#book forum

[literaturha]

[confrontthefamiliar]

“Any writer worth a fuck should be in the business of killing lies. Regardless of what fictions must be made up, the art of writing is about killing lies. It is a kind of war and, being that, it may consume you, or it may make you sick...”

Nico Walker on the death of Giancarlo DiTrapano

[review-mxtakes]

first off -- i'm sorry if you've already received an invitation to FREEDOM & LITERACY. I look through my favorite author's/books tags and tend to message people inside those. It's hard to keep track of who I've invited so far!ANYWAY: i'm inviting you to a forum for book lovers! we are NOT a book club, i promise. there are no mandatory readalongs or anything like that. we just love books!!the link is here: https://freeliteracy.jcink.netthere is absolutely NO pressure for you to join, or for you to post this publicly. hell, you can even blatantly ignore me. that's fine. i don't mind.i simply want to talk to more people about books, and if it takes messaging individuals, than i'll do that!anyway, i really hope that you and yours have a good week, and if you made it this far, thank you for your time!JAY

Whilst this isn't personally for me - because realistically I am someone who signs up to something and completely forgets that they have done so 10 mins later, this sounds like an amazing project and I wish you all the best on it.

(Totally not ignoring it, I hope people do join the forum ❤️)

[redshift-13]

Adam Gopnik’s defense of liberalism

“There is a small but growing industry devoted to picking apart liberals like Gopnik from the left for their brittle pomposity, their comfortable hypocrisy, their proud ignorance. A Thousand Small Sanities adds plenty of grist for that mill: The book praises William Gladstone as a “liberal internationalist avant la lettre” without mentioning his campaign (contra the brave workers of Lancashire) to protect the “rights” of Confederate slave breeders. Gopnik thinks he’s caught leftists in a bind with his new term “opportunistic essentialism”—criticizing the contradiction between the simultaneous use of essentialized identities and the critique thereof—apparently unaware that “strategic essentialism” has been an important concept in postcolonial theory for decades. There’s an asterisk for each arrogant “sanity.” But as an exercise, dunking on liberals is unfulfilling: Odds are not many people will reach for this book except to be reassured, and it does a good job of that. While good Marxists hold to the slogan “Always historicize,” Gopnik offers the alternative: “These problems are permanent.” Human nature vs. human reason is the only real conflict we’ve ever had, Trump plus global warming is a mere speed bump, and liberalism has plenty of time to make its case. Gopnik’s pop-history platitudes are “Live. Laugh. Love.” needlepoint for the MSNBC set, and the book could make a good gift. But no one should read A Thousand Small Sanities and get cocky. Any socialist teen with access to Wikipedia could rip it apart. I can’t imagine the man convinced his daughter.”

[redshift-13]

Top Shelf

Writers choose the best books of the year.

[redshift-13]

Today’s masculinity

It’s time for men to stop worrying about who they are, and start thinking about what they do

“Matthew J. Etchells, Elizabeth Deuermeyer, Vanessa Liles, Samantha Meister, Mario Itzel Suarez, and Warren L. Chalklen (Texas A&M): White Male Privilege: An Intersectional Deconstruction. Why girls can be boyish but boys can’t be girlish. The grown white man in his underwear in Mommy’s basement is the poster boy for a new identity category, the gender separatist. It’s time for men to stop worrying about who they are, and start thinking about what they do. Patriarchy deflated: The #MeToo movement is making male power look silly. What about the boys? Nora Fyles on educating boys for gender justice. Katrina Karkazis on the masculine mystique of T.

Emily K. Carian and Tagart Cain Sobotka (Stanford): Playing the Trump Card: Masculinity Threat and the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election. Too many men: In China and India, men outnumber women by 70 million — both nations are belatedly trying to come to grips with the policies that created this male-heavy generation. University of Texas campaign around healthy masculinity plunges conservative outlets deep into their feelings. Kevin Hardcastle interviews Daemon Fairless on getting into fights, the anxiety-based roots of violence, and the co-opting of masculinity by “public intellectuals”. How Big Dick Energy explains modern masculinity: Big Dick Energy is the meme we need in 2018.

Phil Christman (Michigan): What Is It Like to Be a Man? Samuel Veissiere (McGill): “Toxic Masculinity” in the Age of #MeToo: Ritual, Morality, and Gender Archetypes Across Cultures. Anthony Bourdain took responsibility for toxic masculinity and called out his friends. Today’s masculinity is stifling: As boys grow up, the process of becoming men encourages them to shed the sort of intimate connections and emotional intelligence that add meaning to life. Alia Wong on the many possible meanings of the “masculinity crisis”. Alison Lefkovitz on Jordan Peterson and the return of the men’s rights movement. What kind of man takes his wife’s last name?”

[realbeeing]

What I mean by 'artifice' is social language, styles, and manners, a public way of being that is by necessity coded, fixed, and hard, and which has become even more so through the emergence of the virtual world. In physical life, the hardness and (frequent) deceptiveness of such language is offset by the deep, doggishly honest presence of the body; in the virtual world, such animal presence is either absent or faked. Gone Girl doesn’t compare to other books so much as it evokes flipping through TV shows (including the news) and glimpsing face after chirping face, all with only slight variations on the same manner of speech and 'smart,' high-speed delivery common to Facebook, texting, and tweeting; that is to say, the book evokes (impressively, one might argue) a hyperartificial, hive-minded way of relating, combined with what has become a cultural ideal of relentless feminine charm tied to power and control.

Mary Gaitskill

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/2003/12173