How to Tell You're in a Toni Morrison Novel

Yes this is a Mallory Ortberg fanpost.

You walk into town. A plague of robins follows you.
You find out your family history by the song the children sing.
You are named after a Bibical character or a random object.
A aura of incest surrounds you.
Ghosts haunt you.

I admit that I like memoirs of ordinary undistinguished lives. Reading them I feel part of a sisterhood of plain janes. Some have been addicts, and I sympathize with their horrors, some are ordinarily quirky people, and I laugh with their foibles. Yes, the latest "I had a life that was filled with interesting horrors/ amusing detours" book may not shake civilization to its core, but that's not what I read them for. OK, I admit it- to me, they are the written equivalent of television. I read, I'm briefly entertained and I move on.

Not every book has to be a deathless literary feat.

"Sometimes I think that the world's so small, that we can never get away from the sprawl"-Arcade Fire

George Will is an idiot. This much is true. This week I was reading both Collaspe and The Place You Love Is Gone which are both about the same thing in different ways- humans overtaking the resources that are avaliable to them.

People like George Will don't get it. We're not so much concerned about whether in a million years the carbon levels will go down. We're worried about the human population crashing due to hunger, lack of resources like water, animals, and farmland, natural disasters due to climate change, and wars over resources. Yes, people like Pierson do talk about aesthetics, which is important to humans psychologically. Yes, maybe places where the sea comes in and destroys human settlements will come back, but the people displaced have been dealt a strong blow to their psyche, and their livelihoods in the small blink of time which is their lives.

I ask people like George Will to consider the value of what they are willing to destroy things like our forests, our water, our air for. Is it another pharmacy on a road with five? Is it short term gain in the stock market, followed by a crash? We can't keep growing forever, and maybe instead of forever growing outwards, and hoping that somehow things will be alright, we need to plan for growth, and use things we already have, such as buildings empty from the last time we were convinced that that new Wal Mart was the answer to all woes- Pierson speaks of the retail economy as neighbors finding jobs taking each other's washing in- a sterile circle.

Maybe we could live in houses that do not have home theater rooms[yes, these exist. I've been in two homes that have them], and work with the huge housing stock that we already have. Of course, that's crazy talk, like building a grocery store in an area of the city that lacks one!

And anyway George Will needs to fill column inches- better invest that Newsweek salary in some oil stock. Drill in our last wild places! Spill and pollute the water and the land! The earth doesn't care, so we shouldn't.

Apparently it's some sort of Helen Keller day, which Renee won't celebrate because it's also Juneteenth. Now being the sort of black person who only really knows about Juneteenth because every year the news reports "And in other news, African Americans enjoy Juneteenth", I am not too worried about them sharing the date, although it would have been nice if they said 'oh and it's Juneteenth too"

The real reason I bring this up is because I read a book, and want to talk about it. You can tell my blog is about my narrow interests,eh? I read The Imprisoned Guest, and thought it was a very well described history of disability through the prism of the education of Laura Bridgeman- apparently the first deaf-blind girl to be educated in America.

I really liked how the author described how Bridgeman had been as famous of Helen Keller in her day, but as she grew older, and was no longer the cute little girl prodigy, but a mature woman who it was harder to project one's own visions of purity and gentleness while suffering on, she became forgotten both by the public and her former benefactors.

The prevalent culture had an image of the pure suffering angel girl, but there wasn't a place for a disabled woman.

Also discussed is how the super crip model affected both of them. Laura had an insistent temper, and her own way of doing things. The author notes that passing as 'normal' had never occurred to her. Helen on the other hand did have the abilities to attempt to 'pass' as she had the energy to doggedly work at passing and the means to get very skilled tutors. I liked how the author notes that Helen Keller is a tough act to follow.

Many of us disabled can't be 'super crips'. Some time ago, I found an article on partial disabilities, but I don't have it now. Anyway, my point in mentioning this is that those of us with strong fatigue, or neurological issues may not be able to 'pass' at all, and this of course doesn't even start to talk about people with blindness or deafness or both. One of the reasons Howe[Laura's main benefactor] wanted to educated Laura was that educating a merely blind girl wasn't considered impressive enough.

I'm glad to know that Helen Keller was a socialist anarchist hero, but on the other hand, many folks right now need scooters just to go into the Borders, or we may be OK today to work but have to take precious days off because of our illnesses, and people don't understand.

I am reading Guyland. It has some good insights about how frustrated entitlement contributes to a toxic homosocial culture of male bonding. I especially liked his insights about the desire to delay adulthood[many women also want to delay adulthood but don't have the social space. There's no boys will be boys for women.], to recapture that imaginary space where white men ruled all and they didn't have to do 'politically correct' things like respect women or not bash gays, and also, that some guys are fools, if they think that bangbus is real and that they can really 'score' with those hot girls on campus with their neckbeards and pre middle age paunch.

He does mix a few things up- the state of video games has now far advanced beyond Lara Croft, although GTA is still popular. He also fails to measure the popularity of casual gaming, althoug that sort of gaming is not considered real gaming as it is not gendered masculine. I note that what gaming is considered masculine has changed over the years. RPGs are now unisex or slightly feminine, but they used to be masculine. Family games like Mario and Zelda are now unisex, not just for boys.

Also, while porn does encourage a phalliocentric and predatory sexuality, many men don't have that sexuality as a default. I was also amused that dude had to say I LOVE SPORTS. I think it's like feminists are now all required to say they love makeup and high heels. He also did focus too much on marriage and children as a marker of adulthood. We have too many children already, and anyway, a man who goes around impregnating women without taking care of his kids is more of a boy than anyone who hooks up but is responsible about it.

I was reading Donald Miller's A Mllion Miles in a Thousand Years and maybe I'm just a tool of an evil force that wants you to live boring and meaningless stories, but the fact that when he decided to live a better story, he decided to go and hike a trail in Peru threw me right off. I was feeling slightly bad because I am the sort of person who would choose to be in a story in which there are a lot of naps and any travel is leavened with many stops to eat in delicious restaurants, but then I read The Fantasy of Thin and thought maybe that Miller was just selling a different fantasy.

I think a lot of us daydream that if we just did something, whether it's decide to live a story or become thin or whatever, we'd find that our essential selves would want to do the sort of exciting things that others talk about, but I wonder if that's really true. To be a good story, do we really need to kayak in a river and then stay at the house of mysterious rich, white people? Or can our lives be a good story without the world spanning, life changing arcs that Miller wants from a story?

Yes, it's very exciting in a story for it to be raining blood as our heroes charge the bad guys, but in real life, we take pains for that to happen as little as possible, for obvious reasons. And having two or three passionate love affairs at the same time sounds great, but it probably is really exhausting instead.

I also thought that Miller's screenwriters, well, they were too focused on just one model of film making. Sure, there's a model where everything has to come out all right at the end, and you waste half the movie watching the hero doing boring things that are supposed to endear us to the hero[like some random heterosexual coupling they throw in for no reason], but there are many other ways to make a movie, and so there are many other ways to make a life.

People who benefit from feminism trash feminism, film at 11.

This ties into today's quote:

There were quotas for women[circa 1968, England]; their admission was limited to 15 percent of incoming classes, and most of the successful girls were chemistry applicants right out of the exclusive private schools. But, even so, I believed I could get in. I wrote to the dean of every medical school I could think of. All the responses were the same: I was deemed 'unsuitable' and told, in so many words by one school, to go back to the kitchen sink. In the meantime, I watched medical schools accept my younger male classmates, with poor grades, on the basis of their rugby skills"

-Sue Fisher-Hoch from Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC

Luckily, she didn't go back to the kitchen sink, and the world is richer for it. But what about all the talent that was wasted back then? We can't get it back.

I read Sham and I thought it was quite marred by whining about political correctness. Come on, dude, the Americans with Disabilities Act is a pretty good advance. He complains about addicted people being covered, but if we have to have a few addicts being covered by the ADA to get people with illnesses like Multiple Sclerosis or disorders like Cerebral Palsy in the workplace and producing instead of our losing their abilities, I'm all for it.

And conservatives need to take personal responsibility for some things. If there's not enough pretending to shoot people and dangerous and violent sports in school, why don't they arrange for their children to have those experiences outside of school? And really folks, we have enough guilt, shame, being a busybody, etc for everyone in the country here in the South.

Another pet peeve, alternative family is not the same as a broken home. Two dudes adopt a kid. It's not traditional, but it's not broken. Some woman divorces her cheating and beating husband. Not traditional, but not broken.

And for god's sake, can we stop moaning about political correctness? If I had a dollar for every single moan about it, I could bail out the entire economy, and have a cool billion left for me. And the femininization of society can be a good thing. Some masculine traits don't work well in this modern world, such as being violent. You get in a fight over nothing nowadays, and someone will end up shot. Not something we want to encourage.

The only good thing Against Medical Advice has going for it is that at the end, the dad didn't say that doctors are really serial killers. Also, cognitive behavioral therapy is NOT a rare therapy.

Then again, I don't do 'heart warming'. I wanted to know more about his condition, I wanted different perspectives, I wanted to know how he got into the special school, etc,etc. It's a *book* not a movie. Make it complex!

Homofactus Press offers downloads for those who can not afford the cost of books.

I don't know what a "Radical Psychiatry Action Rap" is but it sounds awesomely hilarious!

I'm enjoying reading The Scripts People Live. I just love the energy of books written in the 70s. I especially love how Mother Hubbard joins a karate club, learns how to fix cars and then starts organizing for welfare rights. And of course, there is a homosexual who cured from terrible parental injunctions lives bisexually ever after living from his center and probably having a lot more sex than it now considered proper.