christine McVie will see herself in Karen Karen, the frustrated keyboardist who has pulled back her femininity to exist in the man's world known as rock n' roll. The easy-going drummer that is Warren Rhodes is Mick Fleetwood. All well and good, but it's lazy as TJR isn't bringing anything of interest to the table with these characters to where we can excuse the striking resemblances.

Not to say one can't be entertained when following the follies of a fictional band. Almost Famous  (what this book wants to be) didn't just follow a fictional '70s rock band and its groupies, but had a young man's coming of age nestled in its story. Bette Midler growls, gripes, and guzzles booze and pills to give off Janis Joplin vibes in an Oscar-nominated performance in The Rose. Eddie and the Cruisers follows a pub band whose moody lead singer goes MIA, and its wrapped up in an intriguing mystery about lost master tapes, and the transition of rock n' roll from the '60s into the '70s. The Five Heartbeats recall the Motown era with a band that echoes the harmonies and hardships of The Temptations. All these films had a neat twist, a change-up that made them familiar, yet different. In short, Daisy Jones is just pure Fleetwood Mac fan fiction that feels more like wish-fulfillment than an actual nuance approach to anatomy of a band.

Track Four: "Message In The Music"

I admit it's a nice touch that at the end of the book we're treated to the full lyrical layout of Aurora, the fictional 'seminal' album of the band that causes them much artistic and personal grief, but big problem: we don't know how these songs are supposed to sound. As someone who has listened to their fair share of 1970s era rock and owns a few of the albums Reid was inspired by, I know of the sound and vibe of the time, but for someone who hasn't a clue the way the music is described would be confusing. Once again a limitation towards writing a book such as this. Music is something you have to hear, feel. These are just words on a page.

Of course, the sound of silence may be resolved when Daisy Jones is given the screen time it was warbled to be from jump since Reese Witherspoon has taken the reigns of an upcoming Amazon Prime streaming project (of course, she wrote the praising cover blurb...🙄), but while Reid does takes great pains to tell us how taxing the album was to create, it's just dead air. At the end, who cares about Aurora when you have Rumours?

Turn me over...

March On

I couldn't help but roll my eyes when I saw the trailer. Another Little Women adaptation? Groundbreaking.

From operas to television miniseries, there are a lot of Little Women adaptations, seven film treatments alone --- this including two lost silent films and anime adaptations. Lousia May Alcott with one book penned an ode to sisterhood that can be crowned the OG of reboots, predating the reboot craze of today. A craze that far too often in its eagerness to cash in on nostalgic comfort, disappoints at renovating its source anew for richer thought.

Little Women, in all of its 151 years of shelf life, has endured as a classic text as it's not just a product of its era, but can be read as a timeless portrait of family dynamics and coming of age during uncertain times. Is it a universal tale? Somewhat. Verdict is out on that as one could argue that for all the times that Little Women has been adapted for a new generation a tale of girlhood from a diverse voice isn't given the chance to speak, but the question of relevancy rises more so when it's brought to life on screen. When each generation gets a re-introduction to the March sisters I do tend to wonder: Do we really need another film about four sisters who are growing up in the midst of the Civil War, this in 2020, this when there has been so much social upheaval for women's rights, and this when there are other stories and novels worthy to be told about the turmoil and wonder of growing up girl?

Be Kind Rewind --- one of my favorite YouTube channels --- answered my question, and then some as it not only nudged me into giving the 2019 Greta Gerwig-directed version a shot after being indifferent about it initially, but to see Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy come alive for the umpteenth time isn't as stale or redundant at first glance.

BKR focuses on the 1939, 1949 and 1994 versions (skipping the 2018 Hallmark-y modernized one --- yeah, there's a modernized Little Women), giving ample discussion on how each film is approached by its prospective release era, and what it meant for the social climate of the time. Being raised on, and showing some bias with the 1994 Winona Ryder-led version, it was interesting to understand that the tone of the film, though being set in the 1860s, echoed the '90s being in the throes of the 2nd wave of women's movements, as it emphasized more on the March sisters career choices and desires to be seen equal to men much more than previous adaptations.

Whatever the opinion on reboots and refashions (please...STOP!), it is fascinating how one story --- written over two centuries ago --- can be told with such variance, and yet never once lose its message and its literary achievement.

I Capture The Blue Castle

L.M. Montgomery does something refreshing with The Blue Castle: she writes the anti-romance story.

Um, let me dial down that sweeping statement just a bit...

This is a romance story, straight up. There is passion, flushes of cheeks, silent stares, dinners that look out on a enchanting lakeside landscape, the archetypal brooding, enigmatic mountain man that can blow a back out and chop a tree with ease (and who in my mind looked liked a rugged Henry Cavill...rowr). It's riddled with all the romance book clichés that conjure up wistful, windswept cover women, promises of a love affair to end all love affairs, and "heaving bosoms". Still, even sainted with these hallmarks, The Blue Castle is the type of romance story that doesn't fuss in the proverbial as it not only deals with matters of the heart, but also concerns itself with how the heroine finds love within.

For a book written in 1926, set in a time before World War I, it was a pretty bold choice to have a heroine who is 29 years old, unmarried, and loathing it. Women aren't supposed to show this on their face, no, they're supposed to grin and bear the spinsterhood, be the subservient shut-in. Valancy Stirling is a archetype character that doesn't want to accept such complacency, and I already love her for this.

Blue Castle was Montgomery's first novel written for adults, and its obvious that Valancy Stirling is no Anne Shirley, L.M. Montgomery's most iconic literary creation. She's jaded and cynical, bereft of hope and just plain miserable, relegated to being the spinster of her family and seeing no prospects for her future. She lives with an overbearing mother, and whiny elder cousin who hover over her like an infantile invalid, and dictate her daily existence. tl;dr: they are insufferable. Her other family members are equally insufferable, with one creepy uncle (isn't always there always that one creepy uncle?) who makes her the butt of his sexist and lame jokes, all while holding the rest of the Stirlings hostage with his ample will if they dare so challenge his opinions. Oh, and to add to the #firstworldproblems, Valancy is often compared to her beautiful (but dingbat) cousin, Olive whose simple existence frustrates Valancy because why is always about Marsha, Marsha, Marsha?!?

For this, Valancy is truly living in a private, socially claustrophobic hell, as she has resigned herself to never living for herself and living out her days unloved and untouched by a man, even though she desires such. Her only escapes are the nature books of a John Foster whose prose Valancy knows by heart --- this to the chagrin of her mother who finds them "racy reads" (cause oak trees make one horny?) --- and in dreams of a "blue castle", a fictitious place where she can be free to be the woman she wishes to be.

"They never knew that Valancy had two homes–the ugly red brick box of a home, on Elm Street, and the Blue Castle in Spain. Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in that castle. Jewels that queens might have worn; robes of moonlight and fire; couches of roses and gold; long flights of shallow marble steps, with great, white urns, and with slender, mist-clad maidens going up and down them; courts, marble-pillared, where shimmering fountains fell and nightingales sang among the myrtles; halls of mirrors that reflected only handsome knights and lovely women–herself the loveliest of all, for whose glance men died. All that supported her through the boredom of her days was the hope of going on a dream spree at night. Most, if not all, of the Stirlings would have died of horror if they had known half the things Valancy did in her Blue Castle."

These escapes to this imagined "blue castle" bring some ease to Valancy in her lonely hours, but once departed from them Valancy begins to feel chest pains and becomes worrisome to their cause. Not wanting to involve her family, she take matters into her own hands to visit in secret Dr. Trent, a noted heart specialist, who lives in the same (fictional) Ontario town of Deerwood as the Stirlings, and who has been denounced by her family as a no-nothing "quack". Seeing Dr. Trent only provides a devastating blow of news for Valancy, but such news allows her to shed her conventional constraints and truly live life for herself, and well, "do crazy shit".

Year In Review: Where'd You Go, Belle?

Alexandra Reading by Laura Lacambra Shubert

Yes, I'm still here.

I could make numerous excuses why I haven't graced this space since the spring, but excuses just waste time. I got lost in my reading and didn't blog, it is just that.

So why even keep this blog up, you say? Out of habit, out of nostalgia for what was blogging in its infancy, mostly. Though blogging has been subjected to an 'ok boomer' practice at decade's end and seeing a slow funeral march toward corporate takeover and personal disenchantment, it's still a lifeline in some regard, a environment that appeals to my camera shy self (the brave ones can do BookTube), a place where I can put megaphone to mouth and holler. Blogs can survive in the roarin' 2020s, and it starts here and now in this space.

With all this newfound gusto, first thing's first: Febreze the fuck out of the 2010s (which was a terrible decade for me) and give 2019 a proper sendoff (because it wore out it's welcome too)...

O Pioneers!

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman"

O Pioneers! is a love letter to Willa Cather's memories of her native Nebraska homestead and the immigrant Swedes, Bohemians, and French who settled on that vast and blustery land of mystique and melancholy during the 1880s. True to Cather's nature, she christens the novel with an independent and iron-willed heroine by the name of Alexandra Bergson, who after her father's death takes over the family farm, this much to the chagrin and jealousy of her disagreeable older brothers. For approximately 30 years we follow Alexandra and other occupants of the Divide, all of whom are hoping not to 'blow away' on this wild and unpredictable land they call home.

What drives this tale is Cather's picturesque prose. She is by far one of America's greatest minimal wordsmiths. She doesn't need to bleed purple to capture a feeling. Even at its barest, her prose snaps crisp and clean, getting right to the root of emotion. As this is her second book, written in 1913, Cather is still maturing into her style. She doesn't quite handle character development well as she has moments where she tells more than shows, and the characters aren’t as vividly explored as one would want. Timelines are also often skipped because we hear of Alexandra making a success of her farm by sheer gumption and keen, almost scientific planning, but we don't get to experience the toil or the complications she ran into as we're just simply told of it all. It was rare for women in Alexandra's era to accomplish a task of this caliber, and it would've made for great reading and a deeper sense of Alexandra’s character if this wasn't so lightly glossed over.

Still the word magic Cather casts make up for the lightweight action. As stated, Cather's prose is just so damn exquisite and it touches all the senses in the simplest of ways. It leads you by the hand through the yellow fields, points skyward to admire the purple and reds of dusk, turns your attention to the elegance of a duck in motion --- an intimate guided tour it is.

"She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring." 

Changing My Mind On Zadie

Zadie Smith's prose and I do not get along.

I tried befriending it when I started (and stopped) reading White Teeth and On Beauty a few years back, this on the recommendations of well-meaning bookish friends. Of what I read, I felt afterward...detached...disengaged...just dunce cap dumb. Her prose just flew over my head, making me second guess what I read, how I read it. Did I not get it? Do I even know how to read? Ugh.

I saw a reviewer on GoodReads brand her right: she is a "glib genius". Her text truly preens in the mirror with little regard. Now, don't think me emerald green envious of her obvious gifts. Smith is an intelligent and perceptive writer who crushes stereotypes that woman of color can analyze Middlemarch one moment and label 50 Cent as a "leading man" with a straight face the next (and all in the same book, mind you), but she's still in a glass casing of academia, removed from a sense of realness.

I thought Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays would be an easier meal to digest and get on the right track with Zadie instead of a sprawling novel that I'd end up getting lost in. All it is is a collection of essays that cover various subject matters ranging from literature to film, and just possibly Smith would be better read in smaller, concise portions?

No such luck.

Changing My Mind --- while meant to be an inconsistent collection of random thoughts --- works in theory, but on paper the thought processes within just don't come together in an effective way.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

"Maybe it's just the whole damn world is like Central Casting. They got it all rigged before you ever show up." 

Numerous books were released during the Great Depression, but no book struck more of a cultural chord or contained a decade's worth of human resilience during economic and social disparity better than John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Even if you haven't read it (*coughs and looks away*), you know something about it, as the title alone has almost become synonymous for the era of hardship it represents within its pages. Just Google "The Great Depression", and its at the top of the results. A teacher you once had probably assigned it in class. It no doubt resides on a bunch of required read-before-you're-casket-ready reading lists. It's a book that is just impossible to ignore.

Now, no disrespect to Steinbeck, but Grapes wasn't the only book to explore one of America's most harrowing hours. Okay, maybe these books weren't out there winning Pulitzer Prizes, but they did exist. Coming up blank? Let me steer you over to a neglected corner, where you'll see cussing and fussing for attention Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, the anti-Grapes...the anti-everything, really.

Horses was released in 1935, in the thick of the Great Depression, and it's with no surprise that it ended up faring better with French existentialists such as Simone de Beauvoir (who dubbed it the first "American existentialist novel"), and Albert Camus (who'd seven years later would pen a similar sketch of human doom with The Stranger). Americans wanted hope and relief and sympathetic characters they could relate to --- not someone extolling pessimism and framing them as farm animals being led to the slaughter. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? doesn't offer a mustard seed of faith, or even a 'this too shall pass' reassuring pat on the shoulder. This lean, mean novella instead sneers at the migrant farming sojourn of the Joad brood as it ensnares its disparate youths Robert Syverton and Gloria Beatty in a thorny fate, all while lifting a soiled middle finger towards the sweet apple pie of Americana optimism and prosperity.

A Girl Grows Up In Brooklyn

"I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this."

Black girlhood has never been written with such poetic potency.

Even though I grew up in a suburban South Texas neighborhood during the 1990s and went to predominately White schools, I understood this story fully. Reading this book was like re-entering my childhood, just this time I got to view it from a distance, finding myself appreciating the sometimes arduous, often awkward journey that was growing up Girl.

It is true that we all experience growing pains and angst. We all at some points of our lives vie to belong somewhere and find “our people”. We all have felt the flutter of first love. We all begin to see our elders live confusing, convoluted lives, and hope to God we don’t turn out like them in the end. We have all become aware of our maturing bodies, wondering where our unique beauty lies within the images we see on TV screens. We all have friendships that are fleeting, sometimes one-sided, but shape us beyond the time frame. And we will at some point, by some strange osmosis, have these friendships come back to us, just that a new script will be in tow.

No matter the gender or the race, we all come of age in similar ways, but Another Brooklyn pinpoints a unique adolescent. The announcement is right in the title. This is 'another Brooklyn', a Brooklyn removed from the Irish immigrant experience of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, and more specifically, a city, a time era, and a racial community removed from Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. I don’t know if this was Jacqueline Woodson's intent --- I’m just taking a stab in the dark --- but while reading echoes of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn sound, with Another Brooklyn's narrator August sharing the same lonely, but fiercely determined spirit as Francine Nolan. Still, I feel, Woodson is also making a point to say that Brooklyn is too often defined through a White lens, when the city holds so many more conversations and stories outside of that limited focus.