Brian > Recent Status Updates

Good poetry. Great poetry, even after 3 rum and Cokes. Enjoying this volume at 1 in the morning ☺️

"I received responses from my pre-med university applications. Orlando, Tallahassee, Gainesville, and Miami were all enthusiastic to welcome me...My father was thrilled, but he had already decided on his alma mater in Gainesville. He wanted me to go farther in life than he had, but not so far that he couldn't reach out with one hand and pull me back into the hell he had built for us.". 😔😔😔

"All man’s essential progress costs heavily in human suffering; the Soviet Union has not escaped this law. What makes it endurable is just this fact that it is caused not by behest of one man or even of three million, but is part of the slow process—history will not call it slow—whereby the tens of millions achieve the organized and conscious planning of their lives.". Hmmmm 🧐

"My father was mowing the lawn with the rest of our neighbors when I came home. A mechanical symphony of men taking pride in the curation of their gardens which, much like their children, were weeded, watered, and nourished by their wives the other six days of the week." -- commentary on gendered division of labor?: women clean and care daily; men do the periodic "big" things and think it's equal.

Amazing writing. But this is the first time I've picked the book back up in several days and I just realized why: I don't enjoy reading fiction about emotional, physical and sexual abuse. I mean, you're not supposed to "enjoy" that either, but good writing should carry you through it. I'll finish the book and be better having read it. I will. Just hard. Easier to read Cardenal's politically conscious poetry.

This is such a great book. But the dad angers me, in part because I experience a flicker of self-recognition in his words and actions and it scares me.

"She laughed to herself and her eyes widened while recounting events that convinced her of some new age - even though everything around us still looked, felt, and sounded exactly the same. We were in the same white house. We lived with the same dark man. We were the same people who curated colors from a palette of abuses and called them beautiful."

Only read 1 poem this morning - The Filibusters. A sarcastic lament for imperialists, and what I love about Cardenal. 1 page, but I'm counting it.

“…all elections presuppose an existing economic system, which voting is powerless to change. Voters in America cannot change Rockefeller’s method of operating oil companies for private profit. Similarly no Soviet election raises the issue of returning public properties to private hands: this was settled by the Revolution, and forms the foundation beneath the whole government.”

I've moved to StoryGraph. Let's talk about what we're reading over there! I'm "basalmons"