Whatcha reading?

[Dr. Medulla]

First of a trilogy, I'd seen and loved the TV series a few years back. So the first book covers about 4 days, starting when a passenger plane lands in New York, the entire 200 passengers dead. The next night they're all gone from the morgue. They're vampires and they gone home to turn their loved ones, all part of the insidious plot by "The Master" to turn the whole planet, breaking a truce between the other ancients. My copy has a contest to meet Guillermo del Toro in person. I know I get over excited about shit, but there was not a single dull page out of the nearly 600. Action packed from the open.

Loved the show, hated the kid.

Monkey said the same. The kid has been introduced and has a role, but he hasn't done much other than exist. Oh, he prefers the Yankees over his dad's Red Sox.

Trying to give him one redeeming quality

A tolerance for evil is redeeming?

[Silent Majority]

57) Henry IV, part one - William Shakespeare. 1597. Play on both Kindle and audiobook simultaneously. It's a play about fathers and sons and the younger generation reaching their potentiality. Despite his reputation, Bill Shakespeare managed to make me laugh with some of his ribbing of Falstaff - needlessly named Oldcastle here, ignoring 400 years of literary tradition. The last few scenes of battle were a thrill, too, where I usually don't give a shit about action.

[Silent Majority]

58) Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett. Audiobook. 2006. A wonderful piece of modern myth work, with younger readers invited along for the ride. Funny, humane, fiercely furious, all the usual Pratchett hallmarks.

[Silent Majority]

59) Antigone Rising: The Subversive Powers of the Greek Myths - Helen Morales. 2020. Audiobook. Morales is a Beyonce feminist, an academic with an egalitarian philosophy, who is angry at the world as she's found it. This book uses the Greek myths as the relevant and immortal lens through which to tell us these stories about ourselves. I did find that, with noble intentions mostly met, by nature of her position as a relatively well-to-do academic she writes from a bastion of privilege and her target audience seems to be the same. I found a class analysis to be glaringly lacking, amongst all the other good work done within. It succeeds in what it sets out to do. It both makes the reader wish to read the myths spoken of and see them as worth engaging with in a modern context

[Dr. Medulla]

59) Antigone Rising: The Subversive Powers of the Greek Myths - Helen Morales. 2020. Audiobook. Morales is a Beyonce feminist, an academic with an egalitarian philosophy, who is angry at the world as she's found it. This book uses the Greek myths as the relevant and immortal lens through which to tell us these stories about ourselves. I did find that, with noble intentions mostly met, by nature of her position as a relatively well-to-do academic she writes from a bastion of privilege and her target audience seems to be the same. I found a class analysis to be glaringly lacking, amongst all the other good work done within. It succeeds in what it sets out to do. It both makes the reader wish to read the myths spoken of and see them as worth engaging with in a modern context

Academic feminism has long suffered from an assumption of middle- to upper-class and white norms. Even when being conscious of it, they can't help but step on rakes.

[gkbill]

59) Antigone Rising: The Subversive Powers of the Greek Myths - Helen Morales. 2020. Audiobook. Morales is a Beyonce feminist, an academic with an egalitarian philosophy, who is angry at the world as she's found it. This book uses the Greek myths as the relevant and immortal lens through which to tell us these stories about ourselves. I did find that, with noble intentions mostly met, by nature of her position as a relatively well-to-do academic she writes from a bastion of privilege and her target audience seems to be the same. I found a class analysis to be glaringly lacking, amongst all the other good work done within. It succeeds in what it sets out to do. It both makes the reader wish to read the myths spoken of and see them as worth engaging with in a modern context

Academic feminism has long suffered from an assumption of middle- to upper-class and white norms. Even when being conscious of it, they can't help but step on rakes.

Hello,

It's great to understand that Walmart's corporate policies hurt the lower economic classes so we shouldn't shop at Walmart. I've got plenty of poor friends that understand this but "Hey, Walmart is cheaper...I can't afford NOT to shop at Walmart.". It's a difficult situation.

[Dr. Medulla]

59) Antigone Rising: The Subversive Powers of the Greek Myths - Helen Morales. 2020. Audiobook. Morales is a Beyonce feminist, an academic with an egalitarian philosophy, who is angry at the world as she's found it. This book uses the Greek myths as the relevant and immortal lens through which to tell us these stories about ourselves. I did find that, with noble intentions mostly met, by nature of her position as a relatively well-to-do academic she writes from a bastion of privilege and her target audience seems to be the same. I found a class analysis to be glaringly lacking, amongst all the other good work done within. It succeeds in what it sets out to do. It both makes the reader wish to read the myths spoken of and see them as worth engaging with in a modern context

Academic feminism has long suffered from an assumption of middle- to upper-class and white norms. Even when being conscious of it, they can't help but step on rakes.

Hello,

It's great to understand that Walmart's corporate policies hurt the lower economic classes so we shouldn't shop at Walmart. I've got plenty of poor friends that understand this but "Hey, Walmart is cheaper...I can't afford NOT to shop at Walmart.". It's a difficult situation.

Certainly. There's consciousness raising and then there's not starving to death. Criticism has to go hand-in-hand with building alternatives.

[Silent Majority]

59) Antigone Rising: The Subversive Powers of the Greek Myths - Helen Morales. 2020. Audiobook. Morales is a Beyonce feminist, an academic with an egalitarian philosophy, who is angry at the world as she's found it. This book uses the Greek myths as the relevant and immortal lens through which to tell us these stories about ourselves. I did find that, with noble intentions mostly met, by nature of her position as a relatively well-to-do academic she writes from a bastion of privilege and her target audience seems to be the same. I found a class analysis to be glaringly lacking, amongst all the other good work done within. It succeeds in what it sets out to do. It both makes the reader wish to read the myths spoken of and see them as worth engaging with in a modern context

Academic feminism has long suffered from an assumption of middle- to upper-class and white norms. Even when being conscious of it, they can't help but step on rakes.

It's true - and Morales is genuinely trying very hard here to avoid those rakes.

[Dr. Medulla]

Back in grad school days in NC, a young women a year behind us whom we were friends with, told us about presenting a paper at a conference and getting ripped by an old feminist scholar. The paper, as I recall, was about Palestinian and Israeli women who placed greater value on their ethnic identity than any shared commonalities as women. That is, their position in that ethno-political conflict was more important. And this scholar just tore into her for defending these women's choices, that they and she had been brainwashed by paternalism, yadayadayada. It reflected quite well my chief criticism of social science, that they're more comfortable thinking in abstracts and universal principles rather than the muddiness of real world conflicting values and choices.

[Dr. Medulla]

Tub book:

Read this maybe 20 or 25 years ago, but it caught my eye on the shelf, so why not?

[Silent Majority]

Tub book:

Read this maybe 20 or 25 years ago, but it caught my eye on the shelf, so why not?

Not the world's greatest graphic design

[Dr. Medulla]

Tub book:

Read this maybe 20 or 25 years ago, but it caught my eye on the shelf, so why not?

Not the world's greatest graphic design

No, not at all. The designer would have adored the early years of the web.

[Silent Majority]

60) Changes: An Oral History of Tupac Shakur - Sheldon Pearce. Audiobook. 2021. A lively biopic from sources yet to share their experiences with a remake artist which casts new and interesting light on his story. It helps explain his contribution to rap and his sometimes self defeating choices. You get a portrait of a powerful personality not yet fully moulded when he was murdered at the ridiculously young age of 25. Understandably, it closes with some speculation from the interviewees about where he may have gone next artistically, but we'll never know.

[Kory]

Tub book:

Read this maybe 20 or 25 years ago, but it caught my eye on the shelf, so why not?

Not the world's greatest graphic design

No, not at all. The designer would have adored the early years of the web.

They should be happy now that web brutalism is making a minor reappearance.

[Dr. Medulla]

Tub book:

Read this maybe 20 or 25 years ago, but it caught my eye on the shelf, so why not?

Not the world's greatest graphic design

No, not at all. The designer would have adored the early years of the web.

They should be happy now that web brutalism is making a minor reappearance.

And as a deliberate statement, a la zines in the 80s and 90s that wanted to emphasize that the creators were amateurs, I can get behind that. I can respect pretty much any purposeful expression even if I disagree with it or find it unpersuasive.