toastykitten

I remembered that I stopped reading him after This Is How You Lose Her, and part of it was this Elle review by Virginia Vitzhum. I followed him on Facebook for a while, and stopped following him after he kept posting stuff that seemed aimed to bolster his "wokeness", for lack of a better term.


Díaz says it's important to map a mind like Yunior's because "it's astonishing how little we understand male subjectivity." At which point my jaw discreetly drops: Is he calling this stuff under­ reported?! Yes, Díaz's voice is fresh, as is the Dominican/New Jersey working-class nerd-turned-academic perspective. But I've been reading about women through a lens of leering contempt forever. That men reduce women to body parts and to their sexual withholding/putting-out/performance is not a revelation. Recording that reductiveness without comment, exploration, or illumination does not a successful "feminist-aligned project" make.


Knowing what I know now, about how people manipulate and abuse, and flatter, and dismiss - it's kind of illuminating to take all that in again. I'm not sure what to do with Diaz and Alexie's books on my shelves right now. I love their writing - it is so good, but it's poison.

My subject line does not refer to anything in particular. I just got tired of writing titles like: "stuff on my mind" or "things I'm thinking about."

Mark has instituted "burrito Fridays". This Friday, we schlepped down to Yuca's, a James Beard-award winner in the "America's Classics" category. It's a little mom-and-pop stand known for its burritos, small portions and cheap prices. Mark liked it better than I did, but then, I am not a good judge or fan of Mexican food. I felt that there was a definite lack of flavor and didn't like the mess the torta I got made on my hands. For some reason they also sell burgers, though if you are going to a place like Yuca's, what the heck are you doing ordering a burger?

I finished reading Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao last week. I really liked the book, although I wanted to love it like I usually do his other work. Although the book is ostensibly about Dominican ghetto-nerd Oscar, it's mostly about his sister and his mother, two larger-than-life women who dominate his life, and it's told from the perspective of the sister's ex, a Dominican player with secret nerd tendencies. I love the way Diaz writes, and liked the fact that he didn't translate most of the Spanish or a lot of the geeky references for his audience. Some people don't like that, but it's something I really like when it's done successfully. I think the protagonist was a little too much for me sometimes and I kind of hated him at points. Otherwise the book was well-written but could have used a bit more editing.

Now I have just started Edwin Abbott's Flatland, which is about literally, two-dimensional characters. It's an interesting science-fiction experiment, but it is also one of the most sexist books I have ever read. Males in Flatland are complete shapes and get more status the more angles they have. Females in Flatland are straight lines and are prone to killing their husbands and emotional outbursts and have inferior intellect. Yup.