Like so many other books coming out even this year, this book is an awkward cousin to The Tempest. Miranda is Mama Day, the late-aged healer of the island “Willow Springs” on the border between South Carolina and Georgia. This is a book chock full of characters named for Shakespeare denizens, like Ophelia, Miranda, Cicero, and George. It’s kind of a Caribbean book, but more so has the history and taste of Gullah islands, retaining a lot of its Americanness. The novel is told from three […]
Powerhouse is playing!
Here’s Eudora Welty reading her story “The Worn Path,” from this collection: I first read Welty in college in an intro to American Lit class, specifically “A Petrified Man” from this collection, which remains one of my very favorite stories of all time. It’s funny, it’s weird, and it’s crass. It’s irreverent in just the right way. Other stories from this collection hit the same kinds of spots. The stars of this one included “A Petrified Man,”Why I live at the P.O.,” “Old Mr. Marblehall,” […]
Look, of course I am going to talk about Stranger Things
I guess will mention that I like Stranger Things just fine. But it has a false veneer to it because there’s so many nods to so many things. That’s fun, but it automatically lacks depth or seriousness (and I will not be arguing that this series lacks thematic depth, but it does have narrative depth), because if you’re winking and nodding too much, you’re not doing a whole lot. This series is a lot of fun too. The girls are tough, the writing is tight, […]
I laughed exactly one time.
Tears we cannot stop by Michael Eric Dyson
Jeremiads have a long tradition in American lit. From the Puritan sermons railing against the turning back to Europe for guidance in the wilderness to Jonathan Edwards worrying about the materialist worldview to Martin Luther King derided fellow clergy for imploring him to have patience. The heart of a Jeremiad is a desire to take those in your fold and remind them of what’s right. Maybe that’s what has been needed among the many many discussions of how the 2016 election happened. This book seeks […]
Totalitarian Double Murder!
Because I recently read Invisible Man again and it’s long and draining and pretty much exactly from the same year as this book, I thought I would journal about this book as I am reading for a somewhat different sense of it. Section 1: Pages 1-150: This book starts off with a group of friends bullshitting in the street. As Cross Damon makes away from his group, he starts to feel a deeply encroaching stress and pressure take hold of him. We are subject to this stress […]
When you realize you’re more Bill than Charlie
I didn’t read this book when I was younger. I am 35 now, and I am a high school English teacher. I am NOT Bill per se because I am not a well-meaning Teach for a America fellow, but instead am a long-working teacher who is much more likely to put a few books in the hands of a student or read the ones they give me. Also, I am not Charlie in this book. My adolescent was pretty tame in comparison. However, not exactly […]
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