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gr8gollygrace · 1 month ago

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Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon - Notes + Thoughts

Main themes: Violence, Gender socialization, treatment of Black people in America, White perspective lying/self-truth, heritage/history, relationships/love, poverty

Images + Symbols: orange-red as a color stand-in for violence, disordered eating and exercise

Relationships

"I was too afraid to touch anyone, but not too afraid to want to be touched. My body didn't care if the person touching me was a boy or girl. My body felt grateful for tender touch no matter where it came from." pg. 42

"I did not feel good at Concord Missionary Baptist church. I felt good watching Grandmama and her friends love each other during Home Mission." pg. 55

"I didn't say a word. I just blinked, listened to what I thought was bullshit, and eventually gave you what you came to my room for: a long hug, forty dollars, and the promise I would always love you no matter how many disasters you walked into." pg. 137

"I told you that it took me ten years of teaching to understand that my students loved me, valued our time, but they did not want to become me. I told you that you cared so much for black folk, but couldn't believe there were some folk in this nation who could love you in the worst minutes of the worst hours of the worst days of your life." pg. 227

relationships are tenuous for Kiese, as the people in his life commit violence against him while also claiming they love him. These mixed signals teach him from an early age, that those who claim to love you can hurt you the most, and that is what he carries with him into his early adulthood

Violence

"I remembered forgiving you when Grandmama told me you beat me so much because something in Jackson was beating you." pg. 87

violence is intertwined with love and relationships for Kiese, and he experiences violence at the hands of his mother

violence is also common in Kiese's environment, becoming commonplace

Gender Socialization

"I stood there watching you, feeling a lot about what it meant to be a healthy safe black boy in Mississippi, and wondering why folk never talked about what was needed to keep black girls healthy and safe." pg. 27

"Nzola told all the girls, in front of all the boys, that they had to look out for themselves because black women couldn't count on these white folk or 'those niggas over there' to look out for them." pg. 122

it is clear that both black boys and black girls are socialized for self-preservation, however, those socialization are separated and different between the genders. This creates tension between them, and not cohesive community.

White Perspective

"Every time you said my particular kind of hardheadedness and white Mississippians' brutal desire for black suffering were recipes for an early death, institutionalized, or incarceration, I knew you were right." pg. 5

"For Grandmama, those wins were always personal. For you, the winds were always political. Both of y'all knew and showed me, how we didn't even have to win for white folk to punish us. All we had to do was not lose the way they wanted us to." pg. 53

"I knew that if my white classmates were getting beaten at home, they were not getting beaten at home because of what any black person on Earth thought of them." pg. 69

"So even if we didn' know real white folk, we knew a lot of the characters white folk wanted to be, and we knew who we were to those characters.

That meant we knew white folk.

That meant white folk did not know us." pg. 72

"I was finally understanding, for all that bouncy talk of ignorance and how they didn't really know, that white folk, especially grown white folk, knew exactly what they were doing. And if they didn't they should have." pg. 79

"And the biggest problem was police weren't the only people doing the shooting. They were just the only people allowed to walk around and threaten us with guns and prison if they didn't like your style of flying.

I loved our style of flying." pg. 83

"I wanted to tell LaThon I wasn't a sellout and I wasn't in love with a white girl but it was hard when I was doing sellout/in-love stuff like riding in her black convertible with the tip down, or holding her hand in between classes, or watching her white friends use vowel sounds we prided ourselves on obliterating and never calling them meager to their faces." pg. 92

"But here we were, in one of our safe spaces, watching white folk watch white police watch other white police destroy our body." pg. 95

"I'd fallen in love with provoking white folk, which really meant I'd fallen in love with begging white folk to free us by demanding that they radically love themselves more." pg. 156

"On September 12, I watched my Pakistani neighbors plaster their Corollas with 'I Love the USA' bumper stickers and dress their newborn in a red, white, and blue outfit I'd seen at Marshalls." pg. 182

"This wasn't easy because no matter how conscientious, radically curious, or politically active I encouraged Cole to be, teaching wealthy white boys like him meant that I was being paid to really fortify Cole's power." pg. 191

"I will want to punish my black body because fetishizing and punishing black bodies are what we are trained to do well in America." pg. 234

The white perspective is pervasive as it ensures the safety of colored people

Kiese consistently receives pressure and pain from his mother at the potential perspective of white people, and that Kiese has to excel in order to survive

Furthermore, black people pressure Kiese to stay within pre-defined limits for black people, and to get too close to white people is sell-out behavior.

Lying/Self-Perspective

"I was a liar; a cheater; a manipulator; a fat, happy sad, bald-headed black boy with a heart murmur; and according to you and the white girl I lied to every day, I was a good dude." pg. 103

"Every waking moment on that campus was filled with my trying to misdirect people from seeing who I really was." pg. 126

"Nothing, other than losing weight, felt as good as provoking and really titillating white folk with black words." pg. 148

"'I'm here because I'm sad, lonely, and addicted to losing,' is a sentence never shared between casino friends." pg. 214

throughout the story Kiese wrestles with lying about himself to his loved ones and others as a form of protections, but as he continues, he finds lying to himself about where he has been means hurting himself and his loved ones even more

Wanting to lie about oneself to make it seem better or more glamour is a natural tendency for many, but is emphasized as Kiese experiences even more societal pressure and familial pressure than most

Heritage

"More than solving the mystery of who killed his little brother or the sheriff, my father wanted me to understand that the so-called terror linking all Americans was nothing compared to the racial and gendered terror that controlled and contorted the bodies of our family." pg. 198

"I will wonder if the memories that remain with age are heavier than the ones we forget because they mean more to us, or if our bodies, like our nation, eventually purge memories we never wanted to be true." pg. 236

heritage, like relationships are confusing and complex, but they show the outline of progress, to remember and to cherish or revere memory as a path away from the current failings of society

Poverty

"Our house had more books than any other house I'd ever been in, way more books than Beulah Beauford's house, but no one I knew, other than you, wanted to swim in, or eat, books." pg. 13

"Even those of us whose parents were part of this shiny black middle class knew those shiny black middle-class parents were one paycheck away from asking grandparents or us for money we didn't have the week before payday, and two paychecks away from poverty. There was no wealth in our family, you told me more than once. There were only paydays." pg. 188

poverty is rampant throughout the memoir, as Kiese experiences great poverty and shares the experience of loved ones. This issue is found throughout the black community

Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir. Scribner, 2018.

#reading journal #kiese laymon #heavy: an american memoir

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gr8gollygrace · 1 month ago

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Dream Work by Mary Oliver - Notes + Thoughts

Main themes: rebirth/cycles/seasonality, nature, self-acceptance, self-truth

Images + Symbols: natural phenomena(sun rising and setting, stars, animals and plants)

I began reading this book while I had no power, stuck in my home in West AVL after Hurricane Helene: Read "Storm in Massachusetts, September 1982"

Morning Poem pg. 6 - 7

Every morning

the world

is created.

Under the orange

sticks of the sun

the heaped

ashes of the night

turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches--

and the ponds appear

like black cloth

on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.

If it is your nature

to be happy

you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination

alighting everywhere.

And if your spirit carries within it

the thorn

that is heavier than lead--

if it's all you can do

to keep on trudging--

there is still

somewhere deep within you

a beast shouting that the earth

is exactly what it wanted --

each pond with its blazing lilies

is a prayer heard and answered

lavishly,

every morning,

whether or not

you have ever dared to be happy,

whether or not

you ever dared to pray.

in this poem is the idea of rebirth or cycles of seasons(or microseasons in this poem)

the last stanza of the poem seems to claim that cycles and time do not wait for anyone to notice them, it just happens.

Consequences pg. 22

Afterward

I found under my left shoulder

the most curious wound.

As though I had leaned against

some whirring things,

it bleeds secretly.

Nobody know its name.

Afterward,

for a reason more right than rational,

I thought of that fat German

in his ill-fitting overcoat

in the woods near Vienna, realizing

that the birds were going farther and farther away, and

no matter how fast he walked

he couldn't keep up.

How does any of us live in this world?

One thing compensates for another, I suppose.

Sometimes what's wrong does not hurt at all, but rather

shines like a new moon.

I often think of Beethoven

rising, when he couldn't sleep,

stumbling around through the dust and crumpled papers,

yawning, settling at the piano,

inking in rapidly note after note after note.

consequences of normalized, unnoticed/unknown things

Members of the Tribe pg. 32-35

Ahead of me

they were lighting their fires

in the dark forests

of death.

Should I name them?

Their names make a long branch of sound.

You know them.

I know

death is the fascinating snake

under the leaves, sliding

and sliding: I know

the heart loves him too, can't

turn away, can't

break the spell. Everything

wants to enter the slow thickness,

aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost.

Wants to be stone.

That time

I wanted to die

somebody

was playing the piano

in the room with me.

It was Mozart.

It was Beethoven.

It was Bruckner.

In the kitchen

w man with one ear

was painting a flower.

Later,

in the asylum,

I began to pick through the red rivers

of confusion:

I began to take apart

the deep stitches

of nightmares.

This was good human work.

This had nothing to do with laying down a path of words

that could throttle,

or soften,

the human heart.

Meanwhile,

Yeats, in love and anger,

stood beside his fallen friends;

Whitman kept falling

through the sleeve of ego.

In the back fields,

beyond the locked windows,

a young man who couldn't live long and knew it

was listening to a plain brown bird

that kept singing in the deep leaves,

that kept urging from him

some wild and careful words.

You know that

important and eloquent defense

of sanity.

I forgive them

their unhappiness,

I forgive them

of walking out of the world.

But I don't forgive them

for turning their faces away,

for taking of their viels

for dancing for death--

for hurtling

toward oblivion

on the sharp blades

of their exquisite poems, saying:

/this is the way/.

I was, of course, all that time

coming along

behind them, and listening

for advice.

And the man who merely

washed Michelangelo's brushes, kneeling

on the damp bricks, staring

everyday at the colors pouring out of them,

lived to be a hundred years old.

this poem is about suicide and describes Oliver's own struggle with suicidal ideation

She asserts that she understands the desire to be at peace, but does empathize most with the loved ones left behind

Orion pg. 49

I love Orion, his fiery body, his ten stars,

his flaring points of reference, his shining dogs.

'It is winter,' he says.

'We must eat,' he says. Our gloomy

and passionate teacher.

Miles below

in the cold woods, with the mouse and the owl,

with the clearness of water sheeted and hidden,

with the reason for the wind forever a secret,

he descends and sits with me, his voice

like the snapping of bones.

Behind him

everything is so black and unclassical; behind him

I don't know anything, not even

my own mind.

I just liked this poem because it seems to me to outline the perfection of classical teachings, marble statues, and wine, and how that juxtaposes the current society we experience, which almost seems like the antithesis

One or Two Things pg. 50-51

Don't bother me.

I've just

been born.

The butterfly's loping flight

carries it through the country of the leaves

delicately, and well enough to get it

where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping

here and there to fuzzle the damp throats

of flowers and the black mud; up

and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly

lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk

of some ordinary flower.

III

The god of dirt

came up to me many times and said

so many wise and delectable things, I lay

on the grass listening

to his dog voice,

crow voice,

frog voice; /now/,

he said, and /now/,

and never once mentioned /forever/,

which was nevertheless always been,

like a sharp iron hoof,

at the center of my mind.

One of two things are all you need

to travel over the blue pond, over the deep

roughage of the trees and through the stiff

flowers of lightning--some dep

memory of pleasure, some cutting

knowledge of pain.

But to lift the hoof!

For that you need

an idea.

VII

For years and years I struggled

just to love my life. And then

the butterfly

rose, weightless, in the wind.

'Don't love your life

too much' it said,

and vanished

into the world.

This poem does not take place in the past of future, but rather a present moment that is fleeting and unable to be grasped - the past or future is not guaranteed

however, with the vanishing of life or of things, it goes "into the world" to be cycled

Oliver, Mary. Dream Work. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.

#mary oliver #dream work #reading journal #poetry

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gr8gollygrace · 1 month ago

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Small Wonders by Barbara Kingsolver - Notes + Thoughts

Main Themes: Environmentalism, Poverty, parenting, feminism, American political and cultural climate surrounding 9/11

Images + Symbols: Climate Change, Homelessness, gardening/farming, nature

much of this novel discusses the American cultural and political climate directly before and after 9/11, as this book was first published in 2002

Small Wonders

"A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves--" pg. 9

"The hard boundary between the haves and the have-nots is still defended with armaments, but now it is also bridged by a dancing, illusory world of material wants. Passing through every wall are the electronic beams that create a shadow play of desire staged by the puppeteers of globalized commerce," pg. 11

"It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life." pg. 19

"Small change, small wonders--these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life. It's a workable economy." pg. 21

This is the first essay in the book, and it really sets the readers' expectations for the themes of the rest of the novel: touching on parenting, environmentalism and poverty in America

Knowing Our Place

"Protecting the land that once provided us with our genesis may turn out to be the only real story there is for us. The land /still/ provides our genesis, however we might like to forget that our food comes from dank, muddy earth, that the oxygen in our lungs was recently inside a leaf, and that every newspaper or book we may pick up(including this one, ultimately, though recycled) is made from the heart of trees that died for the sake of our imagined lives." pg. 39

"I have a place from which to tell my stories. So do you, I expect. We sing the song of our home because we are animals, and an animals is no better or wiser or safer than its habitat and its food chain. Among the greatest of all gifts is to know our place." pg. 40

this essay really helps to create emphasis on placemaking as an influence to Kingsolver's work.

Kingsolver grounds place from a biological standpoint, and appeals to the esoteric animal desires of human beings

Setting Free the Crabs

"When the cute wild things charge down the fence around my garden and bury their faces in my watermelons, they're not cute anymore; then they're the /un/cutest damn ugly things I've ever laid eyes on." pg. 63

"This is not to suggest that it's wrong to love a cat or a dog, or to sell or buy pets, or to lobby for animal rights in the form of better treatment for cats, dogs, veal calves, or lobsters about to be put into boiling pots, but these concerns do not make an environmental case. They make a spiritual case, and animal-rights activists are practicing a form of religion, not environmental science." pg. 69

this essay is an endearing story about Kingsolver's daughter refusing to harm or displace a hermit crab from a beautiful shell

Kingsolver explores the difference our society places on domesticated animals v wild animals - often favoring the needs of domesticated animals before thinking of the way humans are destroying wild habitats

A Fist in the Eye of God

"When agricultural companies have purchased, stored, and patented certain genetic materials from old crops, they cannot engineer a crop, /ever/, that will have the resistance of land races under a wide variety of conditions of moisture, predation, and temperature. Genetic engineering is the antithesis of variability because it removes the wild card--the beautiful thing called sex--from the equation." pg. 101

"I'm a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the door of creation not with a lion tamer's whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship: a temple, a mosque, or a cathedral. A sacred grove, as ancient as time." pg. 108

this is another essay grounded in biological fact, and explores the need for wild genetic diversity, especially amongst our crop systems

Kingsolver also explores the intersection here with poverty which is often exacerbated by predatory promises made by big agricultural manufactures

Lily's Chickens

"Somewhere near you, I'm sure, is a farmer who desperately needs your support, for one of a thousand reasons that are pulling wool out of the proud but unraveling traditions of family farming." pg. 116

"Gardening is the best way I know to stay fit and trim, so during garden season, when it's up to me to make the earth move, I don't waste hours at the gym. Eating this way requires organization and skills more than time." pg. 126

"I'm lucky I could help make my daughter's dream come true. My own wish is for world enough and time that every child might have this: the chance to count some chickens before they hatch." pg. 130

This story is maybe a little less severe and outlines the beauty and use of gardening and learning where your food comes from

The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don't Let Him In

"I purposefully spend a few weeks each year avoiding national and international news altogether, and attending only to the news of my own community, since that is the only place I can actually do very much about the falling-apart-things of the moment. Some of my friends can't believe I do this, or can't understand it." pg. 141

"I also believe it's possible to be so overtaken and stupefied by the tragedies of the world that we don't have any time or energy left for those closer to home, the hurts we should take as our own." pg. 142

The One-eyed Monster is a stand-in for a TV, Kingsolver outlines the problem with television as access to influence people to want more and to not be satisfied with less.

Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen

"I vowed early on to give you more choices than I had, so you could learn self-control in a safer laboratory than I did. . . I've spend so much of my life stitching together the answers to the hard questions that it;s natural for me to want to hand them down like a glove, one that will fit neatly onto an outstretched little clone hand. I try sometimes. But that glove won't fit. . . the answers will work for you only when you've stitched them together yourself." pg. 149

"By concentrating on what I could do to make things better for people who were worse off than me, I taught myself to feel significant. Word by word, day by day, I revised the word /stupid/ out of my journal." pg. 154

"So begins the longest, scariest, sexiest, funniest, smartest, most extraordinary conversations we know. Cross your fingers, ready, set. Go." pg. 159

this essay outlines many of the fears of growing up as a girl, the desire for parents to make their dreams come true in their children, and how children inevitably have their own dreams

Letter to My Mother

"I understood this to be all your fault. You made me, and I was born a girl. You trained me to be a woman, and regarding that condition, I fail to see one good thing." pg. 165

"I am a woman lost in the weary sea of waiting, and you are the only one who really knows where I am. Your voice is keeping me afloat." pg. 174

"You looked happy /because of me/. . . I know exactly how you felt. I am your happiness. It's a cross I am willing to bear." pg. 175

I have felt this sort of resentment towards my mother for making me the way I am, but I realize that it is a gift, not a curse to be me

I do love that the essay ends with Kingsolver and her mother rekindling their relationships

Going to Japan

"What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it." pg. 179

Flying

"What I do believe is that the losers of all wars are largely the innocent, and we are a nation at war--we have been for many lifetimes, reinforcing or inventing reigns of power that mollify some and terrify others in many lands, for many reasons." pg 189

"Of all the fates I can imagine for myself, no legacy leaves me colder than that of bitterness and hatred. I would rather be forgotten entirely than held in any way responsible for the vengeful loss of a single life, let alone thousands of lives, or any historic moment of jingoism or ethnic hatred." pg. 193

this essay follows directly after 9/11 and speculates on why Americans or American government can rationalize waging war for centuries

these sentiments are echoed in the essay "Stealing Apples" and "And Our Flag Was Still There"

Household Words

"I've spent hundreds of pages, even whole novels, trying to explain what home means to me. Sometimes I think it's the only thing I ever write about. Home is place, geography, and psyche; it's a matter of survival and safety, a condition of attachment and self-definition." pg. 196

this essay wrestles with the American shame of homelessness, and what it means to be home

Taming the Beast with Two Backs

"The language of coition has been stolen--or really, I think, it's been divvied up like chips in a poker game among the sides of pornography, consumerism, and the medical profession." pg. 225

this essay made me think of Audre Lorde's "The Uses of the Erotic" and how pornography takes the erotic and makes it for profit

Stealing Apples

"Others still are trying to find a place in between, a place of honest living where they can abide themselves and one another without howling in the darkness." pg. 233

"When fear rules the day, many minds are weak enough to crack the world into nothing but 'me' and 'evildoers,' and as long as we're proudly killing unlike minds over there, they feel emboldened to do the same over here." pg. 237

And Our Flag Was Still There

"Our nation was established with a fight for independence, so our iconography grew out of war." pg. 242

God's Wife's Measuring Spoons

"We're the theater of the street, the accurate jow of children's hearts, the literature of tomorrow's wisdom arrived today, just in time. I'm with Emma Goldman: Our revolution will have dancing--and excellent food. In the long run, the choice of life over death is too good to resist." pg. 250

Kingsolver, Barbara. Small Wonders. Harper-Collins Publishers, 2002.

#barbara kingsolver #small wonder #reading journal

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gr8gollygrace · 2 months ago

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Brier, His Book by Jim Wayne Miller - Notes + Thoughts

Main Themes: displacement, heritage, esoteric knowledge, change, manipulation, faith

Images + Symbols: fish, water, forest, farm, garden, trains, cities, cars, coal mining, religion

The Faith of Fishermen pg. 17 What they see when they go down to the base of the dam in rubber suits, with helmets, air lines and weighted shoes to inspect the twenty0six gates and clear away debris--what they see, the divers say we wouldn't believe: catfish (they shake their heads remember-- ing), catfish lying like logs around those gates, up close against the concrete, catfish with heads as big as buckets ("We don't mess with 'em!"), eight, a hundred, a hundred and twenty-pounders, yellow eyes that glow in the underwater beam. But we believe. The divers are our priests. Ours is the faith of fishmen eager for any authoritative word. We need to know wonders are still alive at the base of the steel and concrete world we've made--a yellow-eyed whiskered wildness, something old and other, akin to what we feel, powerful, cold, living in the dark around the gates that regulate the rivers of our lives.

the first thing that comes to mind is the use of religion in this poem to give "authority" to the divers/fishermen - while many fishermen would jump at the chance to catch these monsters, they respect them

Because of the last 5 lines, the reader can gather that the respect comes from feeling akin or resonant with the catfish

The catfish/human parallel describes the feeling of being an animal at your core, and being trapped or limited by constructs of society

The limits of society/infrustructure is so sever that one is not expected to survive, and it is surprising to witness "wildness"

The Brier's Pictorial History of the Mountains pg. 47 Green wilderness rolling like an ocean. Moccasins moving along a buffalo trail. Deer slip down to a salt lick in the evening. A shot. Another and another. A wolf wheels on a mountain path, turned by the smell of gunsmoke. The creek of wagon wheels. A baby cries. Axes ring in the woods. A cabin rises in a circle of sunlight living in a clearing. Green trees pale before deadening axes. The woods fall back, heading for high ground. Fields follow, pushing the woods uphill, taking all the ground up to the rib rock. Lights burn in houses at the mouths of creeks, in cabins up the coves. School bells. Laughter of children on the road to school. A fiddle tune, a dance, stories, songs that still remember the Scottish border, the English towns, the great halls and the ocean. Timber crews move across the ridges. Rafted logs ride out on April floods. A locomotive pushes through the trees, following the path of first wagons. A Model-T rolls through a mountain town. A farmer leans his hoe against a stump, another unhitches a gray horse from a plow left standing in a thin-soiled, gullied field his grandfather plowed when it was newground. Radios start talking in the leaves. Coves and hollows empty toward coal camps. Men go underground. In coves and hollows, a plowpoint on a rockpile; a horsehair hanging on a staggering barbed-wire fence. A cabin leans and drifts. A spring and spring drain choke on fallen leaves. Fields grown old and tired give ground back to a generation of woods returning to claim them. A panther screams. White-eyed miners ride out of the shafts to meet the match of any hundred miners: a D-9 dozer roots along a ridge, finds the black vein and takes it from the top. Now coal camps where ten thousand lived before sink in on themselves like cabins in the coves, and like old fields, give up to the woods. A concrete sidewalk running beside a creek pitches, breaks; weeds grow out of the cracks. Smaller walks that turned off and rose, twelve steps up to a miner's house, rise now to woods. Squirrels chatter and the creek runs. Cut up and bleeding, the land lies breathing hard, in places torn and gouged beyond all healing, in others beautiful and blessed as ever. Already scouts from east and west, in search of water, have looked over the rim of hills. Like long hunters, they have stayed and seen, and sent word back to cities, turning the eyes of millions out in the world toward the mountains.

the poem follows a historical narrative of the land - which experiences change at the hands of humans, who are a part of the story of the land

something I loved about this poem was the personification of natural landscapes, how the woods retreated away from the fields, and once abandoned, the woods reclaimed - like a war or a tide, symbolizing the ebbs and flows of history

Miller, J. W. (1995). Brier, his book. Small Press Distribution.

#appalachian culture #poetry #reading journal

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gr8gollygrace · 8 months ago

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As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner - Notes + Thoughts

Main Themes: death + grief, classism, individual agency, religion

Images + Symbolism: bananas, buzzards, cows/horses/steer, eggs, rain/water - change, "queer" in reference to Darl's behavior/demeanor

Classism:

Dewey Dell: "I had saved enough so that the flour and the sugar and the stove wood would not be costing anything." (pg. 7)

"'But those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks cant."(pg. 7)

Dewey Dell experiences the class divide starkly after painstakingly saving for the ingredients for a cake - which she cannot sell because the customer, "change[d] their minds" which is privileged

Darl: " Without looking back the horse kicks at him, slamming a single hoof into the wall with a pistol-like report. Jewel kicks him in the stomach"(pg. 13)

Darl works his horse like he is worked, especially by Anse who believes he should own what his children own - violence seems to somehow communicate respect, maybe the respect of handling physical responsibilities

"I have never seen a sweat stain on his shirt. He was sick once from working in the sun when he was twenty-two years old, and he tells people that if he ever sweats we will die."(pg. 17)

Dewey Dell: "We are country people, not as good as town people."(pg. 60)

Anse: "It's because there is a reward for us above, where they cant take their autos and such. Every man will be equal there and it will be taken from them that have and give them that have not by the Lord."(pg. 110)

"But now I can get them teeth. That will be a comfort."(pg. 111)

Darl: "When Jewel comes up he has the saw."(pg. 162)

Darl and others go to retrieve Cash's tools from the water - risking their lives for material goods, those goods are worth significant money, and without them, it would be difficult to make money - the family seems reliant on Cash to produce income through carpentry

Cash: "Kind of hangdog and proud too, with [Anse's] teeth and all, even if he wouldn't look at us. 'Meet Mrs Bundren,' he says."(pg. 261)

the main characters of the story are all aware of the class division to some degree

Religion:

Dewey Dell: "If it is His will that some folks has different ideas of honesty from other folks, it is not my place to question His decree"(pg. 8)

Cora: ". . . coming sometimes when I shouldn't have, neglecting my own family and duties so that somebody would be with her in her last moments and she would not have to face the Great Unknown without one familiar face to give her courage."(pg. 22)

"I have tried to live right in the sight of God and man, for the honor and comfort of my Christian husband and the love and respect of my Christian children. So that when I lay me down . . . I will be surrounded by loving faces, carrying the farewell kiss of each of my loved ones into my reward."(pg. 23)

reminds me of the play EVERYMAN, wanted to take with him family and friendship, but neither would come with, but the symbol for Love did go with in the end

Tull: "The Lord giveth"(pg. 30)

'The lord giveth, and the lord taketh(but please lord don't take it all at once"

Anse: "When He aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it long ways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man."(pg. 36)

Tull: "Then [Cora] begun to sing again, working at the washtub, with that singing look in her face like she had done give up folks and all their foolishness and had done went on ahead of them, marching up the sky, singing."(pg. 153)

Addie: "[Cora] prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too."(pg. 176)

Cora seems to be practicing Christianity in preparation for death, almost waiting for the exalting that comes with being at peace with your loved ones and lord, however, she seems to ignore the strife and trials that come with living

Death + grief:

Peabody: "The nihilists say that it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town"(pg. 44)

death as change, not the end, just difference

Vardaman: "my mother is a fish"(pg. 84)

right before Addie passes, Vardaman catches a fish and guts it - this is the way he can contextualize his mother's death, which allows her to live on in certain ways

Darl: "Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down."(pg. 227)

Addie: "I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time."(pg. 169)

Individualism:

Vardaman: "an is different from my is."(pg. 56)

"He was there and he seen it, and with both of us it will be and then it will not be."(pg. 67)

Addie: "And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at."(pg. 171)

Ars Poetica

Cash: "It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment."(pg. 238)

Misc:

Tull: "Only it kind of lived. One part of you knowed it was just water, the same thing that had been running under this same bridge for a long time, yet when them logs would come up spewing up outen it, you were not surprised, like they was a part of water, of the waiting and the threat."(pg. 138)

Would love to hear other thoughts on this novel!

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage Books, 1900.

#william faulkner #as i lay dying #southern gothic #literature #book journal #reading journal

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gr8gollygrace · 9 months ago

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African Grove Theater - Thoughts + Notes

A Black History learning series curated by Rachel Cargle

Also known as the African Company(1816)

first documented black acting troupe

started by William Henry Brown in NYC, put on Shakesperian and other famous plays

"Brown also wrote and staged the first African American play, The Drama of King Shotaway(1823), a historical drama based on the Black Carib war in St. Vincent in 1796 against both English and French settlers"

Burned down in 1823

Ida Aldridge started acting with the African Grove Theater, before becoming a famous actor in Europe

Thoughts:

After emancipation, there was so much emphasis for black people to become 'functioning members of society' to get trade and manual labor type jobs. Not that there's anything wrong with these jobs, but often they were discouraged from artistic endevours as they were not taken seriously

Reminds me of WEB Du Bois' "Criteria for Negro Art" which argued art created by black artists didn't need any justification(Art for arts sake) and that creative endeavours could uplift the community just as much as financial improvements

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gr8gollygrace · 9 months ago

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Josephine Baker's "Speech at the March on Washington" - Notes + Thoughts

A Black History learning series curated by Rachel Cargle

1963:

"they beat me with their pens, with their writings. And friends, that is much worse"

"I could go into any restaurant I wanted to, and I could drink water anyplace I wanted to, and I didn’t have to go to a colored toilet either, and I have to tell you it was nice, and I got used to it, and I liked it, and I wasn’t afraid anymore"

"You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I cold not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad"

"So then they thought they could smear me, and the best way to do that was to call me a communist"

"And when I screamed loud enough, they started to open that door just a little bit, and we all started to be able to squeeze through it. Not just the colored people, but the others as well, the other minorities too"

"You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself"

"Make it safe here so they do mot have to run away, for I want for you and your children what I had"

"But I must tell you that a colored woman—or, as you say it here in America, a black woman—is not going there"

Why was this something I had not learned -- or at least turned in some depth?

her speech was given right before MLK's "I Have a Dream" Speech, which was the only speech tought in public schools from that march, and often the civil rights

she lived much of her life in France, and saw the racial segregation happening in the US from an outside perspective, this was another thing not taught much in public school history curiculum

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gr8gollygrace · 9 months ago

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Biloxi Wade-Ins - Notes + Thoughts

A Black History learning series curated by Rachel Cargle

Biloxi, Mississippi(1958-1963):

Led by Gilbert R. Mason Sr. for desegregation

First desegregation/civil rights demonstration in Mississippi

Began after Mason and friends were prohibited from swimming on the beaches, and they were illegally trespassing

After petitioning the city governing board, they were offered a segregated portion of the beach, "Mason said no"

Bloody Wade-In Day: 125 men, women, and children held a protest on the beach, they were pelted with rocks and shots went off overhead, Mason was arrested(again)

1960: US Department of Justice sued city of Biloxi for denying access to black Americans

1963: another bloody protest that followed the assassination of Medgar Evers, in which black protestors were attacked by counter-protestors and arrested by police

1968: 4 years after the Civil Rights Act, "Biloxi beaches were finally opened to all races"

Thoughts:

10 years after starting the campaign is finally when the local government allowed/created the infrastructure for the original goal. Typical, that the government is so slow that a generation of children could grow up during this time and never get to swim at the beach

peaceful protest tactics can be used in a variety of ways, I would never have considered a wade-in at the beach or pool

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gr8gollygrace · 9 months ago

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Curt Flood and Free Agency - Notes + Thoughts

A Black History learning series curated by Rachel Cargle

Born: 1938 in Houston, TX

signed with the Cincinnati

"refused to accept a trade" which was then appealed to the Supreme Court - "free agency" within the sports world

Passed in 1997 after battling throat cancer, only after the Baseball Fans and Communities Protection Act of 1997 passed in Congress

This legislation created antitrust protection laws within the MLB

Why might this information not been something I learned -- or at least learned with some depth?

Flood's actions were in direct opposition to capitalistic motivations from corporations and wealthy team owners, so of course we don't learn about how the actions of individuals can fight against financial oppression

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gr8gollygrace · 9 months ago

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Combahee River Collective - Notes + Thoughts

A Black History learning series curated by Rachel Cargle

1977

"The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking"

"Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation"

"Above all else, Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s may because of our need as human persons for autonomy"

"We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough"

"We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy"

"We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress"

"The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions"

"Many Black women have a good understanding of both sexism and racism, but because of the everyday constrictions of their lives, cannot risk struggling against them both"

"Issues and projects that collective members have actually worked on are sterilization abuse, abortion rights, battered women, rape and health care"

"As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture"

What significance did/might this have had in the lived experience of African Americans?

Even today there is radically-exclusionary feminists who seek to separate themselves from other women - ultimately solidarity is required to create real change

Not only do Black women experience racism, but also sexism, which is so convolutely intertwined amongst all interpersonal relationships. This is traumatizing, exhausting, and compounds through generational trauma.

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