Adopting to the Times: Motherhood So White, by Nefertiti Austin
White women controlled who could get away with "oops" pregnancies. This was evident when Bristol Palin became a mother at 18. The conservatives spun a tale of teenage mistakes and gave the young mother a pass. Black folks cried foul, knowing that if Sasha or Malia came up pregnant, the Obamas would have been shamed off the campaign trail. However, white society wasn't the only source of judgment. Black people were also guilty of judging single mothers at the grocery store, gas station, post office, and parent-teacher conferences, assuming they were irresponsible Black Welfare Mothers rather than a woman in love or the maker of an innocent mistake. Single Black mothers were marginalized on both sides, and motherhood, one of the universal female experiences, found itself caught between two worlds, one black, one white. Black people had their own set of religious and class beliefs, and strong feelings about bringing another nappy-headed baby with no daddy into the world. We had drunk the Kool-Aid poured by white people and believed an oops pregnancy brought the race's curve down. Would that be the assumption from whites and Blacks when my son and I strolled down the street or played at the park?
This is me, a white, married father of our biological children, leaving my lane to learn something about the very different experience of being a black woman adopting into single motherhood. The contrast between the framing of white single mothers as Murphy Brown "badasses" and of black single mothers as....shameful scammers of government benefits. Warnings about what if the child turns out to be a "crack baby". The need for extra attention because her toddler's normal toddler behavior will be criminalized and eventually considered appropriate for police attention. Discrimination by teachers. Most of all, the utter absence of references telling the story from a black woman's perspective.
So Austin wrote her own.
Austin lives in Beverly Hills, and has some privilege, but lacks other privilege. There is humor, and anger, and pathos in her story. We see the lessons she learned from her own upbringing, the hardships and challenges unique to one in her position, and overwhelmingly, the joy of raising the child she loves. High recommendations.
The Edwardian Murders: Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk, by Boris Akunin; Under the Dragon's Tail, by Maureen Jennings
"The baby's crowning, we're almost done," said Dolly. Her words were soothing, but her thoughts were steeped in malice. "I know what's going on, my fine lady. You're hoping it will die, then nobody'll ever know. But it's going to live, all right. And I know. I know all about your sin."
--from Under the Dragon's Tail
Pelagia bowed humbly, as if acknowledging that the bishop had a perfect right to his wrath, but there was little humility in her voice, and even less in her words. "That is your limitation as a male speaking, your Grace. In their judgments, men rely too excessively on their sight and the other five senses."
"Four", Mitrofanii corrected her.
"No, your Grage, five. Not everything that exists in the world can be detected by sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. There is another sense that has no name, which is given to us so that we might feel God's world not only with our bodies but with our souls. And it is strange that I, a plain nun weak in mind and spirit, am obliged to explain this to you. Have you not sspoken of this sense numerous times in your sermons and in private conversations?
--from Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk
If you like mysteries, I recommend both of these writers. Even if you don't like mysteries but enjoy high literature that happens to involve solving a crime (like Umberto Eco), I particularly recommend Akunin, who manages to take what is essentially a Scooby Doo story involving intruders being scared away from the spooky old hermitage by appearances of what is supposed to be the legendary ghost that haunts it---and infuses it with Dostoevskian surrealism, Checkovian character subtlety, and Chestertonian religious insights. All wrapped up by the reverent/irreverent nun who used to be a gymnastics instructor and who would certainly not take actual delight in confounding secular villains and uptight, sexist clergy alike, no never. That would be improper.
Maureen Jennings writes in the world of 1900-era Toronto, which might as well be 1900-era Liverpool or any other English workers' city waiting to burst into population for all this American can tell. The people are conservative and prudish, except the ones they make into outcasts, and the detective is an amiable middling fish in a small pond, who manages to stay just within his depth. Jennings' first novel, Except the Dying (the titles are all Shakespeare lines) apparently won great acclaim, but my local library has lost its copy.
Simply Walking into Mordor: The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer
In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.
This is one of two mammoth works that kept the dull times off all year. Twelve full volumes (I read one each month, and was relieved to discover that the 12th volume was all index and bibliography) of early 20th century anthropology, going from Scotland to New Guinea, from Zululand to Alaska and from Patagonia to Nepal, and pretty much everywhere in between, all ostensibly to discover why an ancient priesthood would kill its existing elder, but only after stealing the golden bough from the sacred tree he guarded.
(I myself would have asked, "If the way to attain this priesthood is by killing the existing elder, what kind of schmuck would seek that job in the first place?" But I'm irreverent that way.)
From this riddle springs a huge panoply of myths and legends involving death and rebirth, scapegoating and ritual sacrifice, sympathetic magic, harvest magic and witch-smelling, endless parades of weddings and ceremonial funerals, menageries of holy critters, mountains of fetish objects and rivers of menstrual blood threatening to wither the crops. Fascinating are the similarities of beliefs and practices in far corners of an ancient globe.
Also fascinating and amusing is Frazer's repeated protest-too-much insistence that he doesn't really believe all this bullshit; it's set forth for anthropological value only. And further, how he goes out of his way to distinguish "primitive superstition" from "religion", which is, of course, true. This despite the central legends of a king who dies and is reborn to cleanse the village from defilement. I mean what kind of backwards culture would believe something like that, eh? Oh, right....and yes, some of the primitive taboos are straight out of Leviticus.
I was impressed and fascinated, from the opening to the point where Frazer pulls off the ghostly witch doctor mask and reveals--Balder, the legendary Nordic God who was immune from everything but mistletoe, and who would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for that meddling Loki. But after eleven volumes, I was more than glad to call it a study and move on.
Open Doors: Beneath a Sugar Sky; In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire
Let's be fair here," said Kade. "If my son came back from a journey to a magical land and told me straight up that he wanted to marry a woman who didn't have any internal organs, I'd probably spend some time trying to find a way to spin it so that he wasn't saying that."M/i>
"Oh, like you're attracted to girls because you think they have pretty kidneys," said Christopher.
Kade shrugged. "I like girls. Girls are beautiful. I like how they're soft and pretty and have skin and fatty deposits in all the places evolution has deemed appropriate. My favorite part, though, is how they have actual structural stability, on account of how they're not skeletons."
"Are all boys as weird as the two of you, or did I get really lucky?" asked Cora.
--from Beneath a Sugar Sky
Omigosh, Seanan is SO good and such a delight to read, especially when juxtaposed with so many dusty tomes from or about at least a century prior.
The two short novels I read here are from a relatively new series loosely about children who find doors into alternative, magical worlds, one world made entirely of confectionery and the other containing a Goblin Market that enforces "fair value" in all commerce. There are plot spoilers in both books early on, and so I will not describe them further, but they both have my highest recommendations. Especially In an Absent Dream, which is frighteningly real for a fantasy tale, not least because it makes so much economic sense.
30 Years Manumitted: Amos Fortune, Free Man, by Elizabeth Yates
Amos bowed respectfully as he had long ago been taught to do in the presence of any white man, but neither years, suffering, nor hard work could bow the proud carriage of his head. The constable acknowledged the greeting though he could have wished that, being a short man himself, he had not had to look up to the Negro.
I don't normally include the books I read aloud to my son in my bookposts, but this Newberry-winning children's biography of a man my history lessons had neglected to tell me existed is worth a note. As my boy grows up and I read more significant books ti him, more of these may be included.
It begins a little like Roots, as the young At-Mun, son of an African king, is kidnapped and brought to America as a slave in 1725, and luckily purchased at auction by a kind Quaker in Boston, who renames him Amos Fortune and allows him to purchase his freedom. The majority of the book tells the true story of Fortune's subsequent learning of a trade, his journey to Jaffrey, NH, where his life as a successful tanner and landowner is now celebrated, and of how he worked to buy and free other slaves. The story is told simply, for young minds, and skirts over the worst aspects of slavery, but it is matter of fact about race prejudice in the northern colonies. Some of the more moving parts deal with Fortune's domestic ups and downs with his wife and daughter.
Journeys into Hell: Inferno & Under Fire, by Henri Barbusse
And now I am looking at her. The evening gently removes the ugliness, wipes away the poverty and the horror, and, in spite of me, changes the dust into a shadow, like a curse into a blessing. Nothing is left of her but a color, a mist, a shape, not even that; a shiver and the beating of her heart. Of her, there is nothing left but herself.
It is because she is alone. By some astonishing, almost divine chance, she is really alone. She is in that innocence, that perfect purity, solitude.
I am violating her solitude with my eyes, but she knows nothing about it, and she isn't violated.
--from Inferno
The book jacket of Inferno boldly says that Barbusse (whom I'd not heard of before. Had you?), and not Proust, or Gide, or Maupassant, or Anatole France, was THE definitive voice of Paris in the early 20th Century. I was skeptical.
Maybe it was range. The short books (each took me an hour on the treadmill to get through), while both very French, deal with different subjects in a similar way. In Inferno, an ordinary colorless Everyman type finds a hole in his boarding house bedroom wall, and manages to waste even MORE of his own existence than before by becoming a full time voyeur and watching the people in the next room, who, unlike him, have the capacity for intense feelings. They converse, have passionate love, face approaching death...and the narrator suffers.
He doesn't suffer as much as the Western Front WWI conscripts of Under Fire, which is very similar to the much more famous All Quiet on the Western Front. After a brief prologue of wealthy old men in the club, chuckling over the news that war has been declared and predicting it will be over in time for the seaside season, we see the young men fighting to keep those rich men in the lifestyles to which they are accustomed, slogging through endless mud and blood and barbed wire and corpses and unexploded shells and festive things like that, growing increasingly numb and disoriented and descending into madness, and then most of them get deaded and the war continues.
Philosophy Digest: Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, by Edmund Husserl; The Idea of the Holy, by Rudolf Otto
Every immament perception necessarily guarantees the existence of its object. If reflective apprehension is directed to my experience, I apprehend an absolute Self whose existence is, in principle, undeniable, that is, the insight that it does not exist is, in principle, impossible; it would be nonsense to maintain the possibility of an experience given in such a way not truly existing.
--Husserl
The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by any other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no farther, for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsic religious feelings.
--Otto
I probably should have followed Otto's advice and let his book's primary argument stand at "To he who knows, no answer is necessary; to he who doesn't know, no explanation is possible." But it's a short book, and I'd already checked it out, so whatever. The Idea of the Holy amounts to a restatement of the "sublime" section of Kant's Critique of Judgment, updated to include post-Kant developments in psychology and anthropology.
It cheerfully presents religious comfort as grounded in sensing oneself as an insignificant nothing in the presence of a huge, overwhelming, terrible to behold entity. #FearAndTrembling...to the extent that I have any religious experience at all, it comes from contemplating those few human beings I know who are so good as to make me partially convinced that they are guided by something supernaturally loving and beautiful, nearly the opposite of "sublime." I therefore find little of interest in what Otto has to say, other than as an example of the historical reaction in early 20th century philosophy against the excesses of Darwin, Spencer, and other reductions of humanity to scientific bundles of insignificant chemicals; branches of the intelligentsia became interested in souls again.
Even so, I got more from Otto than I got from Husserl, who is an example of that German school that takes pride in being as incomprehensible as possible, inventing new words like "Noesis" and "Noema" for (I think) "she who perceives" and "that which is perceived". I don't claim to have grokked Husserl, but it seems to me he goes back to Descartes and a starting point of doubting all sensory input, suspending everything one knows, and deriving experience from pure thought. It also seems to me that Husserl goes to an "astral plane" (without saying those words) in which abstract forms are more real and more experienced than those phantasms that silly non-philosophers consider "real".
Born at the Wrong Time: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams
True ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge can do, and in our case, ignorance is fortified by a certain element of nineteenth century indifference which refuses to be interested in what it cannot understand; a violent reaction from the thirteenth century which cared little to comprehend anything except the incomprehensible.
--from Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
Poor Henry Adams. Great grandson of John, grandson of John Quincy, son of Charles who was ambassador to England during the Civil War. He was born into an old fashioned family at the end of Colonial cultural time, and lived to see the Industrial Revolution, which confused and frightened him so much that he retreated back into Colonial living, and ultimately sought refuge and comfort in Medieval Studies. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres begins with descriptions and thoughts upon European church architecture and proceeds to interpret literature from the Song of Roland to (shudder) Thomas Aquinas--all favorably.
The Education of Henry Adams, his third-person autobiography, emphasizes the soul-crushing experience of watching the world change too quickly to suit him, watching the wholesome world of farmers and country parsons give way to smoke-belching factories, profit-maximizing capitalists, and science that reduces man to monkey (compare and contrast with Rudolf Otto, above). By the time he gets to 1900, he might as well be Sarah Connor viewing the rise of the machines and the "multiplicity of forces" threatening to dwarf humankind into insignificance. Like most historians, he is careful to wring his hands over declining moral standards and the corruption, ignorance and greed of new generations.
Tell me about your mother: Misc. works by Sigmund Freud
Scientific thought is till in its infancy; there are very many of the great problems with which it has been as yet unable to cope. A philosophy of life based upon science has, apart from the emphasis it lays upon the real world, essentially negative characteristics, such as that it limits itself to truth and rejects illusions.
---from New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
I've continued to read the works from the Freud volume of the Great Books of the Western World set (Since August, "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego," "The Ego and the Id", "Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety", and " New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis") without the inclination to say very much about them. Including these in bookposts every time for the first half of the year has me all Freuded out. Fortunately, we approach the end.
These later works include the famous division of the psyche into Id/Ego/Superego, but also veer away (mostly) from the usual obsession with sex and feces, exploring crowd psychology, the development of healthy coping mechanisms, a laughably ridiculous attempt at "the psychology of women" written by and for dudes (Omigosh, what are women thinking? It's so mysterious! There are no ways to find out at all!), and suggestions about a philosophy of life. The part quoted above is one of the last lines in the entire first edition of the Great Books set.