Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
In an attempt to fill another lacuna (one of oh so many) in my education, I thought I’d check this book out. I actually found this book contained in a Library of America edition that contains all of Douglass’ autobiographies. But it seems like each one contains the same core material, only expanded on in the subsequent volumes, so maybe I’ll hold off on reading those. Would be nice to get some more variety, plus the MPK library doesn’t have late fees or a limit on how long one can check out a book, so I can hold onto this for a while.
Narrative was a brisk read, and I really got a lot out of it. My favorite parts were when Douglass talks about the hypocritical way in which Christianity is practiced in the slave states. It truly pisses one off to hear about these slaveholding fucks who spend their time alternately brutalizing, raping, and murdering those they have enslaved, and then go to church on Sunday and pose as stalwarts of their community. Though I suppose the lived contradiction between their words and practices made their stalwartness not so much a pose as exemplary of the debased society they had created.
I also read Angela Davis’s Lectures on Liberation, a pamphlet collecting the first two lectures from a class she taught about, among other topics, Frederick Douglass and his autobiographies. I really got a lot out of this–it makes a great companion to any of the books. Found myself grinding my teeth when she discusses how the slavers would teach enslaved Blacks a bowdlerized version of Christianity, where being disobedient would send you straight to Hell; it really makes clear the totalitarian aspect of the slave system, even going so far as to brainwash the slaves.
In conclusion, fuck slavery, and fuck those who justify or glorify it unto this day.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Recently I found myself thinking of the books I’ve read, and the books I have yet to read. Looking at the former, I realized that there are many “classic” works that I never got around to reading. I found myself thinking that I might someday regret not making these more of a priority in my reading journey. After all, there’s a reason that these books have become such a critical part of our literary tradition, in many cases for a hundred years or more–so I’m deliberately trying to devote more attention to them. Hence, reading Moby Dick.
I was expecting this book to be a bit of a slog–and it kinda was. I don’t think I’ve spent this long reading a book (probably 3 weeks) since I was in my early teens. Maybe ever.
But. I was shocked by how entertaining it is. Even as I found myself forced to put down my Kindle, found myself almost exhausted from the volume of words I was reading, I drew back to it over and over again, throwing myself into the task because of how enjoyable it was.
There are some absolutely beautiful passages in Moby Dick: lyrical descriptions of Ahab’s madness and Starbuck’s doomed loyalty to him; incredibly evocative naturalistic writing of the oceans and their denizens.
There are incredibly lengthy (but surprisingly interesting) digressions on the anatomy and habits of whales and other sea creatures. Almost like Ishmael was trying to marry the lens of a Jacques Cousteau documentary with a Wikipedia entry, or perhaps an overly enthusiastic Reddit post.
There are comedy bits which left me flabbergasted at how they mirror common tropes you can still see nowadays. People who are douchebags about how much vermouth is in their martinis will see themselves mirrored in one particular chapter (but replace gin with whale steaks). Puns, wordplay, foreign language interpretation gags: you’ll find them all here.
The way Moby Dick is assembled is just so modern. The language really isn’t difficult; picture Cormac McCarthy, but somehow more easily readable. Every word is just so perfectly chosen and placed. Melville seems to know exactly what notion he is driving at, and he never picks a word that is even 10% less descriptive than it could be.
What can I say? I am so glad I read this. Moby Dick is just comprehensively awesome. I gotta check out “Bartleby the Scrivener” at some point. But more books to come, first.
By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners
(I’m going to start recording more of the stuff I’m reading and writing here–because I don’t want the site to be fallow, and that seems like as good a prompt as any.)
By Hands Now Known was a haunting book to read–and honestly, it makes me feel like kind of a clod. I spent years learning about the American Civil Rights movement in the ’60s, and I had what in retrospect is a very superficial understanding of the subject. Black people were deprived of their rights by white people, but by themselves and with occasional help from others, they were able to regain them to some extent, and now things are more or less OK, or at least “better” according to some definition of the word.
This understanding of the situation did not withstand the first anecdote from the book, which involved an older Black woman being murdered in front of the store at which she had been shopping by one of its employees. She had supposedly offended him by acting impertinently, for which the sentence was death. This type of action must have happened tens of thousands of times across the country during the Jim Crow era. And this group of dead, its vastness unknown, is only the tip of the iceberg of victims of racist crimes and actions in our country’s history.
I must have known about this in some way, but for whatever reason–maybe because of [REDACTED PERSONAL NEWS], or maybe just I’m getting older–it didn’t really permeate me.
Reading about this topic brings to mind the old Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” How many people, if they found themselves living in a Jim Crow reality, one where a group of people is officially or otherwise held back from success and happiness under color of law and public prejudice, would do anything about it… or even notice or care about what was happening around them?
Reading By Hands Now Known catalogues crimes of the past, but it left me shaken and disturbed about where America stands now and where it promises to go. The lesson for me was not just that all this bad shit happened back then. It’s that we can see the same genocidal impulse unleashed against minority groups today, and that those who benefit or have been cast as bystanders by fate will maintain willful blindness.
Media I’ve consumed lately
9 to 5: Very silly and enjoyable. Dolly Parton is the best of the main trio. Love Dabney Coleman as the douche boss who later gets owned by his employees. A sneaky LA movie (Jane Fonda lives in Monrovia and you can see the Verdugos behind her apartment).
What’s Up, Doc?: Barbra Streisand is so sweet in this movie. Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn, and the art grant administrator are all very funny. Makes me want to watch more of Bogdanovich’s movies, even though this seems like an outlier in his filmography. But I don’t think I’ve seen any of his films besides this one, so who am I to say? Love movies like this where the gender politics are completely insane in retrospect, and yet you can still feel a satisfied bliss when the two leads get together at the end.
Broadcast News: Not bad, but less than the sum of its parts. Sometimes you watch a movie and you don’t feel like someone is particularly charming, and you wonder whether this feeling is a result of you doing a bad job of separating the actor from their character. Do I feel like Albert Brooks is super-annoying in this movie because his character was so expertly written to be this way, or do I just find him annoying because he’s trying for another key of performance, missing, and leaving me with this? Either way, I found this pretty unsatisfying.
Evil Dead (2013): Not groundbreaking, but the violence was pretty well-executed, the plot was eerie, the demon was good, and it left me pumped for the upcoming sequel. Sometimes you watch a movie with the goal of scratching a particular itch and you’re willing to ignore or discard the extra not-so-great packaging it’s wrapped in; Evil Dead is definitely one of those movies.
What I’m doing now
Learning about programming! Via the open curriculum at App Academy.
So far I’ve covered:
- HTML and CSS
- The CSS layout stuff is pretty handy once you’ve learned how to use it. CSS Grid and Flexbox are incredibly useful for laying stuff out.
- JavaScript
Besides App Academy, I’m trying to read books about CS in order to give myself a better background on the topic. I just read this rather old book, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, while I was in CDMX, and now I’m switching between the newest (JS) edition of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and Grokking Algorithms.
In the past I’ve taken several stabs at “becoming a programmer,” but I’m hopeful that this time I’ll be able to make something of it. Today marks a month since I started learning.
Resetting my brain with books
For the past few years, I’ve felt like my brain has been fried by social media, specifically Twitter. My attention span seems to have diminished to whatever can be absorbed in bite-sized chunks; at best, I can read a longer newspaper article—i.e., the longest bit of text one might reasonably expect to find while scrolling through one’s feed. Maybe it’s just a side effect of aging, or maybe there’s another cause, but my intuition is that my social media consumption habits are to blame.
Lately I’ve been trying to reverse the slide in two ways.
- Write in this blog.
- Read longer works, with the ultimate goal of finishing each one even if the challenge level is… not so high.
In pursuit of the latter, I’ve just finished First and Only, the first novel in Dan Abnett’s series of Warhammer 40k novels, Gaunt’s Ghosts.
One of the covers for Dan Abnett’s First and Only. Fair play: this cover does not elide in any way what you’re getting into with this book.
I won’t get into the details of the Warhammer 40k universe, but the book is about a never-say-die regiment of sci-fi soldiers who defeat the odds against both unholy legions of cultists and corrupted officers in their own army. Human wave attacks are involved. Evil armies cover the walls of their bases in sigils of Chaos whose mere appearance will cause your eyes to water and your nose to bleed. It’s very dumb, the sci-fi equivalent of the kind of airport lit with operators taking out terrorists to save America, but nonetheless easy and entertaining to read. It turns out rehabbing your brain can be kind of fun. Onward to the second book, Ghostmaker!