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reading journals
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If your interest is piqued by any of Richard's journal excerpts below, click on a year.
1987-1993 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
1987-1993 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Recent Excerpts (Rev. 1/02/2021)
Alexander, Michelle. With a new preface by the author. The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2020. First
published by The New Press, in 2010.
The New Jim Crow, however, is not only about numbers. It is about an entire philosophy in which White people can no longer discriminate outwardly (at the end of the old Jim Crow era) so in an era of colorblindness (“I don’t mind if she’s Black.”), they resort to setting up a new form of discrimination through mass incarceration. How does it work? It begins with the War on Drugs, in 1980, with the Reagan administration. It gains momentum with Bush Senior and gains real traction with Bill Clinton and Bush Junior. Alexander claims that even some of Obama’s policies contribute harm (though he does speak out against mass incarceration). With this new policy young Black and Brown men are given long sentences for minor drug infractions. Then when they finally return to their homes (uneducated and no longer young), they are marked as felons, so for the rest of their lives they cannot vote, cannot get jobs, and wind up in a constant loop of being prisoner or permanent criminal—all for a minor drug offense. And how do White men who commit the same offenses fare? Much better, because, one learns, all these cases are adjudicated by the police, who ignore White drug crime but not Black or Brown.
Greenwell, Garth. Cleanness. New York: Farrar, 2020.
The novel is part language lesson: Gospodar translates (upon first mention) each Bulgarian word or phrase and in such a way that one is acquainted with the word’s fullness. At one point, a male sex partner Gospodar has met online calls him Bulgarian for bitch. But the narrator doesn’t leave it there, massaging the meaning within the context of the indigenous culture. The novel is part love story, in which the narrator meets a man he only calls R (every character is reduced to a single initial, in some way protecting the identities of his co-characters, almost creating the feel that one is reading a roman à clef). I’ve never read such sensual yet meaningful sex scenes (for want of a better term). At one point, the narrator makes love to his lover, R, taking perhaps twenty minutes to kiss every part of the man’s body. When he is finished, his partner is attempting to hide his tears, the fact that perhaps no one has ever loved him so completely.
Guibert, Hervé. To the friend who did not save my life. South Pasadena: Semiotexte,
2020. First published by Éditions Gallimard in 1990.
It’s difficult to know what I think of this book, thirty years after it is first published. On the one hand, it is a fair representation of what the times are like in 1991 Paris. When the author dies at thirty-six from AIDS, I am forty-three—very much a part of the same demographic. I’ve taken an HTLV test which claims I am negative. Whew. Yet there is no real relief for anyone: neither the men and women who test positive and will soon die nor for their friends who have partaken of the same risky behaviors and remain free. Guibert portrays for gay Frenchmen, as do many American gay writers at the time, the devastation that overtakes our community from coast to coast.
Lane, Byron. A Star Is Bored: A Novel. New York: Holt, 2020
And this book is full of so many unforgettable voices. Begin with Kathi’s: off the bat she renames Charlie “Cockring.” From there, it’s only a short step to all the other outrageous things she says while he shops with her, travels with her, sees her in and out of hospitals for . . . well, read for yourself to find out what. Cockring’s head is full of voices: his father bellowing at him through the years by way of sentences in all caps: “WE ALL HAVE TO DO THINGS IN LIFE WE DON’T WANT TO DO!” (66); his own fears as he speaks to his inner Siri: “Hey, Siri, I want to impress. I want to be the best assistant. I want to rescue my failing grade” (77); the voice of Cockring’s Therapista; the voices of all the other PAs to Hollywood stars, all with their own nicknames, who collectively write what is known as The Assistant’s Bible, chock full of information every great PA should memorize
Obama, Barack. A Promised Land. New York: Crown, 2020.
A Promised Land is a title that resonates in a global way. However, Mr. Obama transforms it a bit to reveal how the United States of America has functioned as a promised land for him, for his life. The book seems to possess a unique structure. The former president limns in this the first volume of his long-awaited memoir his political life. Yet he does not hesitate to return readers by way of carefully selected flashbacks to his humble beginnings: we learn things about his family that we perhaps did not know before, the boldly liberal nature of his Kansas-born grandparents who flee to Hawaii to live a freer life; their daughter who marries a Kenyan man and gives birth to Barack Hussein Obama.
At the same time, this memoir develops a strand of history focused as readers would expect to see through the eyes of the person to whom it happened, the one who witnessed first-hand his several political campaigns, his earthy language in dealing with staff who have displeased him or fallen short of their expected performance. In spite of the subjectivity of such a view, one senses that Mr. Obama is being fair, that not many can argue with his point of view, his memory, his own fact-checking.