so i work at a community college—yeah, that’s right motherfucker, you lookin at me? i teach 20-something age people and i’m forever hearing about reading about how these intelligent, imaginative, passionate people don’t read, don’t think critically, don’t care about the world.
to which i’d like to respond: bullshit.
because when you get their attention and you step down off of the high academic fake-o horse and you talk to them as equals, they are hungry.
really, beautifully, hungry.
and they read. trust me.
they just don’t particularly read what you want them to be reading.
and they understand “texts” much more openly than academia does.
thank jesus.
so on the topic of reading as a political act, i’d like to suggest twp dead people’s books and one live woman’s that don’t suck ass. in fact in my mind they create a resistance literature we are in URGENT need of re-membering.
read these NOW whoever you are, but especially if you are in your twenties, your thirties, your forties, your fifties, your sixtees, or your seventees. seriously. these books name precisely and without apology what is happening right this second. the time is now.
leslie marmon silko: almanac of the dead. trust me when I say she fucking NAILED the current forms of so-called terrorism plaguing the world stage, the cost of letting economy inscribe identity, the beauty of a relationship to land, myth, and love rather than economy, the poison of white male power at the level of not only class but also sexuality, the territory of the body as a site of both resistance and creation, the redefinition of time away from a western culture’s obsession with war and conquering.
kathy acker: empire of the senseless. man o man. you want to understand the effects of capitalism on the body of a woman? can you handle the truth?
franz fanon: the wretched of the earth. sometimes the oppressed take such precise shape and form our shame can finally be liberated into action. And it is not from a televised image, a celebrity mouthing off, or a “world leader’s” or religious delusion.
i think if we all read or re-read these books we could have a decent dialogue about current events without vomiting, crying ourselves to sleep, or shooting ourselves.
then we could reinvestigate love, compassion, and making as politically relevant actions.
yours,
lidia
