books bought today

[hannah]

Henry James, Italian Hours
Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object
Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

The first and second were used at the bookstore near the UCB Theatre. The second is a gift for my mother. The third was at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, my second visit in under two months; I was taking my friends there, you dig?

[elpollodiablo]

Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity & Ignore Inequality.

I think this sounds fascinating.

[auto-da-fey]

The third was at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, my second visit in under two months; I was taking my friends there, you dig?

Vaguely relevant to this, have you eaten at the Thai restaurant next door to the Museum, if it still exists (I was last there in 2002, so hopefully it's long since vanished)? If not, don't.

And I haven't bought any books in ages, but today I did check out Laura Kipnis' Against Love and the anthology Queering the Popular Pitch, which has a surprisingly good essay called "Tickle Me Emo: Lesbian Balladeering, Straight-Boy Emo, and the Politics of Affect" in it.

[Lucy]

Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity & Ignore Inequality.

I think this sounds fascinating.

yeah, i think we have an advance readers copy of this lying around my house somewhere, and i've been meaning to read it. agreed.

[elpollodiablo]

I've had this argument about the pitfalls of identity politics before, but I've always ended up feeling guilty, like such arguments are really just the prerogative of shrill white men like myself. So it'd be interesting to read a well-constructed treatise on the subject... even if it's by another shrill white man.

[Andrew_TSKS]

that's the biggest problem with identity politics--they make it so your skin color affects the positions you are allowed by society to take, even if you are being totally rational.

[elpollodiablo]

Not just your skin color, either: your gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. I'm the most classist prick I know, so I'm guilty of it myself... but there is a certain amount of dissonance here in what ID-politicos see as worthy of assertion vis-a-vis one's identity. It's also extremely divisive in a number of ways; when individualism is taken to the extreme, it's hard to preserve a sense of community.

I really wish I could discuss this further, but work is sucking hard right now.

[Greg Nog]

Not just your skin color, either: your gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. I'm the most classist prick I know, so I'm guilty of it myself...

I, on the other hand, am the classiest prick I know.

[elpollodiablo]

ZING

[dumbfish]

I'd go to Swimmy's website now and post an appropriate shot, but I'm at work.

[slow west vultures]

Henry James, Italian Hours
Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object
Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

The first and second were used at the bookstore near the UCB Theatre. The second is a gift for my mother. The third was at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, my second visit in under two months; I was taking my friends there, you dig?

cool hannah.  is that a collection of Henry James travel writings in Italy, or his stories from there?

[Good Intentions]

Hannah Arendt, in The Promise of Politics, made a muted, devestating broadside attack against the tradition of analysis that soon would give rise to identity politics, on two related counts: firstly, by identifying politics as solely arrising between people, meaning that our increasingly apolitical world is the product of and leads to a world lacking in interpersonal richness; secondly, the problem of the displacement of agency away from individual, problematic not because of issues of personal responsibility (as shrill individualists claim) but because it encourages a world within which individuals cannot act, an apolitical world. For Arendt apolitics is a terrible threat, because through politics individuals become empowered, and the condition of worldlessness (not being in an environment suited to your way of life and open to your efforts) is that of helplessness. Identity politics is insufficient because it is a politics of worldlessness.

That said, when one acknowledges the fact that identity politics is a special case - the narrowing of focus to the self-identification of political agents - it remains a very valuable avenue for investigation.

[jebreject]

i really need to get around to reading hannah arendt

[Good Intentions]

You can start with the relevant quote I posted here.

[andronicus]

I so badly want to get into this topic.  For now, I think that there is a lot left to be said about identity politics, the modes of identity-generation it replaced, and possible alternatives to it in the contemporary societal framework.  But I've got to go to sleep.

[Good Intentions]

In all honesty I think the "The Personal is Political" movement is one of the greatest things of the last few decades. But I also don't think its sustainable (not much of a slander - neither was dada, one of my favourite things ever).

Again taking my cue from Arendt, I've gotta say that the reason why identity politics is such a powerful and important tool for especially women is because of the way the political (interpersonal) landscape has been laid out for as long as the West has existed, since ancient Greece: with family units, those on the inside committed to ensuring the means to existence, allowing the head of the household (the patriarch) freedom of movement, enriched by the efforts of his household without having himself to move a finger. This allowed the male heads of the household to devote themselves entirely to their pursuits, which made a society everybody else in the West has been trying to equal ever since then. All fine and well for those who are enfranchised, but for all others their lives are entirely taken up by providing for the master. This means that the condition of women, slaves and children are a private matter, of concern only to their lord: apolitical. When they took a stance instisting on a politics of personal life, whereas in the Greek mode the personal is deprived of meaning, they were empowering themselves. And good on them.

[hannah]

David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light
V.F. Perkins, Film as Film
Christina Stead, Ocean of Story

All used.

[girl]

In the Leonard Cohen tribute movie, I'm Your Man, there's a bit where Cohen reads the forward he wrote for the Chinese translation of his book.  It made me remember that I've meant to read it for a long, long time, so tonight, I stopped at the bookstore and bought Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers.

[jebreject]

good idea, that

[girl]

Yeah, I read a few pages and I think it'll be great.  I'm working on, um, several books right now, so I'm not sure if I'll start this one too, or wait until I finish some of the others.  Still, I'm glad to finally have a copy at hand.

edit:  new page, still talking about Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers

[jebreject]

i quite like his other novel as well, the favorite game, though it's nothing like beautiful losers

[hannah]

We leave Ohio in five hours. I am packing my stuff up, surveying the stuff I have purchased since Wednesday, all for cheap.

Henry James, The Awkward Age (with a cover by Edward Gorey)
Henry James, A London Life
Henry James, A Small Boy and Others
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies

The last purchased in part because I like Rosenbaum, but mostly for the chapter "Made in Hoboken." I will probably read this on the plane.

I also read the complete archives of the Baby Name Wizard blog, not because there's a bun in the oven or any such nonsense like that, but rather because it's an excellent blog and I have long been obsessed with names, as has been documented on these here boards many times. I may make a stop at Border's en route to the airport to purchase the book of the same title.

[Greg Nog]

So I'm a little tight on cash right now, and was thinking today that I shouldn't make any big purchases for a while.

I then saw The Human Career in the bookstore, and popped a MASSIVE EVOLUTION-BONER.  My vow of thriftiness has been shattered by a paleoanthrolopogy textbook.

[girl]

I am also in a self-imposed "no more new books" period, mostly because I have at least a dozen unfinished books cluttering up my chair and the surrounding area.  The thing is, the NYT did their list of the top ten books of the year, and Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart sounded really good.  I didn't buy that one, though, instead I got his first book, The Russian Debutante's Handbook.  It was sort of free, since I bought it using some of my Border's Rewards.  Some day I'll read it.

[auto-da-fey]

The downtown streets of Miami are to urban planning as Finnegan's Wake is to standard narrative, but after some serious confusion I made it to the public library booksale, to pick up:

Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (I already have this, but my copy is disintegrating and this was only a buck)
Junot Diaz, Drown
Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities (I don't particularly like her, but I do love hearing about sex)
Frederik Pohl, Man Plus
Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants