Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality by R. Bach
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Transformers: Unicron by Frank Barber
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Intervention Since World War II by William Blum
The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, and the Debate Over Race in America by Nicholas Buccola
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz
Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan Africanism by Stokely Carmichael
Relentless Pursuit: My Fight For The Victims of Jeffrey Epstein by Bradley J. Edwards
NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW by Guy Evans
Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman
A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey
Dune by Frank Herbert
Transformers: The Manga Volume One by Masumi Kaneda
Transformers: The Manga Volume Two by Masumi Kaneda
Prejudential: Black America and The Presidents by Margaret Kimberly
Football Against The Enemy by Simon Kuper
The State and The Revolution by Vladimir Lenin
Stream Of Life by Clarice Lispector
Superman: Red Son by Mark Miller
I Fight For A Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood 1880-1915 by Louis Moore
James Baldwin: Living In Fire by Bill V. Mullen
Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over The World by Jathan Sadowski
Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In by Bernie Sanders
A History Of Medieval Islam by John Joseph Saunders
Hate Inc: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi
The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
Weekly Reader
The way things are going, they will not be going far, so it’s time to bring back the weekly reader…
Writing in Unherd, Aris Roussinos argues that American is a failed state:
Trump is a morbid symptom of this chaos, rather than its cause. The forthcoming election, which pits two gerontocrats of dubious mental acuity against each other, resembles the late Soviet era, before the regime collapsed under its own absurdities. America indeed represents a strange inversion of the Soviet collapse: the economy dwarfs that of any other nation, save China; its empire is still intact, and its military spans the globe more powerfully than any single challenger.
Farrah Hasnain remembers the late, great, Hana Kimura:
And not just love but admiration. She definitely earned my admiration both as a young woman who invested herself in her friendships with every emotion and who, just by existing, represented something that we don’t always get to see on TV: an authentic biracial woman who wasn’t there for a laugh or set dressing. I think her legacy will continue to be built on by way of Tokyo Cyber Squad’s message of solidarity and acceptance: “Everyone is different, everyone is good.”
Arundhati Roy writes in Financial Times about what comes next after the global pandemic:
Mariame Kaba on abolishing the police for the New York Times.
Jessa Crispin on the liberal cheapening of “Believe Women.”
The language of abuse and trauma is creeping into political rhetoric, as if every interaction between a man and a woman these days can be understood as a potential violation. Virginia Heffernan wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Sanders had gaslighted Warren over whether he told her a female candidate couldn’t win the 2020 election.” Gaslighting is a term for one person lying to their romantic partner so effectively and consistently that they start to question their version of reality. Had Heffernan simply said Sanders lied, it would not have given the accusation the melodramatic pull of centuries of stories of women being tormented and abused by the men in their lives. Lying is something politicians do. Gaslighting is something misogynistic monsters do.
Read In 2019
The Story Of Crass by George Berger
The Western Canon: The Books & Schools Of The Ages by Harold Bloom
The Stiehl Assassin by Terry Brooks
We Created Chavez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution by George Circcariello-Maher
A Penelopean Politics: Reweaving The Feminine In Homer's Odyssey by Barbara Clayton
Atari To Zelda: Japan's Video Games In Global Contexts by Mia Consalvo
The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return by Patrick J. Deneen
Titan Screwed: Lost Smiles, Stunners, and Screwjobs by James Dixon
I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie by Roger Ebert
K-Punk: The Collected & Unpublished Writing Of Mark Fisher by Mark Fisher
Transformers: Regeneration One Volumes 1-4 by Simon Furman
Soccer In Sun & Shadows by Eduardo Galeano
Radioactive Man: Radioactive Repoository by Matt Groening
GI Joe Volumes 1-33 by Larry Hama
My Hero Academia Volume 1-3 by Kohei Horikoshi
Death Of The Territories: Expansion, Betrayal, and The War That Changed Pro Wrestling Forever by Tim Hornbaker
The New Testament As Literature by Kyle Keefer
Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football In Europe During The Second World War by Simon Kuper
Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men Volume One by Stan Lee
Kill Shakespeare Volume One by Conor McCreery
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
One Piece Volume One by Eiichiro Oda
Mega Man 3 (Boss Fights) by Salvatore Pane
Football For A Buck: The Crazy Rise & Crazier Demise of the USFL by Jeff Pearlman
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages by Curtis Perry
Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg
Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy
Where We Go From Here by Bernie Sanders
Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics by Richard Seymour
Essays by Wallace Shawn
Night Thoughts by Wallace Shawn
1923: A Great Depression Memoir by Harry Leslie Smith
Harry's Last Stand: How The World My Generation Built Is Falling Down and What We Can Do To Save It by Harry Leslie Smith
Love Among The Ruins: A Memoir of Life and Love in Hamburg, 1943 by Harry Leslie Smith
Strike For America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity by Micah Uetricht
The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds In Homer's Odyssey by Thomas Van Nortwick
Never Any End In Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas
The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice by Lois Weiner
A Politics of Love: A Handbook For A New American Revolution by Marianne Williamson
Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genuis of Dutch Soccer by David Winner
Worth Reading: Spring Break Edition
I spent a lot of time over spring break clearing out bookmarks and saved articles from Instapaper. Normally I post this list when I get to ten, but here are twenty articles worth reading:
- The New York Times on a swatter that finally got caught after years of swatting.
- A podcast about the app Yik Yak, which is totally dead near me but has fascinating, good and bad, uses elsewhere.
- Some of the family members of Sandy Hook victims have been terrorized by the solipsistic, egomaniac, "Truther" movement.
- This interview with Arsene Wenger is fascinating.
- I am sharing these writing tips with my students this semester.
- Roqayah Chamseddine has become one of the most important voices in my daily social media life on a variety of issues, but particularly the connection between mainstream feminism and the right wing ideals of Hilary Clinton and other neoliberals. Over two essays, Rejecting Bourgeois Feminism, and The Problem With Bourgeois Feminist Defenses of Hilary Clinton she strongly criticizes "white feminists" for their allegiance to destructive liberal ideas. I used to have a lot of respect for at least one of the people Chamseddine mentions and it is sad to see, and they certainly aren't the only ones, how so many have fallen to liberalism* and its destructive ideas of war mongering, union bashing, and shilling for Wall Street. *Plus attacking women for being "crazy," and "hysterical" as seen in the linked articles. How liberal of them.
- I always love interviews with Junot Diaz and this one is no exception.
- 51 years after his assassination, Jacobin looks at the legacy of Malcolm X. I teach his essay Coming To An Awareness of Language every semester and it is always one of the most popular with students.
- An excerpt from Liza Featherstone's upcoming book about the faux feminism of Hilary Clinton.
- Nicole M. Aschoff on a feminism without capitalism.
- FAIR's excellent tribute to Ben Bagdikian. Reading his book The Media Monopoly as a teenager absolutely changed the direction of my life; I will be forever grateful to him.
- Black Agenda Report on Miriam Makeba.
- Liliana Segura on Hilary Clinton's indefensible stance on the death penalty. Bernie Sanders' support of drones is not much better.
- On the "goddamned exploitative farce" that is academic publishing.
- Evan Narcisse on the politics of Black Panther.
- Grant Wahl on the incredible story of Leicester City.
Weekly Reader
The Reading Experience has another post about John Dewey up.
One of my favorite pieces of Transformers fan fiction is A Chance In A Million. Now that I think about it, it might have been the first one I ever read too when I got back into the fandom in 1997.
Veronica over at Conversational Reading finds War & Peace to be a bit of a disappointment. I started reading it back in high school but never finished it. Maybe I will pick that up again this summer.
It seems that I link to a Marjane Satrapi interview almost every week. This week’s interview is from Nerve:
I have to tell you something: I never felt as free as when I wrote Chicken with Plums. When I write about women, and obviously when I write about myself like in Persepolis people relate [the text] to me. In this book, the main character in is a man. I could hide behind him, yet in some ways, he is me. I can be very cynical, but I can also die of love.
Incoming Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is interviewed over at Mother Jones:
Third, I want to take a look at some of the good things that are being done around the rest of the world that are almost never discussed in the United States. How often is it discussed that the American people work the longest hours of any industrialized country in the world? The two-week paid vacation is almost a thing of the past; meanwhile in Europe you get four to six weeks vacation, and maternity leave with pay. We don’t know about these things. I want to take a look around the world and see what workers are receiving, and compare that to the United States — from an educational point of view.