Bout of Books 4 - Thursday

    For Thursday, I again had too much going on to read as much as I have been during the summer. After spending some time doing administrative tasks and reading about 20 pages of Caldeira's City of Walls, I took my husband to have a surgery that he had to schedule for this week. I thought I would be reading in the waiting room, but it turns out that his surgery was a very fast one!  That was good news for both of us, but it meant that I didn't get my reading done.
    At the end of the day, we decided to re-watch some of Deadwood.  I have been thinking about the show since I've been listening to Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries as an audiobook. Despite her setting in Hokitika,New Zealand and Deadwood's 1876 South Dakota, there are many similarities. The time periods are close, the stories center around the brutal capitalist competition over gold mines, expressed as complicated intrigue unfolding in a small prospecting town, filled with smart schemers, city-slicker marks, and a whole range of assistants and opportunists involved in every detail of organizing daily life. In both stories, a seemingly tragic white woman is an opium addict, and in both cases, this woman is generally underestimated by most of the men in the story.  The Luminaries develops more non-white characters. Catton's story includes a Maori character named Tea Rau Tawhare, who has some kind of relationship with Crosbie Wells, whose dead body is discovered at the outset of the novel. There are also two Chinese characters, Sook Yoonsheng and Qui Long, who are fully described and involved in the center of the plot. This is a contrast with the one Chinese character in Deadwood.
   I'd say that fiction about gold mining towns is a good place to look at similarities in the dynamics, both historical and mythic, of settler-colonial societies across the globe. As I was just discussing with my students the other day, we can call music from Australia and New Zealand country music, even if it's not produced in Nashville.

Bout of Books 3 - Wednesday

Tuesday night was rough, which meant Wednesday was rough too. I got done teaching my evening class at 9:30, then drove for about 10 minutes of my hour-long trip home while thinking I heard some kind of bug rustling around. I pulled into a gas station, and lo and behold, found a cockroach on the floor of my car behind the driver's seat!
I completely freaked out and spent an hour rooting around my car with a car vac until I got to the point where I just had to go home. Then, when I got home at nearly midnight, there was a TV news meltdown happening over the idiot president's most recent speech.

So, on Wednesday, instead of meeting my usual 80 page goal, I read only about 30 pages. I started in the morning with Teresa Caldeira's City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paolo. This is really a wonderfully thoughtful and well-researched enthography about the impact of neoliberal transformation in Brazil on the lives of individuals, with an emphasis on walled-in housing and people's constant "talk of crime." It's a very empathic and yet critical study of every-day dynamics that contribute to segregation and criminalization.  I'm reading this both as general support for my teaching this semester, and for my 2017 academic reading challenge, in the category, "read about a subject you study, but in a different country from the one that you usually study." Later in the day, I read another 20 pages or so of The Russian Debutante's Handbook. 

Bout of Books Update 2

Tuesday was a frantic day, reminding me of why summer break, even when you're on the clock is different from the school year, especially the first weeks of a new school year. I had several meetings in the morning and early afternoon, taught a class, and then was swamped with "emergency" emails and phone-calls.

I managed only to read things I had to read for the classes I was teaching. From books, this meant another two chapters of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag, along with three different interviews with activists against broken windows policing from Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton's timely and wonderful collection of essays by scholars and activists,  Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter.  I did drive for an hour and listened to the 20th chapter of The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.  After I got home from my long drive, I was too obsessed with watching CNN to read very much before bed. I'm hoping that tomorrow will be different, but then of course, there's preparing for next week's classes. 

Bout of Books 20 Update One

On Monday,  I spent most of the day in Tennessee waiting on or watching the eclipse. Since we got there early to make sure we could park and had a good spot, I had plenty of time to read before anything got started. I was reading, for the third time, Ruth Wilson Gilmore's amazing book, The Golden Gulag. I'm teaching this book tonight in a seminar on the spatial arrangement of prisons and policing in the U.S.  Tonight, we'll be discussing the notion of how surpluses of investment capital, labor, land and state capacity contributed to what Gilmore calls "the Prison fix" in California.

 Later in the day, I read about 20 pages of Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook. I'm planning to use a chapter of this book in a course I'm teaching to undergrads this semester, but I haven't decided on which chapter yet - but I'm thinking of the one about his return to the former USSR.  

24 in 48 Reading Challenge - the Day After

I'm in the midst of writing a piece about how academics can use reading challenges to broaden their professional reading and enhance their quality of life, and, just as I finished the first draft of my piece, I saw that the 24in48 reading challenge was starting the next day. Of course, I had to join it, ready or not.

 What I found most challenging about this challenge was using technology to prove/record my reading, and also the social media aspect. Since I kept the timer on only when I was actually reading and pressed "stop" if I was doing something else (refilling my coffee, talking to my husband), I don't know how people also did this challenge while posting their updates on social media. What I probably enjoyed most about the challenge was finding another way to get away from distraction that isn't the Pomodoro technique, because of the practice of keeping a stop-watch going without requiring yourself to go 25 minutes without a break. This allows you to monitor how much of your reading time is really spent reading, if you are good about stopping the clock as soon as your eyes leave the page.  However, the downside of the stopwatch method is that I accidentally turned it off while I was reading for 15 minutes on the first day, and more disastrously accidentally reset the stop-watch after 6 hours and 15 minutes (+the unclocked 15).

 Anyway, I mostly used it to finish books I was half-way through, so I didn't read a single book from start-to-finish, which was a little unsatisfying. Since I was doing primarily academic reading, I also took longhand notes as I was going, which made my pace pretty slow. Despite that, I read a total of 664 pages and listened to 6 hours and 12 minutes of Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes. In hard copies, I finished Marjorie Spruill's Divided We Stand; the Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics , James Forman's Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America; and Omar El Akkad's American War. I started, but didn't quite finish George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses and at the very end of the challenge, when I decided I was too tired to effectively read Mosse, I got 65 pages into Billy Wayne Sinclair and Jodi Sinclair, A Life in the Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story, which I've had on my shelf for a long time because it was cited in some other book I read. It turns out to be not at all what I had expected. 

A week's worth of reading and reader-chat

I haven't posted here in a long time. I've been reading a ton lately, and also participating a new kind of online reading challenge: the readathon. Towards the end of July I participated in the 24 in 48 readathon and barely made it to the end on time.

Next week, I'll be joining the Bout of Books, a week-long reading challenge with origins in a blog run by fans of paranormal fiction, but which I think you can participate in while reading anything you like.  Here's how the organizers describe the project :

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, August 21st and runs through Sunday, August 27th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 20 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

It's not clear to me what the goals are for this challenge, but I'll participate by posting updates about what I'm reading next week, along with my usual music match-ups. I'll also post my responses to their social media challenges here as the week goes along.  Right now, I've just started a new semester, and I always revise my courses, so a fair portion of my "bout" is going to be reading around the edges of my own syllabuses.  

Who are the white women who voted for DJT?

I met one in the airport last night. Let’s call her Nancy. She is a white upper-class woman, who told me, during the course of our conversation at the airport bar that she makes over 100k per year. When we first met, she seemed nice enough and said she was eager to hear what I had to say about the state of the country. Before I answered her question, I asked her what side she was on and she said she had voted for Donald Trump.

I asked her why, and most of what she said was not substantive. She wanted a “change”, said that “He is imploding the whole thing” which she didn’t seem to think was bad, though she admitted to being worried about his personal instability. Her main issue was not immigration, but as far as she’s concerned, she earned her money, and she shouldn’t have to pay taxes for other people’s health care. It’s morally wrong, according to her, that people are not denied service at Emergency Rooms even if they can’t pay. “They are never turned away!” She said, “it’s not right!” She rejected any reflection on what this said about her moral priorities when I asked directly, “so your money is more important than someone’s life?” She just repeated: “Health care is not a right,” insisting that the high costs of medical care for her are based on paying for other people’s care (rather than for profits of private health care providers.) “I don’t want to pay $50 for a box of tissues because other people don’t pay for their healthcare.”

I tried to explain to her that our health care is more expensive than what it costs in other countries with public health care or insurance, and how the lack of insurance drives up ER use (though it turns out, this is a myth). She was having none of it, flatly denying that other countries have figured out how to pay less for health care. I talked a bit about Single Payer and she denied it reduced costs, but then the conversation took a conspiratorial turn. She went on that the secret of Obamacare was that it was intentionally set up to “not work” so that we would be forced to go to Single Payer. I told her this was ridiculous, suggesting that private insurance companies and the protection of their profits by BOTH parties was the reason that Obamcare didn’t work. When I asked her where she got her information about the secret plan to make Obamcaare not work she said, “don’t you know, the architect of Obamacare, he said it himself….you know, the Jewish guy.”

Maybe it was the look in her eye, or the tone of her voice, or the fact that I’d been reading Rebecca West this week, but I was done with politely listening to the other side. She protested that she had many “Dear Jewish friends.”

In Rebecca West’s post-war essays collected in A Train of Powder, there is a comment from someone she describes as an able Jew who had returned to Berlin after the war. I think he explained a voter like this one pretty clearly:

You see, under the Nazis, strangers did not come by night and take you away unless you were a Jew or an important Social Democrat, or an important liberal or a party member who had got in with the wrong higher ups. If you were not a Jew or a conspicuous politician or party member, and were an unimaginative person as well, you did not realize what this meant, and perhaps persuaded yourself that it didn’t really happen. And if you were a sufficiently unimportant German, who only knew the people next door, and had no Jewish friends, and never joined the party, then you might very well never get any intimation that it really did happen . (Rebecca West, “Greenhouse with Cyclamens II, 1949)

And today it is only ICE that is knocking on the doors of the homes, schools and churches of immigrants, and only “random individuals” who burn down Mosques or shoot Black people in church, or call bomb threats to the Jewish community centers, and the President and his cronies only advocate the silencing of protesters and newspapers who oppose them, or who dare to criticize the police. But voters like Nancy can live in their bubbles, spending their money happily on their comforts, while others suffer, invisible, outside the boundaries of their limited imaginations.