This is a blog, right? Where I have opinions on stuff?
I spend a lot of time writing about people from the nineteenth century. One thing I like doing is reading reviews of books and artworks from popular magazines back then, Godey's Lady's Book and all that jazz. Old timey! Like that wallpaper in my uncle's bathroom that is a huge repeated toile of pages from an old-timey Sears & Roebuck catalog. It is possible that that wallpaper singlehandedly directed me onto the career path I am on today. To which I would say: "Fuck you wallpaper! I'm stuck living in a commune eight hundred miles away from home because I liked your old-timey style?!"
I spend a lot of time, also, with texts from the nineteenth century that were written by African Americans. You know when people make those arguments where they read something racist or hear something racist come out of someone's mouth from, like, 1950 and they're all "Well, it's just that times were different." That's bullshit. If you spend any time at all with stuff written in different eras you learn that it doesn't matter what difference there is in the times, there have always been people who imagined better worlds, there are always people who believe the right things even in the midst of bad worlds. So if there were people being right, there's no excuse for the people who kept being wrong. I'm a school-marmy kind of progressive in that way.
So I just finished reading Edward P. Jones' (phenomenal) story collection Lost in the City, in honor of loving him and also in honor of Washington, DC. (A city in which, you may have heard, I am currently lost.) The story collection has a batch of positive reviews in the front matter. Two of which really turned my head with a weird sort of racism. ON WHICH I HAVE AN OPINION! FOR MY BLOG!
Okay, so the first is from the infernal Kirkus Reviews: "This debut collection of stories pulses with the lifeblood of the forgotten neighborhoods of Washington, D.C.,. . . .A skillful, elegiac collection, with remarkably little sociology."
Translation: "Those black people and their sociology. Boring, unartful, obvious, always trying to call attention to their LIVES as people affected by society. Wasn't that dude DuBois a sociologist? BO-ring. Well, this book isn't like that, with all that sociology. This here is ART, high art, no soci-anything about it."
The second is from the now-dead-to-me Library Journal: "Although these experiences will be unfamiliar to many readers, Jones instills humanity in his characters and stories." Let me clarify this one as well. These "unfamiliar" experiences Jones writes about? A little girl who raises carrier pigeons and mourns that she never knew her mother, a good-for-nothing kid turns his life around, a divorced woman longs for the man she sees on the Metro every day. WOW. How UNFAMILIAR. You might even say that these stories are....EXOTIC? With their focus on black people living a variety of different kinds of lives between 1940 and the present.
I wonder if Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn got this same kind of review. A novel narrated by a detective with Tourette's syndrome that involves forays into the world of Japanese zen masters and Brooklyn mobsters. Do we focus on the "unfamiliarity" of that world? When I read this review I felt like I was on a bus full of white people driving through the projects, the pleated-khaki-pants-wearing tour leader telling us "If you look out your right window you'll see that people who live in the projects also buy sodas at the corner store!"
These two reviews are tiny little reminders that our world is just as bad as the next, full of jerks writing jerky things. (And, now there's the cheer you've come to expect from me. I do deliver.)
