LCSH Week 15: Did you think I was done ranting about the need for Butch and Femme headings?
The Lower East Side Librarian Library of Congress Subject Heading of the Week for Week 15, April 14, 2010 is...
Tagged with
Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo
I've read this novel about three artist sisters from South Carolina at least twice before. The first time I absolutely loved it, and the second time I was a little cooler. This time--probably 15 years after the last reading--I was in some ways reading a whole different book. Being in my teens and twenties for the first two readings, I was focused entirely on weaver Sassafrass, musician Indigo, and especially dancer Cypress. Now that I'm probably closer to mama Hilda Effania's age, I found her to be the most intriguing character.
reviewdate:
May 20 2010
isn:
0-312-14091-6
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Highsmith: a Romance of the 1950s: a Memoir
aka Ann Aldrich
aka Vin Packer
aka ME Kerr
aka Mary James
and finally aka MJ Meaker
held by only one OCLC member library!
writes of her two year affair with mystery writer Patricia Highsmith who also wrote--as Claire Morgan--the lesbian romance (noted for its happy ending--not that kind of happy end, gutterbrain!) The Price of Salt.
reviewdate:
May 13 2010
isn:
1-57344-171-6
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Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing up Solo
If you read anthologies (or comp zines) you know that they're always uneven in quality and focus. The most common thread I found in Only Child, both thematically and content-wise is a self-consciousness. There are more than the usual amount of asides, parentheticals, and explanations, which I think makes sense for people accustomed to having so much attention aimed their way. Many of the writers cited having all of their parents' love and affection to themselves as a childhood experience. I know when eyes are on me I feel more self-conscious, like if the Pilates class instructor praises me, I inevitably mess up the next exercise, as if to show that I'm not special, I'm the same as everyone else. But of course no one cares. In Pilates you're not looking at anyone else. That is one place where navel gazing is not only okay; it's the rule. Same with these only child authors, but they haven't had siblings beat "no one cares" into them, lucky dogs.
reviewdate:
May 12 2010
isn:
978-0-307-23806-1
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Where the Boy Zines Are zine reviews column
The latest Library Journal zine reviews column, Where the Boy Zines Are is up. It was contributed by Katie Haegele, one of my favorite of the current generation of zine makers. I asked Katie to focus on zines by men in order to offset my personal and professional bias toward women's zines. To date we've reviewed approximately twice as many zines by women as by men. I don't know the demographics of zine publishing, so I'm not sure if female identified authors are as dominant as that. It's pretty unlikely.
Wish After Midnight, a
Hrm. I'm not really sure what to make of this book. It's a pretty good read with a reasonably compelling narrator, but plot doesn't quite gel. The ending left me mystified, and not in that cool dazed way where you contemplate what might happen next. Instead we're left with what essentially feels like a "to be continued," which I would have thought the author would be too classy for.
Anyway, Genna is a smart and solitary African- and Panamanian-American teenager growing up in early 21st century Brooklyn who gets transported back in time to more or less the same location, just before Christmas in 1862. She ends up working for a white doctor as nursemaid to his child and as a sort of nurse-in-training in his practice. (She wants to become a doctor, a psychiatrist specifically, a notion Dr. Brant thinks is absurd. Negroes' heads are small than white peoples', so they aren't capable of being as smart. Same with women vs. men.) She has two potential love interests, one from the present, and one from the future/past, who manages to find her in the 19th century.
reviewdate:
May 9 2010
isn:
978-0982555505-7
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Mother's Day: No Gifts, Just Throw Money
This year my stepmother sent an email to my father, sibs, and me saying please don't get me a present. Instead donate to a reproductive rights or violence against women (recovery or prevention, presumably) organization. I decided that was such a good idea that I extended it to my mother, aunt, and mother-in-law. Most years I spend over $50 each sending them flowers, and I don't even like flowers.
Lucky Girl
When I selected this memoir by a Taiwanese adoptee raised by white parents in Michigan reunited with her birth family, I expected something a bit more critical than Lucky Girl turns out to be. I guess I thought the title would be more ironic than it is. I don't think the title is entirely unlayered, but the author does seem pretty happy with how her life turned out, rather than how it might have if she'd remained one of too many (seven?) daughters of a Chinese couple that kept at it in the hopes of eventually producing a healthy, non-deformed boy.
Quotations:
Besides, to my child mind, adoption seemed a plenty logical way for people to reproduce, way more reasonable than the idea that women grew babies in their bellies that popped out after forty weeks. It made all the sense in the world to me that we would pick up my new brother at the airport--I mean, that's where I came from, right? p.69
reviewdate:
May 5 2010
isn:
978-1-56512-600-8
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Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: the Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson
Per Mrs. Robinson (all titles are listed, which jarred me at first until I realized why that would have been a big deal), Rosa Parks was actually just tired that day. I mean, she was part of it and all, but the boycott wasn't planned until after her arrest. The "Women Who Started It" were the three hundred members of Montgomery's three Women's Political Council chapters. Unfortunately the book is really more about the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and Dr. King, than the women in the title.
reviewdate:
Apr 30 2010
isn:
0-87049-527-5