Jenkins - Daisy Jones and The Six by Reid

By: Taylor Jenkins

Review:

When I started googling why I haven't heard of these band members, this band, that's when I realized that I wasn't reading nonfiction. I was reading a novel, and the whole thing is made up. I spend 10 minutes questioning myself, why doesn't apple music or Spotify has it. If these people were so large, so well described, so recorded, then why couldn't I find them? The reasons were visible, the writing, the speeches, the dialogue, the emotion, the audiobook, were real. They existed in a part of my head. They orated like it was a spectacular set of interviews, from the author to them. And, the author wrote their stories.

The author wrote each and every interview as, as a documentary that was supposed to teach the aura of the 1970s. They took us out of time and lived it through their eyes, every little cup of vodka being drunk, every shard of glasses being broken, every heart being broken, and sown. They're real, they felt authentic. We knew what was going to happen, the burnout, the death, the puking, the heartbreaks.

We all knew. And there are so many themes being taught, especially gender and sexuality. Especially feminism. Especially the addictions.

Especially them all, with many parts from the book are lessons from the ages of rock and roll.

Stats:

• Reading Time: 12/12/19 - 12/13

• Review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes:

• December 13, 2019 –
  90.0% "“I decided I don’t need perfect love and I don’t need a perfect husband and I don’t need perfect kids and a perfect life and all that. I want mine. I want my love, my husband, my kids, my life.
  “I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. I don’t expect anything to be perfect. But things don’t have to be perfect to be strong”"
  

• December 13, 2019 –
  84.0% "D:When T died, that was it. I’d decided there was no sense in getting sober. I rationalized it. You know, If the universe wanted me to get clean, it wouldn’t have killed Teddy. You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything."
  

• December 13, 2019 –
  79.0% "And when you rediscover your sanity, it’s only a matter of time before you start to get an inkling of why you wanted to escape it in the first place.”"
  December 13, 2019 –
  79.0% "“It’s funny. At first, I think you start getting high to dull your emotions, to escape from them. But after a while you realize that the drugs are what are making your life untenable, they are actually what are heightening every emotion you have. It’s making your heartbreak harder, your good times higher. So coming down really does start to feel like rediscovering sanity."
  

• December 13, 2019 –
  72.0% "“Karen and Graham must be sleeping together. And I say to them, I said, “Are you two an item?” And Graham says yes and Karen says no.
  G: I didn’t understand. I just didn’t understand Karen.
  K: Graham and I could never last, it was never…I just needed it to exist in a vacuum, where real life didn’t matter, where the future didn’t matter, where all that mattered was, you know, how we felt that day.”"
  December 13, 2019 –
  51.0% "“BILLY: I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t stay because when I looked at Daisy, wet and bleeding and out of it and half-near falling down, I did not think, Thank God I stopped using.
  I thought, She knows how to have fun.”"
  December 12, 2019 –
  50.0%
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  36.0% "“BILLY: When she took her key out of her pocket, she also took out a bag of coke. She was going into her room, and she was gonna, at the very least, have a bump. I…I didn’t want to be around it.
  I couldn’t go into that room.
  DAISY: I had thought for a moment that he and I could be friends, that Billy could see me as an equal. Instead, I was a woman he shouldn’t be alone with.”"
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  23.0% "“Teddy said, “How do you feel?”
  And I told him I felt like I’d made something that wasn’t exactly what I’d envisioned, but it was maybe good in its own right. I said it felt like me but it didn’t feel like me and I had no idea whether it was brilliant or awful or somewhere in between. And Teddy laughed and said I sounded like an artist. I liked that.”"
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  22.0% "Teddy said, “Daisy, someone who insists on the perfect conditions to make art isn’t an artist. They’re an asshole.”
  I shut the door in his face.
  And sometime later that day, I opened up my songbook and I started reading. I hated to admit it but I could see what he was saying. I had good lines but I didn’t have anything polished from beginning to end."
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  22.0% "It didn’t seem right to me that his weakest self got to decide how my life was going to turn out, what my family was going to look like.
  I got to decide that. And what I wanted was a life—a family, a beautiful marriage, a home—with him. With the man I knew he truly was. And I was going to get it, hell or high water."
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  22.0% "“ I went to rehab so I don’t have to meet my own new daughter.”"
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  5.0% "The audiobook is really fun! Each section is read by a different orator!"

Kendi - How to Be an Antiracist

Author: Ibram X. Kendi

Review:

In an interlacing of pedagogy and personal livelihood, Kendi has given a clear account of overt racism compared to the more dangerous subversive racism in the United States. They are both politically induced racist policies that propagate into the world of racist thinking styles. In this overview course on what it means to be an anti-racist, compared to a racist, compared to an assimilationist, Kendi gives precise introductory origins of each sector of racist ideologies and their backgrounds. The book is broken down into Dualing Consciousness, Power, Biology, Ethnicity, Culture, Class, Queer, and a few more topics. Each section delves into each other as intersectional as it must be, and has a clear focus on the elucidation of such issues. Each issue chapter with terms and definitions, to clearly solidify what grounds of truth that we will be standing on. Each section has a form of personal anecdote, which later finds to be very important in the formation of policies, histories, and self-consciousness of that topic.

Overall, an excellent introduction to race talk, because all people can be racist, asians can be racist, black people can be racist, whites can definitely be racist because we all have the power to be racist. We all have the power to be anti-racist. This book is a must-read for all Americans, and especially for the African Americans who have anti-black-thoughts, and especially for the majority of the whites, who think that they don't see color.

Reading Stats:

• Reading Date: 1/2/20 - 1/3/20

• Reading Level:

  • African American: 8th Grade Level

  • White Americans: Freshmen College Level

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes:

• 5-10% What is racism - a marriage of racist policies and ideologies, that produces and normalizes racial inequalities?

  • Racial Inequality: when two or more racial groups that aren't standing in an approximately equal footing. Ex: 71 percent of white families live in owned homes in 2014, compared to 44 percent of African Americans, and Latinx.

  • Racial Equality: When the different racial groups would own similar percentages rather than having a 30 percent difference.

  • Racist Policy: Any policy that would reproduce racial Inequality based statistics.

  • Antiracist Policy: Any policy that would reproduce racial equality based statistics. And the strategy is written laws that rule the people.

  • Why use these terms rather than more abstract and overview based terms like systematic oppression? These terms are more tangible in understanding, especially for those who aren't normalized to these terms. Racist ideas: Any notion that says one group is better than another in any way.

• ANTIRACIST: One who is expressing the idea that racial groups are equals and none needs developing, and is supporting policy that reduces racial inequity.”

  • “ASSIMILATIONIST: One who is expressing the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior and is supporting cultural or behavioral enrichment programs to develop that racial group.

  • SEGREGATIONIST: One who is expressing the racist idea that a permanently inferior racial group can never be developed and is supporting policy that segregates away that racial group.

  • Since Reagan's agenda on "War on Drugs": from 1980 - 2000, 4x increase in the American prison population.

  • Whites are more likely than Black and Latinx to sell drugs.

  • African Americans are far more likely to be jailed than white Americans.

  • Non-violent Black drug offenders remain in prison for the same amount of time (58.87 months) as Violent white criminals (62.7 Month)

  • 2016, Black and Latinx people are grossly overrepresented in the prison population at 56%, while White People are grossly underrepresented at 30%. When looking at the national population of Black, Latinx, and White Americans, it's significantly off.

  • “Black people have often expressed a desire to be American and have been encouraged in this by America’s undeniable history of antiracist progress, away from chattel slavery and Jim Crow. Despite the cold instructions from the likes of Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal to “become assimilated into American culture,” Black people have also, as Du Bois said, desired to remain N*gro, discouraged by America’s undeniable history of racist progress, from advancing police violence and voter suppression, to widening racial inequities in areas ranging from health to wealth.”

  • “The White body defines the American body. The White body segregates the Black body from the American body. The White body instructs the Black body to assimilate into the American body. The White body rejects the Black body assimilating into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.”

  • “The Black body in turn experiences the same duel. The Black body is instructed to become an American body. The American body is the White body. The Black body strives to assimilate into the American body. The American body rejects the Black body. The Black body separates from the American body. The Black body is instructed to assimilate into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.”

  • “But there is a way to get free. To be antiracist is to emancipate oneself from the dueling consciousness. To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power.”

• BIOLOGICAL ANTIRACIST: One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences.”

  • “BIOLOGICAL RACIST: One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value.

  • We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets.

  • “Looking back, I wonder, if I had been one of her White kids would she have asked me: “What’s wrong?” Would she have wondered if I was hurting? I wonder. I wonder if her racist ideas chalked up my resistance to my Blackness and therefore categorized it as misbehavior, not distress. With racist teachers, misbehaving kids of color do not receive inquiry and empathy and legitimacy. We receive orders and punishments and “no excuses,” as if we are adults.

  • The Black child is ill-treated like an adult, and the Black adult is ill-treated like a child.”

  • “We practice ethnic racism when we express a racist idea about an ethnic group or support a racist policy toward an ethnic group. Ethnic racism, like racism itself, points to group behavior, instead of policies, as the cause of disparities between groups.”

  • “Where are you from?” - I am often asked this question by people who see me through the lens of ethnic racism. Their ethnic racism presumes I—a college professor and published writer—cannot be a so-called lowly, lazy, lackluster African American.
    ““Who do you think your fellow Ghanaian Americans got these ideas about African Americans from?” He thought much longer this time. From the side of his eye he saw another student waiting to speak to me, which seemed to rush his thoughts—he was a polite kid in spite of his urge to lecture. But I did not rush him. The other student was Jamaican and listening intently, maybe thinking about who Jamaicans got their ideas about Haitians from. “Probably American Whites,” he said, looking me straight in the eye for the first time.”

  • “Why are Black immigrants not doing as well as other immigrant groups? - The reason Black immigrants generally have higher educational levels and economic pictures than African Americans is not that their transnational ethnicities are superior. The reason resides in the circumstances of human migration. Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called “immigrant self-selection,” are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources. Generally speaking, individual Black and Latinx and Asian and Middle Eastern and European immigrants are uniquely resilient and resourceful—not because they are Nigerian or Cuban or Japanese or Saudi Arabian or German but because they are immigrants.”

  • “all they saw were our dangerous Black bodies. Cops seemed especially fearful. Just as I learned to avoid the Smurfs of the world, I had to learn to keep racist police officers from getting nervous. Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don’t, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths.”

  • The so-called “first Black president” followed suit. “It isn’t racist for Whites to say they don’t understand why people put up with gangs on the corner or in the projects or with drugs being sold in the schools or in the open,” said President Clinton in 1995. - Indeed, I was irresponsible in high school. It makes antiracist sense to talk about the personal irresponsibility of individuals like me of all races. I screwed up. I could have studied harder. But some of my White friends could have studied harder, too, and their failures and irresponsibility didn’t somehow tarnish their race. My problems with personal irresponsibility were exacerbated—or perhaps even caused—by the additional struggles that racism added to my school life, from a history of disinterested, racist teachers, to overcrowded schools, to the daily racist attacks that fell on young Black boys and girls.

  • -- while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy. This shouldn’t be surprising: One of the fundamental values of racism to White people is that it makes success attainable for even unexceptional Whites, while success, even moderate success, is usually reserved for extraordinary

  • Black people. the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE. I had already forked over $1,000 for a preparatory course, feeding the U.S. test-prep and private tutoring industry that would grow to $12 billion in 2014 and is projected to reach $17.5 billion in 2020. The courses and private tutors are concentrated in Asian and White communities, who, not surprisingly, score the highest on standardized tests. My GRE prep course, for instance, was not taught on my historically Black campus. “The teacher was not making us stronger. She was giving us form and technique so we’d know precisely how to carry the weight of the test. It revealed the bait and switch at the heart of standardized tests—the exact thing that made them unfair: She was teaching test-taking form for standardized exams that purportedly measured intellectual strength.” Intellect is the linchpin of behavior, and the racist idea of the achievement gap is the linchpin of behavioral racism.

• COLORISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequities between Light people and Dark people, supported by racist ideas about Light and Dark people.

  • COLOR ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between Light people and Dark people, supported by antiracist ideas about Light and Dark people. Dark Black men regardless of qualifications? Even Dark Filipino men have lower incomes than their lighter peers in the United States. Dark immigrants to the United States, no matter their place of origin, tend to have less wealth and income than Light immigrants. When they arrive, Light Latinx people receive higher wages, and Dark Latinx people are more likely to be employed at ethnically homogeneous jobsites. “To be an antiracist is not to reverse the beauty standard. To be an antiracist is to eliminate any beauty standard based on skin and eye color, hair texture, facial and bodily features shared by groups.

  • To be an antiracist is to diversify our standards of beauty like our standards of culture or intelligence, to see beauty equally in all skin colors, broad and thin noses, kinky and straight hair, light and dark eyes. To be an antiracist is to build and live in a beauty culture that accentuates instead of erases our natural beauty.”

  • Skin-bleaching products were raking in millions for U.S. companies. In India, “fairness” creams topped $200 million in 2014. Today, skin lighteners are used by 70 percent of women in Nigeria; 35 percent in South Africa; 59 percent in Togo; and 40 percent in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea.

  • 50% ANTI-WHITE RACIST: One who is classifying people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior or conflating the entire race of White people with racist power.

  • When on December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Florida’s recount, I no longer saw the United States as a democracy. When Gore conceded the next day, when White Democrats stood aside and let Bush steal the presidency on the strength of destroyed Black votes, I was shot back into the binary thinking of Sunday school, where I was taught about good and evil, God and the Devil. - this is similar to what we going through right now.

• To Be an Antiracist:

  • To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people.

  • To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people.

  • To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites.

  • To be antiracist is to see ordinary White people as the frequent victimizers of people of color and the frequent victims of racist power. Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the rest of us.

• Getting over Powerless Defense, „When a Black man stepped into the most powerful office in the world in 2009, his policies were often excused by apologists who said he didn’t have executive power. As if none of his executive orders were carried out, neither of his Black attorneys general had any power to roll back mass incarceration, or his Black national security adviser had no power. The truth is: Black people can be racist because Black people do have power, even if limited.“

  • But according to the theory that Black people can’t be racist because they lack power, Blackwell didn’t have the power to suppress Black votes. Remember, we are all either racists or antiracists.

• CLASS RACIST: One who is racializing the classes, supporting policies of racial capitalism against those race-classes, and justifying them by racist ideas about those race-classes. ANTIRACIST ANTICAPITALIST: One who is opposing racial capitalism.

  • Pathological people made the pathological ghetto, segregationists say. The pathological ghetto made pathological people, assimilationists say. To be antiracist is to say the political and economic conditions, not the people, in poor Black neighborhoods are pathological.

  • In losing focus on racist power, they fail to challenge anti-Black racist policies, which means those policies are more likely to flourish. Going after White people instead of racist power prolongs the policies harming Black life. In the end, anti-White racist ideas, in taking some or all of the focus off racist power, become anti-Black. In the end, hating White people becomes hating Black people.

  • White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

  • This stereotype of the hopeless, defeated, unmotivated poor Black is without evidence. Recent research shows, in fact, that poor Blacks are more optimistic about their prospects than poor Whites are. Racist Black elites thought about low-income Blacks the way racist non-Black people thought about Black people. We thought we had more than higher incomes. We thought we were higher people.

  • “The N*gro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men,” Du Bois projected. “Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters.”

  • “In the forty years since Clark’s Dark Ghetto, dark had married ghetto in the chapel of inferiority and took her name as his own—the ghetto was now so definitively dark, to call it a dark ghetto would be redundant. Ghetto also became as much an adjective—ghetto culture, ghetto people—as a noun, loaded with racist ideas, unleashing all sorts of Black on Black crimes on poor Black communities.”

• SPACE RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to resource inequity between racialized spaces or the elimination of certain racialized spaces, which are substantiated by racist ideas about racialized spaces.

  • SPACE ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity between integrated and protected racialized spaces, which are substantiated by antiracist ideas about racialized spaces.

  • “If we can’t be objective, then what should we strive to do?” She stared at me as she gathered her words. Not a woman of many words, it did not take long.

    “Just tell the truth. That’s what we should strive to do. Tell the truth.”

  • Mazama, she lectured on Asante’s contention that objectivity was really “collective subjectivity.” She concluded, “It is impossible to be objective.”

  • The idea of the dangerous Black neighborhood is the most dangerous racist idea. And it is powerfully misleading. For instance, people steer away from and stigmatize Black neighborhoods as crime-ridden streets where you might have your wallet stolen.

  • Americans lost trillions during the Great Recession, which was largely triggered by financial crimes of staggering enormity. Estimated losses from white-collar crimes are believed to be between $300 and $600 billion per year, according to the FBI. By comparison, near the height of violent crime in 1995, the FBI reported the combined costs of burglary and robbery to be $4 billion.

    • The argument: Black students are better served learning how to operate in a majority-White nation by attending a majority-White university.

    • The reality: A large percentage of—perhaps most—Black Americans live in majority-Black neighborhoods, work in majority-Black sites of employment, organize in majority-Black associations, socialize in majority-Black spaces, attend majority-Black churches, and send their children to majority-Black schools.

  • They are conceptualizing the real American world as White. To be antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as the “real world,” only real worlds, multiple worldviews. Why: unfairly comparing Black spaces to substantially richer White spaces. The endowment of the richest HBCU, Howard, was five times less than UT Austin’s endowment in 2016, never mind being thirty-six times less than the endowment of a Stanford or Yale.

    • HBCUs to HWCUs of similar means and makeup, HBCUs tend to have higher Black graduation rates. Not to mention, Black HBCU graduates are, on average, more likely than their Black peers from HWCUs to be thriving financially, socially, and physically.

  • When black people create space, they see spaces of White hate. They do not see spaces of cultural solidarity, of solidarity against racism. They see spaces of segregation against White people. Integrationists do not see these spaces as the movement of Black people toward Black people. Integrationists think about them as a movement away from White people. They then equate that movement away from White people with the White segregationist movement away from Black people. Integrationists equate spaces for the survival of Black bodies with spaces for the survival of White supremacy.

  • Non-White students fill most of the seats in today’s public school classrooms but are taught by an 80 percent White teaching force, which often has, however unconsciously, lower expectations for non-White students. When Black and White teachers look at the same Black student, White teachers are about 40 percent less likely to believe the student will finish high school. Low-income Black students who have at least one Black teacher in elementary school are 29 percent less likely to drop out of school, 39 percent less likely among very low-income Black boys.

  • White spaces that hoard public resources, include some non-Whites, and are generally, though not wholly, dominated by White peoples and cultures. White majorities, White power, and White culture dominate both the segregated and the integrated, making both White.

  • Integration had turned into “a one-way street,” a young Chicago lawyer observed in 1995. “The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around,” Barack Obama wrote. “Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial.” Integration (into Whiteness) became racial progress.

  • “Antiracist strategy fuses desegregation with a form of integration and racial solidarity. Desegregation: eliminating all barriers to all racialized spaces. To be antiracist is to support the voluntary integration of bodies attracted by cultural difference, a shared humanity. Integration: resources rather than bodies. To be an antiracist is to champion resource equity by challenging the racist policies that produce resource inequity. Racial solidarity: openly identifying, supporting, and protecting integrated racial spaces. To be antiracist is to equate and nurture difference among racial groups.”

  • But antiracist strategy is beyond the integrationist conception that claims Black spaces could never be equal to White spaces, that believes Black spaces have a “detrimental effect upon” Black people, to quote Chief Justice Warren in Brown. My Black studies space was supposed to have a detrimental effect on me. Quite the opposite. My professors made sure of that, as did two Black students, answering questions I never thought to ask.

• GENDER RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequity between race-genders and are substantiated by racist ideas about race-genders.

  • GENDER ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between race-genders and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about race-genders.

  • To be antiracist is to reject not only the hierarchy of races but of race-genders. To be feminist is to reject not only the hierarchy of genders but of race-genders. To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. To be antiracist (and feminist) is to level the different race-genders, is to root the inequities between the equal race-genders in the policies of gender racism.

  • “The intersection of racism and sexism, in some cases, oppresses White women. For example, sexist notions of “real women” as weak and racist notions of White women as the idealized woman intersect to produce the gender-racist idea that the pinnacle of womanhood is the weak White woman.”

  • the opposite of the gender racism of the unvirtuous hypersexual Black woman is the virtuous asexual White woman, a racial construct that has constrained and controlled the White woman’s sexuality (as it nakedly tainted the Black woman’s sexuality as un-rape-able).

  • Gender racism is behind the thinking that when one defends White male abusers like Trump and Brett Kavanaugh one is defending White people; when one defends Black male abusers like Bill Cosby and R. Kelly one is defending Black people.

  • For example, sexist notions of “real men” as strong and racist notions of Black men as not really men intersect to produce the gender racism of the weak Black man, inferior to the pinnacle of manhood, the strong White man.

  • Sexist notions of men as more naturally dangerous than women (since women are considered naturally fragile, in need of protection) and racist notions of Black people as more dangerous than White people intersect to produce the gender racism of the hyperdangerous Black man, more dangerous than the White man, the Black woman, and (the pinnacle of innocent frailty) the White woman.

  • These ideas of gender racism transform every innocent Black male into a criminal and every White female criminal into Casey Anthony, the White woman a Florida jury exonerated in 2011, against all evidence, for killing her three-year-old child. White women get away with murder and Black men spend years in prisons for wrongful convictions.

• QUEER RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequity between race-sexualities and are substantiated by racist ideas about race-sexualities.

  • QUEER ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between race-sexualities and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about race-sexualities.

  • "I thought about this hypersexuality and recklessness causing so many Black gay men to contract HIV. I thought wrong. Black gay men are less likely to have condomless sex than White gay men. They are less likely to use drugs like poppers or crystal methamphetamine during sex, which heighten the risk of HIV infections."

  • I watched, stunned, in awe of their intellectual attacks. I call them attacks, but in truth they were defenses, defending Black womanhood and the humanity of queer Blacks. They were respectful and measured if the victimizer was respectful and measured with them. But I call them attacks because I felt personally attacked. They were attacking my gender racism about Black women, my queer racism about queer Blacks, my gender and queer racism about queer Black women.

Additional Reference Links:

• Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X Kendi

• New York Times reading list for How to be an Antiracist

• GSU’s reading list for this book

• Kendi’s Talk at UC Berkley

• Kendi’s Commencement Speech at U of F

Reid - Such a Fun Age

Author: Kiley Reid

Review:

This book was a blast to read through, with nontraditional modes of finishing, I wouldn't go further than that to avoid spoilers. What the main character goes through with her experience as a black woman, clashing that with the intersection of being poor, with a college education, was cringy to listen to. The writing is done terrifically well, with cringes that most of us minorities feel when we felt as though the world has been treating us like a second rate citizen. This is the truth, for Americans can be very racist, for most times the liberal white Americans are the worst when they know not what they are. Subconsciously racist towards those they think they are helping. And this is a conversation that isn't easy to make, it's a conversation that should have been talked about for the last three hundred years, yet it's always postponed. Over and over again, the concept of a race for those in power is just not there, and it's not our job to teach them.

It is not the minorities' job to teach what they ought to act, how they should work, no. It's their own job to join communities, it's their own job to join clubs, it's their own job to join or make or feel vulnerable. It's not our job as minorities, and this book shows that really well. For many, like this book presents in the best of ways, sometimes, the best answer is to move on.

There were many intersectional topics, as I've stated, from race to sex, sex and class, and lastly, race and class. All of those topics were also flushed out in a way that didn't feel unnatural. That's, Kiley shows us most rather than directly telling us everything. This made the world felt like a journey to walk with, with references to social media and the current gossips.

Lastly, the dialogues in here are real, they are real people with struggles, conflicts, souls. Kiley Reid did a fantastic job, and I look forward to more of her proclamation in the future.

Reading Stats:

• 1/8/20 - 1/9/20

• Reading Level: For minorities - Sophomore High School, or Sophomore College Level if you’ve never met a minority before.

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

• Publication Date: 2019

Quotes and Notes:

• * The main character was questioned by the security guard because she was nannying a child, and she's black.... so you know, white bs -- “He paused and ran his tongue over his front teeth. “Okay, that guy was a dick to you. Don’t you wanna get him fired?” Emira laughed and said, “For what?” She shifted in her heels and put her phone back in her purse. “So he can go to another grocery store and get some other nine-dollar-an-hour bullshit job? Please. I’m not tryna have people Google my name and see me lit, with a baby that isn’t mine, at a fucking grocery store in Washington Square.””

• * Emira didn’t mind reading or writing papers, but this was also mostly the problem. Emira didn’t love doing anything, but she didn’t terribly mind doing anything either.

• * But Emira wiped the toddler’s chin and said, “That’s a really good question. We should ask your mom.” She honestly meant it. Emira wished that someone would tell her what she liked doing best. The number of things she could ask her own mother were shrinking at an alarming rate.

• * Emira was once followed by sales associates in Brooks Brothers while she shopped for a Father’s Day gift (her mother had said, “They ain’t got nothin’ better to do?”). And once, after a bikini wax was completed, Emira was told that because she had “ethnic texture,” the total came to forty dollars instead of the advertised thirty-five (to this, Emira’s mother had responded, “Back up, you got what waxed?”).

• * But more than the racial bias, the night at Market Depot came back to her with a nauseating surge and a resounding declaration that hissed, You don’t have a real job. This wouldn’t have happened if you had a real fucking job, Emira told herself on the train ride home, her legs and arms crossed on top of each other. You wouldn’t leave a party to babysit. You’d have your own health insurance. You wouldn’t be paid in cash. You’d be a real fucking person.

• * They had nothing interesting to say, their eyes had dead, creepy stares, and they were modest in a way that seemed weirdly rehearsed (Emira often watched Briar approach other toddlers on swings and slides, and they’d turn away from her, saying, “No, I’m shy”). Other children were easy audiences who loved receiving stickers and hand stamps, whereas Briar was always at the edge of a tiny existential crisis.

• * great writing of sex and consent!! “Uh-huh.” Emira laughed once as she moved forward to undo his belt buckle. “You’re like . . . really smart.” --“Okay, miss.” Kelley laughed. “I’m just making sure.”--In between strokes and kisses, Kelley pulled out a condom and placed it on the couch cushion to his left. It sat there like a peace offering or a panic button; a plastic symbol of consent. At one point, he lifted her hips and told her, “Sit up for me,” before he pressed her pelvic bone to his mouth. Emira said what she recognized as a very white expression, “Oh, you don’t have to . . .” By this she meant, I’d rather not return the favor when you’re done. Kelley seemed to understand her appeal. He laughed and said, “I know,” before he took her in his mouth again. He stopped once more to say, “Unless you’re not cool with it,” to which Emira quickly replied, “No, I am.” She balanced her hands and one knee on the back of the couch. For the second time that night she thought, You know what? Fuck it, and she took hold of the back of his head.-- On her way back down Emira reached for the condom. That she stayed on top seemed implicit and implied.

• * amazing writing of platonic relationship: Alix had developed feelings toward Emira that weren’t completely unlike a crush. She became excited to hear Emira’s key in the door, she felt disappointed when it was time for her to leave, and when Emira laughed or spoke without being prompted, Alix felt like she had done something right. The times when this happened were few and far between, which was why Alix kept peeking at her sitter’s cell phone. She would have just checked Emira’s social media channels instead, but from what she’d gathered from searching, Emira didn’t have any.

• * which Alix administered with one hand. “Are you a wine person or no?”

  “I mean, I like it,” Emira said. She set her glass at the other end of the table, then took the books from underneath her arm and set those down too. “But I’m used to drinking like . . . boxed wine, so yeah, I’m no connoisseur.” — There were moments like this that Alix tried to breeze over, but they got stuck somewhere between her heart and ears. She knew Emira had gone to college. She knew Emira had majored in English. But sometimes, after seeing her paused songs with titles like “Dope Bitch” and “Y’all Already Know,” and then hearing her use words like connoisseur, Alix was filled with feelings that went from confused and highly impressed to low and guilty in response to the first reaction. There was no reason for Emira to be unfamiliar with this word. And there was no reason for Alix to be impressed. Alix completely knew these things, but only when she reminded herself to stop thinking them in the first place.

• * !!“I don’t care so much. Okay, listen . . .” Kelley sipped the top layer of his beer and bent his head lower to speak to her. “Emira . . . the fact that Alex sent you to a grocery store with her kid at eleven p.m. makes a lot more sense now. You’re not the first black woman Alex has hired to work for her family, and you probably won’t be the last.” -- "Okay . . . ?” Emira sat down. She didn’t mean to sound flippant, but she doubted that Kelley could really tell her anything she didn’t already know. Emira had met several “Mrs. Chamberlains” before. They were all rich and overly nice and particularly lovely to the people who served them. Emira knew that Mrs. Chamberlain wanted a friendship, but she also knew that Mrs. Chamberlain would never display the same efforts of kindness with her friends as she did with Emira: “accidentally” ordering two salads and offering one to Emira, or sending her home with a bag filled with frozen dinners and soups. It wasn’t that Emira didn’t understand the racially charged history that Kelley was alluding to, but she couldn’t help but think that if she weren’t working for this Mrs. Chamberlain, she’d probably be working for another one.

• * “Okay, first of all?” Emira turned to him. She threw her coat over her arm and held it close. “You don’t get to tell me where I should and shouldn’t work. You literally have a cafeteria in your office. You wear T-shirts to work. And you have a doorman, Kelley, okay? So you can one thousand percent go fuck yourself. The fact that you think you’re better than A-leeks or Alex or whatever is a joke. You will never have to even consider working somewhere that requires a uniform, so you can chill the fuck out about how I choose to make my living. And second of all? You were so fucking rude in there! At a Thanksgiving dinner!”

• * Emira and Kelley talked about race very little because it always seemed like they were doing it already. When she really considered a life with him, a real life, a joint-bank-account-emergency-contact-both-names-on-the-lease life, Emira almost wanted to roll her eyes and ask, Are we really gonna do this? How are you gonna tell your parents? If I’d walked in here when they were still on the screen, how would you have introduced me? Are you gonna take our son to get his hair done? Who’s gonna teach him that it doesn’t matter what his friends do, that he can’t stand too close to white women when he’s on the train or in an elevator? That he should slowly and noticeably put his keys on the roof as soon as he gets pulled over? Or that there are times our daughter should stand up for herself, and times to pretend it was a joke that she didn’t quite catch. Or that when white people compliment her (“She’s so professional. She’s always on time”), it doesn’t always feel good, because sometimes people are gonna be surprised by the fact that she showed up, rather than the fact that she had something to say when she did.

• * Back in high school, Kelley wanted status, and at Alix’s expense, that’s what he’d got. But what did Kelley think he was getting from Emira? How many times had he proudly told the story of how they met? Acting performatively flustered and suggesting that he shouldn’t have? As she sat on the ledge of her bathtub, Alix’s iPad became so warm that it started to burn her legs.

• * On her own and at her best, Briar was odd and charming, filled with intelligence and humor. But there was something about the actual work, the practice of caring for a small unstructured person, that left Emira feeling smart and in control. There was the gratifying reflex of being good at your job, and even better was the delightful good fortune of having a job you wanted to be good at. Without Briar, there were all these markers of time that would come to mean nothing. Was Emira just supposed to exist on her own at six forty-five? Knowing that somewhere else it was Briar’s bathtime? One day, when Emira would say good-bye to Briar, she’d also leave the joy of having somewhere to be, the satisfaction of understanding the rules, the comfort of knowing what’s coming next, and the privilege of finding a home within yourself.

Reference Links:

• Confronting racism is not about the needs and feelings of white people

• It's Not Our Job: An Open Letter To Well-Meaning White People Who Might Be Racist But Aren't Sure

• 12 Books to Keep Your Feminism IntersectionalarXiv.org Free publication papers archive that was referenced.

• Movie Recommendations:

  • The Hate U Give

Wiener - Uncanny Valley

Author: Anna Wiener

Review:

What does it mean to work in Silicon Valley post-2010? What does it mean to work in a world where the evolution of all aspects of life had been privileged, accelerated, and even "Optimized"? I disliked the term optimized, like Anna's observations too, I used to love it (and to an extent today, I still use that term in my life, as I manage different To-Do list, and optimizing strategies of delegation and GTD). I used to love the world of silicon valley and their holistic everything. How going down the streets of SF, I saw a techno-utopia rather than dystopia. I read the last chapter of this book sitting in the heated room of my company, on the massage chairs that my bosses put in for funsies. I love working in my work environment. I like a lot of things I do as a data analyst that covers the flow of traffic and how to find points of contention in our data-driven company. But the discontent and my relationship to the technopolitical world that we live in right now means that I have to be critical of everything that I do, everything that I write, many aspects of my life since most of them are on the internet.

This book isn't a revolution, or in theory, it's not a revolution in memoir, but it is a must-read for those who are coming into the adolescent world of the current technopoly. It's a tremendous holistic insight into the nature of technological change for the iGeneration (born post 1998ish), and Millenials, and even those who inspire or aspire into viral fame. It's a sad, yet revelatory insight into what the postmodern thinkers have projected, but actualized, and what how that effects us today. What I see in the online space is different than the real world, and yet I don't know what's real or not anymore. I no longer understand the power of Twitter trends as truth, compared to the racist incident that I had a few weeks before reading this book. When I said, wait, this guy was racist to me (saying that I looked like Randall Park), and yet, on the online world, this would never happen to me. I know where to go online, and however, in the physical meat spaced world, I had no idea most of the time.

A great read and a must-read for those growing up that aspire into silicon valley. An excellent read for me, because with all due respect, as a male, I can traverse into those tech worlds.

Reading Stats:

• 1/20/20 - 1/22/20

• Reading Level: Freshmen Level College

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

• Publication Date: 2020

Quotes and Notes:

• Pivoting meant they were worried about runway. Pivoting meant they were a cautionary tale. Only the two cofounders were left, tucked off to the side. Everyone else had been let go once funding ran out.
• The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were only opportunities.
• I began to wonder why it was, exactly, that they had hired me. I had been operating under the vain premise that it was because I knew something about books: I could be a bridge between the old and new guards. I had fancied myself a translator; I had fancied myself essential. Later, once I better understood the industry-wide interest in promoting women in tech—if not up the ranks, then at least in corporate marketing materials—I would allow myself to consider that perhaps I was more important to the aesthetic than critical to the business.
• “We host full-time,” he said. “I guess you could say we work for a startup, too.” -- Could I? He and his wife had both quit their day jobs, in the nonprofit sector, to provide the trappings of an authentic urban experience—different enough to be interesting, -- They slept in the basement. They weren’t employees. They were part of the product.
• When asked how he would spend the new funding, the CEO made his priorities clear: he would pay the first hundred employees far above market, he said, and spoil current employees to retain them. This was the language of customer acquisition
• I was selling out. In reality, I was not paying attention: those who understood our cultural moment saw that selling out—corporate positions, partnerships, sponsors—would become our generation’s premier aspiration, the best way to get paid.
• Good interface design was like magic, or religion: it cultivated the mass suspension of disbelief.
• Anything an app or website’s users did—tap a button, -- stored, aggregated, and analyzed in those beautiful dashboards. Whenever I explained it to friends, I sounded like a podcast ad.
• Data could be segmented by anything an app collected—age, gender, political affiliation, hair color, dietary restrictions, body weight, income bracket, favorite movies, education, kinks, proclivities—plus some IP-based defaults, like country, city, cell phone carrier, device type, and a unique device identification code.
• The culture these inhabitants sought and fostered was lifestyle. They engaged with their new home by rating it. Crowdsourced reviewing apps provided opportunities to assign anything a grade: dim sum, playgrounds, hiking trails. Founders went out to eat and confirmed that the food tasted exactly how other reviewers promised it would; they posted redundant photographs of plated appetizers and meticulous restaurant-scapes. They pursued authenticity without realizing that the most authentic thing about the city was, at this moment in time, them.
• Even so, the enemy of a successful startup was complacency. To combat this, the CEO liked to instill fear. He was not a formidable physical presence—he had gelled, spiky hair; he was slight; he often wore a green jacket indoors, presumably to fight the chill—but he could scare the hell out of us. He spoke in military terms. “We are at war,” he would say, standing in front of us with his arms crossed and his jaw tensed. Across the world, Syria and Iraq and Israel raged. We were at war with competitors, for market share. We would look down at our bottles of kombucha or orange juice and nod along gravely.
• there was always an opportunity to accelerate straight into management, like skipping a grade, skipping three. We dressed however we wanted. We were forgiven our quirks. As long as we were productive, we could be ourselves. Work had wedged its way into our identities. We were the company; the company was us. Small failures and major successes were equally reflective of our personal inadequacies or individual brilliance. Momentum was intoxicating, as was the feeling that we were all indispensable.
• Listening to EDM while I worked gave me delusions of grandeur, but it kept me in a rhythm. It was the genre of my generation: the music of video games and computer effects, the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out. It was decadent and cheaply made, the music of ahistory, or globalization—or maybe nihilism, but fun. It made me feel like I had just railed cocaine, except happy. It made me feel like I was going somewhere.
• He asked us to write down the names of the five smartest people we knew, and my coworkers dutifully obliged. --I wrote five names down: a sculptor, a writer, a physicist, two graduate students. I looked at the list and thought about how much I missed them, how bad I’d been at returning phone calls and emails. I wondered how I’d stopped making time for the things and people I held dear. I felt blood rush to my cheeks. “Okay,” the solutions manager said. “Now tell me, why don’t they work here?”
• Everyone was sorting out a way to live. Some of the women instituted systems of gender reparations with their male partners. Staunch atheists bought tarot decks and fretted over how best to infuse them with powerful energy; they discussed rising signs and compared astrological birth charts. They went to outposts in Mendocino to supervise each other through sustained, high-dose LSD trips, intended to reveal their inner children to their adult selves.
• Processing as a hobby made me feel an affinity for the cool, impersonal bullshit of business culture. Radical honesty often looked to me like a collapse of the barrier between subjectivity and objectivity. It could look like cruelty. But it also seemed to work.
• Much as we tried, we were not the CEO’s friends. We were his subordinates. He shut down our ideas and belittled us in private meetings; dangled responsibility and prestige, only to retract them inexplicably. He was not above giving employees the silent treatment. He micromanaged, was vindictive, made us feel inessential and inadequate. We regularly brought him customer feedback, like dogs mouthing tennis balls, and he regularly ignored us.
• I felt very protective of the CEO—or, at least, of my idea of him. For a long time, I would harbor a free-floating sympathy for people I imagined hadn’t had the opportunity to experience their youth the way I had. He never had space to fuck up. He’d been under pressure—and a certain degree of surveillance—from venture capitalists and journalists and industry peers since he was twenty. At the age when I was getting drunk with friends on bottles of three-dollar merlot and stumbling into concerts, splitting clove cigarettes and going to slam-poetry open mics, he was worrying about headcount, reading up on unit economics. I was exploring my sexuality; he was comparing health insurance providers and running security audits. Now, at twenty-five, he was responsible for other adults’ livelihoods. Some of my coworkers had families, even if they tried not to talk too much about their children in the office. Surely, he felt that weight.
• Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men—I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego.
• I wanted to avoid, at all costs, being the feminist killjoy. -- I stopped wearing dresses, to stanch a recruiter’s stream of strange and unsettling compliments about my legs, which he spoke about as if I were a piece of furniture. A chair without a brain. A table with shapely legs. -- Sexism, misogyny, and objectification did not define the workplace—but they were everywhere. Like wallpaper, like air.
• The influencer brought a scooter into the office and rolled around barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking: value prop, first-mover advantage, proactive technology, parallelization. Leading-edge solutions. Holy grail. It was garbage language to my ears, but customers loved him. I couldn’t believe that it worked.
• I also resented that it seemed as if we had no choice: -- to skip out on the off-site. This made it feel like mandatory vacation, mandatory fun. Though it was a reward, a treat, the company trip was scheduled for a three-day holiday weekend, what others in the workforce might have considered personal time.
• Despite the family-friendliness, however, we lacked the natural ease of blood relatives choosing to vacation together. The housing groups had been preassigned, without employee consultation. I liked some of my coworkers better than others, but was largely indifferent to the sleeping arrangements. There was one person I hoped not to bunk with
• The CEO came in and announced that he was flipping the script: to allow the support team some leisure time, the engineers were to do our job instead. We’d spent the morning on the road and the day on the mountain, and the queue of customer tickets stretched out for hours. Already, most of us were drinking. Some had been drinking all afternoon. Though it wasn’t clear if we were working as we partied or partying as we worked, the scene in the condo was one of good-natured frustration as the engineers struggled to explain their own product to our users.
• didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want to correct him. It was perhaps a symptom of my myopia, my sense of security, that I was not thinking about data collection as one of the moral quandaries of our time. For all the industry’s talk about scale, and changing the world, I was not thinking about the broader implications. I was hardly thinking about the world at all.
• As a software engineer, Ian had never encountered a job market with no space for him; he didn’t know what it felt like not to have mobility, options, not to be desired. He loved what he did and could easily command three times my salary. No company would ever neglect to offer him equity. He was his own safety net.
• The endgame was the same for everyone: Growth at any cost. Scale above all. Disrupt, then dominate.
• At the end of the idea: A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything—whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself—could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.
• Unfortunately for me, I liked my inefficient life. I liked listening to the radio and cooking with excessive utensils; slivering onions, detangling wet herbs. Long showers and stoned museum-wandering. I liked riding public transportation: watching strangers talk to their children; watching strangers stare out the window at the sunset, and at photos of the sunset on their phones. I liked taking long walks to purchase onigiri in Japantown, or taking long walks with no destination at all. Folding the laundry. Copying keys. Filling out forms. Phone calls. I even liked the post office, the predictable discontent of bureaucracy. I liked full albums, flipping the record. Long novels with minimal plot; minimalist novels with minimal plot. Engaging with strangers. Getting into it. Closing down the restaurant, having one last drink. I liked grocery shopping: perusing the produce; watching everyone chew in the bulk aisle.
• human. The fetishized life without friction: What was it like? An unending shuttle between meetings and bodily needs? A continuous, productive loop? Charts and data sets. It wasn’t, to me, an aspiration. It was not a prize.
• At the very least, I figured, employees would be talking about sexism openly. Sexism had to be part of the internal conversation. I’d read Foucault, a million years ago: discourse was probably still power. Surely, in the fallout, women would have a place at the table.
• This was peak venture capital, the other side of the ecosystem. The company appeared to be spending its hundred million dollars in venture funding the way any reasonable person would expect founders in their twenties to spend someone else’s money: lavishly. I didn’t need to compare the office to the austere, fluorescent-lit tundra of the analytics startup, or even to Ian’s cool, industrial-chic robotics warehouse, to appreciate the novelty of the work space. It was a fever dream, a fantasy, a playground. It was embarrassing, too giddy; more than a little much.
• For nearly two years, I had been seduced by the confidence of young men. They made it look so simple, knowing what you wanted and getting it. I had been ready to believe in them, eager to organize my life around their principles. -- an entire culture had been seduced. I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It had become a global affliction.
• To ensure that all employees were on equal footing regardless of geography, the majority of business was conducted in text. -- All internal communications and projects were visible across the organization. Due to the nature of the product, every version of every file was preserved. The entire company could practically be reverse engineered.
• But also—it was complicated. “On the one hand, if we have a problem with sexism or sexual harassment, then that problem needs to be addressed,” a teammate told me. “On the other hand, this hurt everyone.” I asked what she meant, and she pushed her hair to the side. “I don’t know if the company will ever recover from this,” she said. “And, to put things bluntly, she wasn’t the only one with equity.”
• Our relationships, fostered through software, did not immediately map onto physical reality. We were all more awkward in person than in the company chat rooms and over video, where conversation flowed.
• I had always considered hacking an inherently political activity, insofar as I thought about hacking at all, but it seemed the identity had been co-opted and neutralized by the industry. Hacking apparently no longer meant circumventing the state or speaking truth to power; it just meant writing code. Maybe would-be hackers just became engineers at top tech corporations instead, where they had easier access to any information they wanted.
• “Flat structure, except for pay and responsibilities,” said an internal tools developer, rolling her eyes. “It’s probably easier to be a furry at this company than a woman.” -- Can’t get sexually harassed when you work remotely, we joked, though of course we were wrong.
• The browser was sick with user-generated opinions and misinformation. I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next.
• Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality. I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to.
• It was the work culture, too: what Silicon Valley got right, how it felt to be there. The energy of being surrounded by people who so easily articulated, and satisfied, their desires. The feeling that everything was just within reach.
• On any given night in America, exhausted parents and New Year’s–resolution cooks were unpacking identical cardboard boxes shipped by meal-prep startups, disposing of identical piles of plastic packaging, and sitting down to identical dishes. Homogeneity was a small price to pay for the erasure of decision fatigue. It liberated our minds to pursue other endeavors, like work.
• My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick;
• Technology was gnawing into relationships, community, identity, the commons. Maybe nostalgia was just an instinctual response to the sense that materiality was disappearing from the world.
• But using male pseudonyms wasn’t just useful for defusing or de-escalating tense exchanges. It was useful for even the most harmless support requests. I was most effective when I removed myself. Men, I saw, simply responded differently to men. My male pseudonyms had more authority than I did.
• I wasn’t sure why anyone should be so eager to hand the keys to society over to people whose primary qualification was curiosity. I wasn’t eager to go to bat for older industries or institutions, but there was something to be said for history, context, deliberation. There was something to be said for expertise.

Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind

Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Review:

This book is gorgeous, it's a story of Barcelona during the early days of the 1900s. With such wonderous translations from the original Spanish, the translated copy provided me with a dreamy atmosphere as I journey through this book. The start, a retelling of the youth of the main character, recounted the lack of memory of his mother. The father then took the child to the cemetery of forgotten books, the start of this creative fiction. Reading this book was similar to me walking down Valencia a few years back. It was 11pm at night, where the roads of Valencia were twisting and turns in the classical parts of the city. Everything was real, the beauty of the Spanish night in the local streets, with the sounds, the commotion, and yet, the mysteries.

To produce magic without incantation, to conjure worlds without sigils, to mystify without gesture.

This book reads like a thriller novel, but dreamy, the hangover fog, and hazy. It's gorgeous for sure, but much like this review, a bit convoluted. It's broken into the perspective of a few characters and meant for those who love prose. This novel reminded me of my journey and has given me many new proses to study. Read this if you like the way Proust wrote, dreamy, dreamy, dreamy.

Reading Stats:

• 1/3/20 - 1/6/20

• Reading Level: Freshmen College

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Quotes and Notes:

• “HEARD A REGULAR CUSTOMER SAY that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”

• * “A SECRET’S WORTH DEPENDS ON THE PEOPLE FROM WHOM IT MUST be kept.”

• * “Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”

• * “Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not for the merits of who receives them,” said my father. “Besides, it can’t be returned. Open it.”

• * The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population,” he would remark. “And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there’s no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church, and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.”

• * Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.”

• * “Let me see. This afternoon, about an hour or an hour and a half ago, a gorgeous young lady came by and asked for you. Your father and yours truly were on the premises, and I can assure you without a shadow of doubt that the girl was no apparition. I could even describe her smell. Lavender, only sweeter. Like a little sugar bun just out of the oven.”

• * The female heart is a labyrinth of subtleties, too challenging for the uncouth mind of the male racketeer. If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is to win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.” I clapped solemnly at his discourse. “You’re a poet, Fermín.” “No, I’m with Ortega and I’m a pragmatist. Poetry lies, in its adorable wicked way, and what I say is truer than a slice of bread and tomato.

• * The man came up to the counter, his eyes darting around the shop, settling occasionally on mine. His appearance and manner seemed vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t say why. Something about him reminded me of one of those figures from old-fashioned playing cards or the sort used by fortune-tellers, a print straight from the pages of an incunabulum: his presence was both funereal and incandescent, like a curse dressed in Sunday best.

• * The caretaker gave me a guarded look. When he smiled, I noticed he was missing at least four upper teeth.

• * "I imagined Julián Carax at my age, holding that image in his hands, perhaps in the shade of the same tree that now sheltered me. I could almost see him smiling confidently, contemplating a future as wide and luminous as that avenue, and for a moment I thought there were no more ghosts there than those of absence and loss, and that the light that smiled on me was borrowed light, real only as long as I could hold it in my eyes, second by second.”

• * “Not evil,” Fermín objected. “Moronic, which isn’t quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn’t stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced that he’s doing good, that he’s always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around fucking up, if you’ll excuse the French, anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or, as in the case of Don Federico, his leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.”

• * "if you see my father, tell him I'm well. Lie to him."

• * Few years separated her from the hospice’s guests. “Listen, isn’t the apprentice a bit young for this sort of work?” she asked. “The truths of life know no age, Sister,” remarked Fermín. The nun nodded and smiled at me sweetly. There was no suspicion in that look, only sadness.“

Reference Links:

• Forgotten books: 17 years since ‘The Shadow of the Wind’

• Readers Guide by Penguin Random House Books

This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto by Suketu Mehta

By: Suketu Mehta

Review:

Suketu Mehta, a first-generation immigrant's open manifesto on what it means to be an immigrant in this country and some other countries as well. This book backs up the personal narrative from those seeking to cross the borders with statistics about them, making his arguments much more convincing both on moral grounds and on statistical grounds. The first part of this book hit me hard. Many times it triggered me due to how close I was personally to these migrants journeys. Thankfully the second part of the book was a lot easier for me to digest due to the more global ideas on migrants. For example, he covers much about colonialism, war, global warming, and various factors that aren't covered by the Trump administration.

The last part of the book, however, gave some impressive stats on why immigration is a good thing for many first-world nations. Notability that the more immigrants there are (whether legal or illegal), the better the crime rates become (lower crime rates). There is an increase in social security benefits for the older generations since most of the new migrants are younger influx.

The hardest part that one ought to think about is the cost of the first immigrant communities. Because once the migrants are set in, the following generations provide financial, social, and educational improvements to the culture around it.

Overall, a fantastic statistically filled book on what the cost of immigration, whether legal or illegal is, that covers the full map of immigration issues.

Stats:

• Reading Date: 12/9/19 - 12/9/19

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes:

• "It’s astonishing that the multiculturalism is lower Manhattan had some of the lowest crime rates since 1950s due to the amount of immigrants there."

• "Among the various themes I've learned from this book so far, on why migration exist in many third world countries is, global warming. Migrants can't eat because the lands are dry, where the only source of jobs is the militias. Also with 1.5 raise in global temperature, there's a 15 percent lost of corn in India."