Reading "The Warmth of Other Suns"

... by Isabel Wilkerson.

I thought I'd read this before, but I think I bought it and then mentally collapsed it into the collection of all the primary sources, historical monographs, and fiction I HAVE read on the topic -- Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Hortense Powdermaker, W. E. B. DuBois, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, the papers of the Louisiana Central Lumber Company.

Anyway, I'm reading it now, and it is as excellent as I thought it would be. I want to read Caste, too. And then watch Ava DuVernay's Origin.

One thing it makes me remember is the anomaly of my grandmother's poetry notebook I found after her death, hand-typed in the early 1930s when she was in the only year she had of community college (at least I think it was one year? I know she didn't actually finish... add it to the dozens of questions I wish I had asked her and will never be able to ask her now).

She had typed copies of the poems she particularly liked, to which I assume she was exposed in Kansas City, Kansas around 1933 or so. The icon for this entry is a photo of her in KCK sometime close to then.

The poems were an eclectic mix, but the ones that caught and held my attention were the ones from the Harlem Renaissance, STILL UNDERWAY. How did a young white woman encounter and love these poems? Who was the professor at whichever junior college this was? I don't even know which college she went to for a year or two before marrying her high school boyfriend Dick Miller.

Countee Cullen -- there were at least two of his. Langston Hughes, too. Arna Bontemps.

It's another bit of evidence that complicates the expectations of history of race, and for that matter, gender. My grandmother's future sister-in-law was a lesbian (known to her family), living with her partner in Kansas City, by the late 1930s. Was my grandmother aware of Countee Cullen's or Langston Hughes' rumored (more than rumored in Cullen's case) sexuality? On the other hand, that same future sister-in-law, my great-aunt Billie Miller (actual name Willanore, a combination of her grandmother's and grandfather's names) was herself a horrific racist. Her family was in fact the first exposure I had to racist white people in my life, when I met her sister and more, her sister's husband, in Springfield, Missouri when I was four. Aunt Pat gave me my first Barbie, in fact, during that visit. I named the doll Malibu, which was the style of Barbie she was. Such a tangled weird tapestry.

Kneecap was brilliant!

My sister pushed me into going to an actual movie theater today* to see the Irish film (North of Ireland, in fact) Kneecap, the semi-fictionalized story of how the pretty fucking republican hip hop band got started. The actual band members were the stars of the movie, plus Michael Fassbinder as the possibly apocryphal Provie father who fakes his own death (thus abandoning his family) to escape the Brits.

I have liked what I'd heard of Kneecap's music -- and Liam's nephew, I forget his name -- was in one of their music videos, which took place at a party.

But the film spent more time on the Gaeltacht, or Irish speaking, community in West Belfast, a stubbornly persistant political movement to get Irish recognized legally and supported. And Kneecap is part of that, because their rap is mostly in Irish. And fucking catchy. I told Rosie I thought she should definitely see the movie, and she mostly demurred because she thinks wypipo shouldn't try to rap. Which I get. But ... though arguably Eminem is exploitative in the same way Elvis was... his rap is good. Most white rap is not. But Kneecap's is, very much so. Anarchic and hedonistic and political, all at once.


Notes: shows I want to continue and finish:

1. S3 Only Murders in the Building -- finished 8/6

2. A Discovery of Witches

3. True Detective: Night Country

4. My Lady Jane (frippery recommended by Veronica Stein while we were texting today)

5. Warrior (maybe)

Shows finished: remake of Shogun and The West Wing rewatch and Brooklyn Nine-Nine



* We were going to go to Union Landing in Union City, because I am curious about their theaters, which show a lot of Hindi and Telegu films... but ended up for scheduling reasons, having to go to Bay Street, which was arduous and fucking annoying, because once we'd parked and struggled with the parking payment machine, it turned out that the only elevator was broken, so RQ had to haul my scoot while I stood grimly on the escalator... and then the second escalator up to the actual movie theater was also broken! We almost shitcanned the whole project then... but after some food and drink my sister went to get the car and pick me up and drive ... as it turned out, ALL THE FUCK OVER THE PLACE eventually to Parking Garage B, to find a practically hidden floor with "temporary ADA parking spaces" and a metal ramp I worried my battery wouldn't be able to deal with, but it did, brave little 'scoot. And then the handicapped bathroom was out of order, too. All garbage.