What are you reading right now?

[Guybrush]

Looks interesting, TR 🙂

I'm currently reading Mr. Know It All by John Waters. He writes about getting his various movies put together, describing the cast, adding in some advice for young filmmakers, etc. It's good fun.

[Toy Revolver]

Looks interesting, TR 🙂

I'm currently reading Mr. Know It All by John Waters. He writes about getting his various movies put together, describing the cast, adding in some advice for young filmmakers, etc. It's good fun.

i remember him plugging a book he had written-

it bet it's interesting



well written short story about an affair where nothing too serious happens

reminded me of raymond carver

[Toy Revolver]

oh my she passed away a long time ago

it seems like they would've mentioned that

i generally assume it's new 

i mean i think this is the first it's been published but you know

maybe she's famous enough that a person should know

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Colwin

[jadis]

When Cleopatra was alive, she wasn't categorised by the colour of her skin

[Toy Revolver]

she wasn't black

now there's this weird thing where some people think blacks can make up any history they want

blacks were the original and only real hebrews

blacks were the first indigenous people in america

blacks built the pyramids

einstein was black

ye's black

on and on

[jadis]

Ludwig van Beethoven? I think you mean Ludwig van Blackhoven

[Toy Revolver]

just finished the novel The Death of Vivek Oji

i didn't get engaged in the story

it dealt with lgbtq issues in nigeria but basically it was a whodunnit

i don't think i ever enjoyed a whodunnit and this was no exception

the author introduced like six characters on the first page which alienated me

i really didn't put much effort into this book

maybe it's my fault but there was also a lot of random jumping with the chronology - i feel like these authors are trying to be faulkner

however it seems most people who read this think it's great so you know

[innerspaceboy]

I found the third and final edition of Classics Illustrated I've been looking for at a vintage toy and comic show today! It was from the same fellow who sold me the restored edition of Metropolis at the last show I attended.

I now have all 3 of my favorite classic science fiction novels in vintage 1940s-50s comic book form - Frankenstein, The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds. Yay!

[Lisnaholic]

^ Nice covers, ISB !
_________________________________

On the topic of Cleopatra, I remember reading once how 19th century Europe was prepared to admire the Egyptian civilization, but only on the assumption that it was created by Middle-Eastern-looking types around the Nile delta, as it safely flowed into the good old Mediterranean Sea, which is almost Europe, really. But an earlier culture was pretty much ignored, because it was located up-stream, in Africa proper, and was established by the (black) Nubians.

Here's a quote suggesting that Delta Egypt owed more to the Nubians than to the Middle East:-

Frank Yurco stated that depictions of pharonic iconography such as the royal crowns, Horus falcons and victory scenes were concentrated in the Upper Egyptian Naqada culture and A-Group Nubia. He further elaborated that "Egyptian writing arose in Naqadan Upper Egypt and A-Group Nubia, and not in the Delta cultures, where the direct Western Asian contact was made, further vititates the Mesopotamian-influence argument".[22]

_______________________________

the author introduced like six characters on the first page which alienated me

i really didn't put much effort into this book

maybe it's my fault but there was also a lot of random jumping with the chronology - i feel like these authors are trying to be faulkner

however it seems most people who read this think it's great so you know

Yep, I agree, T R: I don't like reading whodunnits much, and would prob abandon a book that does those things you mention. To me it's like a lack of courtesy to the reader, saying "I have a story to tell, but I'm going to make it difficult for you."

In contrast, the book I'm reading totally grips you from the first chapter. Ayaan has a hard-to-believe, real-life story about her girlhood in Somalia, and like any narrator with a good story, her intention is to explain rather than to confuse:-

[Toy Revolver]

have a story to tell, but I'm going to make it difficult for you

i think it started with the sound and the fury which is one of my favorite books ever but faulkner's very difficult approach wasn't just to be artsy - he was taking you into the insanity of disabled and suicidal characters minds

it's worth the work but it's been copied to death and usually without valid purpose

[ᑕᐧᔐᔫᓂᑯᒑᔥ]

 



ᐯ

[Lexi Darling]

I agree, Creeme Coling is better than EPcEATSE.

[jadis]

The Inner Life of Gender

A colleague and friend of mine, a Jewish lesbian who has found herself, mostly with pleasant bemusement, teaching at a small Christian university in the Midwest, recently shared with me, outraged, her employer's new policy on "gender" and pronouns. In the solemn, moralizing tone of a land-acknowledgement—a register of piety that the school's administrators no longer use to talk about their institution's religious denomination—officials declared that they understood gender to be an essential component of students' "identities." Students have genders, and those genders must be recognized by faculty through the use of proper pronouns, on pain of administrative sanction. Gender is a vital psychic reality and a site of fraught self-investigation; it is, at the same time, a datum to be tracked and enforced by the university bureaucracy. It can, moreover, be changed at any moment, by a student's declaration of a new gender, which will in turn be registered by administrators and recognized by faculty who want to keep their jobs.

The meaning of the terms around which the above paragraph is organized—gender, identity, recognition—have in recent years become self-evident both in the operations of policy and in people's everyday experience of themselves. Individuals who would be suspicious of the invisible forces around which vanished moral-political orders were built (soul, destiny, telos, Providence, etc.), and who would be baffled by the various concepts by which their ancestors made sense of their selves (chastity, honor, virtue, authenticity), seem to find in gender and its related keywords a means both of expressing their inner life and of remaking the world. The apparently irrefutable obviousness of these concepts conceals from us both their novelty and their strange, self-contradictory logic.

How is it that gender could be something I have, do, understand, declare, register, recognize, and change? Gender has the pathos of a struggle to access the hidden depths of inner life, a quest for the truth of the self that centuries of Christian confession and post-Christian therapy have taught Westerners to regard as sublimely difficult and noble. But gender is also as easy, as public, and as increasingly compulsory as "saying one's pronouns." In what may be the basic bait-and-switch of contemporary liberalism, gender promises us a domain of personal freedom in which we can create ourselves anew and then compels us to expose that intimate self, enrolling it in a public campaign of good against evil, future against past.

Asking questions about gender reveals its status as ideology—as the transformation of a particular, contingent interpretation of the world into an ostensibly natural fact about the world. In critiquing "gender ideology," however, one risks becoming the proponent of a counterideology no less shrilly political in its insistent defense of "common sense." How can we resist an ideology, not least by exposing it as an ideology, without ourselves becoming ideological? How can we question "gender" without thereby becoming "fascists," as gender theorists like Judith Butler insist we are? Is it possible to be neutral about gender—to elude the demands that its proponents place on us rather than silently accepting or screamingly refusing them?

[Lexi Darling]

Articles like that are so exhausting. People don't know how awful it feels to have their personhood reduced to "discourse".

I'm sick of my friends and my people being spoken of like this.

[Toy Revolver]

Articles like that are so exhausting. People don't know how awful it feels to have their personhood reduced to "discourse".

I'm sick of my friends and my people being spoken of like this.

it's also very poorly written - obviously hiding behind obfuscation and pointless ambiguity

all those words to say fuck your pronouns

here's a fact of life, at least here in america, college is fucking expensive, and in america when you pay for things you expect to get it your way - a professor who wants to ignore pronouns is like a dishwasher who wants to ignore the cutlery - bitch it's your fucking job - people don't like washing forks but folks pay for nice meals and they get clean forks - tuition is 10 grand a year at least - you call me whatever the fuck i tell you to call me