#and preferably fiction as opposed to memoirs. I know there’s some good memoirs out there but thats not what I’m looking for rn

[dykenav]

okay I’ve gathered a decent number of seemingly promising recs for lesbian fantasies but now I am just literally asking and begging for any book with a butch main character that is not a Sad Contemporary

[capshorty]

11/11 (Make A Wish) Tag

Another tag game! Yes! I was tagged by @minnowf.

Rules: Answer the 11 questions of the person who tagged you; make up 11 questions; tag 11 people to answer them. 

1. What is your favorite book on writing / place to get writing tips?

This question I can answer immediately, with no hesitation whatsoever. It’s probably one of the most common answers today, but that’s just because it’s so good. Stephen King’s On Writing is absolutely my go-to book for everything writing related, and also the book that I carry with me to read when the random time to do so arises. Part memoir, part instruction on writing, amazing all the way through. As for places to get tips, Tumblr is where I tend to stumble upon the most and some of the best I’ve seen. 

2. What do you want to improve on in your writing right now?

This is a tough one. In general, description, and when/where to use it. If I don’t think consciously about it, at least to an extent, it will basically be non-existent. If I think too hard about it, then I put in way too much. As opposed to things like dialogue, which probably isn’t amazing but at least comes naturally to me. As for my original writing, confidence is a big one for me right now. Fanfiction comes so natural to me; I never second guess the solidity of my writing when it’s fanfiction (perhaps I should a bit more, but I don’t). Original stuff terrifies me and I doubt it so much more. 

3. Describe for me your ideal writer’s nook.

This is a difficult one. Hm. Somewhere cozy, for sure. Somewhere where I can curl up, with a table for me to have snacks and such nearby, preferably somewhere I can see nature and where there’s no distractions (aka people) whatsoever. If I could have one of those little window seat nooks with like pillows and blankets just built in to the wall of like a library or something, like the kind of thing you see or read about in books/movies, I would adore that. 

4. Do you have a writing ritual? If so, what is it? If not, why?

Why do I not have a writing ritual? I dunno. Probably should, but I really don’t. I can’t honestly say that there’s anything I do or don’t do every time I write, or even most of the time. When and how I write is just so unpredictable that up til now having a ritual has been kind of impossible. 

5. What are some of your hobbies outside of writing?

Hm. Reading, obviously, is a huge one for me, though I tend to go through patches where I either read a lot or write a lot, and somehow never manage to do both at the same time. Outside of that, music is a huge hobby for me. I sing (decently), like a lot. I daydream enough it ought to count as a hobby. 

6. Which of your stories has made the greatest impact on you? How?

I’d have to say the first story I ever wrote made the biggest impact on me, because that was my first moment where I was realized that writing was a viable thing that I could do and something I liked to do very much. Second to that, Undercover Disaster probably would be the next greatest, just because it was the first massive project that I ever completed that I felt was actually quality and like it could stand on its own, not as a fanfiction (even though the original I am referencing here was in fact a fanfiction. But the point is if I’d changed the characters names you’d never have guessed that.)

7. Which color/s would best represent your WIPs?

Well, let’s see. If I’m going with the ones I’m currently trying to focus on, then there’s a few. Little Red would, for obvious reasons, be varying shades of red - for blood, for violence, for Red’s hair, for passion. Exile is a difficult one, because there’s so much going on there. I’d have to say purple, for a mix of the whites and blues and reds; blue for the adventures, the waters and the skies that will connect everything, red for the passion and brutality again, white for the possibilities of where it can go, not only in the future but in second draft stage as I reach it. Only time will tell for Undercover Disaster as I start to redraft it - I have no idea what will stay and what will go as it transitions from FF to original. With time travel I immediately think black - because black kind of consumes all other colors, and encompasses everything, and this story has a little bit of everything, all surrounded by the changing circumstances of hopping through time and space. And if the void of time and space isn’t black, what color is it?

8. Have you ever written fanfiction? If so, on what? If not, why?

I suppose I’ve accidentally answered this question a few times now. Yes, I’ve written a crap ton of fanfiction - maybe two crap tons - and it definitely outnumbers my original attempts at least twenty to one. Fanfiction is what I started on and I don’t know that I’ll ever quit writing it, regardless of whether I quit posting it or not. Most of what I’ve written has been for Artemis Fowl because I absolutely adore and hate it. I’ve dabbled a few others, however, notably the Legend of Zelda, a bit of Alex Rider fanfiction that never quite made it online, some Kingfountain (conceptually; apparently I’m one of the only ones who knows these books exist, so I never got very far on that), and recently I’ve read and fell in love with Throne of Glass, so I’m working on something for that as well. 

9. What do you believe are the greatest influences on your writing?

On my writing today? Most of what formed my style and preferences were things I read, whether it be books or fanfiction, good or bad. Media doesn’t play much part with me, since Tumblr is just about the only thing I use regularly and most of my ideas come from either spinoffs or AUs of stories I’ve read or two or three random things that just happen to come together in my head and make something semi-coherent. So yeah, I’d have to go with things I’ve read, and also my surroundings. 

10. What’s a story you could have written better than their original writers?

Well. Um. I feel like no matter how you answer a question like this, you’ll make someone mad, so I’ll just be honest here. I already stated how I love/hate Artemis Fowl, because I love the concepts and the characters and how the author started out and then it just all kind of went downhill after book 3 in my opinion. Given the same number of books he was, I definitely feel like I could have done a better job, or at least I could improve upon the job he did. Even if I could only touch the end of the eighth book alone, I feel like I make it so much better. But maybe that’s just me being bitter. 

11. If you got to go anywhere on a research trip for one of your stories, where would you go, what would be your agenda, and which story would you be researching?

This question is kind of wasted on me, and for that I am sorry. But I’d be lying if I said it was really about researching anything for writing, because a lot of my stuff isn’t the type of thing I could just take a trip and do research about, as the things I really would need to research either don’t exist (yet) or existed in the past. So, if I were taking a trip I wanted to be conducive to writing, I’d probably want to go to Ireland, or to Maine in the US. Reasons being that nature-y/green places are so inspiring to me, and because some of my favorite writers live in or came from those places. 

Tagging: @the-evanescent-inkwell @mistbornvinventure @shadowfire71-writes @hoofgirl @thel3tterm @somedeadmagic @jynecca @writeness @ofinscriptions @mischiefiswritten @coloursintheblur

Questions for YOU! 

1. How old were you when you realized writing was something you wanted to do? How old were you when you actually started doing it? 

2. What are your favorite fandoms? Do you read or write fanfiction for any of them?

3. What was your first story idea that you really felt was solid? 

4. What’s your best solution for getting over writer’s block?

5. What book(s)/author(s) have you read that you think of influenced your writing most?

6. Which of your story was/is the easiest to write? Which was the hardest?

7. What are some of your favorite tropes to read/write?

8. If you could date ANY fictional character, who would it be?

9. What are some of your favorite things to do outside of writing?

10. Where would be your ideal place to live?

11. What’s the most underrated book you’ve ever read? Most overrated?

Have fun everyone! :D

[auron570]

2018 Readlist

FAQ

Why do you read so many old books?

Because most of them belong to the public domain, and are thus freely available online. Also it is fun to see how much the past influences and creates the foundation for the present. And how much or how little has changed, and what this says about humanity.

 Orwell - Animal Farm (1945)

A satire on the Russian Revolution and the failure of communism. Among other things, Animal Farm underlines the importance of learning to read properly and think for oneself, in a way that tickles with dark humor.

 Orwell - 1984 (1949)

Similar to Animal Farm, 1984 is an even more systematic and total examination of a society where all history and information is tightly controlled and constantly being rewritten. Being published after WW2, 1984 trades some of Animal Farm’s humor for more serious and tragic imagery of concentration camps. In a sense, 1984 is an exploration of the possibility of mind control or brainwashing through societal-level propaganda.

 Huxley - Brave New World (1932)

Absolutely fantastic. If 1984 was about what would happen if everything we read was false, then Brave New World is what would happen if no one had the desire to read at all. Brave New World shows a futuristic society that runs like clockwork with the help of genetic engineering and a miracle drug called Soma. COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. BNW examines the costs of a society that is mass-produced off assembly lines.

 Fitzgerald - Great Gatsby (1925)

A criticism of conspicuous consumption and the Roaring 20s. You can’t bring your mansion with you when you die. Mortality sucks that way. Throughout the novel we are invited to ask ‘what makes Gatsby (the character) so great?’ From rags to riches to death, Gatsby’s lonely existence is pitiable, tragic and relatable as ever.

 Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Steinbeck’s illustration of the 1930s Dust Bowl and the resulting migration of impoverished families west across the United States, is a poetic masterpiece. ‘You want to work for 15cents an hour?! Well I got a thousan’ fellas willing to work 10cents an hour.’ Also featuring two of the strongest female characters in modern literature, Grapes of Wrath is a powerful lesson on human dignity.

 Shakespeare - Hamlet (1599)

The more I read Hamlet, the more I come to the conclusion that Hamlet is about delay of action. In a way, Hamlet forces himself to be penitent for something he doesn’t do. The more time he spends contemplating whether or not to kill Claudius, the more time he has to beat himself up and call himself a coward, and for accidents to pile up. ‘But put your courage to the sticking place!’ Hamlet is what happens when you ask a philosopher to commit murder.

 Shakespeare - King Lear (1605)

A lesson in parenting. If you want people (especially your children) to respect you, do not spoil them. Lear learns this lesson far too late, and gives up his inheritance far too early. Another possible lesson is to not trust liars, and instead divine a person’s character by their actions. The trouble is, with so much action going on behind the scenes, the opportunities for dramatic irony and treachery are twofold!

 Wilde - Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

An example of 19th century Gothic Romanticism. And also, similar to Great Gatsby, another cautionary tale against conspicuous consumption. Dorian Gray, forever beautiful, forever young, is by all appearances the outward ideal of a dandy. As the novel develops, his cruelty and vanity plunge to increasing depths.

 Wilde - Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

The comedic side of being a dandy. If the suit makes the man, surely if I wear a different suit I become a different man? In a play of double-identities, love polygons and other trivialities, Earnest is a raucous upset of 19th century decorum.

 Ibsen - Hedda Gabler (1891)

A complex and cruel character, Hedda’s penchant for destroying the lives of others, seems to stem from bitterness and boredom toward her own life.

 Williams - Glass Menagerie (1944)

Theater is a box through which we view the lives of our fellow homo sapiens. Like passing by an exhibit at the museum, or peeking in on pandas at the zoo, Glass Menagerie presents a slice of life.

 McCourt - Angela’s Ashes (1996)

A coming-of-age memoir about an Irish boy growing up in an impoverished family. From the day he’s born to the day he becomes a man, memorable moments include: father always coming home drunk, scavenging for coal to get the fire going, stealing loaves of bread, shoes made of tire rubber, having an affair with a terminally ill girl, having pig’s head for Christmas, and wearing Grandma’s old dress to stay warm at night.

 Salinger - Catcher in the Rye (1951)

A tightly written story of teenage angst, about the few days after an unmotivated student drops out of a New York prep school. Unable to face his family, he wanders around the bustling city, growing increasingly depressed. Holden’s conversations with different characters throughout the novel, underline a simple moral that sometimes we just want someone to listen. (Preferably someone who isn’t a phony!)

 Shakespeare - Macbeth (1606)

A bloody and ambitious soldier descends into madness after the murders the King! It can be difficult interpreting and staging the supernatural elements of the play (e.g. do you show the ghosts on stage? what about the Witches? When, why). But remember Shakespeare is writing in a time hundreds of years before modern psychology, where memory and cognition was still immaterial and mysterious. Similar to Dorian Gray (1890), Macbeth is a moral on how one’s actions affect one’s mind.

 Albom - Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)

Succumbing to ALS near the end of his life, sociology professor Morrie Schwartz welcomes death with open arms. Hosting many visitors and having many conversations with family, friends, past students, the media, Morrie’s affable outlook on life and mortality shines.

 Golding - Lord of the Flies (1954)

An allegory on the state of nature. One wonders if/how the story may have been different (and possibly more horrifying and prone to censorship debates) if female characters were involved. I suppose that would be a separate inquiry. Unable to see beyond the horizon, and unwilling to look at themselves, Jack and his follows almost doom them all.

 Lowry - The Giver (1993)

Another science fiction dystopia in a similar vein as Brave New World or 1984, but less difficult and more relatable for teenagers. Those who enjoy The Giver, should check out the film Pleasantville (1998) featuring Tobey Macguire getting stuck in a black-and-white world. Naturally the lesson being that life is never so simple.

 Naipaul - Miguel Street (1959)

A collection of short stories centered around unique characters in a slum in Port of Spain. Featuring arson, domestic violence and plenty of eccentric amateurs, Miguel Street illustrates a colorful community.

 Thiong’O - Weep Not Child (1964)

Set during the Mau Mau Uprising against British colonial rule, Weep Not Child follows one boy’s goal of education. Meanwhile his family falls apart around him, and is cut off from his best friend.

 Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables (1908)

Having recently been adapted by CBC/Netflix into a series (which is very good), the original novel is full of comedy, quaint coming-of-age lessons centered around school, tea parties, accidents and adventures. But despite this levity, Anne ends with a tragic turn which places it well within the realm of reality.

 Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)

Another example of 19th century Gothic Romanticism (like Dorian Gray). Doctor Victor Frankenstein becomes obsessed with the idea of creating life from inanimate material, only to spurn his own creation just after giving life to it. The monster, filled with rage and envy, murders Frankenstein’s dearest friends. A sort of cautionary tale in the same vein as Doctor Faustus by Marlowe, Frankenstein is a counter-weight to the enthusiasm around science at the time. That science can not only produce miracles, but also horrors in its own way if one is not careful.

 Anderson - Winesburg Ohio (1919)

A collection of short stories revolving around a small community (similar to Miguel Street). Themes of religion, old age, loneliness, love, feeling stuck in a small town, Winesburg is full of some of the most heart-rending stories in all literature. Also Winesburg manages to accomplish a unity of themes in very short space. The whole of Winesburg is much more than the sum of its parts, such that it can stand just as well against other great novels.

 Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre (1847)

One could argue that Jane Eyre is the predecessor to Anne of Green Gables. The latter frequently references the former, both are about orphan girls who grow up successfully in the face of many adverse challenges. While Anne ends with the protagonist becoming a young adult, Jane Eyre ends with a more traditional romantic happy ending, but like Anne is not without its tragedy.

 Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights (1847)

Fun fact, Wuthering Heights was a novel I considered doing an independent study essay on, but didn’t since I didn’t know anything about literature back then. Although technically of the gothic genre, Bronte primarily uses cruelty and domestic violence to evoke scenes of horror, as opposed to ghosts and monsters, while at the same time using these as tools to explore very down-to-earth themes of social class and gender inequality.

 Joyce - Dubliners (1914)

Very similar to Winesburg Ohio, but without the same unity. For example, one story is difficult to read without first reading about the history of Ireland. There are some tear-jerkers and lovely metaphors. For example the final metaphor of “snow falling faintly through the universe”, is a variation of the oft-used metaphor of flowers. How they bloom for a short period then die. What is new with this metaphor is that each snowflake is unique, thanks to the chaotic tumbling of water droplets through the atmosphere, just like how every live is unique. But all snowflakes much reach the ground some time and then melt away into nothingness.

[austennerdita2533]

Tagged by these two darlings: @ejunkiet and @lclrgsl

1. how tall are you? 5′6′’ or 170 cm

2. what color and style is your hair? Blonde and naturally curly. It’s full and thick--think Irish/Scottish. Though I can blow it out and wear it straight/soft as well.

3. what color are your eyes? Blue

4. do you wear glasses? Nope! Good eyesight is one of my only shreds of good health, and dammit, I will cling to it until the day the devil tries to take it from me. 😈

5. do you wear braces? I had braces as a kid. 2.5 years. I had expanders before that, so it’s safe to say I spent most of my youth at the orthodontist. I can’t complain, though. I have good teeth now and I love to smile. :-D

6. what is your fashion style? A hat for all seasons, bold lipstick (usually red, pink, rose, or orange), jeans, ankle boots, sweaters

7. full name? This sounds like a perfect way for murderers to find me. No thanks.

8. when were you born? USA

9. where are you from and where do you live now? USA and Pennsylvania

10. what school do you go to? I went to school in my home state

11. what kind of student are you? Curious. Studious. Competitive (with myself above all). I’ve been called an overachiever before but I hate that term. I prefer to think of it as me always wanting to do the best I could and wanting to know as much as possible.

12. do you like school? Love it! Academia always has and always will stimulate me.

13. what are your favorite school subjects? Tbh, I liked pretty much all of them for different reasons. There’s something so fabulous about acquiring new or unfamiliar knowledge. I’ve always been more verbal/analytical so I excelled in languages, history, and the social sciences but I did well in math and science as well. I find the latter no less interesting than the former.

14. favorite TV shows? I have too many! Gilmore Girls, Game of Thrones, The Good Doctor, This Is Us, The Resident, Grey’s Anatomy, Friends, Bones, Dawson’s Creek, The Mindy Project, Downton Abbey, Doctor Who, Sex and the City...etc.

15. favorite movies? Lots. I am unashamed to say that most of them are probably romcoms. You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, While You Were Sleeping, Sweet Home Alabama, Pride and Prejudice to name a few. If I’m sick, need a pick-me-up, or they’re simply on I watch them. 

I also love period dramas and  a bunch of old movies. Namely Sabrina, Gone with the Wind, the Philadelphia Story, Casablanca etc. 

I’m also obsessed with the Iron Man trilogy/Marvel and Star Wars.

16. favorite books? This question is difficult for someone who reads as much as I do, and also for someone who has favorites in like 20 different genres. That said, I’m a huge Austen fan (hence the URL), I love classics (which includes plays, short stories, and poetry), I will read anything from fiction to fantasy to history to memoir to science, and nobody can stop me from flailing over new or long dead authors. 

17. favorite pastime? Reading, maybe? Finding the right words to express what I’m imagining?

18. do you have any regrets? I have a few, yes. I think we all do. I wish I would’ve handled some things differently but I take my mistakes in stride and do my best to learn from them. To grow. That sting when I look back will probably always be there but I’m kind of okay with that.

19. dream job? Book editor. It’d be such an awesome way to blend my love of reading with my love of analyzing writing/words.

20. would you like to get married someday? I wouldn’t be opposed to it if I met a man I cared about deeply. Otherwise, I’m perfectly content on my own. I suppose I’m like Elizabeth Bennet in that regard--

21. would you like to have kids someday? I wouldn’t be opposed to that either, under the right circumstances. I love kids. 

23. do you like shopping? When I’m in the mood for it, sure.

24. what countries have you visited? I’ve only been to the UK but I’ve been a bunch of places in the U.S.

25. what’s the scariest nightmare you’ve ever had? There was one I had as a kid where I was in this slippery, grimy sewer with my mom. A crocodile crawled out of this bricked pit in the floor and swiped my mom with its claw, knocking her, screaming, away from me and into the claws of darkness. I woke up with sweat plastered to my forehead, bawling, because I thought she was dead. It was awful enough that it’s stuck with me all these years.

26. do you have any enemies? I’m sure there are people out there who dislike me. *waves* *shrugs*

27. do you have an s/o?

Do fictional ones count? 😂

28. do you believe in miracles?

I don’t know? The hyper-rational part of me wants to say no, but then there’s this other part of me that’s conscious of how many other things about this life and world we can’t explain, don’t understand. So who’s to say one way or another? 

I plead the fifth.

Tagging: @roryssgilmore, @wings-of-an-angel, @supremeuppityone, @itsnotacrimetoloveyou only if you’d like, of course. :)

[recentanimenews]

Memoirs Most Charming, Part 1

I’ve read a handful of charming memoirs lately, and more are on the way!

I’m a Lucky Guy by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. This was a reader suggestion from Anne!

Here, Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. (writing without sister Ernestine, his sometime collaborator) recounts various happenings and misadventures from his early adulthood, beginning in 1929 when he’s headed off to college and ending somewhere around 1946, when he has returned from serving in the Navy and resumed his career as a newspaperman. These include things like going out for football whilst scrawny, being mistaken for a gun-toting gangster whilst attempting to hide booze (prohibition was still on) from the cops, pranking an odious professor (and, later, an odious superior officer), and repeatedly failing to live up to the standards of a demanding admiral to whom he has been assigned as aide.

On the whole, I found all of these stories entertaining, though the sole moment that made me laugh out loud was when Frank’s soon-to-be wife and mother-in-law completely excused the lascivious behavior of his friend, which a moment before had scandalized them, upon learning he was Methodist (their preferred denomination).

“You don’t think he’s a Ten Commandment breaker?” I asked. “Why, I’d trust him any place,” Liz said indignantly. “So would I,” said her mother. “I’ve always said that people shouldn’t be judged by circumstantial evidence.” “You’re so right,” I assured her. “Probably,” she continued, fishing around for a likely excuse, “probably—well, probably the doctor sent that girl over to your apartment to change the boy’s bandage, again, before he went to bed.” I was tempted to break into a high-pitched giggle, but I looked at Liz and caught a warning. “That’s probably just the way it happened,” I nodded gravely.

Unfortunately, it does seem Frank shares a little of the antipathy toward overweight people that his sister possesses. I don’t mind when he accurately describes a person’s physical characteristics—if a bosom is ample and an abdomen abundant, there’s really no getting around that—but when he makes comments about fellow student Sallye—whom he later proclaims to be “a real friend”—like no “male student in his right mind” would give her their fraternity pen, it’s just unnecessarily mean. True, Sallye has a tendency to be loud and overbearing, and I’m fairly sure that’s part of what he meant, but not the whole of it.

That criticism aside, I did enjoy this book and I’m glad I read it. Thanks, Anne!

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography by Eric Idle Initially, although it was an enjoyable read, I wouldn’t have classified this “sortabiography” from the Monty Python co-founder as charming. Idle recounts his childhood, school days, introduction to the world of comedy, the formation of Monty Python, the run of the original series, and the Python movies without a tremendous amount of detail. He does elaborate more about his independent endeavors, and I especially appreciated learning more about the creation of The Rutles. Using the song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” as a sort of framework, Idle chronicles the various circumstances after The Life of Brian where he was called upon to sing it, ranging from Graham Chapman’s funeral to the Royal Variety Performance to the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics.

As is common for a book of this type, there is a lot of name-dropping, but in this case a lot of the names were people I genuinely like, like Harry Nilsson, George Harrison, David Bowie, Stephen Fry, Peter Cook, Robin Williams, and Eddie Izzard. And, too, Idle toots his own horn rather frequently, which is admittedly justified when you’ve accomplished as much as he has, and makes sure readers know there were times in his life when he was having loads of sex.

Where he really shines, though, is penning touching tributes to friends who are no longer with us. My husband and I listened to Idle read the unabridged audiobook version together, and by the end of the chapter entitled “George,” we were both in tears. The chapter about Robin Williams is no less lovely. I cannot stress enough how wonderful these two chapters are; they alone are worth the price of admission. It does make one wonder why he doesn’t delve so deeply into the character of his comedy partners, and only makes a few mentions of Terry Jones’ dementia, but perhaps it is because they were all still living in 2018, when the book was published. I shall have to find out whether Idle penned any tributes to Jones on the sad occasion of his passing last year.

Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson I’d heard such good things about these books, but my reaction to Life Among the Savages wasn’t what I expected. True, some of the “lightly fictionalized” anecdotes Jackson relates are somewhat amusing, like the family’s struggle to find a house to rent in Vermont, or insisting to the hospital intake person that her occupation is “writer” as opposed to “housewife,” or her son’s fascination with all the gory details after he gets hit by a car. But the vast majority of the stories involve her children behaving badly, and I had very little patience with these at all.

I imagine that other mothers sympathize with these episodes. Perhaps they see their own experience reflected, and so they laugh but also feel all warm inside, in a loving, maternal way. Not so me, I’m afraid. No, whenever the son showed arrogant condescension toward his mother, or her daughter became intolerably fixated on proper decorum, or one kid or the other was insolent and disrespectful, it just made me angry. In fact, I might have said “Shut the fuck up!” aloud a time or two. This is why it is probably a very good thing that I am not a parent.

Thankfully, Raising Demons contains less of that sort of thing (though significantly more than none). I really loved the section in which Jackson waxes nostalgic about her adolescent obsession with making clothespin dolls and her snarky description of life as a faculty wife (who is expected to have “hemming dishtowels” among her hobbies). The story of how she got a new refrigerator was a highlight, as well.

You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism by Amber Ruffin & Lacey Lamar Having seen and adored whimsical clips from The Amber Ruffin Show, I was very excited to see that Amber Ruffin and her older sister Lacey Lamar had written a book together. Although the topic is racist incidents the sisters have endured (mostly Lacey, who lives and works in Omaha), the approach at least attempts to be light-hearted. These aren’t stories where someone gets hurt or dies; instead, they elucidate the kind of crap Black people are just expected to swallow or forget.

I did laugh a few times, particularly at Ruffin’s effervescent line delivery—I listened to the unabridged audiobook read by the authors—but after a while, the unrelenting wave of absolutely flagrant ignorance and hate becomes overwhelming. The commentary on the stories is funny, but the situations themselves are stressful and horrible and eye-opening in the most abject, despair-inducing kind of way. I have never been one to deny that racism exists, but I admit to being surprised and horrified by a lot of these stories, espcially the awful things done to kids. A beautiful drawing torn to shreds, a group of teens accused of stealing car keys when none of them is old enough to drive, kids threatened at gunpoint by a crazy neighbor but nobody calls the cops because who will the cops believe… I also feel terribly naive for being surprised.

I’m glad I read this.

Our Hearts Were Young and Gay and Nuts in May by Cornelia Otis Skinner Note: The former was co-written with Emily Kimbrough.

Our Hearts Were Young and Gay recounts the three months in the early 1920s that two young American women spend abroad in Europe, written when they are older (“Emily and I have now reached the time in life when not only do we lie about our ages, we forget what we’ve said they are.”) and nostalgic for more innocent days. It’s written in Cornelia’s voice, though Emily provides many of the details, and tells of the time their ship ran aground, the time Cornelia caught the measles and evaded quarantine, the time they met H. G. Wells and Emily made an embarrassing first impression, the time they mistook a brothel for a boarding house, the time bedbugs gave Cornelia a swollen lip “shining like a polished tomato,” the time their dogs piddled in a swanky Parisian restaurant, etc. For the most part, it’s quite amusing, but there are a few comments that expose the girls’ ignorant attitudes regarding people of other races and sexual preferences.

Rather than focusing on one particular adventure, Nuts in May is a collection of humorous yet unrelated anecdotes Skinner wrote for publications like The New Yorker. Topics include but are not limited to: actors being asked to lend their talents in aid of charitable organizations, a Protestant family’s audience with the Pope, people who laugh at anything, dizzying real estate transactions, and being interviewed by Dr. Kinsey. Occasionally, the tone turns more domestic and reminds me some of Shirley Jackson, such as in “Bag of Bones,” when Skinner’s son insists that the bones they find on a Colorado trail belong to a dinosaur, or “Those Friends of His,” about her son’s reticence on the origins of his friends who come to visit. The latter also makes reference to a car “teeming with hamsters,” which is a phrase and a visual that I adore. Indeed, there were quite a few giggles to be had, and I reckon I might seek out more of Skinner’s work in the future.

By: Michelle Smith

[heylabodega]

Books Read, Age 26

Previously: 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18 (holy shit)

Enigma Variations–Aciman I talked to Robbie about this one a bunch bc he’s always looking for good novels about gay people by gay people and I thought this might be that but this is…not that. It had promise and the first section is really kind of lovely but it veers off and just…I don’t know, mileage will vary, but it didn’t feel True to me. idk idk either like he misunderstands love and sexuality or I do and it honestly could more than likely be me.

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy–Adams One of those books I had just always kinda pretended I read. I mean not that people like frequently check to make sure I’ve read AHGttG but just like in my mind whenever it was mentioned I checked it off. You know the dealio you don’t need my thoughts on it (as opposed to most things, on which you definitely do).

All Grown Up–Attenberg My favorite of the Attenberg novels I’ve read. Of particular use and relevance to me, an aging single woman and unlikeable protagonist. I enjoyed this very much, it was sharp and warm and mean and tender.

Queen of the Night–Chee Hmm. Ok. I felt for most of this book that it like…thought it was a different, more important book than it actually was? It is overwritten–both in prose style and in that it could have been at least 100 pages shorter–and you know how sometimes you read a book with a female protagonist and you’re like ‘I can’t believe a man wrote this!’? Yeah this isn’t that. But the ending line is really good? idk. Someone else read it and tell me your thoughts.

Too Much and Not the Mood–Chew-Bose First of all, excellent title. These essays reminded me, and I mean in this in the lease self-important way possible, of my own writing. Just in that way where writing doesn’t have to be traditionally literarily linear. These essays are good and filled with the kind of sentences that make you know the writer loves words, you can feel her placing them carefully with the satisfying click of scrabble tiles, sliding them into the right order.

Who Killed Roger Ackroyd–Christie Typical Agatha novel and very good. I can’t tell you any more without spoiling it.

Murder in Retrospect–Christie This is one of my fave Christie’s. It was dark and smart and pithy.

Rule Britannia–Du Maurier I found this in a used bookstore in Portland, Maine, just after the Brexit vote. She wrote it in like the 70s and it’s speculative fiction based on if the UK left the EU and formed a union with the United States. It’s kind of really good but it also ends kind of abruptly, like maybe it could have been the first of a trilogy or something.

Plum Bun–Fauset This was my favorite book from my Harlem Renaissance class. I wrote my term paper on it. I love this book. I want to write it as a screenplay and someone to make it into a movie and I want Troian Bellesario to play the lead.

A Coney Island of the Mind–Ferlinghetti A book of (I think?) beat poetry that I found in a used bookstore in Saugherties at Thanksgiving. I love these poems, especially one called “The World is a Beautiful Place” which I read out loud to Robbie one night while we were walking between bars in the snow at like midnight.

Wishful Drinking–Fisher Carrie Fisher is one of those people whose very existence makes me feel braver and weirder and funnier. She’s a truly good soul and I don’t have anything else to say except that you should read this and also that you should Postcards From the Edge first it’s better.

Difficult Women–Gay I prefer Roxane Gay’s fiction to her nonfiction and these are very good, very interesting stories full of sadness and love.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley) I have never had so many people approach me while reading a book in public as this one. It is, unsurprisingly, an extremely compelling and upsetting book. But I was very surprised by it. I’m not sure quite what I expected from it, but it wasn’t what it was. I think about this book at least twice a week. I think everyone should read it and I think they’ll all enjoy it.

How To Be  A Person In the World–Havrilesky I think maybe Ask Polly columns are better in smaller doses than a whole book, but nevertheless, for better or for worse, she shaped a great deal of my early-twenties self esteem and the essays translate to the page much better than a lot of internet writing I’ve read. 

Girl on the Train–Hawkins This felt…cheap somehow. Like I got really into it and then felt like I’d been cheated or fooled because it’s truly not very good.

Bright Lines–Islam This is a fascinating book. It’s the most Brooklyn summery, felt the most like my Brooklyn summers despite describing a Bengali Muslim family and smoking weed and other experiences that are not specifically mine. I’d recommend it. Highly.

Intimations–Kleeman Man, I’ve recommended this book of short stories to so many people. It’s weird and interesting and it does something I think is hard, which is write surreal stories where the stakes still feel real, if that makes sense. She came and spoke to our class and she told an interesting question to ask of short stories which was, “what are the satisfactions of this story?” and all of these are satisfying and visceral. There’s one long one in the middle that I skipped and you can too, I give you permission.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet–L'Engle Hey, um, you know what’s p upsetting to read? A plot where a crazy dictator is gonna drop a nuclear bomb and start the end of the world (this isn’t a spoiler it’s introduced like five pages in). 

A Wind in the Door–L'Engle This was not as good as A Wrinkle in Time–what is–but it was a bright easy read, her books are so–loving, I guess. Good if you need a little palate cleanser.

Passing–Larsen We read a LOT of books in my Harlem Renaissance course. This a very good, short novel about, well, guess. It’s like a painting somehow, like a 20th century painting.

Sister Outsider–Lorde  I have taken none women’s studies courses so this was a pretty important text I had never read. It is very Good and everyone should read it if they have not already.

Cruel Shoes–Martin I LOVE Steve Martin and still on a few of these I was like “I don’t know, Steve.” But many others (they’re very short stories) are funny or clever or great.

Bright Lights, Big City–McInerney ughhhhhhh a book that is entirely written in second person and is about how womens’ existences and deaths have like ~made a man feel~ but it’s a short quick read and–I am E X T R E M E L Y reluctant to admit–the end is a really good image that did lowkey make me cry but also fuck this book

The Hopeful–O'Neill This I didn’t like much, in a way that I thought it needed a stronger editor and I want Eleanor or Robbie or someone I trust to read it to tell me if I’m wrong.

The Bed Moved–Schiff Weird and good little stories. I don’t think about them often, but they were elegant and sharp as I read them.

Eligible–Sittenfield It’s nice that they’re publishing Modern AU Pride and Prejudice fanfic now in a bound book. This was enjoyable tho tbh not the best Modern AU Pride and Prejudice fanfic I, a cool and chill person, have read in my life.

Swing Time–Smith I think this is my fave of the Zadie Smith books I’ve read. I wasn’t sure by the end quite what the point of it was, but I guess also what’s the point of anything? idk this is a useless description of a book. It was immersive and interesting but I’ve also not told anyone “you *have* to read this you’ll love it.” We did go see her read from it and in person she is enchanting.

The New Woman–Sochen Nonfiction about what I think we’d call first-wave feminism? It was really fascinating about an era I knew nothing about but also had some, um, glaring omissions ahem any mention of race whatsoever.

Action. A Book About Sex–Spiegel Ok look yes fine I am an adult sexually active woman who still reads books about sex whatEVER. I missed sex-ed and I also like to hear, in a non-prurient (or sometimes prurient w/e) way what other people are up to, sex-wise. I mean there’s no real like advice about sex in the world, I think, except that everything consensual and fun is fine, but I think it’s important to occasionally remind yourself of that. This was a good book.

Missing, Presumed–Steiner A crime book that I neither loved nor hated and generally enjoyed reading. Big enh.

The Girls From Corona Del Mar–Thorpe Robbie gave this to me for my birthday last year. A beach read with an edge, page-turner-y but sharp. Seems like it’s going to be a light read, but there’s a bite to it, a reminder of the cruel randomness of fate and of our inability to really know other people or ourselves. I loved this.

Cane–Toomer So this is an important text from the Harlem Renaissance and it’s kinda…never classified? It’s a series of related but not continuous short stories, as well as poetry, and little like plays? idk it’s very evocative and beautiful and dense and bears up to intense overreading. One of my favorite books I read for my Harlem Ren class.

The Blacker the Berry–Thurman Ok so Wallace Thurman apparently worried his whole life that his writing style was too journalistic and he maybe wasn’t…wrong. This is NOT a bad book and it’s well written and novelistic exCEPT when sometimes it feels pedagogical or expository. It’s a short, well constructed novel about colorism and worth checking out.

Killer–Walters Lovely and weird poems. I went to go follow the author on Twitter and discovered I already was. I love these.

The Underground Railroad–Whitehead An extremely. upsetting. book. Here’s the thing and I understand the presumption of my criticism of a book that won the national book award, but: if you’re going to make your conceit that the Underground Railroad is a real railroad, I think that you should do more with it. THAT SAID the rest of this is truly wonderful, somehow at once a page turner and viscerally upsetting.

Kiss Me Like a Stranger–Wilder I love Gene Wilder. I’d read Gilda Radnor’s memoir a couple years ago so part of this was sort of an interesting other side of the story. Anyways he seems like a genuinely strange, slightly neurotic, flawed but mostly warm and kind person.

[mastcomm]

How an Author and His Husband Host Casual Dinners in Their New York Apartment

It’s tempting to call the author Richie Jackson’s new book, “Gay Like Me,” a memoir or an epistolary — but it’s really a manifesto, a 156-page letter from a gay 54-year-old father to his gay 19-year-old son, Jackson Wong, about what it meant to be gay when the writer was young in New York and what it means to be gay now. In that way, the work is a magnanimous gesture of generational transference: a cheat sheet on queer history; a lecture about safe sex; a call to get angry, harness one’s otherness and ultimately claim individuality. But it’s also one man’s personal history, a timeline of decades spent pursuing fatherhood as well his (nonbiological) L.G.B.T.Q. family at large.

That the author’s eldest son is gay was both unexpected (as such news usually is), and a catalyst for Jackson, who spent his career as a television, film and theatrical producer, to finally commit to paper his thoughts and wisdom: “When I rejoiced that you were gay, I was really wishing for the good parts — the community, the camaraderie, the creativity. The incredible beings who populate our community, who against all odds are themselves,” he writes. “But you can’t be gay with just the good parts: Your life daily will be touched by all the difficult parts, too. The fight, the struggle, the challenges, will make it even more valuable, even more worthy.”

Ultimately, Jackson says, he wanted to write the book that he felt he needed when he was growing up, back when he looked to late-20th-century memoirists, essayists and fiction writers to “learn how to be gay.” So to celebrate the book’s launch, and his own entrance into this lineage of queer authorship, Jackson and his husband, the theater producer Jordan Roth, recently hosted a dinner party at their West Village apartment, gathering some of their favorite contemporary L.G.B.T.Q. writers for conversation over a relaxed meal. It was a broad, varied group, a room full of thinkers who’d followed each other’s work but rarely met in person, from the eminent author Edmund White to the playwright Matthew Lopez to the memoirist and screenwriter Thomas Page McBee. Some guests, like Camille Perri and Raquel Willis, had started their careers in journalism and were now branching out, while others, like Lane Moore and Michael Arceneaux, had published books of essays that were as personal as Jackson’s, whose editor, Jonathan Burnham (the president and publisher of the Harper division of HarperCollins), was in attendance with his husband, Scott Rothkopf, the chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Both Jackson and Roth, who is increasingly a fixture on the international fashion circuit, often host guests in their home — they have a system in place, down to the catering and stemware and elegant corner dining table. But the added joy of this night came from shining a brighter light on Jackson and his literary accomplishments: “Now that my book is out, I’m learning how to walk in the world in a completely new way,” Jackson says. “Sometimes I feel reborn.” As the dozen guests milled about, discussing the imperiled state of L.G.B.T.Q.-focused media or regaling White with tales of contemporary gay sex (the children were not in attendance), it became clear that the evening was also a kind of salon, a throwback to an era when gay people gathered exclusively among one another to celebrate and get mad and express their true selves. “When I first got to New York in 1983, you would find yourself in spaces where you were around only gay people,” Jackson says. With assimilation and progress, of course, those sorts of safe spaces have become less customary or necessary. And yet to create your own majority, in a beautiful home over a delicious meal, no less, remains an empowering and vital act of generosity. “It’s obvious,” Jackson adds. “You have to get your gay stories from gay writers.” Here’s how the night came together.

Extend the Cocktail Hour

Roth and Jackson like to invite a group of people over “just because it’s Thursday night — or who don’t know each other, or who have no reason to find each other at the same table,” Jackson says, which necessitates building in extra time at the beginning of the party to welcome everyone, extend introductions and allow people to get comfortable with each other in their corner living room, where through the wide windows you can see the city’s lights glinting off the Hudson River. On this particular occasion, guests spent much of the evening configuring themselves in small groups, weaving between each other: White and Lopez discussed the legacy of AIDS, Roth and Willis complimented each other’s looks, Perri and McBee compared notes about Hollywood. Inviting everyone to socialize before sitting around the table meant that the dinner itself felt like a continuation, rather than the inception, of a sprawling conversation.

Go Family-Style, but on the Side

The table was arrayed, simply, with Calvin Klein glassware and plates and flatware from the Italian company Match. However, Jackson and Roth prefer to present their meals, which are prepared by their own culinary team, nonchalantly in a banquet-like spread on the nearby sidebar. This approach to family-style dining limits clutter and prevents the food from being the sole focus of a meal, letting human interaction take center stage. It also allowed guests to follow their own dietary restrictions and preferences with minimal fuss, as everyone created their own colorful plates of, say, citrus-glazed salmon — “I would date this salmon,” Willis joked — or Spanish-spiced chicken, farro with porcini mushrooms, shawarma-roasted purple cauliflower and mixed greens crowned with edible flowers. “We always do buffet because we feel it’s more casual,” Jackson says. “We want it to feel not so stodgy.”

Outsource Dessert

Though a pastry chef baked a few treats to celebrate the release of Jackson’s book — including a seven-layer cake with fresh raspberries, plus a chocolate-and-orange layer cake and white chocolate torte that were both vegan and gluten-free — the couple typically ends such parties with a bounty of their favorite baked goods from a rotating roster of iconic New York bakeries and chocolatiers. For this one, they brought in chewy chocolate chip and dark-chocolate “explosion” cookies from Mah Ze Dahr bakery in the West Village, plus double-chocolate gluten-free pecan cookies from the famed Dominique Ansel, whose shop is also nearby. Guests couldn’t stop passing around the cakes and cookie plates — proof that, sometimes, it’s better to leave a few key details in the hands of pros.

Decorate With Proportions in Mind

“Our entire dining room, which Jordan created, is designed to encourage intimate conversations,” Jackson says. The custom table in polished concrete is longer and narrower than is typical so that people can form intimate groups and actually hear each other — its dimensions and gray color evoke a New York City sidewalk. The chairs are vintage Steiner, but reupholstered in a sumptuous-but-comfortable Castel “teddy bear” fabric. Flowers are nonnegotiable, of course, but this night’s arrangements — peony and orchid varieties in red and pink (the hues of which matched Roth’s sweater), clustered in small bunches in amber apothecary bottles by the florist Frank Fiore — were a reminder that a single, low line of blooms adds visual interest without being a distraction.

Switch Up the Seating

For dinner, guests were assigned places via simple name cards; the hosts separated themselves and made interesting calculations about who should sit next to whom. Though Jackson and Roth were at opposing ends, their final party trick was to swap seats halfway through the meal, which provided an unexpected jolt of energy to conversation that was, perhaps, lagging a bit between bites of food. It’s a dead-simple, foolproof idea to steal: “Did you notice, after the dinner, nobody got up from the table?” Jackson recalls. “Everybody stuck around and kept talking — perhaps because it was so fun to watch Edmund White hold court.”

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[samanthasroberts]

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

Last March, my 71-year-old grandmother, Betty, waited in line for three hours to caucus for Bernie Sanders. The wait to be able to cast her first-ever vote in a primary election was punishing, but nothing could have deterred her. Betty a white woman who left school after ninth grade, had her first child at age 16 and spent much of her life in severe poverty wanted to vote.

So she waited with busted knees that once stood on factory lines. She waited with smoking-induced emphysema and the false teeth shes had since her late 20s both markers of our class. She waited with a womb that in the 1960s, before Roe v Wade, she paid a stranger to thrust a wire hanger inside after she discovered she was pregnant by a man shed fled after he broke her jaw.

Betty worked for many years as a probation officer for the state judicial system in Wichita, Kansas, keeping tabs on men who had murdered and raped. As a result, its hard to faze her, but she has pronounced Republican candidate Donald Trump a sociopath whose mouth overloads his ass.

No one loathes Trump who suggested women should be punished for having abortions, who said hateful things about groups of people she has loved and worked alongside since childhood, whose pomp and indecency offends her modest, midwestern sensibility more than she.

Yet, it is white working-class people like Betty who have become a particular fixation among the chattering class during this election: what is this angry beast, and why does it support Trump?

Not so poor: Trump voters are middle class

Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didnt have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall werent clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. Surprisingly, a Gallup researcher wrote, there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism not income, education, gender, age or race predicted Trump support.

These facts havent stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working classs giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trumps appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if were examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

The faces journalists do train the cameras on hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities I know well. That the media industry ignored my home for so long left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.

Part of the current glimpse is JD Vance, author of the bestselling new memoir Hillbilly Elegy. A successful attorney who had a precariously middle-class upbringing in an Ohio steel town, Vance wrote of the chaos that can haunt a family with generational memory of deep poverty. A conservative who says he wont vote for Trump, Vance speculates about why working-class whites will: cultural anxiety that arises when opioid overdose kills your friends and the political establishment has proven it will throw you under the bus. While his theories may hold up in some corners, in interviews coastal media members have repeatedly asked Vance to speak for the entire white working class.

His interviewers and reviewers often seem relieved to find someone with ownership on the topic whose ideas in large part confirm their own. The New York Times election podcast The Run-Up said Vances memoir doubles as a cultural anthropology of the white underclass that has flocked to the Republican presidential nominees candidacy. (The Times teased its review of the book with the tweet: Want to know more about the people who fueled the rise of Donald Trump?)

While Vance happens to have roots in Kentucky mining country, most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia. That sometimes seems the only concept of them that the American consciousness can contain: tucked away in a remote mountain shanty like a coal-dust-covered ghost, as though white poverty isnt always right in front of us, swiping our credit cards at a Target in Denver or asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk.

One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. The last time I saw my native class receive substantial focus, before now, was over 20 years ago not in the news but on the television show Roseanne, the fictional storylines of which remain more accurate than the musings of comfortable commentators in New York studios.

Countless images of working-class progressives, including women such as Betty, are thus rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll.

This media paradigm created the tale of a divided America red v blue in which the 42% of Kansans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are meaningless.

This year, more Kansans caucused for Bernie Sanders than for Donald Trump a newsworthy point I never saw noted in national press, who perhaps couldnt fathom that flyover country might contain millions of Americans more progressive than their Clinton strongholds.

In lieu of such coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.

Poor whiteness and poor character

The two-fold myth about the white working class that they are to blame for Trumps rise, and that those among them who support him for the worst reasons exemplify the rest takes flight on the wings of moral superiority affluent Americans often pin upon themselves.

I have never seen them flap so insistently as in todays election commentary, where notions of poor whiteness and poor character are routinely conflated.

In an election piece last March in the National Review, writer Kevin Williamsons assessment of poor white voters among whom mortality rates have sharply risen in recent decades expressed what many conservatives and liberals alike may well believe when he observed that communities ravaged by oxycodone use deserve to die.

The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles, Williamson wrote. Donald Trumps speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

For confirmation that this point is lost on most reporters, not just conservative provocateurs, look no further than a recent Washington Post series that explored spiking death rates among rural white women by fixating on their smoking habits and graphically detailing the haggard face and embalming processes of their corpses. Imagine wealthy white woman examined thusly after their deaths. The outrage among family and friends with the education, time, and agency to write letters to the editor would have been deafening.

A sentiment that I care for even less than contempt or degradation is their tender cousin: pity.

In a recent op-ed headlined Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class, David Brooks told of a laid-off Kentucky metal worker he met. On his last day, the man left to rows of cheering coworkers a moment I read as triumphant, but that Brooks declared pitiable. How hard the man worked for so little, how great his skills and how dwindling their value, Brooks pointed out, for people he said radiate the residual sadness of the lonely heart.

Im hard-pressed to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We dont need their analysis, and we sure dont need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.

One such journalist, Alexander Zaitchik, spent several months on the road in six states getting to know white working-class people who do support Trump. His goal for the resulting new book, The Gilded Rage, was to convey the human complexity that daily news misses. Zaitchik wrote that his mission arose from frustration with hot takes written by people living several time zones and income brackets away from their subjects.

Zaitchik wisely described those he met as a blue-collar middle class mostly white people who have worked hard and lost a lot, whether in the market crash of 2008 or the manufacturing layoffs of recent decades. He found that their motivations overwhelmingly started with economics and ended with economics. The anger he observed was pointed up, not down at those who forgot them when global trade deals were negotiated, not at minority groups.

Meanwhile, the racism and nationalism that surely exist among them also exist among Democrats and higher socioeconomic strata. A poll conducted last spring by Reuters found that a third of questioned Democrats supported a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. In another, by YouGov, 45% of polled Democrats reported holding an unfavorable view of Islam, with almost no fluctuation based on household income. Those who wont vote for Trump are not necessarily paragons of virtue, while the rest are easily scapegoated as the countrys moral scourge.

When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a basket of deplorables, Zaitchik told another reporter, the language could be read as another way of saying white-trash bin. Clinton quickly apologized for the comment, the context of which contained compassion for many Trump voters. But making such generalizations at a $6m fundraiser in downtown New York City, at which some attendees paid $50,000 for a seat, recalled for me scenes from the television political satire Veep in which powerful Washington figures discuss normals with distaste behind closed doors.

The DeBruce Grain elevator. Federal safety inspectors had not visited it for 16 years when an explosion ripped through the half-mile long structure, killing seven workers. Photograph: Cliff Schiappa/AP

When we talked, Zaitchik mentioned HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, who he pointed out basically makes eugenics-level arguments about anyone who votes for Donald Trump having congenital defects. You would never get away with talking that way about any other group of people and still have a TV show.

Maher is, perhaps, the pinnacle of classist smugness. In the summer of 1998, when I was 17 and just out of high school, I worked at a grain elevator during the wheat harvest. An elevator 50 miles east in Haysville, Kansas, exploded (grain dust is highly combustible), killing seven workers. The accident rattled my community and reminded us about the physical dangers my family and I often faced as farmers.

I kept going to work like everyone else and, after a long day weighing wheat trucks and hauling heavy sacks of feed in and out of the mill, liked to watch Politically Incorrect, the ABC show Maher hosted then. With the search for one of the killed workers bodies still under way, Maher joked, as I recall, that the people should check their loaves of Wonder Bread.

That moment was perhaps my first reckoning with the hard truth that, throughout my life, I would politically identify with the same people who often insult the place I am from.

Such derision is so pervasive that its often imperceptible to the economically privileged. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books, and magazines with best intentions sometimes offend with obliviousness.

Many people recommended to me the bestselling new history book White Trash, for instance, without registering that its title is a slur that refers to me and the people I love as garbage. My happy relief that someone set out to tell this ignored thread of our shared past was squashed by my wincing every time I saw it on my shelf, so much so that I finally took the book jacket off. Incredibly, promotional copy for the book commits precisely the elitist shaming Isenberg is out to expose: (the book) takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing if occasionally entertaining poor white trash.

The book itself is more sensitively wrought and imparts facts that one hopes would dismantle popular use of its titular term. But even Isenberg cant escape our classist frameworks.

When On the Media host Brooke Gladstone asked Isenberg, earlier this year, to address long-held perceptions of poor whites as bigots, the author described a conundrum:They do subscribe to certain views that are undoubtedly racist, and you cant mask it and pretend that its not there. It is very much a part of their thinking.

Entertain a parallel broad statement about any other disenfranchised group, and you might begin to see how rudimentary class discussion is for this relatively young country that long believed itself to be free of castes. Isenberg has sniffed out the hypocrisy in play, though.

The other problem is when people want to blame poor whites for being the only racist in the room, she told Gladstone. as if theyre more racist than everyone else.

That problem is rooted in the notion that higher class means higher integrity. As journalist Lorraine Berry wrote last month, The story remains that only the ignorant would be racist. Racism disappears with education were told. As the first from my family to hold degrees, I assure you that none of us had to go to college to learn basic human decency.

Berry points out that Ivy-League-minted Republicans shepherded the rise of the alt-right. Indeed, it was not poor whites not even white Republicans who passed legislation bent on preserving segregation, or who watched the Confederate flag raised outside state capitols for decades to come.

It wasnt poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the war on drugs.

Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black welfare queen.

These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at the top in different forms and with more terrible power.

Among reporters and commentators this election cycle, then, a steady finger ought be pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who donate to Trumps campaign while being too civilized to attend a political rally and yell what they really believe.

Mainstream media is set up to fail the ordinary American

Based on Trumps campaign rhetoric and available data, it appears that most of his voters this November will be people who are getting by well enough but who think of themselves as victims.

One thing the media misses is that a great portion of the white working class would align with any sense before victimhood. Right now they are clocking in and out of work, sorting their grocery coupons, raising their children to respect others, and avoiding political news coverage.

Barack Obama, a black man formed by the black experience, often cites his maternal lineage in the white working class. A lot of whats shaped me came from my grandparents who grew up on the prairie in Kansas, he wrote this month to mark a White House forum on rural issues.

Last year, talking with author Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books, Obama lamented common misconceptions of small-town middle America, for which he has a sort of reverence. Theres this huge gap between how folks go about their daily lives and how we talk about our common life and our political life, he said, naming one cause as the filters that stand between ordinary people who are busy getting by and complicated policy debates.

Im very encouraged when I meet people in their environments, Obama told Robinson. Somehow it gets distilled at the national political level in ways that arent always as encouraging.

To be sure, one discouraging distillation the caricature of the hate-spewing white male Trump voter with grease on his jeans is a real person of sorts. There were one or two in my town: the good ol boy who menaces those with less power than himself running people of color out of town with the threat of violence, denigrating women, shooting BB guns at stray cats for fun. They are who Trump would be if hed been born where I was.

Media fascination with the hateful white Trump voter fuels the theory, now in fashion, that bigotry is the only explanation for supporting him. Certainly, financial struggle does not predict a soft spot for Trump, as cash-strapped people of color who face the threat of his racism and xenophobia, and who resoundingly reject him, by all available measures can attest. However, one imagines that elite white liberals who maintain an air of ethical grandness this election season would have a harder time thinking globally about trade and immigration if it were their factory job that was lost and their community that was decimated.

Affluent analysts who oppose Trump, though, have a way of taking a systemic view when examining social woes but viewing their place on the political continuum as a triumph of individual character. Most of them presumably inherited their political bent, just like most of those in red America did. If you were handed liberalism, give yourself no pats on the back for your vote against Trump.

Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are voting against their own best interests, undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isnt mentally fit to cast a ballot.

Whoever remains on Trumps side as stories concerning his treatment of women, racism and other dangers continue to unfurl gets no pass from me for any reason. They are capable of voting, and they own their decisions. Lets be aware of our class biases, though, as we discern who they are.

Journalist? Then the chances are youre not blue collar

A recent print-edition New York Times cutline described a Kentucky man:

Mitch Hedges, who farms cattle and welds coal-mining equipment. He expects to lose his job in six months, but does not support Mr Trump, who he says is an idiot.

This made me cheer for the rare spotlight on a member of the white working class who doesnt support Trump. It also made me laugh one cant farm cattle. One farms crops, and one raises livestock. Its sometimes hard for a journalist who has done both to take the New York Times seriously.

The main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks. Few people born to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books. So few, in fact, that this former laborer has found cause to shift her entire writing career to talk specifically about class in a wealth-privileged industry, much as journalists of color find themselves talking about race in a whiteness-privileged one.

This isnt to say that one must reside among a given group or place to do it justice, of course, as good muckrakers and commentators have shown for the past century and beyond. See On the Medias fine new series on poverty, the second episode of which includes Gladstones reflection that the poor are no more monolithic than the rest of us.

I know journalists to be hard-working people who want to get the story right, and Im resistant to rote condemnations of the media. The classism of cable-news hosts merely reflects the classism of privileged America in general. Its everywhere, from tweets describing Trump voters as inbred hillbillies to a Democratic campaign platform that didnt bother with a specific anti-poverty platform until a month out from the general election.

The economic trench between reporter and reported on has never been more hazardous than at this moment of historic wealth disparity, though, when stories focus more often on the stock market than on people who own no stocks. American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the grievances on Main Streets for decades surely a factor in digging the hole of resentment that Trumps venom now fills. That the term populism has become a pejorative among prominent liberal commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies the plutocracy its supposed to critique has failed its watchdog duty and lost the respect of people who call bullshit when they see it.

One such person was my late grandfather, Arnie. Men like Trump sometimes drove expensive vehicles up the gravel driveway of our Kansas farmhouse looking to do some sort of business. Grandpa would recognize them as liars and thieves, treat them kindly, and send them packing. If you shook their hands, after they left Grandpa would laugh and say, Better count your fingers.

In a world in which the Bettys and Arnies of the world have little voice, those who enjoy a platform from which to speak might examine their hearts and minds before stepping onto the soap box.

If you would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself say, the ones who worked third shift on a Boeing floor while others flew to Mexico during spring break; the ones who mopped a McDonalds bathroom while others argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/dangerous-idiots-how-the-liberal-media-elite-failed-working-class-americans/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/dangerous-idiots-how-the-liberal-media-elite-failed-working-class-americans/

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How an Author and His Husband Host Casual Dinners in Their New York Apartment

It’s tempting to call the author Richie Jackson’s new book, “Gay Like Me,” a memoir or an epistolary — but it’s really a manifesto, a 156-page letter from a gay 54-year-old father to his gay 19-year-old son, Jackson Wong, about what it meant to be gay when the writer was young in New York and what it means to be gay now. In that way, the work is a magnanimous gesture of generational transference: a cheat sheet on queer history; a lecture about safe sex; a call to get angry, harness one’s otherness and ultimately claim individuality. But it’s also one man’s personal history, a timeline of decades spent pursuing fatherhood as well his (nonbiological) L.G.B.T.Q. family at large.

That the author’s eldest son is gay was both unexpected (as such news usually is), and a catalyst for Jackson, who spent his career as a television, film and theatrical producer, to finally commit to paper his thoughts and wisdom: “When I rejoiced that you were gay, I was really wishing for the good parts — the community, the camaraderie, the creativity. The incredible beings who populate our community, who against all odds are themselves,” he writes. “But you can’t be gay with just the good parts: Your life daily will be touched by all the difficult parts, too. The fight, the struggle, the challenges, will make it even more valuable, even more worthy.”

Ultimately, Jackson says, he wanted to write the book that he felt he needed when he was growing up, back when he looked to late-20th-century memoirists, essayists and fiction writers to “learn how to be gay.” So to celebrate the book’s launch, and his own entrance into this lineage of queer authorship, Jackson and his husband, the theater producer Jordan Roth, recently hosted a dinner party at their West Village apartment, gathering some of their favorite contemporary L.G.B.T.Q. writers for conversation over a relaxed meal. It was a broad, varied group, a room full of thinkers who’d followed each other’s work but rarely met in person, from the eminent author Edmund White to the playwright Matthew Lopez to the memoirist and screenwriter Thomas Page McBee. Some guests, like Camille Perri and Raquel Willis, had started their careers in journalism and were now branching out, while others, like Lane Moore and Michael Arceneaux, had published books of essays that were as personal as Jackson’s, whose editor, Jonathan Burnham (the president and publisher of the Harper division of HarperCollins), was in attendance with his boyfriend, Scott Rothkopf, the chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Both Jackson and Roth, who is increasingly a fixture on the international fashion circuit, often host guests in their home — they have a system in place, down to the catering and stemware and elegant corner dining table. But the added joy of this night came from shining a brighter light on Jackson and his literary accomplishments: “Now that my book is out, I’m learning how to walk in the world in a completely new way,” Jackson says. “Sometimes I feel reborn.” As the dozen guests milled about, discussing the imperiled state of L.G.B.T.Q.-focused media or regaling White with tales of contemporary gay sex (the children were not in attendance), it became clear that the evening was also a kind of salon, a throwback to an era when gay people gathered exclusively among one another to celebrate and get mad and express their true selves. “When I first got to New York in 1983, you would find yourself in spaces where you were around only gay people,” Jackson says. With assimilation and progress, of course, those sorts of safe spaces have become less customary or necessary. And yet to create your own majority, in a beautiful home over a delicious meal, no less, remains an empowering and vital act of generosity. “It’s obvious,” Jackson adds. “You have to get your gay stories from gay writers.” Here’s how the night came together.

Extend the Cocktail Hour

Roth and Jackson like to invite a group of people over “just because it’s Thursday night — or who don’t know each other, or who have no reason to find each other at the same table,” Jackson says, which necessitates building in extra time at the beginning of the party to welcome everyone, extend introductions and allow people to get comfortable with each other in their corner living room, where through the wide windows you can see the city’s lights glinting off the Hudson River. On this particular occasion, guests spent much of the evening configuring themselves in small groups, weaving between each other: White and Lopez discussed the legacy of AIDS, Roth and Willis complimented each other’s looks, Perri and McBee compared notes about Hollywood. Inviting everyone to socialize before sitting around the table meant that the dinner itself felt like a continuation, rather than the inception, of a sprawling conversation.

Go Family-Style, but on the Side

The table was arrayed, simply, with Calvin Klein glassware and plates and flatware from the Italian company Match. However, Jackson and Roth prefer to present their meals, which are prepared by their own culinary team, nonchalantly in a banquet-like spread on the nearby sidebar. This approach to family-style dining limits clutter and prevents the food from being the sole focus of a meal, letting human interaction take center stage. It also allowed guests to follow their own dietary restrictions and preferences with minimal fuss, as everyone created their own colorful plates of, say, citrus-glazed salmon — “I would date this salmon,” Willis joked — or Spanish-spiced chicken, farro with porcini mushrooms, shawarma-roasted purple cauliflower and mixed greens crowned with edible flowers. “We always do buffet because we feel it’s more casual,” Jackson says. “We want it to feel not so stodgy.”

Outsource Dessert

Though a pastry chef baked a few treats to celebrate the release of Jackson’s book — including a seven-layer cake with fresh raspberries, plus a chocolate-and-orange layer cake and white chocolate torte that were both vegan and gluten-free — the couple typically ends such parties with a bounty of their favorite baked goods from a rotating roster of iconic New York bakeries and chocolatiers. For this one, they brought in chewy chocolate chip and dark-chocolate “explosion” cookies from Mah Ze Dahr bakery in the West Village, plus double-chocolate gluten-free pecan cookies from the famed Dominique Ansel, whose shop is also nearby. Guests couldn’t stop passing around the cakes and cookie plates — proof that, sometimes, it’s better to leave a few key details in the hands of pros.

Decorate With Proportions in Mind

“Our entire dining room, which Jordan created, is designed to encourage intimate conversations,” Jackson says. The custom table in polished concrete is longer and narrower than is typical so that people can form intimate groups and actually hear each other — its dimensions and gray color evoke a New York City sidewalk. The chairs are vintage Steiner, but reupholstered in a sumptuous-but-comfortable Castel “teddy bear” fabric. Flowers are nonnegotiable, of course, but this night’s arrangements — peony and orchid varieties in red and pink (the hues of which matched Roth’s sweater), clustered in small bunches in amber apothecary bottles by the florist Frank Fiore — were a reminder that a single, low line of blooms adds visual interest without being a distraction.

Switch Up the Seating

For dinner, guests were assigned places via simple name cards; the hosts separated themselves and made interesting calculations about who should sit next to whom. Though Jackson and Roth were at opposing ends, their final party trick was to swap seats halfway through the meal, which provided an unexpected jolt of energy to conversation that was, perhaps, lagging a bit between bites of food. It’s a dead-simple, foolproof idea to steal: “Did you notice, after the dinner, nobody got up from the table?” Jackson recalls. “Everybody stuck around and kept talking — perhaps because it was so fun to watch Edmund White hold court.”

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