bell hooks.
bell hooks.
Meditation.
Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
"Do you feel that? she asks in her too-familiar raspy voice. At first all you feel is the heat of her and the density of the tissue, like a bread that never stopped rising. She kneads your fingers into her. You’re as close as you’ve ever been and your breathing is what you hear. Don’t you feel that? She turns toward you. Coño, muchacha, stop looking at me and feel. So you close your eyes and your fingers are pushing down and you’re thinking of Helen Keller and how when you were little you wanted to be her except more nun-ish and then suddenly without warning you do feel something. A knot just beneath her skin, tight and secretive as a plot. And at that moment, for reasons you will never quite understand, you are overcome by the feeling, the premonition, that something in your life is about to change."
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- Junot Diaz
Pulphead: Essays
By John Jeremiah Sullivan
After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their overworked mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of “townies” and the ambitions of students debating books and ideas, couldn’t have been more stark. In this unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Dubus shows us how he escaped the cycle of violence and found empathy in channeling the stories of others—bridging, in the process, the rift between his father and himself.
The Gentlewoman.
"Black Cool is sexy, no doubt. But the sexy comes from the mind as well as the body, the substance as well as the style. It’s deep sexy. It’s smart. It’s multi-layered fine."
- http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/05/28/rebecca-walker-black-is-cool/
"From what I can tell, the average man doesn’t want to hear that he is wrong. It is ingrained into men’s culture, into their social DNA, that they are, for the most part, always right, always rational. From where I stand, most men who don’t know any better don’t want to be challenged when it comes to gender issues. Most of them believe that having sex with a woman is loving women; that spending money on women is caring; and that any sign of feminism a woman lets slip—be it anger, pro-queer talk, or any other kind of agency—can be silenced. They attribute the radical, pro-woman ideology to women who actually sleep with women—not to women like me: flirty, feminine, heterosexual. This belief is compounded by women who, like me, identify as heterosexual, and fit the traditional feminine model, but who cannot be bothered with personal liberation if it comes at the expense of a man. And in the worst of ways—the women I knew at Spelman who were submissive to men, whether by silence, or by action—were not so because they wanted sex, or material things, or a way into a male-dominated arena: they were submissive because they wanted approval, attention, and validation from the men around them, the men they knew, whether consciously or not, could not stomach an independent-minded woman."
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