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RAFTM1 Tia Glista is hosting a book club on her newsletter this month and the book is Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are. Personally, I find August to be the hardest month for being motivated to read, so why not dive into a short story collection with other brilliant minds?
You can tell Jesus the bitch is back. I’ve been back in New York for two weeks now and have been kind of trying to hole up in my apartment so that I can catch up with the reading I have to do for my qualifying exams at the end of the month. Despite my grand ambitions for spending endless days reading in Ithaca, I only ended getting through 6.5 of the 15 books I hauled up there, so I have some catching up to do at this point. What I wouldn’t give to be Merve Emre and read two books a day! I finished On the Road on Friday night, almost a decade after I told my high school crush that I thought it was really good when he said it was his favorite book. I’d probably only read eighty pages of it at that point and hated it. Reading it now, a little older and wiser, I didn’t find it as intolerable as I did when I was fifteen, though there’s a point near the end where I’m sort of like, let’s wrap this up Mr. Paradise. I would love to teach this to students though, just because I would love to see how they receive it and if they would be moved by it in the same way that teenagers in the 50s were. The other book I finished for my exams was Erica R. Edwards’ The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire. I was working through this during the first week of the Kamala Harris for President campaign and a lot of the critiques that Edwards makes about the intimacy of Black women with the project of U.S. imperialism, both domestically and abroad, resonated with the narratives that suddenly started to bubble around about Harris as the hope for the future of democracy. Although Edwards doesn’t get into depth about Harris, she does mention her a few times and her discussion about the “glass cliff,” the idea that women tend to be appointed to leadership positions in moments of crisis, as the clean up team, all are applicable to the framing of Harris as “Mamala” or a hero in this moment. Edwards also has a great chapter on Condoleezaa Rice and everyone’s favorite object of swirl representation, Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, that is worth reading whether you’ve seen the show or not.
I sent out two For Your (Re)Consideration columns this past month: one on American Fiction and Percival Everett’s Erasure, which I did with RAFTM Ashley Bodika; the other on Hustlers, a movie I get now in a way that I didn’t get before.
As I’ve mentioned before, Hilton Als is one of my heroes and my admiration only grew after reading the transcription of his talk with the Joshua Jelly-Schapiro that was hosted at Pioneer Works last summer. In the talk, he mentions how essay writing for him is an ethos, a way of affecting and being affected. He describes writing about another person as an act of breaking them apart and trying to puzzle them back together, shaping them back into themselves. There’s also a really precious and earnest moment where he talks about loving Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones because his mother really loved it and, motivated by his earnest admiration of both his mother and Marshall, finding Marshall’s phone number in the phonebook and calling her up. And then finding his way to Marshall’s front door and asking to speak with her, to no success. Because why not? Even though he never got to speak with her, it was an act of reaching out, a true and nonparasitic desire for closeness to someone whose work moved him and shaped him. More of us should be like that.
What I’ve watched recently: I double featured Challengers and Twister while taking out my braids; went to see the Barbara Streisand A Star is Born at Village East and spilled cherry coke on myself before the movie had even started; went to a screening of Showgirls 2: The Cut (which is the 100 min version of Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven), the low-budget parody made by Rena Riffel who was in the original film; finally watched Daughters of the Dust because I was surprised to find out that Arthur Jafa was the cinematographer and formerly married to Julie Dash; I’ve been wanting to rewatch Succession for a while, so I rewatched the pilot this week and was reminded of what a sharp and well-executed (and unmatched?) work of television that is.
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RAFTM = Reader and Friend to Me; stolen from my own RAFTM Rachel Tashjian <3