Recently in race & ethnicity Category
After a long and fruitful week of getting up to speed in my new position over in Ethnic Studies and teaching my first session of a graduate workshop in memoir, I am looking forward to some kicking-back time tonight at 7 p.m. at Indigo Bridge Books, swilling some ethical decaf and listening to a bunch of slam-winning young people, including one Grey Castro, perform their spoken-word poetry for us locals.
I'm a little nervous. Among the pieces Grey's going to do is one about what it was like for him to read my memoir The Truth Book, something he put off for four years after its publication, aware that it probably wouldn't be pretty. Wise child. But he took the plunge, and responded with words. I've read a paper copy of the piece, and that alone was intense enough to leave me torn up for a while. It won Grey a slam in Ohio, so, though I'm obviously saturated with bias, I'm not the only one who thinks it's strong work. So this evening should be interesting. It's kind of a rare and special privilege to now be in a two-generation cycle of making art from hard things.
On the topic of making art from hard things at a broader sociopolitical level, i.e., surviving U.S. history, the inimitable Honorée Fanonne Jeffers posted a bracing piece on why Women's Equality Day still doesn't feel so equal:
I'm a little nervous. Among the pieces Grey's going to do is one about what it was like for him to read my memoir The Truth Book, something he put off for four years after its publication, aware that it probably wouldn't be pretty. Wise child. But he took the plunge, and responded with words. I've read a paper copy of the piece, and that alone was intense enough to leave me torn up for a while. It won Grey a slam in Ohio, so, though I'm obviously saturated with bias, I'm not the only one who thinks it's strong work. So this evening should be interesting. It's kind of a rare and special privilege to now be in a two-generation cycle of making art from hard things.
On the topic of making art from hard things at a broader sociopolitical level, i.e., surviving U.S. history, the inimitable Honorée Fanonne Jeffers posted a bracing piece on why Women's Equality Day still doesn't feel so equal:
So, I don’t celebrate Women’s Equality Day today, because contrary to popular mainstream American opinion, Women includes all American women, not just White ladies.
Alyss Dixson's guest-post in The Atlantic's blog, "On Invisibility, Gender, and Publishing," looks at how women's literary work fares in the world of publishing and prizes, and what women are doing about it.
As far as how this woman's work is faring in the world of publishing, I received my contract for ISLAND OF BONES in the mail yesterday--hurray! But gentle readers, it looks like there's an error in it. A minor, dinky little error that, sigh, nonetheless means I can't just sign and be done, which I have so been looking forward to, because I don't like to celebrate until the ink is on the dotted line, and I do love to celebrate. Now: more waiting. C'est la vie.
As far as how this woman's work is faring in the world of publishing, I received my contract for ISLAND OF BONES in the mail yesterday--hurray! But gentle readers, it looks like there's an error in it. A minor, dinky little error that, sigh, nonetheless means I can't just sign and be done, which I have so been looking forward to, because I don't like to celebrate until the ink is on the dotted line, and I do love to celebrate. Now: more waiting. C'est la vie.
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Lovely readers, right now, as I type, Lorraine López and the other PEN/Faulkner finalists, including winner Sherman Alexie, are being feted at a dinner at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC. Congratulations, Lorraine, on the national success of the probing, funny, honest stories of Homicide Survivors Picnic.Congratulations to poet Carrie Shipers, whose collection Ordinary Mourning is just out (as in yesterday) from ABZ Press. To read three of her striking poems, go here.
Also right now, in the USA, an estimated two and a half million women--most of whom are women of color from the global South--labor as domestic workers, making possible the labor and leisure of all those who choose to leave the care of "the most precious elements of [their] lives: their families and homes," to others. Ai-jen Poo's essay looks at our interconnections, sketches out a feminist bill of rights for domestic workers, and calls for change:
The upside-down concentration of the world's resources and wealth in the hands of a small minority at the expense of the vast majority is in fact unsustainable for everyone. Domestic worker policy demands that we recognize and value the basic care that we all require to live and provides a model for reshaping our economy to serve our collective human needs.
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Gentle readers, the electricians left this morning. My new office has walls, a door (with a lock), lights, and the Internet. I'm so happy. Photos soon.
It awaits paint and a floor. Oh, and furniture. But it's standing, and I love it.
Thanks so much to whoever nominated one of my blog posts as "Best Writing Advice" for Jane Friedman's blog at Writer's Digest. The titles of all 20 blog posts look fascinating and useful; link to the list here. What a nice surprise, to be in such good company. Thank you!
If you live in Lincoln and need to buy some gifts (or spoil yourself), shop tomorrow, Saturday the 24th, at Ten Thousand Villages in the Haymarket. Ten Thousand Villages is an amazing enterprise, period, but tomorrow, ten percent of their profits tomorrow go to Voices of Hope, a center that helps survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. So get your shop on and do some good. Thanks, Ariana, for the heads-up.
I'm very excited to have received, just yesterday, an acceptance from Indiana Review of my creative nonfiction piece "Hip Joints." It's about sexual harassment and strip mining in West Virginia in the '80s, when I was a high school senior and my boss at the factory hadn't yet heard of women's rights. (Pre-Anita Hill, sexual harassment wasn't a term very many people anywhere knew, and it sure hadn't trickled down to rural Appalachia back when I was sixteen.) "Hip Joints" (which are what we manufactured at the factory, but you can see the possibilities) is an ecofeminist piece that also incorporates issues of ethnicity. I'm happy that it's going to have an audience soon.
Here at UNL, there's one week left in the semester, and it's total crazy-time. Students are writing their final papers, and graduate students are defending their theses and dissertations and taking oral exams--which means we professors should really have cloned ourselves by now to handle it all. Somewhat counterintuitively, I've taken to revising a chapter of THE DESIRE PROJECTS every morning before the work-day starts. (I had been revising one chapter a week, and calling it good.) This makes me much happier. I can go around blithely, knowing I've paid my dues to writing first.
In other news, my Little Sister Amara turned 16 this week, my marriage to the HH turned 15, and Grey is counting down the days until his college graduation. Spring is always such an exciting time. And damn, it's good not to have to wear a coat everywhere!
It awaits paint and a floor. Oh, and furniture. But it's standing, and I love it.
Thanks so much to whoever nominated one of my blog posts as "Best Writing Advice" for Jane Friedman's blog at Writer's Digest. The titles of all 20 blog posts look fascinating and useful; link to the list here. What a nice surprise, to be in such good company. Thank you!
If you live in Lincoln and need to buy some gifts (or spoil yourself), shop tomorrow, Saturday the 24th, at Ten Thousand Villages in the Haymarket. Ten Thousand Villages is an amazing enterprise, period, but tomorrow, ten percent of their profits tomorrow go to Voices of Hope, a center that helps survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. So get your shop on and do some good. Thanks, Ariana, for the heads-up.
I'm very excited to have received, just yesterday, an acceptance from Indiana Review of my creative nonfiction piece "Hip Joints." It's about sexual harassment and strip mining in West Virginia in the '80s, when I was a high school senior and my boss at the factory hadn't yet heard of women's rights. (Pre-Anita Hill, sexual harassment wasn't a term very many people anywhere knew, and it sure hadn't trickled down to rural Appalachia back when I was sixteen.) "Hip Joints" (which are what we manufactured at the factory, but you can see the possibilities) is an ecofeminist piece that also incorporates issues of ethnicity. I'm happy that it's going to have an audience soon.
Here at UNL, there's one week left in the semester, and it's total crazy-time. Students are writing their final papers, and graduate students are defending their theses and dissertations and taking oral exams--which means we professors should really have cloned ourselves by now to handle it all. Somewhat counterintuitively, I've taken to revising a chapter of THE DESIRE PROJECTS every morning before the work-day starts. (I had been revising one chapter a week, and calling it good.) This makes me much happier. I can go around blithely, knowing I've paid my dues to writing first.
In other news, my Little Sister Amara turned 16 this week, my marriage to the HH turned 15, and Grey is counting down the days until his college graduation. Spring is always such an exciting time. And damn, it's good not to have to wear a coat everywhere!
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Dear Hegemony, please tell me who I am. Please tell me how to see myself.
We've just been reading Wide Sargasso Sea in class, so my mind's on how a dominant voice--backed by money and the power of the metropole--can erase and madden someone else's truth.
And how generous Hegemony is with its answers! Here are just two that scratched their fingernails across my brain this week.
David Denby, reviewing Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer in the March 8, 2010 New Yorker, refers in passing--admiringly--to Olivia Williams "one of the rare actresses who seem more intelligent and beautiful as they get angrier." Just in passing, mind you. It's not his focus; it's an aside.
But pause. Let that sink in. So . . . the majority of actresses, then, seem more stupid and ugly as they get angrier? Do women in general, David Denby? (Is it any wonder that so many women have trouble expressing anger directly?) Is that true of male actors, of men?
On to #2. Nathaniel Rich, who turns all of 30 tomorrow, is perhaps surprisingly young to be the senior editor of fiction at The Paris Review, but then, he's had unusual opportunities. His father is Frank Rich, who writes for the New York Times; his brother Simon writes humor for the New Yorker. He grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Yale. He worked at the New York Review of Books straight out of college.
Hegemony. Money. The metropole.
Why does this matter to you, writers? Well, at the Paris Review, a most desirable publication venue for any writer, Nathaniel Rich serves as the decider, the gatekeeper. His taste determines what gets into the journal's pages.
So I found it rather fascinating to stumble across this window into his desires. It appeared in Canteen Magazine this January in what Rich's own website describes as "an autobiographical nonfiction piece." Its title, "Over Ernest," suggests that it's looking back at youthful folly; that the author's early infatuation with Hemingway is now outgrown. Still, its opening paragraph is fascinating:
Gentle readers, we recently read and discussed in class an excerpt from Madwoman in the Attic, that groundbreaking work of feminist criticism from the 1970s. The students were shocked by the wildly sexist things that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century male writers said about the blood-congested male drive they saw as essential to writing works of literary genius.
How backward, we all said.
Yet here we go again, in 2010. (Hey, it's working for Avatar.)
Okay, so Nathaniel Rich was young and oversexed when he fantasized about Hemingway. Okay, so surely the essay will later take his younger self to task--I couldn't tell, because Canteen only excerpts the first page. (Invited to read more--by subscribing, at $10 an issue--gee, I declined.) Okay, so it was 9 whole years ago.
But not as long ago as I'd like to believe.
We've just been reading Wide Sargasso Sea in class, so my mind's on how a dominant voice--backed by money and the power of the metropole--can erase and madden someone else's truth.
And how generous Hegemony is with its answers! Here are just two that scratched their fingernails across my brain this week.
David Denby, reviewing Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer in the March 8, 2010 New Yorker, refers in passing--admiringly--to Olivia Williams "one of the rare actresses who seem more intelligent and beautiful as they get angrier." Just in passing, mind you. It's not his focus; it's an aside.
But pause. Let that sink in. So . . . the majority of actresses, then, seem more stupid and ugly as they get angrier? Do women in general, David Denby? (Is it any wonder that so many women have trouble expressing anger directly?) Is that true of male actors, of men?
On to #2. Nathaniel Rich, who turns all of 30 tomorrow, is perhaps surprisingly young to be the senior editor of fiction at The Paris Review, but then, he's had unusual opportunities. His father is Frank Rich, who writes for the New York Times; his brother Simon writes humor for the New Yorker. He grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Yale. He worked at the New York Review of Books straight out of college.
Hegemony. Money. The metropole.
Why does this matter to you, writers? Well, at the Paris Review, a most desirable publication venue for any writer, Nathaniel Rich serves as the decider, the gatekeeper. His taste determines what gets into the journal's pages.
So I found it rather fascinating to stumble across this window into his desires. It appeared in Canteen Magazine this January in what Rich's own website describes as "an autobiographical nonfiction piece." Its title, "Over Ernest," suggests that it's looking back at youthful folly; that the author's early infatuation with Hemingway is now outgrown. Still, its opening paragraph is fascinating:
While being fellated by a native woman.There was a time—not as long ago as I’d like to believe—when I imagined all novelists as Ernest Hemingways, hero-adventurers who shot tigers, fought in wars, seduced wild-eyed women, gambled their life savings at high-stakes poker, won duels, lost duels, and wrote frantic bursts of prose while standing upright in their rented rooms in Havana or Saigon or Beirut. I didn’t fully understand the standing-upright part, but I had read that Hemingway worked this way. At first I figured it had something to do with the immense ferocity of the act; surely he was too wired with genius to sit down at a desk. The more I thought about it, though, it occurred to me that the reason Hemingway wrote standing up was to allow a woman (his muse, no doubt) to more easily “inspire” him while he was in the midst of his demanding labor. This image—of the great writer madly scribbling masterpieces while being fellated by a native woman—haunted me. If this was the writing life, who wouldn’t want to be a writer? . . . I had just turned 21 years old.
Gentle readers, we recently read and discussed in class an excerpt from Madwoman in the Attic, that groundbreaking work of feminist criticism from the 1970s. The students were shocked by the wildly sexist things that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century male writers said about the blood-congested male drive they saw as essential to writing works of literary genius.
How backward, we all said.
Yet here we go again, in 2010. (Hey, it's working for Avatar.)
Okay, so Nathaniel Rich was young and oversexed when he fantasized about Hemingway. Okay, so surely the essay will later take his younger self to task--I couldn't tell, because Canteen only excerpts the first page. (Invited to read more--by subscribing, at $10 an issue--gee, I declined.) Okay, so it was 9 whole years ago.
But not as long ago as I'd like to believe.
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My beautiful, funny, and generous friend Lorraine López, about whom you've read on here before (multiple times), has just been catapulted into the national limelight! Her latest book, Homicide Survivors Picnic, a collection of short fiction, has been named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The other finalists are Barbara Kingsolver, Sherman Alexie, Colson Whitehead, and Lorrie Moore. (Thanks to Tayari's blog for the heads-up.)
Always modest, Lorraine says she's still stunned and ecstatic. It's going to be a whirlwind until March 23, when the winner is announced. Wow!
Regarding the issue of representing latinidad, Lorraine says that she "intended to produce stories for [the colllection] that would shift the focus from the performance of ethnicity that essentializes cultural experience. . . ." The L.A. Times includes a lengthy passage from a lovely 2-page interview, which you can access in full at BkMk's webpage for the book:
In the meantime, lift a glass to Lorraine!
Always modest, Lorraine says she's still stunned and ecstatic. It's going to be a whirlwind until March 23, when the winner is announced. Wow!
Regarding the issue of representing latinidad, Lorraine says that she "intended to produce stories for [the colllection] that would shift the focus from the performance of ethnicity that essentializes cultural experience. . . ." The L.A. Times includes a lengthy passage from a lovely 2-page interview, which you can access in full at BkMk's webpage for the book:
Lorraine's also co-editing a new collection, The Other Latino, that addresses this very issue--the expected performance of Latina/o ethnicity--from multiple perspectives. It's due out next year from University of Arizona Press.Q: Your collection has many Latino characters, and they all interact with characters from other backgrounds. Did you intend this bicultural or multicultural dimension of the book from the start, and do you think Latino writers face any special challenges in writing about Latino characters and culture for today’s varied literary audiences?
Lopez: This is a complicated question, and I thank you for asking it. For me, I did not set out to do more than explore characters beyond their cultural definition. As mentioned, I wanted to avoid that performance of identity that essentializes cultural experience. I am not interested in providing the usual themes, characters, and props that many associate with Latino literature. These do not characterize my experience as a Latina, so why should I artificially simulate such things to validate stereotypic notions? I can think of no reason to do this, except to gratify expectations of others....
I am not out to give anyone (including myself) what he or she might be expecting. In speaking to other Latino writers, I find that we similarly resist gratifying expectations that our characters perform in culturally expected ways, say, rolling tortillas, bopping around the barrio, or gathering wisdom from a sweet abuela. More and more, Latino literature is evolving away from such stereotypes, and becoming more interesting and challenging in the process.
In the meantime, lift a glass to Lorraine!
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Dear and gentle readers, we (here in Lincoln) will soon be graced by a visit from the lovely and amazing poet Camille Dungy, author of two books and editor of two more. Mark your calendar, Star City Sceners:
Thursday, February 4
3:30-5:00 p.m.
"Editing Black Nature"
Bailey Library, Andrews Hall, UNL
and later that evening,
7:00 p.m.--Camille's inaugural reading from her brand-new collection, Suck on the Marrow
Bailey Library, Andrews Hall, UNL.
Her edited anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, is especially exciting for anyone who's noticed that nature-writing anthologies tend to be not only green but white. (Seriously. Scan your collections' TOCs now.) At the 3:30 presentation, she'll talk about the process of gathering the poems and shepherding the book through the editing process at University of Georgia Press.
At 7:00 p.m., she'll read from her own work--particularly her new book Suck on the Marrow, a collection rooted in 19th-century history, which Natasha Trethewey calls "[p]lainspoken and unflinching," marked by "restraint and wry wit." She'll then be happy to chat and sign books, which will be available for purchase after the reading.
I first heard Camille read in 2004 at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She was a Bread Loaf Scholar, and of course all the Scholars are solid, but when Camille began to read, the air in the Little Theater hushed. Folks didn't even cough. The poems--and her riveting delivery--were knockout. I can't wait to hear her read from her new book. (And I can't believe she's gotten 4 books into print since then! Makes me feel laaazy.)
It's going to be an honor and a pleasure to have her here. And readers, I happen to know happy news: she's pregnant! So there'll be no wining with our dining, but we do intend to have fun.
On the home front, James and I are now cosily ensconced in our new place--which feels, after two and a half years in a smaller apartment, practically palatial. Its sweeping vistas of 1082 square feet and its blank white walls seem all Dr. Zhivagoesque to me--you know, those wide snowy plains with the tiny troika gliding along?
Now, as I've mentioned, the floors are bare, unfinished concrete, so it has roughly the ambience of a parking garage, and the appliances are from the 1970s. (The refrigerator shelves proudly proclaim "Spacemaker Door," as if it's a radical new invention, and the scary microwave has more knobs and dials than a cockpit.) Since we haven't been able to paint yet, the plaster from the refinished (popcorn-be-gone) ceiling sifts down in a fine white dust, coating everything.
But it's home, and it's ours, and we're happy.
Many thanks to Sandra and Cindy for their recent notes of encouragement and congratulations; to Ingrid and Douglas for the bread and salt, which is an old German custom of housewarming; and to Susan and Linck for the wine. We hope to be having some of y'all over soon.
Thursday, February 4
3:30-5:00 p.m.
"Editing Black Nature"
Bailey Library, Andrews Hall, UNL
and later that evening,
7:00 p.m.--Camille's inaugural reading from her brand-new collection, Suck on the Marrow
Bailey Library, Andrews Hall, UNL.
Her edited anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, is especially exciting for anyone who's noticed that nature-writing anthologies tend to be not only green but white. (Seriously. Scan your collections' TOCs now.) At the 3:30 presentation, she'll talk about the process of gathering the poems and shepherding the book through the editing process at University of Georgia Press.
At 7:00 p.m., she'll read from her own work--particularly her new book Suck on the Marrow, a collection rooted in 19th-century history, which Natasha Trethewey calls "[p]lainspoken and unflinching," marked by "restraint and wry wit." She'll then be happy to chat and sign books, which will be available for purchase after the reading.I first heard Camille read in 2004 at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She was a Bread Loaf Scholar, and of course all the Scholars are solid, but when Camille began to read, the air in the Little Theater hushed. Folks didn't even cough. The poems--and her riveting delivery--were knockout. I can't wait to hear her read from her new book. (And I can't believe she's gotten 4 books into print since then! Makes me feel laaazy.)
It's going to be an honor and a pleasure to have her here. And readers, I happen to know happy news: she's pregnant! So there'll be no wining with our dining, but we do intend to have fun.
On the home front, James and I are now cosily ensconced in our new place--which feels, after two and a half years in a smaller apartment, practically palatial. Its sweeping vistas of 1082 square feet and its blank white walls seem all Dr. Zhivagoesque to me--you know, those wide snowy plains with the tiny troika gliding along?
Now, as I've mentioned, the floors are bare, unfinished concrete, so it has roughly the ambience of a parking garage, and the appliances are from the 1970s. (The refrigerator shelves proudly proclaim "Spacemaker Door," as if it's a radical new invention, and the scary microwave has more knobs and dials than a cockpit.) Since we haven't been able to paint yet, the plaster from the refinished (popcorn-be-gone) ceiling sifts down in a fine white dust, coating everything.
But it's home, and it's ours, and we're happy.
Many thanks to Sandra and Cindy for their recent notes of encouragement and congratulations; to Ingrid and Douglas for the bread and salt, which is an old German custom of housewarming; and to Susan and Linck for the wine. We hope to be having some of y'all over soon.
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Okay, so I'm getting to this late, but I do have to wonder about these lines from Obama's Afghanistan speech on Tuesday night. This part comes toward the end, when he's talking about the moral authority of the U.S.:
Yes, "our union was founded in resistance to oppression"--for some. Not for all. For some, it was founded precisely upon oppression, to the point of genocide.
And really, to say "we have not sought world domination"--does that square with every epoch of American foreign policy as you remember it? If our government and/or populace has ever wanted to be the single superpower in terms of military and economic might, doesn't that count as "domination"?
Come on, Barack. I'm all on board with the restoration of the United States' moral position in the world via the re-abolition of torture and so on, but let's not erase or distort our national past for the exigencies of the moment. Your speeches matter. Don't pretty stuff up.
For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for — and what we continue to fight for — is a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.Sitting there listening and watching, I was like, "Nuh-uh. He did not just say that." Because of course, "[o]ur union was founded" precisely by means of the successful attempt "to occupy other nations." That's exactly what happened. The founders of the United States did indeed "claim another nation's resources"--and not just the resources of the first nations of the North American continent but also the human resources of multiple African nations. They claimed these resources--land, materials, and human labor--by means of lethal force and the imposition of tremendous suffering.
Yes, "our union was founded in resistance to oppression"--for some. Not for all. For some, it was founded precisely upon oppression, to the point of genocide.
And really, to say "we have not sought world domination"--does that square with every epoch of American foreign policy as you remember it? If our government and/or populace has ever wanted to be the single superpower in terms of military and economic might, doesn't that count as "domination"?
Come on, Barack. I'm all on board with the restoration of the United States' moral position in the world via the re-abolition of torture and so on, but let's not erase or distort our national past for the exigencies of the moment. Your speeches matter. Don't pretty stuff up.
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Congratulations to path-breaking French Senegalese writer Marie NDiaye! She has just won the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary award in France, for her novel Trois femmes puissantes ("Three Powerful Women," Gallimard, 2009), becoming the first black woman ever to do so in the 106-year history of the prize. (Wondering why it took so long? Go here to speculate.)Though the monetary award is only a token 10 euros, the prize brings tremendous international attention and prestige to the book and the author.
While I don't think you can yet get Trois femmes puissantes in English, the attention from the Goncourt should soon correct that. In the meantime, you can get NDiaye's novel Rosie Carpe from the University of Nebraska Press--the amazing little press that calls 'em first (as with Müller & Le Clezio on the Nobel).Thanks to Cheryl Strayed for the heads-up!
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Congratulations to the Rachel Maddow Show and to Indigo Bridge Books for great first years! Congratulations to UNL for opening a childcare center on campus! Congratulations to Obama for another great, important speech!
Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry. I have been going through it. But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.
Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross. Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years.
What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning. Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty. At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie. They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.
Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths. We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film. Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.
When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire. I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with. Livingston didn't say.
Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry. I have been going through it. But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.
Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross. Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years.
What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning. Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty. At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie. They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.
Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths. We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film. Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.
When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire. I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with. Livingston didn't say.
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Wow! I really needed this:
Graham also has a very smart new piece on why meetings suck so profoundly for creative workers (like writers), while manager-types seem to love them. Amen. Go here to read it. Then send the link to your chair/boss/supervisor.
In happy news, the lovely Meri Nana-ama Danquah's new edited collection, The Black Body (Seven Stories), is now available for pre-order. Andres Solomon writes:
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.Prestige + money? Even more disastrous. Read essayist and programmer Paul Graham's whole piece--about doing the work you actually love and not getting sidetracked along the way--here.
Graham also has a very smart new piece on why meetings suck so profoundly for creative workers (like writers), while manager-types seem to love them. Amen. Go here to read it. Then send the link to your chair/boss/supervisor.
In happy news, the lovely Meri Nana-ama Danquah's new edited collection, The Black Body (Seven Stories), is now available for pre-order. Andres Solomon writes:
This singularly brave book recounts with poignancy, wit, and fierce passion the ways that Americans, black and white, have come to understand the black body. These are exquisite stories of what it is to see, and love, and to be seen, and be loved. They make an utterly compelling collection.Good luck, Meri! And congratulations!
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