Finished Ties that Bind, and checked out Beloved since Morrison has been mentioned in so often in our texts this semester, and one historic narrative was also referenced in Gilroy. Let's hope I can keep my hands off it until my final paper is written.
I think I am also enjoying Ties that Bind because it is a nice break from my other studies right now; screens and digital rights and technologies--which is something that I often want to escape from!
One of the things a decently long commute has taught me is what kinds of books I can or want to read on the train. Anything that causes me to want to take notes is impossible. Anything that I would want to append is borderline. Ties that Bind is a great read in that I can just read it; it's fascinating, it reads like a narrative and yet it's historically appropriate (many "we have no way of knowing"-s) and I am blowing through it, which somehow also inspires me to keep reading more + more + more.
Started Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom by Tiya Miles, which I am really enjoying! It's nice to read narratives after a lot of theory.
This morning I was reading and enjoying: Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz. "American Studies as Accompaniment." American Quarterly 65.1 (2013): 1-30. Project MUSE. Web. 24 May. 2013.
And I'm also back to reading See Now Then in bits and pieces on the train and in coffee shops. It's pleasant but has an underlying rage, which gives it a unique feel.
Lots of reading, amidst the cracks of life as it goes, changes. Halfway through E. Biella Coleman's Coding Freedom, started David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and wanted to start, but probably have to wait until after the thesis, bell hooks' Where We Stand: Class Matters.
A piece in the New Yorker about Noah Baumbach, a person whose work I have a lot of sympathy for somehow, but in this piece he sounds like he wants to be a vampire sucking the energy off of his girlfriend's ideas. Is that a great way to have a relationship, or a terrible way?
I've also been reading Living Anarchy on the train, while very tired lately.
Going to try to finish In Praise of Copying today. This book has pleasantly surprised me in many ways and I'm greatly enjoying it. Highly recommended if you would like to think more deeply about copying (and its mimetic, ever-present nature) on a philosophical level.
Many of the books about intellectual property I've looked at recently discuss the absurdities of various IP situations, or examine IP clashes via specific (often outrageous) legal cases. This book, on the other hand, talks more about the practices and traditions of copying, collaging or appropriating through many different perspectives, going back to the work of philosophers who are long dead but also looking for the mimetic in religious practices, theory, art, and even inside the human body. Totally fascinating.
Last week watched the documentary, Kind Hearted Woman. Among many powerful scenes, was struck by those where Robin took family to go walking through the U of M, and how looking at the university and thinking about what it offered was a powerful activity for them.
While fighting some kind of bug finished Please Kill Me and ripping through Cometbus Omnibus and Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change
Been reading Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Not sure if it will help the thesis, but it's a good pick up/put down at random book.
Also still moving very slowly through Moonwalking with Einstein, my official over-lunch-at-work book of the moment.