academic journals

Said and read – September 2020

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Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I must have waded through about 2,500 pages of academic journals, theory and method books, law cases and so many things that I didn’t keep close track of and can’t quantify. But it consumed me in the latter half of September as I completed a paper for university that got completely out of hand.

Among the materials here that I did keep track of – all of which I found enjoyable, informative and thought-provoking, are the following, which I’d expect most people to find a bit dry:

Realistic Socio-Legal Theory: Pragmatism and a Social Theory of Law – Brian Z. Tamanaha

Unspeakable Subjects: Feminist Essays in Legal and Social Theory – Nicola Lacey, ed.

Media, Religion and Gender: Key Issues and New Challenges – Mia Lövheim, ed.

The Sociological Imagination – C. Wright Mills

Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law and Public Policy – Susan B. Boyd, ed.

Previous book reports: 2020 – August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January. 2019 – December, November, October, September, May, April, March, February, January. 2018 – November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February and January.

Thoughts on reading for September:

Highly recommended

*Breasts and Eggs – Mieko Kawakami

“I knew these women were only venting their frustration and their anguish, but so long as they had someone, they were blessed. Technology was on their side. They had options. There was a way. They were accepted. That’s even true for same-sex couples who wanted kids. They were couples, sharing a dream with someone who could share the load. They had community, and people who would lend a helping hand. But what if sex was out of the equation? What if you were alone? All the books and blogs catered to couples. What about the rest of us, who were alone and planned to stay that way? Who has the right to have a child? Does not having a partner or not wanting to have sex nullify this right?”

My favorite book for September. It just flowed, and I felt immersed in it. The protagonist is a writer who is considering having a child, and her reflections dive into the losses and consequences of having versus not having.

“It’s really simple, I promise. Why is it that people think this is okay? Why do people see no harm in having children? They do it with smiles on their faces, as if it’s not an act of violence. You force this other being into the world, this other being that never asked to be born.”

“Once you have children, you can’t unhave them,” she laughed. “I know how this sounds. You think I sound extreme, or detached from reality. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is real life. That’s what I’m talking about—the pain that comes with reality. Not that anyone ever sees it.”

Another passage that really caught my attention was one that made me feel such powerful familiarity… that sense of meeting the “right” someone when it’s too late, when you’re too damaged…

“I know that might sound totally out of line,” he said, “but it’s the way I’ve felt for quite a while now.” I took a deep breath, holding it, and closed my eyes. And then I let everything go. What Aizawa had said was like a dream. Just like a dream, I told myself. Only it made me feel hopelessly depressed. I ran through what he had said a bunch of times and shook my head. It made me even more depressed. What if . . . what if I’d met him years ago, when I was younger. Why couldn’t we have met back then? The thought tore through my heart. If we had only met back then. But when, exactly? What would have been the right time? How many years ago? Ten? What if we met before I even met Naruse? What would have worked? Hard to say. All I knew I wished we could have met before I got this way. That’s for sure. But there was nothing I could do about that now.“

*The Chronology of Water – Lidia Yuknavitch

My last bout of Yuknavitch was during a snowy winter traveling the north south Oslo-Göteborg corridor, remembering reading one book during the three+ hour long ride between the two cities.

This time I just loved how she described things in her own memoir.

I have also learned that we share a birthday, albeit a few years apart. It signifies nothing, but somehow shared birthdays seem comforting.

*Alien Candor: Selected Poems, 1970 – 1995 – Andrei Codrescu

Strange and unique voice – poetry of course.

*Hiding in Plain Sight – Sarah Kendzior

I reread this. I found more new things to be angry about. Wow. Absolutely must recommend again.

Also read her previous book, The View from Flyover Country.

Also listen to her podcast, Gaslit Nation.

Good – or better than expected

*The Lying Life of Adults – Elena Ferrante

Like all Ferrante, it reads effortlessly, and you are drawn into the story. I didn’t find this as immersive as previous work, but it still shone a light on how some things seem so black and white when young, when you don’t see the whole picture, but become so complicated.

“Maybe everything would be less complicated if you told the truth.” She said haltingly: “The truth is difficult, growing up you’ll understand that, novels aren’t sufficient for it. So will you do me that favor?” Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many.

*When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa – Peter Godwin

“In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With most Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain…”

A surprisingly engaging book.

“IT IS SOMETIMES SAID that the worst thing to happen to Africa was the arrival of the white man. And the second worst was his departure. Colonialism lasted just long enough to destroy much of Africa’s indigenous cultures and traditions, but not long enough to leave behind a durable replacement.“

Entertaining/informative/thoughtful or some combination thereof

*Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America – Robert Whitaker

A different take on the “epidemic” of mental illness diagnoses in the last 40 or so years and the exceptional level of prescriptions issued, which, according to the case studies presented in this book, often appear to be doled out without great consideration for the patient’s well-being. Much of this is predicated on the question:

“If we have treatments that effectively address these disorders, why has mental illness become an ever-greater health problem in the United States?“

Is the heralding of miracle drugs for psychiatric disorders really miraculous? Are they doing more harm than good? How much can clinical trials and evidence presented by pharmaceutical companies be trusted? This book dives into some of these questions but is imperfect in its answers … at least it does raise the questions, though, which feels like an important counterbalance to the typical narratives about mental health and medication.

*Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture – Karen E.H. Skinazi

Read as part of my aforementioned university paper, much of this book didn’t do much for me but did offer important insights into divisions between groups of Orthodox Jews. Most stories in the mainstream, like the popular memoir, Unorthodox, and the even more popular Netflix adaptation of it, paint a picture of tightly knit, aggressively oppressive communities, particularly for women. And how some of these people choose to “escape”. But not every community is the same, and this book uses a number of cases to highlight this. Quite informative and enjoyable.

*Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots – Deborah Feldman

As mentioned above, I read the memoir, and perhaps because I saw the Netflix adaptation first, the book didn’t affect me very much. Maybe it is because as Feldman describes her life, it came across as controlled by family, community, husband, and a set of arbitrary and constantly changing rules ostensibly set by “innovation as tradition”, a term Skinazi writes about the aforementioned book, Women of Valor:

“When innovations like these are rendered as traditions, they are justified within the sects as age-old and unchangeable. And for mainstream, secular readers, Orthodox women’s modest dress and behavior, seen to be dictated by these long-standing, immutable “traditions” of the religion, render the whole practice of Orthodoxy outdated and oppressive and thus “completely unacceptable.” That Orthodox communities construct their own modernities is hard to see. But they are indeed modernities, ones that embrace ideals distinct from those of mainstream culture and have, in fact, arisen in direct opposition to mainstream culture. “Haredization” is, in large part, a response to liberalization.“

Feldman’s rebellion read as though she forged a lot of freedom and latitude for herself, however hidden and “second life” it had to be. I cannot imagine trying to break away from a life that had been the norm or the kind of consciousness development one would need to undertake to free him/herself from a life and community they felt had oppressed them. Many people never reach the stage of self-awareness to realize that they are not fulfilled by the life they lead, particularly when boxed in as Feldman was.

I read an interview with Feldman discussing the TV version of Unorthodox in which Feldman expressed a fascinating point of view on women’s roles in the community she came from (italics mine):

“Interviewer: In episode four, during the Passover scene, the grandfather leads the prayers and tells the story of Exodus. No women participate. Yet, if you look at the actions that move Unorthodox forward, almost all are taken by the female characters.
Feldman: Men tell the story and women make the story real. You have the table where the man dictates prayer, belief and narrative, but if you look at the story of Esty, it’s women who are making the decisions. It’s the women she’s interacting with who are basically the driving force behind community life, the engine behind the story.”

Biggest disappointment (or disliked)

*The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

I don’t think I need to describe this. I never read this when I was young, and thought I should. But I hated every second of it.

who’s keeping score?

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As the year ends, I feel compelled to tally up what I’ve done versus what I aimed to do when the year began. Of course life isn’t quite the linear thing that smoothly hands over what we ask for or think we will do, see or accomplish. Even what we want (or think we want) can change so fast, can be led along by circumstance, or a sudden need for dramatic change, that it’s almost silly to do things like set ‘resolutions’. Sillier even than watching 40-year-old, late-night reruns of The Love Boat or Only Fools and Horses, which has been my rough introduction to peri-Brexit Britain. (I certainly didn’t choose the wisest time to put down stakes in that neck of the woods.)

I had no idea when 2018 began that I’d spend half the year in Glasgow, immersed in intensive psychology studies. I also had no idea that I would try to balance that with work/job and the simultaneous completion of a thesis from a previous, almost-finished MA from another university. I had no idea that I would (mostly) have the discipline to follow through on almost all the goals I set for the year, somehow managing not to disrupt them despite the otherwise disruptive nature of the chaos I sprung upon myself by moving from place to place in a more itinerant than normal (for me) fashion.

“That life is not for me. Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots. I’ve tried, a number of times, but my roots have always been shallow; the littlest breeze could always blow me right over. I don’t know how to germinate, I’m simply not in possession of that vegetable capacity. I can’t extract nutrition from the ground, I am the anti-Antaeus. My energy derives from movement—from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.” –Flights, Olga Tokarczuk

Hands-off, ears-off

Sadly, there is no new soundtrack for this month. But you can revisit the musical archives that date all the way back to 2004.

Emotional turmoil

On a less physical, hands-on level, though…

I had no idea, at least not consciously, that I would continue to dig deep into reserves of patience I had no clue I had, trying to patch up holes that are completely bottomless. They cannot be fixed.

I had no idea that I would finally try to come to terms with myself as a too secretive person, completely lacking in transparency when it comes to myself. I pretend to be open, but I’m open to you and your problems; I’m listening to you; I am reflecting you; I am flexible to and for you; I am absorbing your misery and anxiety.

But I am not being me with you, and I never have been.

(This “you” is everything and everyone.)

And this, rather than getting better, is getting worse. Much of what I did this year was to try to go against the grain, to stop doing this insofar as I recognized it. I did not succeed; instead I… recede.

Or could I have known that I would continue to love, to love more deeply than I could imagine possible, that being lovestruck, despite its implication of being immediate and fleeting, can continue and deepen? And despite the distance I put between myself – my self – and another? I could not come to trust it all because I have found the physical world is not to be trusted.

Yet others – all others – continue to tell me all the things contained in the vulnerable underbelly of their lives, their pasts, their hidden desires… their urge to share, to confess, to scrape out all the gelatinous globs of all the things they could never, ever tell anyone else too strong to resist, even if in the immediate aftermath they realized, Ah, now things will never be the same. 

Knowledge: Reading and thinking

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” ― John Locke

In terms of reading, I read a whole lot more than I set out to read – and a whole lot more than I expected. And in many cases it’s been an elusive and esoteric pursuit. As I’ve written through the year, a great majority of this reading in the second half of 2018 was academic/scholarly/empirical, but there were quite a few other things as well – mostly dominated by poetry whenever possible. (And many of my “lists” of what I’ve read don’t reflect a lot of the academic stuff.)

When 2018 started, I’d set a goal – read 26 books, all of which had to be in non-English languages. I started off strong but first found myself lured into a whole lot of English-language books (novels, poetry, contemporary non-fiction), and then into the required readings from academia (a lot of BS/masturbatory theory, i.e. an academic citing a previous academic, citing a previous academic/philosopher/theoretician, not actual theory on masturbation). In the end I only managed… well, 20 as of 12 November 2018. Still better than I thought, thinking back to spring when I found that reading in Russian again was so slow-going that I’d never make the kind of progress I can make in English. Reading Russian has also become bittersweet – so intense the memories of the time when it was the most important thing in the world to me, and so fresh the knowledge that one of the closest friends I had at the time died two years ago. She had not been in my life at all since 1995, but it still hit me to learn that she is really gone. I read Marina Tsvetaeva, for example, which is something she and I talked endlessly about, in a wholly different way.

In any case, this whole exercise required a re-evaluation of what progress is in this context. What am I doing this for if not for the qualitative experience of living, loving and grappling with languages, words, concepts, constructions, time periods, perspectives that are not even close to my own? In the digestion, interpretation (literal and figurative) and comprehension of these particular reading challenges, reading feels like a new endeavour, different from the much-loved near-obsession I experience with own-language books. Novel and difficult, and truly as worthwhile as I had hoped. Still I set such a goal when I had a fraction of today’s deadlines to meet and ‘achievements’ to unlock.

I’d be remiss not to reflect on these things even though I feel empty of the ability to truly reflect. Outside of my own little world, everything has been so ugly and contentious I can’t bring myself to think about it.