Places and Markers

As the final four months of this little project of mine bends onward, I thought I’d take a moment to document the books that I have read or am currently reading.* As you’ll note, I suck at making time to write about a lot of these. Going to work on that pronto.

Assata, by Assata Shakur
A Taste of Power, by Elaine Brown
American Innovations, by Rivka Galchen
The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros
Spit and Passion, by Cristy Road
Indestructible, by Cristy Road
Redefining Realness, by Janet Mock
The War Against Women, by Marilyn French
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde
Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh
Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit
Black Sexual Politics, by Patricia Hill Collins
The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson (the illustrated edition!)
Caramelo, by Sandra Cisneros

Additionally, I also started but never finished A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki (What I read of this was awesome and I plan to resume it. I was just really busy when I picked it up); Tell the Wolves I’m Home, by Carol Rifka Brunt (Ditto this one. Also: awesome cover art!); and Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowel. I also have read several essays by Susan Sontag, which I hope to write my reflections on sometime soon. I also read some poetry here and there, but not enough that I feel like I can post about it, which is disappointing.

Reviewing this list, the first obvious gap I notice is I don’t have any international (for lack of a better word) writers represented. I just checked out Americanah by Chimimanda Adichie, but I’d like to add more.

Lastly, on that note, if anybody who happens by this post would like to make recommendations, I’d love to have them. I’m kind of limited to only what I come across or is recommended to me by people I know. And although that provides a pretty rich selection, it’s by no means comprehensive. I also think that I’ll continue this blog beyond the one-year mark, so feel free to make lots of suggestions, too.

*I opted to include links that will help people find these books at their local libraries. I’m poor, so that’s where I got copies of many of these. The only books I bought were the Cristy Road books, which I’ve linked directly to her website because those are harder to come by.

The Bird Forgets, but the Trap Doesn’t

Book: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde




But sometimes, I was close to crazy with believing that there was some secret thing wrong with me personally that formed an invisible barrier between me and the rest of my friends, who were white. What was it that kept people from inviting me to their houses, their parties, their summer homes for a weekend? Was it that their mothers did not like them to have friends, the way my mother wouldn’t? Did their mothers caution them about never trusting outsiders? But they visited each other. There was something here that I was missing. Since the only place I couldn’t see clearly was behind my own eyes, obviously the trouble was with me. I had no words for racism.

– Audre Lorde

My year of reading only women has had the curious but welcome side-effect of this also being a year in which I’ve read several autobiographies of Black women. The Audre Lorde autobio is the fourth one that I have read, following Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness, Assata Shakur’s Assata, and Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power. Although Shakur and Brown’s books are most similar because of the time and circumstances in which those two women lived, all of the books have been uniquely enlightening. As I was finishing up Mock’s book and moving straight into Lorde’s book, a familiar pattern started to take shape in each of these very different books: it is impossible to write the narrative of Black experience without the formative moment of when one becomes aware that the culture they live in is racistly oppressive to them.

By no means is this something that’s new to me, but to see the repeated cycles of this tale told by four different women in four very different time periods has really anchored my thinking on this lately. Knowing about racism in a generic, global sense of the concept is immeasurably different than hearing the first-person accounts that detail the formative experience of being victims by racism. Acknowledging this, I also have to own the fact that it’s been a before-now very under-appreciated privilege of mine to get this far in life without knowing more about the personal effects of racism. Before this reading project of mine, I knew full well that I possess All The Privilege and that I had indirectly or (more often) directly benefited from it, but it’s never been so angering and stark with how unfair the whole currency of privilege truly is. That’s the thing about personal experiences, I hear – you put a face to an injustice and the injustice comes shrieking into focus like never before. That said, it’s never been more important for privileged people to get out of their comfort zones and learn about the experiences of other people, both in print and in person. Otherwise, professional dickwags like Tucker Carlson will continue to be given a huge megaphone for bemoaning that old white men don’t get praised enough.

(PS – We have a day like that in the US. We occurs every year on the first Tuesday that follows the first Monday of November, and we even call it Election Day so the aforementioned old white guys can feel like they really earned something.)

Jack Kerouac Sucks When You’re Not a 15-Year-Old Boy, and Other Pleasures of Growing Up

Book: American Innovations, by Rivka Galchen




I read Kerouac’s On the Road when I was 16 or so, mostly while I was crammed onto the top bed of a three-tier bunk on a train traveling across northern France. It was as idyllic as it sounds, and the experience was galvanizing to my nascent wanderlust. The lifestyle of the Beatniks was romantic, something to dedicate myself towards. It was a way of life that, to my tangled up wires of fucked up teenage psychology, seemed wholly misunderstood by everybody but me because of how unique and bold it was. I don’t think the book resonated with me because I was naturally unique and bold, but because I wanted to be unique and bold.

Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise appealed to me, although I doubt my 16-year-old self would have been able to exactly articulate why. If I were asked to elaborate as to why (I’m not sure anyone ever did challenge me on this), I think I probably would’ve reached for the off-brand box of answers and used words like “free” and “do what they want” and “romantic.” The Beatnik culture was certainly counter to everything in my experience up to this point in my life, and revealed the possibility of a life driven by a lust for experience and zero accountability. What could be more ideal for a teenage boy who, thus far, hadn’t even held his first job?

Being unique and hard to grasp, that was what made you alluring and worth knowing. You didn’t have to try to meet people if you fit this mold, didn’t have to worry about fitting in, didn’t feel anxious around strangers. Rather, people would come to you because they needed to know you. People would not be able to avoid orbiting you because the gravitational pull of you-as-curiosity was simply too powerful.

Revisiting Kerouac almost 20 years later, the determination of a teen boy trying to Be Like Jack can’t help but drown in its own conceit. I was the prime audience for On the Road: young, entitled, a landfill of emotions, and male. However, the most painfully clear yet still embarrassing fact about books like On the Road is that, sure, it lays out a lesson plan for how to make yourself interesting, but it’s only instructive of how to be interesting to yourself. To other people, not so much. In fact, On the Road is a how-to for making yourself insufferable to other people.

Men Are Sucking the Life out of the Left

Book: Assata, by Assata Shakur; A Taste of Power, by Elaine Brown




Men really can’t help themselves. They really can’t help but screw up a good thing, especially if it’s a progressive movement.

I don’t mean to suggest that men are actively sabotaging the mission of any movement they’re in. In fact, I’ve volunteered with many organizations, and there’s never been one man who has belonged to the group that just outright said, “I will fuck up everything you do to make sure this doesn’t succeed.”

That’s part of the problem, really. The way in which men do undermine a movement is much more covert, and a whole lot more damaging. Most other organization members – namely other men – likely don’t even catch a man’s disruption of group unity. If men were just outright with their sabotage, the threat would be much easier to identify, and the offending man could be excised from the group.

The way it tends to work out, really, is that men simply can’t see beyond themselves and put what’s best for an organization before their ego.

I doubt that the men who contribute to the discord and decay of a movement are aware that their own behavior has a negative impact on the mission and the other members because these men are simply behaving the way culture has instructed men to behave. That is to say, men do not reconcile their male privilege within a space shared with others, regardless of whether that’s other men, women, straight or queer people, etc. Even among men who identify as leftist, progressive, liberal, whatever, male privilege has an ugly habit of not gently instructing the behavior of men so much as it possesses a man’s actions as if he’s been infected by a zombie-ant fungus.

Room for Their Own

In the interest of full disclosure, I typed about three different viral headline parodies as the title of this post, but they were all horrible. Dog shit, really. I’ve never been good at internet humor bandwagons. And since this is the inaugural post, I figure I might as well give you a full and clear glimpse of what kind of poorly executed jokes often infect the things I try to say.

At any rate, this blog serves a couple of purposes. Primarily, it’s a space for me to write about a project I’ve assigned myself: to spend the next year of my life (from birthday to birthday) only reading books that aren’t written by men.

More disclosure: I am a man. Well, approximately. Manhood and masculinity are vile constructs that I really hate. But I am male – an XY-born, hetero, cis-identified male. However, be certain that I’m also not one of these postmodern nimrods that think everything means nothing and we can be whatever we want just because we say so. Hell, I’m not even really all that comfortable with using the word “feminist” to describe myself simply because I’m wary of unintentionally wresting any agency of the movement from women (which is another Gordian Knot to tangle with in another post). Besides, the last thing feminism needs is another asswipe dude coming along, boasting about how he’s so feminist this and so feminist that.

Anyways. While I don’t want anything to do with masculinity, I also unequivocally recognize that masculinity is a constant venom in the common carotid artery of our culture. Also, I can’t escape the fact that while I reject masculinity and all the things heir to that culture/identity, I cannot simply fleck it off of me like it’s some uninvited insect that’s alighted on my sleeve. Maleness/masculinity is a privilege that I have, whether I want it or not.

More, as I often mordantly joke with people, I’m the face of the American Empire.

First post

This is the first post of a blog I started to document a personal project that I’ve decided to sorta-kinda make into a public artifact of how the (for now) year-long project goes.