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Twitter Stories

“Black Box” by Jennifer Egan doesn’t seem meant to be read in bits, as it was posted on Twitter. The New Yorker version has it divided even further, into 47 sections that contain a “tweet.” It wasn’t until I read the sentence, “Technology has afforded ordinary people a chance to glow in the cosmos of human achievement.” that I saw how “Black Box” could be related to social media. In the context of the story, the sentence is about espionage, but in relation to social media, it is about how technology allows one visibility--- access to an audience--- with less stress on location or status. (economic, social, etc.) 

One thing that stuck out to me was how Egan’s story was posted on Twitter, but that it didn’t utilize the “dialect” that is often used by the masses of those who post on Twitter. Egan doesn’t use hashtags, colloquialisms, emojis, or acronyms. Another Twitter story that popped up recently, written by a user named “_zolarmoon” uses most of these things, except for hashtags. This created an air of authenticity that had many readers wondering how much of the story was true. Conversely, Egan’s story was posted directly from the “NYerFiction” account, immediately separating itself as a) distinctly fiction, and b) directed to the average New Yorker reader. Both stories are released in sections of 140 characters or less, as a tweet, but the similarities seem to stop there. It is interesting to see how these two Twitter stories so greatly differ in their usage of the platform, and how they might inspire Twitter stories in the future. 

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The Ideal Woman

In “The Patchwork Girl” by Shelley Jackson, there is a list of the physical attributes that constitute an ideal woman: the voluptuous buttocks and breast of England, fiery glance of Polish, German body, and podex (which I’ve just learned means “butthole?”) from Paris. 

This reminded me of a quote from Tina Fey’s book “Bossypants,” “Every girl is expected to have caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama and doll tits.”

I thought it was interesting, how the features went from mostly European (keep in mind that Frankenstein was published in 1818, but the events of it take place in the 17th century, so the list of features in “The Patchwork Girl” are most likely indicative of beauty standards during that time) to being slightly more universal, but still mostly unattainable and still based on stereotype. Have they, perhaps, become even more unattainable, since there doesn’t seem to be any canceling out of standards, just an adding up? Or do they make it easier for non-European women to be seen as beautiful?

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If I am the queen of dispersal then however far you take my parts you only confirm my reign.

Shelley Jackson

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for angela and gloria and

assata and leila and

marsha and yuri and 

the countless unnamed

for the women I was taught not to remember

(a work in progress plz send suggestions this way)

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Women Don’t Riot by Ana Castillo (For N.B.S) Women don’t riot, not in maquilas in Malaysia, Mexico, or Korea, not in sweatshops in New York or El Paso. They don’t revolt in kitchens, laundries, or nurseries. Not by the hundreds or thousands, changing sheets in hotels or in laundries when scalded by hot water, not in restaurants where they clean and clean and clean their hands raw. Women don’t riot, not sober and earnest, or high and strung out, not of any color,  any race, not the rich, poor, or those in between. And mothers of all kinds  especially don’t run rampant through the streets. In college those who’ve thought it out  join hands in crucial times, carry signs, are dragged away in protest. We pass out petitions, organize a civilized vigil, return to work the next day. We women are sterilized, have more children than they can feed, don’t speak the official language, want things they see on TV, would like to own a TV– women who were molested as children raped, beaten, harassed, which means every last one sooner or later; women who’ve defended themselves and women who can’t or don’t know how we don’t–won’t ever rise up in arms. We don’t storm through cities, take over the press, make a unified statement, once and for all: A third-millennium call– from this day on no more, not me, not my daughter, not her daughter either. Women don’t form a battalion, march arm in arm across continents bound by the same tongue, same food or lack thereof, same God, same abandonment, same broken heart, raising children on our own, have so much endless misery in common that must stop not for one woman or every woman, but for the sake of us all. Quietly, instead, one and each takes the offense,  rejection, bureaucratic dismissal, disease that should not have been, insult, shove, blow to the head, a knife at her throat. She won’t fight, she won’t even scream– taught as she’s been to be brought down as if by surprise. She’ll die like an ant beneath a passing heel. Today it was her. Next time who.

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I was a person of color in a workshop whose theory of reality did not include my most fundamental experiences as a person of color—that did not in other words include me.

Junot Diaz, “MFA vs, POC” 

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In my workshop the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight and male. This white straight male default was of course not biased in any way by its white straight maleness—no way! Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.

Junot Diaz, “MFA vs. POC” 

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I’m reading Junot Diaz in two classes this week, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” in Lit and “MFA vs. POC” in Creative Writing. Whenever we talk about race in class I feel like it stretches beyond that one class for me in a way that it doesn’t for most other students. I cannot walk into the room, think about race, and walk out of the room and stop thinking about it. I cannot help but suddenly feel myself overwhelmed by the social implications and the historical context of it all. And that we talk about race, usually in a class of mostly white people, who condemn racism but do nothing to stop it, who continue to reap the benefits of their whiteness while claiming to be an ally, is kind of insulting. 

This has more to do with “MFA vs. POC,” but even when we talked about Oscar Wao (and “Black No More”) I saw these issues popping up. Like I said in class, we Americans (specifically, white Americans, because some of us are never fully made welcome, even when our family has lived here for generations. For example, the other day a guy asked me what country I’m from originally. Seriously.) have a very specific notion of an American experience, and an American text. There is American Lit and then there is Latino Lit, African American Lit, etc. By code-switching in Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz immediately rejects the notion that an American text has to cater to a specific experience, and his humorous approach makes it hard to be upset. Some people are offended when the narrator says, “In case you missed your two seconds of Dominican history...” but are we upset because Diaz makes assumptions? Or because these assumptions are TRUE? And he has the confidence to speak about them unapologetically? 

I’m reminded of an interview with Toni Morrison on Steven Colbert. He asked her what she wanted to be pigeonholed as. As an African-American writer? An American woman writer? And she simply replied, “An American writer.” Because gender and race are not separate from her American experience, but an integral part of it. 

(Also, I introduced my mother to Junot Diaz and we laughed while comparing some of the characters to our crazy family members. She thought “fuku” was Junot Diaz’s funny way of saying “fuck you.”)

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the PEN World Voices Festival, 5/10/15

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Chimamanda Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story”

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I’m an English major. It is a language of conquest. What does it say that I’m mastering the same language that was used to make my mother feel inferior? Growing up, I had a white friend who used to laugh whenever my mother spoke English, amused by the way she rolled her r’s. My sister and I tease Mami about her accent too, but it’s different when we do it, or is it? The echoes of colonization linger in my voice. The weapons of the death squads that pushed my mother out of El Salvador were U.S.-funded. When Nixon promised, “We’re going to smash him!” it was said in his native tongue, and when the Chilean president he smashed used his last words to promise, “Long live Chile!” it was said in his. And when my family told me the story of my grandfather’s arrest by the dictatorship that followed, my grandfather stayed silent, and meeting his eyes, I cried, understanding that there were no words big enough for loss. English is a language of conquest. I benefit from its richness, but I’m not exempt from its limitations. I am ‘that girl’ in your English classes, the one who is tired of talking about dead white dudes. But I’m still complicit with the system, reading nineteenth-century British literature to graduate. Diversity in my high school and college English literature courses is too often reduced to a month, week, or day where the author of the book is seen as the narrator of the novel. The multiplicity of U.S. minority voices is palatably packaged into a singular representation for our consumption. I read Junot Díaz and now I understand not only the Dominican-American experience, but what it means to be Latina/o in America. Jhumpa Lahiri inspired me to study abroad in India. Sherman Alexie calls himself an Indian, so now it’s ok for me to call all Indians that, too. We will read Toni Morrison’s Beloved to understand the horrors of slavery, but we won’t watch her takedowns on white supremacy. Even the English courses that analyze race and diasporas in meaningful ways are still limited by the time constraints of the semester. Reading Shakespeare is required, but reading Paolo Javier and Mónica de la Torre is extra credit. My Experimental Minority Writing class is cross-listed at the most difficult level, as a 400-level course in the Africana Studies, Latina/o Studies, and American Studies departments, but in my English department, it is listed as a 300-level. I am reminded of Orwellian democracy: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Monica Torres, “Majoring In English,” The Feminist Wire 3/29/13 (via racialicious)

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Tabu, The Namesake (2006)

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— Hey, hippie girl, you Mexican? On both sides? — Front & back, I say. — You sure don’t look Mexican. A part of me wants to kick their ass. A part of me feels sorry for their stupid ignorant selves. But if you’ve never been farther south than Nuevo Laredo, how the hell would you know what Mexicans are supposed to look like, right? There are the green-eyed Mexicans. The rich blond Mexicans. The Mexicans w/the faces of Arab sheiks. The Jewish Mexicans. The big-footed-as-a-German Mexicans. The leftover-French Mexicans. The chaparrito compact Mexicans. The Tarahumara tall-as-a-desert-saguaro Mexicans. The Mediterranean Mexicans. The Mexicans w/Tunisian eyebrows. The negrito Mexicans of the double coasts. The Chinese Mexicans. The curly-haired, freckled-faced, red-headed Mexicans. The Lebanese Mexicans. Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say I don’t look Mexican. I am Mexican. Even though I was born on the U.S. side of the border.

“Caramelo” by Sandra Cisneros (via anotherfeminist)

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"Listen, we'll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in English. Fire, he blurted out, unable to help himself.

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” when Oscar accidentally ordered his own execution, such an Oscar thing to do.