Traveling Black: a Story of Race and Resistance, Mia Bay

 I was thinking this would be sort of like the book about travel in the Polish People's Republic that I read recently, except about African Americans in the US. But it's actually more about how travel creates legal complexities that scramble segregation efforts. Like, it turns out that a big part of how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually got reinforced was through the angle of interstate commerce — though it also turns out that Plessy vs. Ferguson was a case about train travel. As Bay notes at the outset, a lot of social history tends to focus on how groups inhabit a given place, not so much how they move from one place to another, or where they vacation. But a closer look at travel, especially in 20th century America, illuminates so many different aspects of society — infrastructure, laws, leisure, relationships of race, gender, class. And the history of segregation and the struggle for civil rights is such a fundamental part of American history (as we are increasingly coming to realize...), and it's really kind of astonishing stuff, when you dive into the details.

It's a fascinating and important history, but it must be admitted that the book is a little dry. Isabel Wilkerson sort of spoiled me for reading history — I'm like, oh, it's not all riveting page turners?? This one feels a bit more academic. And though there are anecdotes throughout that give you some sense of the lived experience behind these various issues, overall the book is more focused on legal history. I bought this book, Driving While Black, at the same time, and it will be interesting to see how it compares.

Minor Feelings: an Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hoang

 This is terrific. A collection of autobiographical essays, loosely gathered around the theme of Asian American womanhood. I'd been thinking about the specificities of Asian identity more after a fantastic panel on Critical Brownness Studies at the MLA earlier this year, and this book returned to some of the issues I had heard about there (especially the position of Asians within a US racial hierarchy organized around anti-Blackness), but it also went in some unexpected, and incredibly thought-provoking, directions. I'm especially thinking about the essay about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, which starts with the observation that the volumes of writing about her rarely mention her rape and murder, and then goes on to explore how to write about that, as well as an excellent essay on Richard Pryor and stand-up comedy.*

  The more autobiographical essays — especially one about college friendships and becoming an artist — are also fantastic. I found myself reflecting on the difference between essay and auto-theory — these are definitely essays, and I'm still pondering what that means exactly. Certainly, they do not feel self-indulgent in the way that auto-theory often can, and I think that's partly because, although they go in all kinds of surprising directions, there is a consistent theme or idea that holds them together. I like the looseness and whimsy of auto-theory, sometimes, but there's a limit. This book, though, strikes the exact right balance of meta-reflection, a judicious use of the pause to stop and ponder the thing one has just said, or openly worry about whether to say something else. The book's wonderful dry humor is crucial as well — it doesn't appear, as you might expect, in those meta-moments, but at other, unexpected points that provide a helpful leavening in a book that also pulls off the admirable feat of having really compelling moments of intense anger.

Required reading!

* A persistent fascination of mine. If you know of some good writing on stand-up comedy, please, tell me about it.

Spring, Ali Smith

 I love Ali Smith, and I've been enjoying the Seasonal Quartet, but I kind of hated this one. It felt sensationalistic and gross. The blend of magic and realism was exactly wrong for a representation of immigration detention centers, and the characters seemed utterly false. I don't know if I just wasn't in the right mood for it or what, because even Smith's style, which I typically love, came to seem twee and grating.

I'm determined to read each book in the quarter in its season, but I might wait until the very end of summer for the last one, to let the grumpiness wear off...

The Biggest Bluff, Maria Konnikova

 I started playing poker in graduate school with a group of friends, and quickly fell in love with the game. We played pretty regularly (like every other week) for years, and I missed it terribly when I left. I'd come to think of myself as being a decent player, and when I was in Vegas for a friend's bachelorette weekend, I even spent a few hours at a cash game, and came out of it $100 richer. Then, last January, I signed up for free poker lessons from Poker Powher, this super awesome organization that teaches women to play poker (for free!!!), and reconnected to my love for the game. I also discovered I wasn't nearly as good as I thought I was, heh heh, but after three months of weekly lessons, and lots of (free) practice games, I got a whole lot better. And now I just want to play all the time.*

I had posted something about all this on facebook, and a friend recommended Konnikova's book. I'll confess, I was a little skeptical, but I got the audiobook from the library (read by the author, which is always nice), and 10 minutes later, I was hooked. This is a really great book. It's not so much an account of how Konnikova learned to play poker (and play it well) as it is an investigation into the nature of poker as a game, and more broadly, into the way people conceptualize luck and risk. What does it mean to gamble? Why do we think of poker as gambling, but not, say, attending a PhD program in the humanities (surely the riskier endeavor, with more on the line). I've been super fascinated by these questions for awhile — not just because I am the graduate of such a PhD program, and have dealt with the roulette-like job market more than once, but all the more so during the onset of the pandemic, which was a particularly vivid illustration of the totally illogical way people understand risk — and Konnikova brilliantly shows how examining poker is actually the ideal way to study them.

On the way, you get some fun stories about the eccentric characters she meets, and a few brief scenes of the heart-pounding, nerve-wracking experience of playing Hold 'Em (especially as a woman, an aspect of the book I particularly appreciated). If you're an aspiring poker player, what you get in this book is not really a set of lessons for how to play, but a philosophy of play that helps you wrap your head around its particular combination of luck and skill. A lot of poker lore is focused on the idea of bluffing and tells, and yes, that stuff matters, but it's not quite as all-encompassing as some movies make it out to be (though I do think the mental aspect of the game is one of its biggest challenges, and one I'm still very much learning). The Biggest Bluff is really useful in the way that it carefully sorts through all those aspects. But the particular pleasure of this book, I think, is that Konnikova also subtly, gradually, draws out the beauty of poker — the things about it that make it, really, the perfect game.

It's a really fun read, and a much more intellectual one than I'd expected. Highly recommended!

* Free games are great, but they're really not the same as playing for money. Hence I am currently seeking a generous patron, interested in sponsoring me...

The Black Unicorn, Audre Lorde

You may be thinking, wow Kasia, you already abandoned the blogging, so soon? But actually, I've been a terrible reader. This might actually happen to me at the end of every semester — I get so excited about having additional reading time that I start running around like a headless chicken, picking up every book I pass. So I'm in the middle of, like, 12 books right now, and that's the main reason why I haven't posted.

But I did finished Audre Lorde's Black Unicorn. I pretty much always have a book of poetry going, usually in the bathroom (sorry poets). Lorde is in what I've termed my pantheon, aka, the collection of authors whose complete works I intend to read. Her work is so, so amazing. My first introduction to her writing was actually Cancer Journals, which is not where most people start, but it's an incredible text — she writes about her mastectomy and cancer treatment, and it's just a completely mind-opening work on gender, intimacy, self, illness. If you haven't read her, I think Sister Outsider is really the place to begin. What makes her essays so astonishing is the incredibly straightforward way that she moves through her ideas. We often think of difficulty as a marker of intelligence, when it comes to critical theory, but Lorde's writing is extremely accessible. As I write this, I'm wondering whether I'd call her ideas complex, and I'm really not sure — but certainly, they are profound. 

This was my first forray into her poetry, and it's actually very similar, in some sense, to the essays. The language is mostly fairly simple, but there's just an incredible force to her words, and you find yourself re-reading them over and over, working through the enormity of what is being said. For example:

TO MARTHA: A NEW YEAR

As you search over this year

with eyes your heart has

sharpened

remember longing.

I do not know your space now

I only seek a woman whom I love

trapped there

by accident.

but such places do not change

so much

as what we seek in them

and faith will serve

along the way

to somewhere else

where work begins.

This is writing that is openly spiritual, full of feeling, connected to a sense of ancient, elemental ways of being, and that's the kind of thing that can be difficult for soul-less intellectuals like me, heh heh, but truly, Lorde's writing is the closest I come to religion, and these poems feel like sacred texts.

Friends of the Library sale

 People had mentioned the Friends of the Library book sale as one of the great perks of living in Ithaca; an annual springtime ritual. But I was nonetheless surprised to arrive and find a line extending down the block! It felt kind of thrilling to be in a long line for something fun — remember concerts? People ahead of us were chatting (masked, from 6 feet away) about how long they'd been waiting, rumors flew about how much time it would take to get in. We quickly realized that we weren't able (or in the mood) to wait a few hours and decided to come back early the next day.

 

And so we arrived on Sunday bright and early, and got in line (only about 10 people ahead of us), and after maybe half an hour, we were in! They limit the number of people inside even more so than usual because of covid, and everyone was very considerate — if you were looking at a particular shelf, people waited until you were done. I wonder if it's usually more of a push-and-shove sort of affair. It was hard not to feel that delicious urgency to grab at whatever gem you saw before someone else got to it, even with less people — with more, I would have been a complete maniac. 

    I made a beeline for the literary criticism section first, then went to fiction, then poetry, then graphic novels. Next time I'll know to start with graphic novels first — that section was totally decimated. I didn't even make it to the children's books, because I'm the worst mom ever, but luckily my partner picked up a few things (a Richard Scarry and The Runaway Bunny).

 

 

 

And then, here's what I picked up...

 

I'm a little embarrassed at the size of these stacks, tbh. I definitely went overboard. But what a haul!! Some highlights I'm especially excited about:

   I was reasonably into the Wrinkle in Time series as a kid, but as a teenager I discovered L'Engle's books for adults, and those, I really got into. I haven't read either of these, and I'm very curious what they'll be like. 

    Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Joseph Roth are authors I'm completist about — steadily amassing and reading everything they've written. 

    I read Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other when it won the Booker, and liked it, and then randomly picked up The Emperor's Babe (it was on a semi-decorative bookshelf at a bar and they let me have it) and enjoyed that too. Blonde Roots imagines a world where Africans enslaved Europeans. I tend to hate this kind of fantasy alternative to historical atrocity stuff, but I'm curious what she does with the premise.

    I read Kitchen in January and people came out of the woodwork to tell me about their high school obsession with Banana Yoshimoto. So I'm clearly overdue.

    Will I actually tackle Marguerite Yourcenar's Abyss? It's rather dauntingly long, and I imagine it to be the same kind of dry, bejeweled, slow burn sort of experience as her other works. I feel so overwhelmed with work right now that it's hard to imagine having the time to sit and sink into this, but someday... Surely summer is precisely when one finds time for such things? The Elizabeth Taylor and Rebecca West novels, and The Makioka Sisters, too, seem like the quintessential summer read — sprawling sorts of stories best read on a towel or blanket outside... (I was just saying on twitter that I don't quite understand the category of the beach read).

Second Skin by John Hawkes and Woman at Point Zero are the only two of the novels that I really know absolutely nothing about, and picked up entirely out of whim (I did a quick check of goodreads and saw that Chad Post had liked Second Skin, so boom, sold. Goodreads is good for stuff like that). All the others, I've either read something else by the author, or have had them, or that book, on my radar for awhile. The poetry I'm much more random about — I flip through it and read a few, and if it calls to me, I take it home. 

But now I really, REALLY, should not buy any more books for a good long time. Except Ali Smith's Summer when it comes out in paperback next week, because I randomly decided to read each of the books in the quartet in their season, and thus started on Spring last night because jeeze, summer is almost here! 

But after that, really, nothing for a few months. Really!

Poetry to-read stack

 

I really bought into all that April is Poetry Month propaganda...