Lori > Recent Status Updates

"Doylestown was a quiet, pretty little burg over in Bucks County, actually between Philly and Lathrop's farm in Quakertown. It was where James Michener the author and the songwriter Oscar Hammerstein lived. People there lived in quaint old houses and ate boiled chicken and drank gin with cranberry juice."

"The man who gladly surrendered the Spanish crown yielded, not one inch of New Jersey soil."

"WHAT KIND OF IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cursed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway in the breeze? - The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world."

"Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with . . . émigré, expatriate, refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning. Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air."

"'Things are ending . . . This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls.'"

'We strive for the heights but our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him. Once I was lighter, happier, warm. Now the black water is in my veins."

"But even if you've never been there, you probably have many connections to Delaware. Most of us do. Delaware is inescapable. Delaware is everywhere."

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"If we say that a Black reader like me ought not to notice that cataclysm, ought not to notice that the text is active, but only acknowledge its assignment through the lens of refined taste, then a reader like me is, . . . 'excluded from the domain of modern reason, aesthetic judgment and the culture of taste.'"

"The range of emotion in these works is limiting, in that there can only be grief and fear and melancholy, not happiness or love or wonder (except the wonder in horror). In other words, the full range of emotions and repair that a novel might offer and is said to offer are, a priori, foreclosed to a reader like me."

"A white reader encounters the flow of time, we encounter stasis. We know the duration of slavery, and we know no other life is possible for the Black protagonist/subject, no trajectory to freedom, since the novel's bedrock of landscape, character and desire self-evidently contain us as chattel."

"A structural problem of English literary narrative . . . all we must be concerned about is the individual plight, the individual striving against 'life's' odds. This is the idyll that soothes the reader - as if the antagonism is personal and not social/structural, as if the appraisal of the state of being involves one individual instead of the mass of individuals who come under the regime."

"Just like the British books I read, the American songs dragged one's thoughts away and intimated again that our existence was one not worth conceiving."

"What Chamoiseau gets at is this: that the footprint haunting literature is a spectre of the colonized, a threat both in real and imagined terms; a spectre hanging over the whole enterprise of colonization and slavery."

" . . . it bestows, once again, the mantle of the human on the European. Yes, the text is a work of art - as we have come to define art. And yes, it is also reducible to its origins and its imaginaries, which are produced by its historical place, environment, quotidian details."

"Some contemporary readers might say, 'Well, it was the time . . .' But these readers cannot have it all ways. First, enslaved people also lived in their time - as narrators without an author. They lived in the same time as this novel's author and narrator, and any equivocation places and objectifies enslaved people as inanimate and inhuman, like a chair or an axe . . ."

"Literature has made [Crusoe] an 'everyman,' an exemplary character whose feet of survival is to be admired and duplicated. We might call this narrator unreliable now - but perhaps only some of us would. A reader like me is alert to this story and finds the narrator abhorrent. A reader like me is wondering about Xury and is broken at this point."

"The protagonist's focus assumes and carries the weight of affinity, and the reader's affinities are assumed, too. The moral weight is with the protagonists, no matter their actions. So: Crusoe buys into the trade and is captured and enslaved, which we are meant to feel is wrong, but only for him."

"The adventure sets out as the character does. A character who indeed may change - but only toward aggression, because he expects to encounter dangers. There is a penetrating quality to the adventure. It is prepared for violence or harm, either receiving or giving that violence. It is prepared to act, as opposed to witness."

"Crusoe is 'entirely bent upon seeing the world.' To 'see the world' is a working phrase for exploitation; likewise, to go abroad, to make one's fortune, and so on, are all euphemisms or understandings for conquest - or profit, at least. The adventure is already violent - it presupposes an encounter that has no boundaries and from which there will be profit."

"We know the words; we demure the meanings. As those earlier readers did. Or, we love the meanings. As they did."

"The innocence implied or introduced in the word 'adventure' - the gesture toward the seemingly unknown - is not innocence at all, but a will to strive and to make something. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, readers understood what that something was, just as we too understand: notions of investment, finances, venture capital, etc."

"One might say that the affective is the way that the political economy circulates. That is, the political economy is conjoined with the affective, conjoined with desires; and the relations of ruling inhabit the affective."

"The professors will make no reference to the histories that produced and buttressed this literature. Those will be dealt with by ignoring them, or through the laissez-faire position of assuming a natural state. Nor will these professors observe the language in the texts that reference these histories and psychologies. Like mine in the classroom, the Black bodies that appear in the novels will be inanimate."

"While the category of fiction avoids being collapsed into the idea of function . . . the novels and proto-novels that I discuss and gesture to here do have a weight and force in the world. We were trained to read the books, but not to understand the words and their larger contexts."

"Imprisoned in the attic is Bertha Mason, while underneath, in the drawing rooms and parlours, is the gaiety produced by the excesses of the plantation, the violence not regarded as violence and experienced as power wealth and well-being."

"Slavery is never mentioned in [Vanity Fair], what virtue, modesty, goodness and religion and God are. So, here is a society proceeding as if these things are divisible from enslavement. Conquest gives the narrative its velocity and moral reasoning - but it is the welfare of the conquerors that is at stake. Parity never undermines them."

"The mores of the British aristocracy are his main concerns, not colonial exploitation. And the novel is a scathing indictment of those mores. But nowhere does it indict what that wealth is built on. That wealth is a given - not the subject in question."

"Reading narrative requires, demands, acts of identification, association, affiliation, sympathy, and empathy, acts of inhabiting."

"One suspected and feared the possibility of being Becky Sharp for other reasons. Becky Sharp gestured toward blackness in this respect of wanting what one did not have and growing bitter without it; of making out the project of becoming while being outside the project of becoming."