I am reading Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre, embarrassingly I have never read it before and it is totally engrossing. My partner is also reading it with me so we can talk about it. Going from here we want to explore media based on it, there is so much!
So… Whatcha Readin this week?
Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud. Haven’t read anything from it in a good while.
An Indigenous People’s History of the United States
It’s devastating. The horrific cruelty of this country against its indigenous population is something we have to recon with, because the legacy echos through political conflicts today. Joe Biden apologizing is nice and all, but it rings hollow.
I’m struck by how US settlers were almost exactly the same as Israeli settlers, both in behavior and rhetoric. Israel is the 51st State because it’s built on the same European settlers colonial structures with the same Manifest Destiny ideology.
I’m also noticing that US policy has been to displace class conflict by subsidizing land grabs for settlers, and that his process has continued through to today in the various ways home ownership are subsidized for the people the government wants elevated in their class position like veterans. There’s also still land grabs, they’re still stealing indigenous land and there’s parallels with the ways they’re stealing the public housing projects for development projects.
The so-called middle class can be more accurately described as a settler class, even if today the process of settlement seems complete.
I really need to check this out. You can never read too much about colonialism. As sad and horrific as the topic is it’s really important to do so especially since this is unfortunately still very prevalent in the world today.
The United States is the most evil government in the world imo.
I started “The Vegan Studies Project” by Laura Wright, in which she looks through a vegan lens at the trend of vampire romance… apparently, I am susceptible to suggestion, because I stopped reading that book after the chapter where she discusses “True Blood” and instead read the first book in the Sookie Stackhouse series, “Dead Until Dark”. I don’t know that I’d recommend it, but it was a quick read and put me in mind of its time, late 90s/early 2000s.
Now I’m back to the Vegan Studies Project. I’m not finding it terribly compelling, honestly, but that’s okay. It is at least interesting to see an academically-oriented vegan text looking at, among other things, media that I love like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
