Most booksellers would say their favorite part of the job is recommending their favorite books unsuspecting customers, but I would argue it’s even better when customers recommend something to you. I first heard of James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” from a theater professor at the University of Edinburgh who had stumbled into our bookshop and was looking for a replacement copy. We spent a good thirty minutes looking for it (it’s a veeeery slim book and this was a big bookshop) and by the time we found it I couldn’t help wishing we had a second copy I could take home. A week later I bought my own copy at Libreria in London, and read the whole thing over a very noisy pub dinner in Shoreditch. Since then I must have pushed it into the hands of dozens of customers. My bookshop, like so many others, is closed, and I can’t give you a physical copy. But I can point you to a place where you can sit down, close your eyes, and listen, thanks to the magic of YouTube. I hope you do.
Kara Walker Fons Americanus Tate Modern 2019. Photo: © Tate (Matt Greenwood)
The world is in flames and it feels stupid to talk about anything else. There’s been a lot of information to wade through on the internet about how we can best help others, which, ironically, has only made me feel more helpless about the state of the world. It’s insane the amount of work it takes to be a good person in 2020. Like so many of us, I don’t feel like my own life experience has given me the ability or tools to truly, perfectly show up in a movement that I haven’t spent that many years actively fighting for. But that’s not an excuse to not try. White supremacy does not go softly into the night; it’s a cancer that can only be dismantled from the inside. We start with ourselves and move into our communities. It is a lengthy and exhausting process, but it’s a necessary one. Would you rather let your guilt and anxiety paralize you into inaction? Or would you look deep inside you, find the bad things, and force them into the light?
My perspective is of a white Hispanic immigrant. Historically my country has not yet had to grapple with its own deeply racist history, which means I not only have a lot to catch up on in an American context but also in an Argentinean context. Our first instinct is to prioritize the injustices we see done to our community rather than the injustices done unto others that we will never experience ourselves. The burnout, feed fatigue, and internal resistance we encounter within ourselves when we look at the staggering pile of work necessary just to become a good person is a good sign: it means that part of us is slowly dying inside. Hunt it down. Society is very quick to forgive racism and intolerance and hatred and it is a very easy thing to fall into the same patterns unless you make a conscious effort to kill that part of yourself every single day. The fact remains that it is a privilege to educate yourself on racism rather than experiencing it firsthand. From police brutality to the upcoming election, a new world is waiting for us after COVID-19. How are we preparing for it?
The wonderful thing about being quarantined is that we actually have time and resources to educate ourselves. Here’s a very tiny list of things that have helped me make sense of things in the last few days. Some of these I’ve been following for a very long time, some are new finds, all are part of a lifelong commitment to improve my understanding of the world we live in. It’s not meant to be a definitive list by any means, it’s just a place to start.
A free PDF of Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? from my alma matter, Seven Stories Press (lots of good stuff in their catalog btw!).
Films/TV/Documentaries: I Am Not Your Negro, 13th, When They See Us, Beyonce’s Homecoming, Insecure, Dear White People, BlacKKKlansman, Sorry to Bother You, The Get-Down, Bobby Kennedy for President, Explained: The Racial Wealth Gap, anything Amber Ruffin does on Seth Meyers.
Writing: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, The Good Immigrant U.S., Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kimberly Drew’s This Is What I Know About Art, Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (I recommend the Penguin Modern pocket edition but you can also get a free PDF here), Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, James Baldwin: The Last Interview from Melville House, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. DON’T read “Heart of Darkness”. Three separate English lit seminars had it in their syllabus for some reason. Honestly, fuck that book. And DO NOT BUY FROM AMAZON: IndieBound or Bookshop.org support your local indies if you don’t already know who they are.
Podcasts: Still Processing, 1619, The Read, this episode of The Daily.
Articles: Kara Walker for the Gentlewoman, anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic (but especially The First White President), Kim Drew for Teen Vogue (actually, anything from Teen Vogue).
Police brutality stems from a deeply entrenched personal bias and racist history. Police departments also function within a fierce patriarchal fraternity that isn’t really visible in other spaces of public service outside the fire department (you don’t see National Park rangers running over campers). JJ Bola’s “Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined” is a good primer on why toxic masculinity sets men back instead of pushing them forward.
Donations: Philly Community Bail Fund (text "GIVE" to (833)608-5511), Black Lives Matter Philly, Up Against the Law Legal Collective (Venmo: @upagainstthelaw), Fishtown’s black-owned Harriett’s Bookshop (they’re inundated with book orders right now but you can venmo them at $HARRIETTSBOOKSHOP). There are millions more places to help, just check your social media feeds.
Argue. You know all those times you’ve ruined class discussions and first dates by playing devil’s advocate? Now you can do it for the betterment of the world!! There is nothing I can say about a black person’s experience that hasn’t already been said more eloquently by somebody else, and nobody should be looking at white people to validate black people’s perspectives in the first place. However, white supremacy is a white people problem, and we’re not going to heal until we recognize our own complicity. This is our mess to clean up. It is not up to the black community to save us from ourselves. The least we can do is argue with our racist family members at the dinner table so someone else doesn’t have to.
Note: This list may stand out because I don’t normally write a lot about activism or my own politics in this blog. This is in stark contrast with my personality, because if you talk to me in person you’ll probably hear 5 opinions in the first 5 seconds. The fact is I don’t really talk about personal things in my blog because I don’t like talking about my personal life on the internet. I also feel deeply uncomfortable with performative allyship, especially as I recognize that I myself have so much to learn and would rather clear the way for smarter voices to take over the conversation. But seeing as you’re here right now, I might as well show you who I’ve been learning from. It feels disingenuous to talk trash about Bernstein right now, and I want to respect that feeling.
-M
I think I speak for all of us when I say, *SCREAMS INTO THE VOID FOR AN ENTIRE MINUTE AND A HALF*
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the time for screaming is going to end any time soon, and if there’s one thing I don’t want to get right now, it’s a sore throat. May I suggest instead a productive activity to pass the time, like taking up knitting, or diving into that foot-tall To Read pile that’s been collecting dust since you made that New Year’s resolution to read more, or…. I don’t know, binge-watching a show about the adventures of a giant felt bear?
Rilakkuma and Kaoru is a Netflix show based on Rilakkuma, a giant teddy bear with a huge head whose entire life revolves around eating pancakes and sleeping - a true social distancing king. He lives with Kaoru, a twenty-something office worker whose other roomates include a smaller felt bear and a lil yellow bird. I’m not sure who the intended audience is, because most of the show centers around Kaoru’s inability to get promoted or keep from going broke when she gets a crush on her Amazon delivery guy. I must then assume that the intended audience is me, a millennial in her late twenties who can’t stop covering her cellphone with pastel animal stickers.
It takes approximately 2 hours to binge the whole thing, and I plan on rewatching at least once a week because apparently it’s the only thing keeping me from staring out the window for 45 minutes a day. I know it’s not exactly the most heroic activity to indulge in during a pandemic. It’s hardly sewing face masks for the NHS or stocking grocery shelves. But since I lack sewing materials and health insurance, it’s the closest thing to medicine I’ve got.
Be well,
-M
One of the worst things about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has revealed how nice it actually is to hang out with other people. What the hell, Covid? I feel like the Grinch at the end of the movie, except we skipped all that fun parts when he terrorizes the village below him and goes right to learning a lesson. Ugh.
With no job and no actual plan to get back to, I’ve spent most of my quarantine cooking up several possible routines designed to keep life feeling as normal as possible, all of which have fallen apart almost immediately. Instead, I spend my days following what little desires float to the surface and hoping that all this time spent sitting down isn’t causing my body to grow a tail. In the interest of recording these things for posterity the next time I wail “BuT hOw CoUlD tHinGs Be WoRsE????”, here’s a list of things I’ve done to keep sane.
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Made an inventory of all my books and came to the conclusion that I’ll probably never actually read 1/16th of them (why the fuck did I buy a lettering manual?).
Cooked my way through “Nothing Fancy”, like a millennial Julie and Julia, except Alison Roman is alive and would probably make fun of my disdain for anchovies in some devastatingly clever way.
Killed an enormous spider and cried while I did it
Made an Barefoot Contessa size-approved Aperol Spritz and took a bath.
Baked more cakes in two weeks than I have in the past two years
Watched every studio Ghibli film and discovered, to my horror, that I don’t like Kikki’s Delivery Service (nothing happens! And her cat is mean! Screw your adorable Halloween costumes, this movie sucks!)
Seriously contemplated starting a weed habit
Laid in my couch and listened to the instrumental part of the Marie Antoinette soundtrack while staring at my radiator.
Got dressed in exercise clothes and unrollled my yoga mat in the living room for Yoga with Adrienne, only to shut it off as soon as poor Adrienne started talking.
Rewatched seasons 1 through 2 of Fleabag and followed along with the scriptures as if I was in some kind of millennial witch lady BBC church.
Watched the Normal People trailer and thought “am I the only one who thinks this trailer is making it look like Marianne and Connell are, like, cheating on their lifelong partners with each other?”. That sexy music tone is too intense, Hulu. This isn’t The Affair. CHILL.
Subscribed to Haley Nahman’s newsletter and actually read the whole thing because, you know what? It was very sweet.
Cried through “The Two Popes” and “Angels and Demons” like the recovering Catholic weirdo I am.
Harassed my sister daily for pictures of her new puppy like some kind of deranged admirer who can’t take a hint.
Folded all my clothes in the KonMari method like it’s 2018 all over again
Developed a very strong contempt for corporate newsletters that start with the phrase “In these uncertain times”. Who do you think you are, FDR? Stop doing this!
Stay safe, watch Fleabag, wash them hands. Oh, and don’t come near me.
-M
I know I have claimed this once before already, but let me very quietly back up on my word and pretend you never heard that. This is it. This is The Shirt. There is no Other. It’s the kind of shirt where, if you wear it, men will ooh and ahh and say, “there he goes… Mr. Steal - Your- Girl,” rendered speechless by your skill at Stealing The Girl. I’m a feminist and all, but I’m also just a simple mortal. And no simple mortal can deny this baskeball-ass spider lookin dude. It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times. It’s six long blond hairs clinging on for dear life, or a sun with sunglasses on it. It’s Gritty, probably.
It’s designed by Ed Illustrates on everpress and I’m pretty sure it’s only available for a few more days to order. I suggest you jump on it before it jumps on you.
Regards,