I'm borderline illiterate, but I try to read as much as I can.
We all lack power in our lives (think about being a kid, can you freely travel? How many choices in your life are in your hands, and how many make those decisions for you?) and books are a way to get a little bit of power in our hands.
I dropped out of college twice. I tried really hard in college, but I couldn't ever fit into what my professors wanted. I also I had to contend with severe mental health issues and my untreated dysphoria. Normally college drop outs aren't supposed to accomplish a lot in life
But, there are ways to gain knowledge besides school. I also worked at a thrift shop named Goodwill in a really rich, arty neighborhood (that's sort of similar demographics to where you live). People would donate books all the time, and I'd read whatever came through my hands before they hit the shelves. Everything from classic liteture, books on sports sociology, a book on how to design websites from the year 2003 (so it was super out of date) and a book on how to have a career if you are a retired ballaerina. Because I dropped out of college twice, I consider reading all these books to be my "true" "college degree," and went a long way to having a very deep, eclectic cultural fluency.
some of the stuff that people would donate would tell a story about the life of the person who donated. For example, one person donated three books on how to cook with beer and one book on how to stop being addicted to alcohol. Bare minimum, I would make an effort to read the last page of every book that came into the store. I don't even know why. Maybe it's because books are such mysteries; it's so difficult to read one, it's even more difficult for me to finish a book, and the reality we don't read most books, and so the final page of a book can be elusive, and so I figured if I had the privlege of having so many books in front of me, that it's nice to have a peak to where that book wanted to take us.
I loved the fancy literature books would often end with this sense of indefinite closure, and that the genre books such as detective stories would always have a direct, definitive end. Like a period at the end of a sentence
I mentioned a couple of times on these online blogs or whatever that I would buy you books every year for Christmas. I wanted to try to give you just one gift, a library. I I hoped to impart on you I habit of reading. what else you do with your life is your business, I just hoped for you to read so that you can have power.
Reading is very difficult for me, and yet I try anyways. as I write this I'm surrounded by a dozen half-read, unfinished books.
The only thing that you ever truly have in life is stories. Look at your room around you, none of those objects truly belongs to anyone; they decay, they get stolen and they get lost. and even if we outlive them, the moment we stop being alive they stopped being ours. I learned that working at Goodwill, after people would die, their relatives would donate these dead people's entire belongings, and I would pick through them, looking for things to sell, but also wondering about them with the same sort of wonder that I would see in the mystery of books. The only thing that you can ever have is a story. And when you read a book, it goes inside of you, and you carry that story with you the rest of your life. And that is power
anyways, here are my favorite books
 Flannery O'Connor (Spooky Southern Gothic writer where a lot of people die) |
Donald Barthleme (Weird writer with a bunch of experimental fiction) |
Why Do all the Black Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria |
|---|---|---|
| Documentaries |
Dramas |
Horror/Action Films |
| Documentaries |
Dramas |
Horror/Action Films |
When I transitioned, I made my middle name "Flannery," which I named after the southern author Flannery O'Connor. As a kid, I didn't know who my mother was and so I imagined for myself a mother who was very similar to what I imagined Flannery O'Connor was. She was a Catholic woman in the South, where she was a religious minority - the majority of relgious people in The South were Protestant and often in opposition to Catholics; the racist Protestant organization Ku Klux Klan, for example, were in opposition to Catholics just as much as they were in opposition to Black people or any other racial minority. This was in part because Catholic church's association with immigrant populations.
O'Connor had this autoimmune disease named lupus, and the treatments for her affliction made her unable to walk without mobility aides, so she spent the majority of her life living with her popinjay mom on her small farm, often confined to her bed, until she died young, at the age of 39. People speculate that she was queer in some ways, most popularly that she was a closeted lesbian, her best friend was a pen pal who was a closeted lesbian. From time to time, I reflect on my own struggles with being a trans woman, and sometimes I read her works and suspect that she was a closeted trans man.
All of these facts of her life swirl together to shape the stories she wrote. Her genre was something that was called Southern Gothic. If your parents let you see that movie Sinners, that is a Southern Gothic tale. After the Civil War, there was a period called Reconstruction, in which our country had the opprounity to to reconcile with the political violence that was slavery, and pay reperations and full emancipation to the formerly enslved Black population, but we failed. This led to compounding tragdies such as the racist segergationist policies of Jim Crow and the terroistic campagin of lynchings across The South
You ever see something so sickening bad happen that you can't wrap your mind around it? It's almost unimaginable? Southern Gothic, and especially O'Connor's works, takes that mystery that comes from wittnessing horror and expresses it through metaphor and allegory. The ugliness of the sins of The South turns into stories of outlaws, freaks, monster and other grotesque types trying to find redemption
O'Connor wasn't perfect. She was a liberal racist. Racism isn't this matter of "person good" or "person bad," it is this sort of political fiction that subconsiously sneaks into everybody looks at the world. Think about money, we all take it for granted that, say, a bunch of green pieces of paper can be traded for a candy bar at a gas station, even if that doesn't make sense if you think about it. Race and racism works the same way, there is this "fiction" that we call race, where we use differences in phenotypes (racism is not enitrely about "color," there are some people out there that society considers "Black" who has lighter skin then some people who society considers "white") and they use those differences to rationalize, say, paying one person less money then another, and it's hard for anyone to escape those premises. In the way it's hard not to get excited seeing a dollar on the ground even if you know it's just a piece of paper
A paradox is when two opposite things are true at the same time (think about the sentance "this sentance is a lie."). O'Connor's paradox is that her writing was loaded with insight about the hypocrisies of racism in The South, and how it rots the area at the core, while at the same time posessing the same bigotry and racist assumptions of the people she was attacking. The fact that O'Connor is racist is one of the reasons why I chose to use her name. Not because I'm alligned with racism, but as a reminder that no matter what we achieve, we can't escape the bullet of being human, flawed.