Nonfiction
Sanford Levinson, An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century: An interesting but not entirely successful conceit: an essay for each one of the Federalist papers. One result is to highlight that the concerns of the Founders were not our own-though some issues (like party politics) and thus some of the Federalist Papers remain very important, many of the things they worried about are now pretty established, without much fuss. Among the questions of continuing importance: Levinson points out that Publius was concerned to preserve American homogeneity and that this concern still has resonance today, as we make lawful residents wait five years before eligibility for citizenship, and longer before they can serve in the House or Senate (7 and 9 years, respectively), not to mention the exclusion of naturalized citizens from the Presidency. Likewise, anti-Federalists charged that Congress might manipulate the electorate by requiring that the vote take place in one city in a state, predictably excluding a class of voters. Publius responded that Congress wouldn’t do that because of the backlash from the states-but now, of course, we have states that are trying to do exactly this with polling places, and the only plausible recourse is to the federal government, if we manage to make that work ever again.
Levinson is an advocate for a new constitutional convention and a new constitution freeing us from the chronic mis-representation of the Senate and the Electoral College-and he was before 2016, too. He points out that taking Publius seriously would mean being open to serious upheavals in governmental structure, which was after all what Publius sought and achieved. (Among other things, each congressional district in 1789 had a voting population of around 20,000; today each district has roughly 400,000 voters.) “[W]e must ask ourselves if it was only Publius’s generation that had a duty to improve the institutions of American governance in order to perpetuate its central goals …. [W]e must be willing to honor their example not by mindless adherence to their own decisions of 1787, but by standing in their shoes (or on their shoulders) and asking what improvements are necessary in our own time.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir:Laymon writes tenderly of terrible things in this memoir written as an address to his mother, a woman who demanded excellence and also beat him savagely. The writing is painfully about involving sex, sexual abuse, his weight, his disordered eating, the racial expectations and threats he faces from teachers and others, and his addiction to gambling. A lot of times, I was reminded of Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”-the book is full of lacunae, obvious failures to speak that testify to the depth of the pain of life.
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays: A collection merging Cottom’s “thick description” with the politics of blackness. She didn’t conceive of these as personal essays, even though “the personal essay had become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes black women.” She discusses the negative reactions she got from black women when she described herself as unattractive; she resists the idea that she could be “beautiful” under racism and capitalism, because the aspiration would make her into a market subject and she wants to name what’s been done to her. The hardest essay to read is about the death of her newborn, which was preceded by pain and bleeding and healthcare professionals assuming she was incompetent and later berating her for not telling them something was wrong earlier (she did, but they didn’t understand her symptoms as important)-I’ve experienced a fraction of this treatment as a white woman, but for black women it routinely kills their babies.
Cottom also writes about universities’ expectations that black “ethnic” students (immigrants or children of immigrants) will do better than U.S. black students, and points out that we are “generally cherrypicking the winners of extreme social stratification in other countries through our admissions processes.” The most bitterly hilarious part is the essay on why she wants banal black women writers at elite outlets, “since David Brooks wrote 865 words about how gourmet sandwiches are ruining America in the New York effing Times.That was 593 words more than the Gettysburg Address and about 365 words more than we allow poor students to write about their neediness on many scholarship applications.” Otherwise, the great black women intellectuals she knows will continue doing second-, third-, and fourth-shift work to get published in the same places, instead of benefits and a salary-the bind is that you get exposure but only by contributing to writers’ economic precarity, but that bind is unequally distributed.
Lux Alptraum, Faking It: The Lies Women Tell about Sex-And the Truths They Reveal: Basic thesis: “while a number of honorable women have been unfairly slandered as dishonest, it’s the lies that many, if not most, of us are telling on a daily basis that offer the greater insight into the female experience. We lie because it makes our day-to-day lives easier; we lie to keep ourselves safe; we lie because no one believes us when we tell the truth. But most of all, we lie because the world expects us to live up to an impossible standard-and frequently, lying is the only way to get through life with our sanity intact.” Alptraum covers faking orgasm (or faking understanding why orgasm is a big deal), lies about virginity (or lack thereof), lies about sexual interest, lies about having a boyfriend, makeup as “lying,” and lies about contraception, with a coda on lies about rape (adults who lie usually have otherwise disordered lives and report a stranger rape, while juveniles are more likely to lie to avoid parental condemnation). “When women are assumed to be unable, or unwilling, to overtly communicate desire, men treat everything as a covert expression of desire, a secret code that they and they alone have the power to decipher.” Along the way, she argues for acknowledging the struggles and realities of all kinds of women-those who can and can’t orgasm through vaginal penetration alone, those who lie and use long-term contraception as a form of harm reduction because they’re in abusive relationships, those who lie and don’t use contraception because they want to control their own reproductive futures, those who are willing to have not-fantastic sex for other goals, those who want casual sex and those who don’t. Even so, she recognizes, some of these lies end up contributing to toxic myths, and others just don’t encourage (mostly) men to do any better. I’m not sure I learned a lot, but it was a saddening juxtaposition of different types of lies, often because women haven’t been asked for their truths. In comparison, she points out, men who pressure and deceive to get sex-or lie and remove the condom they agreed to wear-don’t see themselves as untrustworthy, but as doing what is only natural and commendable. Ultimately, as she quotes one of her sources, “[w]e don’t need empowerment messages; we need power,” and a lie is, “in a sense, an attempt to claim power, and as a short-term strategy it can be a fairly successful one.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Levinson is an advocate for a new constitutional convention and a new constitution freeing us from the chronic mis-representation of the Senate and the Electoral College-and he was before 2016, too. He points out that taking Publius seriously would mean being open to serious upheavals in governmental structure, which was after all what Publius sought and achieved. (Among other things, each congressional district in 1789 had a voting population of around 20,000; today each district has roughly 400,000 voters.) “[W]e must ask ourselves if it was only Publius’s generation that had a duty to improve the institutions of American governance in order to perpetuate its central goals …. [W]e must be willing to honor their example not by mindless adherence to their own decisions of 1787, but by standing in their shoes (or on their shoulders) and asking what improvements are necessary in our own time.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir:Laymon writes tenderly of terrible things in this memoir written as an address to his mother, a woman who demanded excellence and also beat him savagely. The writing is painfully about involving sex, sexual abuse, his weight, his disordered eating, the racial expectations and threats he faces from teachers and others, and his addiction to gambling. A lot of times, I was reminded of Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”-the book is full of lacunae, obvious failures to speak that testify to the depth of the pain of life.
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays: A collection merging Cottom’s “thick description” with the politics of blackness. She didn’t conceive of these as personal essays, even though “the personal essay had become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes black women.” She discusses the negative reactions she got from black women when she described herself as unattractive; she resists the idea that she could be “beautiful” under racism and capitalism, because the aspiration would make her into a market subject and she wants to name what’s been done to her. The hardest essay to read is about the death of her newborn, which was preceded by pain and bleeding and healthcare professionals assuming she was incompetent and later berating her for not telling them something was wrong earlier (she did, but they didn’t understand her symptoms as important)-I’ve experienced a fraction of this treatment as a white woman, but for black women it routinely kills their babies.
Cottom also writes about universities’ expectations that black “ethnic” students (immigrants or children of immigrants) will do better than U.S. black students, and points out that we are “generally cherrypicking the winners of extreme social stratification in other countries through our admissions processes.” The most bitterly hilarious part is the essay on why she wants banal black women writers at elite outlets, “since David Brooks wrote 865 words about how gourmet sandwiches are ruining America in the New York effing Times.That was 593 words more than the Gettysburg Address and about 365 words more than we allow poor students to write about their neediness on many scholarship applications.” Otherwise, the great black women intellectuals she knows will continue doing second-, third-, and fourth-shift work to get published in the same places, instead of benefits and a salary-the bind is that you get exposure but only by contributing to writers’ economic precarity, but that bind is unequally distributed.
Lux Alptraum, Faking It: The Lies Women Tell about Sex-And the Truths They Reveal: Basic thesis: “while a number of honorable women have been unfairly slandered as dishonest, it’s the lies that many, if not most, of us are telling on a daily basis that offer the greater insight into the female experience. We lie because it makes our day-to-day lives easier; we lie to keep ourselves safe; we lie because no one believes us when we tell the truth. But most of all, we lie because the world expects us to live up to an impossible standard-and frequently, lying is the only way to get through life with our sanity intact.” Alptraum covers faking orgasm (or faking understanding why orgasm is a big deal), lies about virginity (or lack thereof), lies about sexual interest, lies about having a boyfriend, makeup as “lying,” and lies about contraception, with a coda on lies about rape (adults who lie usually have otherwise disordered lives and report a stranger rape, while juveniles are more likely to lie to avoid parental condemnation). “When women are assumed to be unable, or unwilling, to overtly communicate desire, men treat everything as a covert expression of desire, a secret code that they and they alone have the power to decipher.” Along the way, she argues for acknowledging the struggles and realities of all kinds of women-those who can and can’t orgasm through vaginal penetration alone, those who lie and use long-term contraception as a form of harm reduction because they’re in abusive relationships, those who lie and don’t use contraception because they want to control their own reproductive futures, those who are willing to have not-fantastic sex for other goals, those who want casual sex and those who don’t. Even so, she recognizes, some of these lies end up contributing to toxic myths, and others just don’t encourage (mostly) men to do any better. I’m not sure I learned a lot, but it was a saddening juxtaposition of different types of lies, often because women haven’t been asked for their truths. In comparison, she points out, men who pressure and deceive to get sex-or lie and remove the condom they agreed to wear-don’t see themselves as untrustworthy, but as doing what is only natural and commendable. Ultimately, as she quotes one of her sources, “[w]e don’t need empowerment messages; we need power,” and a lie is, “in a sense, an attempt to claim power, and as a short-term strategy it can be a fairly successful one.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.