Walker James > Recent Status Updates

"Sugar" is so beautiful :)

"Poetry is killed for students in high school by teachers who only understand this dull kind of association, while their students are associating faster and faster."

I feel like you have to be really into Nathaniel Mackey's poems to appreciate his poems. All his poems, in this collection at least, reference concepts and names and things from his poems. Idk. Maybe I'm missing something. I think I'm missing contexts to appreciate his poems or maybe its the over 40 pages of this book dedicated solely to these multi-page Mackey poems. His are the only poems I've skimmed, wont grab me

"The place was run by an ancient Frenchman dressed in an elegant black suit which was green with age, who cannot properly be described as bewildered or even as being in a state of shock, since he had really stopped breathing around 1910."

I love how much Baldwin seems to despise Paris. This is the second essay so far in which he destroys American mythos about Paris.

"From the vantage point of Europe, he discovers his own country."

Found Giovanni's Room.

Terrifying how much damage an individual with enough power can enact. The Spanish invasions would have happened regardless of who was there, but we see the severity of brutality depends on who is in charge.... But, there would have been brutality anyway. Even Las Casas owned slaves and made money off that labor - although, he eventually denounced everything, divested entirely and spent the rest of his life arguing.

Interesting how genocidists learn from prior genocidists. So far we have Columbus bringing a biography of Cato the Censor with him across the Atlantic. Cato the Censor, who called for the destruction of Carthage, justified that destruction by espousing agrarian ideals of masculinity that was a part of Spartan culture. That question of agriculture was the crux of colonial argumentation in Spain (Cortes, Las Casas)

There's this really interesting idea that moral transgression in men was/is associated with criminality and so punishment has been prisons. And that moral transgression in women was/is associated with hysteria/insanity and so punishment has been asylums. But that these two binaries (prison/asylum) have not only been gendered but also racialized.

"...that with self-reflection, religious study, and work, male con­victs could achieve redemption and could recover these rights and liberties. However, since women were not acknowledged as securely in possession of these rights, they were not eligible to participate in this process of redemption."

"Bender thus sees a kinship between two major developments of the eighteenth century-the rise of the novel in the cultural sphere and the rise of the peniten­ tiary in the socio-Iegal sphere."

Popular novels, such as Robinson Crusoe, which extolled monastery-like ideas about solitude leading to transformation, seemingly influenced prison reform in the Victorian era.

More proof that popular entertainment influences.

Thinking about the phenomenon of prison rape jokes. I think it goes like this.... We associate men having sex with criminality -> we place that into the imagined prison we carry around with us -> which is also where we place any male-assigned body we associate with criminality -> the imagined (and the real) prison functions to ensure the comfort of white-male power? Still organizing these thoughts.

"Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of those contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle."

Is this still true? I don't think Americans revel in contradiction anymore. We seem to blot out complexity in public.

The sentences in this are so convoluted. In one sentence it begins with "As a result," then 18 words followed by a colon, after which there is a parenthesis with quotation marks inside the parenthesis, two more commas, a semi-colon, another colon, then three commas. Despite all that, it's not a difficult sentence to follow, but I just think Lerner's editors were a little too indulgent with him on this one.

Attention to rhythm is astounding.

I've only just started, but it's refreshing to read a book in which there are so few major issues that I can consider the technical aspects. Lerner does this odd thing where a character begins a monologue and its not marked in quotes, the only way to recognize the monologue has begun is the change in voice and tone. And it is well done. I successfully realized the speaker had changed. But I also wonder why even do it

This book seems to be no different, really, than the hundreds of other books on Churchill. That said, I have not read any of those books all the way through - so here we are.

There are wayyyy too many cliches in this book, but I do appreciate how it unpacks the politics of social media journalism and reality tv. I also appreciate that the characters are not defined by their identifications but does not diminish the importance of those identifications in the process. And I like how depression is portrayed.

Just got to the fourth chapter on the audiobook. Pretty good so far. I'm impatient, though, so I wanna get straight to the queer stuff. Love the cover.

Almost done with Street of Crocodiles (Still have the other stories in the book to read). It's been kind of a slog. The language is hard to access, but when you do get through the netting Shulz's world opens up entirely and it is pure poetry. I'm hoping Sanatorium is a little more accessible.

I'm proud of Bruno Shulz who was killed by Nazis, and before he was killed by Nazis wrote this experimental-ass memoir-fiction-poetry hybrid slammer. What a genius. How dare they call the man Polish when Poland won't even claim ALL his history. This man is fucking Jewish, you dickheads. Tell me about Etty Hillesum then call this man a Pole. Tell me about Eli and little Annie and Chil and Olga before you claim Bruno.

Noooot digging it so far. Shoulda been a chapbook, tbh. Some of the stuff moves me, the relationship between the speaker and Tina is moving. The dissonance of living in the city but going to the farm each weekend, that culture-clash, is compelling. But damnit these poems are TOO LITERAL sometimes. I want quadruple-meanings! I want metaphor! I want my little brain cells, dumb meat as they are, to be stretch into shape

I hate to have to put this down in favor of books for school - but so it goes.

... pizza spot who will give you a free slice if you are down to wait for him to finish the day's fourth prayer is my president"

"and the trans girls making songs in her closet, spinning the dark into a booming dress? she too is my president"

"& my grandma is my president & and her cabinet is her cabinet cause she knows to trust what the pans knows how the skillet goes to war"

...I had thought about unification of pain, and I had thought about what can be done in a world now without precedent. But the very first emotion I had that night was sadness, yet I hadn't confronted that yet. The first poem in this collection does that, and it does so with triumph; it does so with fucking wings.

"& my auntie, only a few months clean, but clean, she is my president."

"& and the dude at the...

I don't think I had processed the Trump presidency through the emotion of grief, yet. I had done rage. And I had done fear. And I had done that odd little rock of hope that comes with being so close to the revolution - it won't be a triumphant one but it will be something....

Two things:

1. Did they get an actor JUST to do the "black voice" of the taxi driver that appears in one chapter - or was that Kyf Brewer doing his best black impression?

2. OMG North Korea (and Russia) are gonna nuke the GRAND CANYON! The canyon's gonna be REALLY grand, now! The loss of life could reach the 40s or even the 50s! How's Pine gonna get us outta this one?

The chapters are getting into a rhythm. The chapter will being with following up on the previous chapter's cliffhanger. Then it veers/meanders through the narrator's related memories, which lead into a new cliffhanger. It takes many pages to really become intriguing, but it's gets there once you start to care about the characters. I think it would make a good audiobook, actually.

Reminds me a lot of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Light within utter tragedy. He doesnt have Angelous gift for language, but he does have her brutal, simple, nuanced honesty.