Syllabus #55

I don't have a lot to say that would be of value in this moment.  Racial injustice has been a cancer in this country since before its inception, and what's happening right now is sickening but it isn't new.  In this moment when so many of us have more free time than usual to pay attention to the news, and so little else is happening aside from the pandemic, it's harder to ignore what's going on.  I hope the escalation and increased attention finally bring about real and positive change.  I hope it brings us together instead of dividing us further. 

I think the best thing I can do right now is listen, and direct attention towards perspectives that have been ignored or overlooked for too long.  Also a couple things just for S's and G's, because we're only human.

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Things that make you go hmmm

What happened to 'serve and protect'?

Here is a pretty solid roundup of actions we can take and places to donate

This list is from last year, but we should be educating ourselves:  An Antiracist Reading List

Italian tupperware.  I guess it wasn't just my family who called it that.  For the longest time I thought the name came from the fact that most of our so-called food storage containers were those Maggio ricotta cheese containers that look like the Italian flag.  Then I realized it was being used more or less as a slur, but now it turns out actual Italian people in New Jersey refer to their plastic food container upcycling as such, and my life has come full circle.

Sharing this Gilmore Girls eating challenge for my mom.  This sounds wonderful yet frightening.  I feel constipated and broken out just reading about it, so let's never do this: 

This all sounds eloquent and like the kind of leadership we need, but is this just Biden paying lip service to the cultural moment we are in?  Does he really stand behind these words?  I hope so.

Analog Reading:

Finished The Woman in the Window.  Yikes.

Read Trust Exercise by Susan Choi.  The format is inventive, in that it's a book within a story, wherein one of the characters on whom the book was based uses the remainder of the story to set the record straight.  It gets at the fallibility of memory and the subjectivity of experience, and does so in a way that makes me want to keep reading even though pretty much every character is grotesquely unlikable.

Started Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine by Kevin Wilson, another story collection.  The stories so far are a little darker than the ones in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, but I'm becoming a big fan of Wilson's work.