Category Archives: Recommended Reading
The Possibility of an Island
If I have a job in the Fall, I’ll probably teach this dystopian novel by Michel Houellebecq:
Houellebecq is an interesting writer with a certain degree of notoriety. To me he also looks a lot like Antonin Artaud after years of drug abuse and electro-convulsive therapy:
Organize
The last Democratic president urged his party to embrace the audacity of hope. For him, hope was an airy thing: a feeling rooted in the faith that our future can be built on reason and goodwill alone. But offering real hope to the American people is a material project. Hope depends upon the deconstruction of an economic system that leaves too many Americans wondering if they have the resources and capacity to make it through today and a privileged few free to build themselves a better tomorrow.
Osita Nwanevu, “Don’t Mourn Bernie Sanders’s Candidacy, Organize”
Journal 1
“All the Plays and Interludes, which after the Manner of the French Court, had been set up, and began to encrease among us, were forbid to Act; the gaming Tables, publick dancing Rooms, and Music Houses which multiply’d, and began to debauch the Manners of the People, were shut up and suppress’d; and the Jack-puddings, Merry-andrews, Puppet-shows, Rope-dancers, and such like doings, which had bewitch’d the poor common People, shut up their Shops, finding indeed no Trade; for the Minds of the People were agitated with other Things; and a kind of Sadness and Horror at these Things, sat upon the Countenances, even of the common People; Death was before their Eyes, and every Body began to think of their Graves, not of Mirth and Diversions.”
–Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
No Distance (225/310/425/485)
Bill Duke directed this adaptation of Chester Himes’s 1958 crime novel A Rage in Harlem.
Charles Portis
Charles Portis. 1933-2020.
Pie (225/310/425/485)
Not a huge fan of network news in general but this is worth looking at.
Speculators
Film Noir Festival 2020
FNF20
Jack (310/485)
As Christian, Amy, and Declan indicated The Great White Hope is based on the life of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion in the US. The PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness is widely available and worth screening not only for its depiction of Johnson, but its representation of the era. See, for example:
