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Archive: March 2006

Goodbye, Cruel World!

It’s spring break for Steven and so today we blast off to a not-so-springlike place where we won’t be moderating comments much if at all, so don’t expect to hear from us or have us hear from you through the rest of the week. Maybe we’ll come back with stories and even an audiobook or two to add to my monthly book list next time.

We’re finally off the comic weblog update list since we don’t really aim to talk about comics, so maybe most old readers won’t even notice this note!

I am Curious (…)!

Anonymous commenter says (in reference to Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane #106, “I am Curious (Black)!”):

Live this next 24 hrs. as a black woman… Man, just live the next 24 hrs. White, black, red, yellow… It don’t matter what color.. Just live!!!!

Thanks to you, O commenter: we will take these words of wisdom to heart.

Except…. This comment arrives, fortuitously, soon after I complained about excessive attention to universal themes in Brokeback Mountain. The exhortation to just live suggests that we ought to pay more attention to our universal, shared experience of life and not worry so much about differences—don’t live in some other person’s skin for a day, but consider what you share with that other person. Good advice. Exclusive attention to differences leads at best to alienation and lack of empathy and at worst to hatred and oppression: racism, sexism, homophobia. But exclusive attention to universal or shared experience and ignorance of difference leads to the subtler oppression of whitewashing. By living in some other person’s skin for a day, figuratively or literally, we may find and celebrate the diversities and the universalities of our lives. “I am Curious (Black)!” for all its clumsy preaching, makes this worthwhile point.

Ummmm

Ah, not blogging is fun. Maybe blogging can be fun too?

Um, but what to blog about? Rose and I saw Brokeback Mountain a few days ago. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are so brave! Fah.

I was going to mention how it’s not exactly a universal love story, since people whose love doesn’t deviate from normative restrictions aren’t encouraged to fear and despise themselves, aren’t murdered for the crime of existing or driven into a traumatized unlife in the closet. Then I read the New York Review of Books review, so I’ll just link to that instead. Because I’m lazy.

I will say this: universality is overrated. Universal themes: who cares? They’re generic, we’ve seen them a million times before. The specificity is what makes stories worth reading! And the specificity is especially important in Brokeback Mountain, where the specific story is real and happening right now. There are people—maybe not as many as there used to be, but still far too many—who would watch Brokeback Mountain and rejoice in Jack and Ennis’s misery. (They’d probably be sad about the broken marriages, though.) There are many men who won’t see the movie because they fear the image of gay sex. That’s what the story’s about: denial, hatred and fear of sexuality, a man who can’t overcome his fear and kills his own soul as thoroughly as other fearful men kill his would-be lover.

I just thought of something. Did anybody praise Liam Neeson and Peter Sarsgaard for playing bisexual in Kinsey?


Isn’t it sad that the little girls can’t read Wonder Woman? (Um, what about the little boys?) I was gonna say the little girls are being denied their veiled bondage quasi-porn, but it occurred to me they they must be getting plenty of that in their manga.


Abraham Lincoln (from Posivite Atheism):

My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.

When the Know-Nothings get control, it [the Declaration of Independence] will read: “All men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure….

If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, “I see no probability of the British invading us,” but he will say to you, “Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.”

Thomas Jefferson:

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise … without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

Dr. Rush told me (he had it from Asa Green) that when the clergy addressed General Washington, on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation that he had never, on any occasion, said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Christian religion, and they thought they should so pen their address as to force him at length to disclose publicly whether he was a Christian or not. However, he observed, the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article of their address particularly, except that, which he passed over without notice.

February Reading List

Right, it’s not February anymore. I didn’t make much time to read in February and hope to do better about that in March, as well as pull in some non-fiction. I may have come to a halt on Le Guin for now, but gorging myself on her books didn’t detract from my enjoyment of any of them.

The Love Wife, Gish Jen
The story of the stresses and delights of a multiracial family when a distant Chinese relative comes to live with them and provide childcare. While the plot itself was engaging, the style was really the high point. Written almost like a screenplay, each major character narrates at various times, often commenting on the narrations of others. It sounds awkward when I describe it, but it was very effective and made me sympathetic to all the characters, which is all the more powerful in a story about conflict and changing self-definition. I very much enjoyed readiing, although the plot doesn’t overlow with joy.

The Telling, Ursula Le Guin
As I said yesterday, this warrants rereading for me and was worth buying too. Relevant and beautiful.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow
I really hadn’t liked Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and here I didn’t think the postmodern magical realism added up to much and didn’t think the revolutionary techgeek subplot worked, but there were moments that were absolutely lovely. Maybe the next Doctorow book will be the one for me, but I have no regrets about reading this. Like The Telling, I found it an inspiring relationship book, although it’s not exactly about good happy-ending-type stories.

The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula Le Guin
I think this is the oldest Le Guin I’ve read, but it didn’t feel particularly dated. I briefly complained about is-she-crazy-or-does-she-have-access-to-another-world stories, but here it’s clearly not an either/or situation. Here it’s a man who’s the protagonist and his dreams can remake the world, which means that no one in that world can be aware of the changes. Maybe I don’t have a problem with stories like that after all.

Tales of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin
The tales themselves are mixed in depth and context, but all entertaining for fans of Earthsea and they provide support and added explanation for other books without being necessary to understand them.

The Other Wind, Ursula Le Guin
The latest and perhaps last of the Earthsea books brings back characters from all the previous novels (including Tehanu, which I hadn’t yet read) and brings them to satisfying conclusions by having them look death in the face and understand their places in the world as a part of world-building.

Tehanu, Ursula Le Guin
I already knew who Tehanu was and some of her story from reading the sequels first, but I was amazed and delighted to read a book for children in which a character says, appropriately angered, that a child has been raped because sometimes children are raped. There’s so much more to it than that, but the politics impressed me. I should try to write more on this later.

The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
As long as we run across people saying, “Don’t chicks just naturally like cleaning?” I don’t think this book is outdated yet.