Port over some additional files from old site

Author: devalog

_posts/2021-01-18-kindred.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "*Kindred* didn't pander to me and I liked that"
+date: 2022-01-18
+---
+
+I loved the book *The Help* when I was in high school – it takes place in the 1960s and the protagonist is a white woman who writes about black maids working in white households. It's not a terrible book, but it centers on a nice white woman who helps black people (who don't really need the help in the first place) and then profits off of it. I liked the book because it was readable and the characters were overall compelling, but even more so, I liked it because it pandered to me, a white reader.
+
+More broadly, many of the books I read when I was a child that took place during the time of slavery focused primarily if not exclusively on a nice white person who is unfortunate enough to be born during slavery.
+
+Because of this background, the white characters in *Kindred* really struck me – they were so different from the sympathetic white characters I was used to, the kind of characters I could relate to without feeling too uncomfortable. The white characters in *Kindred* made me uncomfortable because they were "nice people" but completely morally indefensible. I'm not used to not being pandered to.
+
+In *Kindred*, Dana (a black woman) travels back in time from 1976 to 1815 to save her white ancestor Rufus from a series of accidents. Rufus is a kind, caring child who grows up to be a callous adult with some nice-ish tendencies. Dana's relationship with Rufus mirrors the white reader's relationship with Rufus: the white reader (at least, this white reader) expects that Rufus will be good – that the goodness he displays as a child will translate to goodness as an adult and he will be the exception to the rule in a time where it was hard but not impossible to be a moral white person who will one day inherit his father's slaves. In fact, every chapter (that is, every time Dana goes back in time) is a new chance for Rufus to be good, to be an exception to the system of slavery and slave owning. If there can be an exception to the system, the white reader might unconsciously think, then perhaps the system wasn't that, all-encompassingly bad. But it is. And because it is, Rufus is not a good person – because there are no good white slaveholders.
+
+Dana and the reader find out early on that Rufus had a child with Alice, a free black woman. This child is Dana's great grandmother. Rufus and Alice's childhood friendship combined with Alice's free status combined with Rufus's childlike goodness caused at least one white reader (me) to expect sort of a forbidden love story where everyone ends up happy despite a lot of difficult trials. But of course, that turns out not to be the case. Rufus is in love with Alice and repeatedly tries to get her to love him back. She repeatedly refuses him, and he finally rapes her. After she and her enslaved husband are captured while trying to escape, Rufus buys Alice and continues to rape her for the rest of her short life.
+
+There is one genuinely good white person in *Kindred*, and that's Kevin, Dana's husband. Kevin goes back into time with Dana the third time she goes back. Because Dana can't precisely control exactly when she goes back to 1976 (she goes back when she thinks she is about to die), she ends up leaving Kevin in 1815. While Dana spends only a few days without Kevin in 1976, Kevin spends almost a decade alone in the 1800s. And he bears the scars of being a good white person in the slaveholding South – he gets a literal scar on his forehead and has to grow his beard out as a disguise as a result of harboring escaping slaves. And when he finally gets back to 1976, he has trouble adjusting and reconciling the trauma he witnessed and experienced with his nice, comfortable life.
+
+A lot of people have written a lot more eloquently than me about both *The Help* and *Kindred:*
+
+* Janet Maslin reviewed *The Help* for *The New York Times* and called it an "ultimately soft-pedaled version of Southern women's lives, one in which real danger is usually at a distance." ([link](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/books/19masl.html))
+* Charles H. Rowell interviewed Octavia Butler for the Callaloo Journal in 1997. In that interview, Butler explains how she got the idea to write Kindred: "I heard some remarks from a young man who was the same age I was but who had apparently never made the connection with what his parents did to keep him alive. He was still blaming them for their humility and acceptance of disgusting behavior on the part of employers and other people." ([link](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3299291?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents))
+* Gabrielle Bellot wrote a lovely, meandering review of *Kindred* for LitHub focused on how "*Kindred* erodes the naïve idea that the brutalities of the past are no more in the present." ([link](https://lithub.com/octavia-butler-the-brutalities-of-the-past-are-all-around-this/))
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_posts/2021-04-08-mexicangothic.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "I didn't like *Mexican Gothic*, but a lot of critics did"
+date: 2021-04-08
+---
+
+I didn't like *Mexican Gothic*, but a lot of other people did. I was so excited about the premise: a gothic novel in 1950s Mexico! I thought, "maybe this will be sort of like a new twist on Jane Eyre." Yeah, it wasn't. I was disappointed.
+
+Here is a list of some of the things I didn't like about the book:
+
+* The whole story just seemed… generic? It wasn't very 1950s, and it wasn't very Mexican. There were some creepy, inventive details – for example, the Doyle family carted soil over from England in order to ensure the efficacy of the mushrooms that make them immortal – but these interesting parts weren't executed well and sort of fell flat amongst all of the other mediocre details.
+
+* It was slow. I was wondering "where is this going?" for the first two-thirds of the book. All of the action happens in the last third. It wasn't very satisfying as a reader.
+
+* A lot of the characters and relationships seemed super underdeveloped, like they only existed to move the (mediocre!) plot along. The villains were all bad – no complexity. I guess this is the gothic way? But I guess I would have expected a modern take on the gothic novel to be a bit more ambiguous. Noemi, the protagonist, was an inconsistent character – she's this rich socialite who studies anthropology, but oh no! She's too outgoing and bounces from topic to topic! How dare she! It all seemed too "Rah! Rah! Feminism!" to me. She's just not that complex, and she doesn't have real flaws.
+
+* Some really interesting threads got completely dropped. In the beginning of the book, there's a lot of different moments where the book mentioned how Noemi's dad runs a paint business and she's really good at identifying paint colors and chemicals. I was like, "Ooh, this sounds cool and I bet it's going to contribute to the twist at the end!" Nope. It didn't have anything to do with anything.
+
+* Sure, there was an undertone of racism and eugenics. This was interesting. This played a major part in the whole revelation at the end. But it was sprinkled throughout the beginning of the book in a rather heavy handed manner. (Noemi finds a book about eugenics on the bookcase…) I feel like this discussion of insidious racism could have been so complex and rewarding, but it felt flat and generic to me.
+
+I've seen a lot of reviews comparing Mexican Gothic to Jane Eyre and Rebecca, two of my all-time favorites. I don't think Mexican Gothic even approaches the brilliance of those two books.
+
+A lot of critics loved this book, though:
+
+* An [NPR review](https://www.npr.org/2020/07/09/889365673/jane-eyre-meets-dracula-in-this-sharp-inventive-mexican-gothic-tale) described the book like this: "Set in Mexico in 1950, when women weren't yet allowed to vote, Mexican Gothic explores how, for its independent female characters, marriage threatens to be a premature burial." See, doesn't that make the book sound so cool? Yet in my opinion, it didn't live up the high expectations these sorts of reviews gave me.
+
+* [A review from the Los Angeles Times](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-06-26/mexican-gothic-sylvia-moreno-garcia-review) said: "Moreno-Garcia works in a tradition in which chills and thrills tap into elemental cultural fears — runaway science, carnal passion. But to these she adds a more politically inflected horror, both ancient and timely: A racist will to power." Ugh, but she makes this into its own sort of flat trope! So disappointing! It's really not that political or controversial to say, "we shouldn't do eugenics."
+
+While many [Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53152636-mexican-gothic) users predictably raved about how much they loved the book, some agreed with me, like the user [Kim ~ It's All About the Thrill](https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/72904050-kim-it-s-all-about-the-thrill): "They said yeah wait for it...Okay so it did pick up- at page 250. So the last 50 pages of the book was crammed full of weirdness." But my favorite dissenting review is from [Elle](https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/9703774-elle), who said: "what a dumb fucking book."
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_posts/2022-01-09-booksjan.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "The books I read in January 2022"
+date: 2022-01-09
+---
+
+...in chronological order.
+
+# #1: *The Doomed City* by Arkady and Boris Sturgatsky
+
+I loved the wacky *Definitely, Maybe* by the Sturgatsky Brothers (a book that was rather difficult to get ahold of), when I read it a few years ago, and I've been meaning to read more of their work ever since. 
+*The Doomed City* was at times incomprehensible, boring, confusing, totally wacky, bizarre, and amazing. Overall, I liked it, though it was somewhat of a slog at times. The best parts of the book were the most bizarre, like when baboons inexplicably invade the city. Everyone subsequently freaks out and tries to figure out how to get rid of them, and then within a few hours totally accepts them as just another part of the city. There were some parts I found boring and over long. I also found the few passages involving women pretty offensive. There are very few women/scenes involving women, and all the women are completely unnecessary to the plot. Most only exist for the male characters to ponder their sluttiness. (One is only ever referred to as "The Skank.")
+
+# #2: *Life After Life* by Kate Atkinson
+
+I received this book as a Christmas gift. I read Atkinson's first book, *Behind the Scenes at the Museum*, in high school and loved it – so I was eager to read another book by Kate Atkinson. *Life After Life* has a super unique premise – Ursula lives the same life over and over again. The book was fast-paced and really readable, which was a welcome follow-up to *The Doomed City*. There were a few chapters that I found comparatively slower and more tedious to read, like when Ursula is living in Nazi Germany and, in a separate life, when Ursula is living in London during the Blitz. (I'm not a huge fan of war books.) But overall, this book was great and super fun, and I quite liked the ending.
+
+# #3: *Rogue Protocol* by Martha Wells
+
+Another excellent Murderbot book. Maybe my favorite so far?
+
+# #4: *May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian* by Suzanne Raitt
+
+Continuing my fascination with May Sinclair, I read her biography. (The author, Suzanne Raitt, was actually my professor and advisor during college, though I never read any of Sinclair's books until a few years after I graduated.) It was great!
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_posts/2022-07-24-booksmayjune.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Some thoughts about the books I read in May and June 2022"
+date: 2022-07-24
+---
+
+The worst book I read recently was *Lady Chatterley's Lover*, which provoked a [landmark obscenity trial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd) in the UK in 1960. Some critics think D.H. Lawrence's writing style was influenced by his tuberculosis, which he died from two years after publishing *Lady Chatterley's Lover*. Apparently, tuberculosis can cause a heightened emotional state and also impotence, which matches up pretty well to my personal beef with the book: I found the prose insufferably flowery and the characters flat and annoying.
+
+The best book I read recently was probably *Passing* by Nella Larsen. The book was so tense and readable and concise. *Klara and the Sun* was good too – I like speculative fiction that has disorienting, unobtrusive world-building, where the reader has to figure out over the course of many pages how exactly the setting relates to present-day Earth. *Klara and the Sun* did that really well.