working-class-jobs candidate

"But Ryan’s bid may have the most riding on it, because it is based on substantive disagreements within the party about how to rebuild the middle class and the middle of the country. For years, too many leading Democrats stood by as the wrenching transformation of the economy devastated communities, while accruing benefits to a small set of highly prosperous cities, mostly on the coasts, that became the party’s gravitational center. It was so easy to disregard far-off desolation — or to take only passing note of it, counting the dollar stores as one happened to traverse areas of decline — until Trump’s victory brought it to the fore."

~~ from "Tim Ryan: The Working-Class-Jobs Candidate in the Era or Resentment" by Alec MacGillis

Rushdie update

Salman Rushdie will live without use of one hand and eye.

he had volunteered

"The recruits were on the march with varying degrees of consent: some were volunteers, others were volunteered by their elders who themselves were under duress, some swept up or coerced by circumstances, some picked up on the road. The schutztruppe was expanding and was eager for fighting men. Some of them talked freely, already swaggering with anticipation, familiar with this kind of work, laughing at the bullying words of their escort, eager to be admitted into the language of scorn. Others were silent and anxious, perhaps even fearful, not sure yet of what lay ahead. Hamza was in the latter category, silently wretched about what he had done. No one had forced him, he had volunteered."

~~ from Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Linghun

 

Linghun by Ai Jiang

note from January 6

from poet Lamont Steptoe

 

2022 Nobel Prize for Literature

Do you find it fishy that Salman Rushdie did not win the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature? In fact, the Swedish Academy chose the knitting needle over the knife as their writing utensil, so to speak, if I heard correctly as a radio program discussed Nobel prizewinner Annie Ernaux's memoir of seeking an abortion in France in the early 1960s. It's worth noting, of course, that the decision could have been made well before Rushdie was nearly murdered on stage in a savage attack.

why pretend

"But what if I am overstating these points and everyone really does accept that race is cultural and not biological? Is this really such a good thing? If human beings are not members of scientifically measurable "bioraces," then why pretend as though they are? Why do the work of making race by other, non-scientific means? If witchcraft isn't real, then why pretend as though witches walk among us? When I asked Adrian Piper, the artist who 'retired' from being black, whether she believed there was even something so straightforward as a 'black' sensibility, she denied it. Her point, which is worth taking seriously, is similar to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s: All human culture is available and knowable to all human beings. (Which is not quite the same as saying all human culture is equally important to all human beings.)"

~~ from Unlearning Race: Self-Portrait in Black and White by Thomas Chatterton Williams

a tiny epic

"I picked this one up on the fly from a used bookstore just around the corner, a tiny epic about an adjunct instructor teaching in Philadelphia who is living an ironic life—being a [college]-educated professional making less [than] a bartender, with no health insurance or safety net thanks to the income inequities so common everywhere in America (and the globalized world) these days."

~~ from a review at Robert Raymond's Blogtorium with a selected quotation at his DOG EAR.