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Best Of Jen Sookfong Lee's "Superfan"

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Here is a selection of memorable quotes from  Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke by Heart by Jen Sookfong Lee What is real, and what I know for certain, is that there are spaces in which we move from destination to destination, spaces through which we move with so much velocity that we are impossible to define, spaces that require change, that ask us to access one of the multiple identities we carry at any given moment, that allow us to be as fluid as we want to be. It’s a beautiful fact. And it’s ours. p.134 For the first time, I realized my grandfather and father had both been young men when they came to this country, walking the streets of Vancouver with a straight posture that sometimes read as primness, even as they carried an unwieldy burden of otherness and fear. At nineteen, I walked those same streets with. Slouch, dragging the hems of my oversized pants on the sidewalk. I never worried that I might be stopped on the street by police, that my presence could be construed as illeg
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Best Of Olivia Laing's "Funny Weather"

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Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing [...] This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments. p. 4 We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living. Don’t you want it, to be impregnate with all that light? And what will happen if you are? p.8 Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises. p. 128 Fiction can do that: can make a spa
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#ReadWomen 2024 First Quarter

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I have a goal of reading as many books by women as I possibly can. Here is a list of what I read January-March 2024. Ironically, the first book I read this year was by a man (Raymond Carver) and I hated it. Some of the stories were decent, and I only read it because I love  Time Ain't Accidental  by Jess Williamson (she sings about reading Raymond Carver by the pool bar like a lady). Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality: Stories  by Lindsay Wong was brutal and dark but I enjoyed it much. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories by Raymond Carver White Cat, Black Dog: Stories  by Kelly Link This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music edited by Sinéad Gleeson and Kim Gordon Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Irma Voth by Miriam Toews This is what it sounds like: what the music you love says about you by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas Beloved by Toni Morrison Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality: Stories by Lindsay Wong  A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews  Funny We
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Best Of Kyo Maclear's "Unearthing"

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Here is a selection of memorable quotes from  Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secret s by Kyo Maclear Something about the way he nods stays with her. “Some people underestimate how erotic it is to be understood,” writes Mary Rakow. p.112 Only years later did I discover: we don’t get to choose how we will become unmoored. Or “overwrought.” That’s the horror of it. p.138 What is a heart? My mother accuses me of not speaking my mother tongue but I know that in Japanese, there are three words for “heart”: shinzou , which refers to the physical organ; ha-to , which is the anglicized word for a love heart; and kokoro , which means your metaphysical heart and soul. What is a heart but a broken masterwork pieced together from desire, envy, regret, nostalgia, pity, tenderness and hope? What is a heart but a way of muscling your way onward? What is a heart but a fist? p.140 […] There is a brand of softness that is lethal and not in the slightest way meek; I have observed the softe
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Alexander Graham Bell and "avoidable savagery"

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Here are a couple memorable quotes and a quick review of The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness by Katie Booth A couple years ago I read The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness by Katie Booth. It was a very interesting (if a little clumsy with focus at times) revisionist biography of Alexander Graham Bell, who is best known for inventing the telephone.  "Meticulously researched, crackling with insights, and rich in novelistic detail. By shining a bright light on society's assumptions about disability, Booth's book is a profound and lyrical meditation on what it means to be human." - Steve Silberman, New York Times bestselling author of NeuroTribes I read it because I was surprised to learn of Bell's curious, devastating work in the deaf communities of his time--his own wife, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, was deaf.  Indeed, I'm ashamed to say I have re
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Four Thoughts on Greed

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Here are a few quotes on the topic of greed.  Death and the Miser c. 1490 by BOSCH, Hieronymus Greed violates the spirit of connectedness and community that is natural to human survival. It wipes out individual recognition of the needs and concerns of everyone, replacing this awareness with harmful self-centeredness. Healthy narcissism (the self-acceptance, self-worth, that is the cornerstone of self-love) is replaced by a pathological narcissism (wherein only the self matters) that justifies any action that enables the satisfying of desires. The will to sacrifice on behalf of another, always present when there is love, is annihilated by greed. - from all about love: new visions by bell hooks "I try to work with honesty and integrity. The greed is conquering too many of us. You wind up doing things just for the money. There is more to life than just making money; my life has to mean something" - Raymond Moriyama , Japanese-Canadian architect The same voice that will say no t
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"...the scale of my ambition"

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  above: from King by Florence + the Machine I'm increasingly/always thinking derision of ambition as a legacy of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, here are a few quotes below--Pemberton and Smith are Black, Whyte is not. Back then, being ambitious wasn't cool. Many of the bands were perfectly happy just trying to meet women and drink beer. You were expected to have that Canadian attitude of false humility. Even if you thought what you were doing was good or interesting, you could never verbalize it. It wasn't that far removed from the '90s slacker era where the preferred pose was aloofness. - from Bedroom Rapper: Cadence Weapon on Hip-Hop, Resistance, and Surviving the Music Industry by Rollie Pemberton Ambition ultimately withers all secrets in its glare before those secrets have had time to come to life from within and then thwarts the generosity and maturity that ripens the discourse of a lifetime's dedication to work. - from Consolations: T
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