Sherbert Illuminated

  “Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.” Stamped from the Beginning is brilliant, not only in its content but its form. I expected Ibram X. Kendi’s award-winning nonfiction book to retell American history with scholarly nuance and antiracist passion. And it does that, exploring forgotten corners of history and examining famous figures in a new light. Stamped from the Beginning is subtitled “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” and that history is long and complicated . According to Kendi, historical and present-day antiracists have contended not only against segregationist theories, which blame Black people for the discrimination they experience, but assimiliationis

  “I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face any my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon—the unimaginable universe” (28) Jorge Luis Borges is a brilliant man. The Aleph and Other Stories , written by the Argentinian author between 1933 and 1969, attests to that. About half of the pieces in the famous short story collection are brilliant revelations about ordinary life and fantasy. Like the labyrinths which so often wind through their pages, they’re immersive, clever and filled with the terrible knowledge of bygone eras. And the other half? Well, they’re also pretty good. But their author is an idiot about women. “La Lujanera—she was Rosendo’s woman—had the others all beat by a mile. She’s dead now, and I can tell you years go by when I don’t

  “The hero's home has its own magic” (81) Maxine Hong Kingston’s most famous work, The Woman Warrior , is only half of the story. I loved her original memoir for its combination of myth and history, and for its beautiful, savage and vulnerable prose. But its glittering stories (essays?) are defined by their femininity . Kingston dredges up women buried by history and marginalized by Chinese and American culture, and they’re what gives The Woman Warrior its power. A different tack is required for China Men , a memoir about Kingston’s male relatives. How would Kingston handle the depiction of masculinity? Would she keep the mythical elements that animated her first memoir? Would China Men rise to its example, or fall short? In my opinion, they’re two sides of the same coin. I plan to purchase both from Everyman’s Library, which has complied the two books into one volume. That’s the way they ought to be read: their stories are equally beautiful, and both weave personal and cultural

  I would like to thank both Professor Demleiter, who was generous enough to give me this copy of Schloss aus Glas , and the North Shore Public Library, who have temporarily supplied me with its original English version. Your generosity helps expose people like me to new things, and we don’t acknowledge that nearly enough! I’m grateful for Prof. Demleitner especially, since Schloss aus Glas was a very appropriate gift: although she (probably) didn’t know it, I had read and loved The Glass Castle , Jeannette Walls’ memoir about growing up with eccentric, neglectful parents, in its original English. The Glass Castle is neat. It’s sad, but it’s full of wonder too. Even when it’s clear Walls is being led astray, there’s no emotional barrier between her and the reader. Schloss aus Glas was the first adult book I read in German, so I checked the original English version out of the library again. Since I want to be a translator, I also thought it would be interesting to observe the differen

  “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not” (13) Some theories become so entrenched that even idiots like myself recognize them instinctively as the truth. In the spring of 2020, I approached my mother with a question. My AP Euro teacher had assigned my class an essay on how the Industrial Revolution affected Europe’s working classes. But I wasn’t sure how to phrase my thesis, I told her. Didn’t the Industrial Revolution create Europe’s working classes? My mother said yes, and that there was a very famo

    “In 1959 my mother is boarding a train. she is barely sixteen, her one large grip bulging with homemade dresses, whisper of crinoline and lace, her anme stitched inside each one. She is leaving behind the dirt roads of Mississippi, the film of red dust around her ankles, the thin whistle of wind through the floorboards of the shotgun house, the very idea of home”  - The Southern Crescent , 1 God. Native Guard is gorgeous. I’m going to see if I can be articulate here, because I haven’t read a volume of poetry in years and I’m always worse at explaining why I love the things I love. Reading Native Guard , a collection of poems by former Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, is like discovering footprints on a wrecked coast. It’s got everything—not “everything” in the sense that it’s stuffed with tropes, or even that it’s a particularly large volume, but that reading it reveals an ethereal, historical world that two centuries of white supremacy have tried to repress. “ Before the war, the