January 9, 2020 at 2:09 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, television, Women Writers)
Tags: essays, nonfiction, reading lists
Since finishing The Hobbit, a week and a half ago, self has read two books by women: The Haunting of the Mexican Border, by Kathryn Ferguson (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) and Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino (Random House, 2019).
Ferguson undertakes an exploration of the southern border, with a vague hope of making a documentary: she doesn’t have funds, doesn’t know anyone, but stumbles around, talking to whoever will talk to her. And she IS lucky: nothing bad happens to her.
Jia Tolentino is lucky. The daughter of Philippine parents who became Canadian citizens, she is smart as a whip, in-your-face, and funny. Her style is to sit back and analyze everything that happens to her, and everything she does.
In Essay # 2 of Trick Mirror, she recounts her time as a reality TV contestant (She was 16. Never one to miss an advantage, she packs a lot of pocket-sized mini-skirts. Points!). After analyzing her fellow castmates (one was “a sweet guy,” another was “the all-American girl,” still another was “the wacko,” etc.), she asks her castmates what they thought she’d been cast as:
Though I’m sure they would’ve answered differently if someone else had been asking, my castmates guessed I was the smart one, or the sweet one, or the “fun Southern one,” or the prude.
(It is amazing that someone would ever think she’d been cast as “the prude,” given the pocket-sized minis!)
But then she writes, disarmingly, that reality TV “is a narcissist’s fantasy come true . . . everyone likes to have an audience. Everyone thinks they deserve one.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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January 8, 2020 at 2:57 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: essays, news, politics
White nationalists have brought white people together through the idea that white people are endangered, specifically white men — this at a time when 91 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are white men, when white people make up 90 percent of elected American officials and an overwhelming majority of top decision-makers in music, publishing, television, movies and sports.
— The I in the Internet, Essay # 1 in Trick Mirror
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January 8, 2020 at 4:05 am (Books, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Personal Bookshelf, Philippine History, Places, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: essays, Filipino food, memories, New Mexico, teaching, The Philippines
Doreen G. Fernandez was self’s Freshman English professor at the Ateneo de Manila University. Her greatness was in her writing. She wrote beautifully about her subject: Philippine food, and its long history.
Recently, self began re-reading her book Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture (Anvil Publishing, Philippines, 1994)
Her Process:
My teachers are all those who give me information about food: market vendors, street sellers, cooks, chefs, waiters, restaurant and carinderia owners, farmers, tricycle drivers, gardeners, fishermen, aficionados, nutritionists, readers of my columns, friends, food critics and historians, fellow researchers, authors of books (and cookbooks), writers of columns, food anthropologists — everyone who eats and cares.
— Doreen G. Fernandez, 13 June 1994
For self, the biggest, most interesting stop in her very brief late December visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico was the Farmer’s Market. It was bitter cold, snow lined the tracks of the railyard just adjacent, and inside a vast warehouse were smells, the indescribable smells of chili, pine, roasted coffee. Oh, heaven.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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January 7, 2020 at 1:49 pm (Books, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: essays, nonfiction, reading lists
- Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend — we learn this as early as elementary school — and politically, it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look. — p. 22, Trick Mirror
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September 26, 2019 at 1:03 am (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Dearest Mum, Filipino Writers, Memoirs, Pianos, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, essays, fiction, flash fiction, inspiration, Literary Magazines, literature of medicine, memoirs
Grace Loh Prasad curated, Roy Kamada’s Grey Matter has just posted.
Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.
More goodness — from Caroline Kim Brown and Grace herself — to follow.
Grace’s introductory essay, here.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 15, 2019 at 12:55 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Places, Recommended)
Tags: English writers, environment, essays, London, natural history, nonfiction, reading lists, Redwood City, summer
from p. 118 of Landfill: Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene, “Needs”:
I’d read my Henry Mayhew on London’s waste workers and had been out at night on the Thames with the body-salvagers of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. I stayed away from Milton. My telescope wouldn’t have been welcomed by anyone and I don’t think I could have used it. The hunt for the body resumed in the late autumn of 2017 in a part of the landfill adjacent to the area already examined. After seven fruitless weeks the search was called off.
Redwood City, July 2019
Love Dee’s book. So much.
Stay tuned.
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August 11, 2019 at 4:37 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Sundays)
Tags: English writers, environment, essays, London, nature writing, nonfiction, science writing
Landfill: Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene is a great book. Lord how self parses every paragraph.
Late last night, self got to Essay # 7: “The Birds,” about the iconic Daphne du Maurier short story and Hitchcock’s film adaptation of it. This morning she began the next piece: “London Labour and London Poor,” the title of a “work of epic taxonomical ethnography” by Henry Mayhew.
p. 82:
Dust is everywhere in Mayhew’s city . . . He knows there is no such thing as dirt. It exists — just as Mary Douglas spelled out a hundred years later — only in the eye of a beholder. “No single item,” she said, “is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit.” But, for Mayhew, dirt is the one thing he most wants to define.
Yet he can never fix it. How do you count dust? How do you hold it? What is it? The powdered world? The fundamental raw material? Sediment or suspension? A cast of everything that has lived? That which we tread on — or breathe? That which we are? Hamlet’s quintessence?
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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March 18, 2019 at 4:06 am (Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Explorers, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Recommended, Sundays)
Tags: Asian American Writers, discoveries, essays, history, nonfiction, Salon.com, San Francisco
Love Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco. Reading the essays in it painstakingly slowly.
Gary Kamiya was one of the founders of Salon.com (still going strong!). An ex-fellow Fellow from Stanford, Jim Paul, used to write for them. As did Chitra Divakaruni. As did Laura Miller. As did Heather Havrilesky.
Self is on Essay # 5, The Harbor at the End of the World:
A 1508 map by Johannes Ruysch depicts South America as the New World, with Asia in the place where North America actually is.
Private beach access for this homeowner along the Mendocino coast
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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January 1, 2019 at 3:19 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Links, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: California history, discoveries, essays, history, San Francisco
- What is remarkable about the Tenderloin is that it has remained physically unchanged for more than 80 years. It is a time capsule. The same progressive forces that have kept out ‘progress’ and inadvertently created a Museum of Depravity, have also created a Museum of the Lost City, a vanished world memorialized in the neighborhood’s extraordinary collection of residential hotels. There are hundreds of these historic SROs in the Tenderloin, the largest number in the world. The SROs are the reason that in 2008, the Uptown Tenderloin was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the 24th San Francisco neighborhood to be so listed.
— Gary Kamiya, “Adventures in the Skin Trade”
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August 19, 2018 at 2:53 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Sundays, Surprises, television, Women Writers)
Tags: essays, humor, reading lists
Self will put off My Cousin Rachel for a week or so, just so she can un-knot her nerves after reading Jamaica Inn (Five Stars)
She began reading Would Everybody Please Stop? by Jenny Allen.
Sometimes, when I first go to sleep for the night, I fall asleep to the television. And this is a strange thing: No matter what I have fallen asleep watching, when I wake up, what’s on is Girls Gone Wild. I never turn the channel to Girls Gone Wild, let alone turn up the volume, but the volume is ear-splitting.
If someone had told self that less than 24 hours after bidding farewell to Altarnun, Launceston, and the moors, she would be reading about Girls Gone Wild, she would have said: Shut up!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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