Latest flyer

Author event at Mayday

Recent Reading

America, America by Ethan Canin
I loved the first part of this book. I admire the ability of writers to successfully pull off the unrealiable narrative. We don't distrust the narrator because we think he is lying, we distrust him because of his naivete. And so I loved this romp into class differences and the guilty pleasure our young working class kid gets with his chance to rub elbows with the rich and famous. And we understand his ability to detach himself from his own realization that the only reason the workers are given attention is because the unions can deliver votes. Yet, we are left disappointed by the failure of our narrator to recognize his gullibility. I found it hard to believe that someone so accustomed to analysis could so completely miss the clues live had given him. So, although I admire the class consciousness of this novel, I despair of the way our hero makes excuses for the ruling classes.

Dark House by Theresa Monsour
This author has moved to another pseudonym and her books are out of print. I found this used book at a local store. It is the third of third and final novel in a trilogy focused on St. Paul homicide detective Paris Murphy. Serene Ransom is a fascinating villain. Crazy cat lady, child molester, academic. Of course! I have a sense that the earlier books provided an interesting back-story for Murphy, but I'll have to search the used bookstores to find out, it seems.

Blind Rage by Terri Persons
Terri Persons is the next pseudonym used by the woman who wrote as Theresa Monsour. This series wanders into the currently fashionable psychic field of crime fiction. Our heroine, Bernadette Saint Clare, is able to see through the eyes of murderers. Yet her vision has serious limitations and has caused her to draw erroneous conclusions. It's an interesting way to portray esp: useful sometimes, but often misleading. It makes us questions the very concept of "hunches" and "gut reactions". I read the first in the series, Blind Spot and liked it enough to pick up the second book on a recent bookstore expedition. Saint Clare's visitors from beyond the grave are fascinating, infuriating and their powers are mystifying. But it's a fun read and I'm willing to take the ride.

Black Bolshevik by Harry Haywood
Reading this with one of my book groups. We read the first half of the book for our first meeting last Sunday. I didn't make it all the way through. I am fascinating by the discussion of black nationalism and how the Communist Party position diverged from the more popular Marcus Garvey "back to Africa" movement. I have a lot to learn about the discussion and don't feel as if I understand it from reading this book. Haywood spends lots of time attacking sectarianism in a very sectarian way, which makes this book difficult and fascinating. It is fascinating when it shows the "correct" political thinking doesn't mean much if an activist is not connected with the actual struggles going on here and now. We activists have a tendency to build utopian structures that fundamentally miss the realities of the people we claim to support. I look forward to reading the second half of this fascinating portrayal of an American communist activist.

1,000 books?

You've got to be kidding me. 1,000 books? You MUST read?

OK. Confession time. Way back when I was a struggling English major at the University of Minnesota, I stumbled upon a book called something like "Books for the college bound" and I decided I had to collect them all. I haunted used bookstores and many of the local ones, most notably Biermaiers Books, made quite a lot of money off my efforts to collect all of the listed books. I read and I read and I tried to become a self-taught literature snob. I wrote long hand-written reviews in the college-ruled notebooks I favored at the time.

Rather than savoring the reading, I racked up the reading like points on a basketball scoreboard. So I missed quite a lot, of course.

And still, the lure of the "XXX best books" list still has its appeal. I want to be one of those cultured people who has read the books and understands the cultural references. Also, I want the pleasure of a damn good book.

But these lists, they are so arbitrary. This latest one by the Guardian newspaper in the UK is beyond ridiculous. How many of us have the time to read 1,000 books? Isn't that cheating? Shouldn't we demand the list be chopped down to 10 or thereabouts?

Because, seriously, just read Beloved a few hundred times and you will have learned more than you could possibly know about life and the power of words.

Author Visit at Mayday Books

Another flyer I did for the bookstore:

Run by Ann Patchett

I read the novel Run by Ann Patchett last week and cried relentlessly at the happy ending. Patchett has an awesome way with words in which nothing is wasted. The pages fly by and I kept wanting to learn more, know more, find out the secrets, get to know the characters more.

I first encountered Patchett when I read Bel Canto a few years ago. That was an awesome experience. I loved so much about it and my book group passed the novel among us, each enjoying it for different reasons.

Run takes place in Boston and centers around a political family not unlike the Kennedys. Bernard Doyle, the former mayor of Boston, white an Catholic, dreams that one of his three sons will follow in his footsteps. Unsurprisingly, none of the boys are headed on that path. The oldest son, Sullivan, is the outcast, having caused a scandal that brought his father's political career to an end. The two younger sons, African-American boys adopted a year apart, have other career goals. Tip is fascinated by fish and studies ichthyology, Teddy considers the seminary.

The book begins with a car crash. The younger boys have reluctantly joined their father at a speech by Jesse Jackson. As they argue about whether to attend a reception, Tip turns away in anger and is saved from being hit by a car by a complete stranger, an African American woman, who pushes him out of the way and takes the full blow of the oncoming truck.

It turns out that the "stranger" is, in fact, the birth mother of Teddy and Tip and the rest of the book takes up the unraveling of secret upon secret.

I highly recommend this book. Being part of an adoptive family, I'm sure I reacted to this book more strongly than most people. Like I said. Cried. Uncontrollably. For a good while.

Articles by David Roediger

Roediger will be in town this weekend. These are just place holders for articles he's written that I want to check out.

The Retreat from Race and Class in Monthly Review July-August 2006

Interview on Stuff White People Do

An Interview with David Roediger Working Toward Whiteness

Gook: the short history of an Americanism

What Effect Would Obama's Election Have on Race Relations?

Race Will Survive the Obama Phenomenon

Understanding Racism Today: an Interview with David Roediger

The idea of the bad girl

A Review of two new books that look interesting:

Emily Maguire, Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2008 (256 pp). ISBN 9-78192135-131-0 (paperback) .

Meda Chesney-Lind and Katherine Irwin, Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence and Hype, Routledge, New York, 2007 (235 pp). ISBN 0-41594-828-2 (paperback).

Sex Wars by Marge Piercy

I am totally in love with Marge Piercy's writing. I used to buy her books as soon as they came out. But in the last couple of years I've been slacking. So I've just finished reading Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period and I loved it, of course.

She makes obvious the commonality between activist women of 130 years ago and activist women of today. Piercy know activism because she has been and continues to be an activist. Here's her comment on the reason she chose to examine the later half of the 19th Century:

"I was attracted to the era after the Civil War because I found it had so many of the same divisions and conflicts as our own time. The role of women in the public sphere and in the family, the degree to which free sexual expression was valuable, permissible, tolerated or condemned, whether Church and State should continue to be separated or whether Christianity should be the official religion, as opposed to all the other religions found in the States – these are all deep divisions in our own time as they were then."

Class issues, sexual issues, race issues, labor issues all came crashing together for the activists then just as they force activists today to question our assumptions and broaden our horizons.

Women got screwed royally back then and I suppose the novel will provide fodder for those who haul out the "women have always been oppressed" line. What's valuable to me, however, is how Piercy shows that strong women survive and thrive, especially when they have the ability to analyze their oppression and figure out who is an ally and who is a self-serving git.

I'm going to be re-reading bits of this book and will perhaps post more of my responses. Mostly, I'm reveling in the sheer comfort and delight of spending time with a writer who understands feminism and classism and life in ways that are so familiar to me.

Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

I caught part of a talk on C-SPAN Book TV by Peniel Johnson, who has a book out about the Black Power Movement. It was pretty awesome. Turns out I can watch the whole thing on the web here.

Here's the blurb from C-SPAN's website:

Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

About the Program
Peniel Joseph chronicles the history of the black power movement in America. Mr. Joseph follows a group of activists that built their movement upon the work of Malcolm X. The author relays the rise of the Black Panthers and profiles leaders of the black power movement such as Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis. Peniel Joseph discusses his book at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

About the Author
Peniel Joseph is the editor of "The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights - Black Power Era." He currently teaches in the Africana Studies department at Brandeis University.

And here Joseph’s website about the book.

I'm gonna have to order me a copy of this book!

The Eagle Catcher

This book is the January selection for the reading group at Once Upon a Crime Books, a wonderful independent mystery bookstore in Minneapolis.

This is the first in a series of novels by Margaret Coel. This is not a novel I would have chosen for myself. It starts very slowly and it took quite a while for me to care very much about the characters. But the last few chapters are filled with suspense and action that kept me flipping pages until the end.

Coel documents the history of lies and manipulation by white people toward native populations in interesting ways. For instance, when looking for a motive for murder, the white people keep focusing on money. The answer is revealed not in a bid for money, but in respect for the land and the Arapaho ancestors.

Coel has a couple of interesting, flawed but likeable characters to build a series upon. The main character, Father John is a Catholic priest who runs a mission, and a softball team, on the reservation. His character development lags until halfway through the book, a fatal flaw if I hadn't wanted to finish the book for the group meeting.

A young Native lawyer, Vicki Holden, is torn between living on the reservation and moving with her Lakota boyfriend to a big law firm in Los Angeles.

My checks around the internet indicate the following novels in the series are improvements over this beginning, but I'm not sure I'm interested enough to follow through.

Quiz

I took the "If You Were a Poet..." quiz on gURL.com
		I am... Gertrude Stein Do you have a thing for words? You're in good company. Gertrude Stein did too. Who else could write a line like, "A rose is a rose is a rose," and call it poetry? Read more... Which poet are you?

A book proposal and its consequences

VISITORS FROM FEMINISTING, PLEASE REQUEST THAT THESE LINKS BE POSTED DIRECTLY ON THE FEMNINISTING SITE. I REFUSE TO BE THE "NICE WHITE LADY" (SEE VIDEO ABOVE) THROUGH WHICH THESE AWESOME WOMEN GET FILTERED. THANK YOU.

Over at Feministing.com, there is a Call for submissions for a new book to be published by Seal Press.

Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren't shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.

Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes.

Yes Means Yes! will fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex. We are looking to collect sharp and insightful essays, from voices both established and new, that demonstrate how empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture.....

What follows is a series of bullet points suggesting topics to write about.

Make of it what you will. This could turn it to be a decent book. But what a narrow concept of rape!

One good thing, is the quality of the responses to this badly written cfp. Read and enjoy:


Tekanji

Magniloquence

Sylvia

Sudy

Fire fly

Black Amazon

Veronica

Therimorph

I'm falling up

Elaine Vigneault

Responses from at least one of the editors, Jacklyn Friedman, have been exceptional in the lack of defensive I normally see when valid criticism arises:

Jacklyn's response to Tekanji

Jacklyn's respose to Firefly

Author event next month in Minneapolis

My first draft of a flyer for a visit by Antonia Juhasz:

The Book

I haven't blogged about this yet, but today seems like a good time. I took the day off from work to travel to the town where my mother lives. We participated in a book release party for the book that she researched and wrote and that I typeset and illustrated. The book is about our ancestors and the decisions they made as they moved from New England to the midwest in the 1800s. This book is based on letters and diaries that my mother discovered in the attic of the home where we both grew up. The letters describe the "frontier" experience for white settlers in the U.S.

My mother's academic specialty is the migration of people. What is it that motivates people to move from one part of the world to another? What decisions do they make in that process? Is the move gradual or sudden? What political, geographic and societal forces are most influential in those decisions?

What we discovered in this process is that, not surprisingly, the settlement of the "western" territories did not follow the plotlines we learned in school. Our ancestors bought midwestern land in the early 1800s but did not move there until years later. They hired other, less affluent, people to clear the land and establish the agriculture that became the basis of future wealth for our family. The family that cleared the land, built the barn, established the livestock and produced the crops was not our own. Once all the hard work was finished, my ancestors moved in and reaped the profits. The family that did the work is not longer mentioned. That's colonialism 101.

The release party was held at the retirement village in which my mother currently resides. 40 people attended, most of whom were residents of the building or friends of my mother.

This book is important because it dispels some myths and clarifies some truths. Colonialism is a messy, complicated affair. Families are affected in unpredictable ways by capitalism's need to expand and consolidate territory. The ground troops of colonialism are privileged in many ways, but they are subject also to unforgiving circumstances. Colonialism is bloody and messy and difficult. Even the so-called beneficiaries of capitalism often get a raw deal.

Come and sit a spell



Yesterday it was announced that Doris Lessing had won the Nobel Prize for literature. She was on her way home from shopping and was met by a hoard of journalists on her front porch. So she sat down and answered questions. What an awesome 87-year-old!

I've spent time this year re-reading her books, this time in order. I've read the first two books of the "Children of Violence" series: Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage. Many times I found myself quoting passages out loud to Ravenhub because she does such a wonderful job of popping the overinflated egos of the colonists in Africa.

Here's some quotes form her encounter with the press yesterday:

"I was coming back from the hospital with my son Peter who was sick. I stepped out of a taxi and there were all these cameras, a whole posse of photographers. As this street is very good for that kind of thing, I thought they were shooting a soap or an episode of Morse or something. But it was me. So I first heard that I had won the Nobel prize for literature from the reporters."

"It is the most glamorous prize, and naturally it has got a lot of prestige, which none of the other prizes have, so it's the icing on the cake. At one point, sometime in the 70s, they [the Nobel academy] didn't like me - they said they didn't - but they seem to have changed their minds. Committees are like that. Of course I didn't expect to get it. I've been on the shortlist for 40 years. It is good to be the 11th woman on the list, I'm only sorry that one of the first or fourth or the fifth wasn't Virginia Woolf. But I don't think it is helpful to talk about writers in terms of male and female. A lot of British writers have won it, which is good. We produce a lot of good writers. I've been talking non-stop all day. I've spoken to my publisher and agent and old friends who rang me up, which was very good. There were lots of people who have wanted me to have it for a long time, so it is very nice that I have. I'm exhausted. To celebrate I'd have to go and buy champagne. I'm going to bed."

Author visit at Mayday Books

My latest flyer for the bookstore.

Michael Albert

Here's a flyer I made for Michael Albert's talk in Minneapolis.