Bakom garden by Åsa Sandell

Ellis Island by Georges Perec

Imagine Ellis Island. According to Perec, 3.000 people took their own lives on the tiny island between 1892 and 1924. 

Reborn (Early Diaries 1947-1964) by Susan Sontag, Ed. by David Rieff

I simply cannot talk about it at this point. 

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag

It's been so long since I first fell in love with the first sentences of Illness as Metaphor that I almost can't believe that I actually managed to finish this masterpiece today. 

I suppose more strange things have happened. After all, my word for 2009 was base (makes a little more sense in SWE). And I did finish some other long lasting projects in the past year (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) so, if I can just hurry up and wrap my head around Duras' Moderato Cantabile, Barnes' Nightwood and Martinson's Aniara before December, 31... Yeah, well - then what?

I'll be better equipped for the next decade? Sort of like wearing David Shrigley's Battle Dress? I don't dare to even start hoping for something that great.

Kent - Texter om Sveriges största rockband - Edited by Håkan Steen

A collection of interviews, album/concert reviews and other articles from 1991-2006, all on the subject of Swedish band Kent. 


There was a time when I used to say I was all about hip hop - and Kent. Some thirteen years later, I'm sad to admit I've grown out of keeping up with the rap game. Kent, however, strangely remain as close as before. 


Perhaps it has to do with the fact that one has to fight so hard to love this country during these snowless winters. Especially in November, which happens to be a typical release month for new Kent albums. 


Or maybe it's just that even I have a lonesome middle-aged white male inside of me, a man who sits in a dark room with a bottle, longing for some understanding (and 80's pop)?


It's a good collection.

One Big Happy Family, edited by Rebecca Walker

 

After sharing my love for Rebecca Walker's work with a few internet friends - and the desperate need to get a hold of the One Big Happy Family anthology, the great Jen Disgrasian quickly came to my rescue. Within a week, this beautiful book (plus a note written on enviable personalized stationery) had reached my mailbox. For that, I am eternally grateful to this fabulous woman. 

The anthology contains 18 well-written essays about different family constellations, among them mixed marriages, polyamory, single parenthood, open adoption, househusbandry, sperm donation... Marc and Amy Vachon's story Half the Work, All the Fun on equally shared parenting and Sasha Hom's beautiful account of a home birth in Unassisted especially got to me. As did Neal Pollack's Home Alone Together: 

"Why don't you do the fucking dishes?"

"Why don't you do the fucking dishes?"

"Because I don't fucking want to, that's why. So can you tell me why the kitchen floor is such a mess?"

"I don't know. Why don't you fucking clean it?"

It's sometimes hilarious, too. 

 ***

Read Rebecca Walker's foreword here and Unassisted by Sasha Hom here. 

Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff

[...] You don't just die, as Simone de Beauvoir points out in her beautiful memoir, "from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something."

The particular something that David Rieff writes about in this beautiful memoir is Myelodysplastic Syndrome, the illness that in less than a year took his mother Susan Sontag's life in 2004. In her journal, she wrote:

"While I was busy zapping the world with my mind, my body fell down"

Rieff explains the guilt of the survivor, the unanswerable questions one poses to oneself, even long after the loved one is gone. The thought that it would have been easier to die oneself, which of course would be less about making the ultimate sacrifice than it would be about making it easier for oneself.

In Sontag's workbook for the essay Illness as Metaphor that came out in 1978, Rieff later found a notation that read:

"leukemia: the ony clean death from cancer, the only death that can be romanticized"

The truth had been far from it.

.

Listen to NPR's program about the book and read the first chapter or so.

Read an excerpt from Sontag's diaries 1947-1963 here.

.

UPDATE: I found this great talk held by Rieff over at Fora.tv!

What I Talk About when I Talk About Running by Murakami Haruki

Is what I read about when I think about running. And writing.

Reading and Writing: a Personal Account by V.S. Naipaul

I am fascinated by Naipaul's literary awakening. His father had an interesting way of reading to him a few pages here and there, of many different works. This lead to Naipaul not really recognizing all these seemingly familiar stories when he later read them as a whole. He suddenly thought them strange, told for another world. I'm also intrigued by the way Naipaul describes how he became an author, the genres he has chosen and why. I should probably read more.

Virginia Woolf by Nigel Nicolson

I could hardly put it down.

«Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country, ‘For’, the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’»

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1931). Read it in full here.

By the way, it becomes more evident for every day that Orlando is one of my greatest reads ever. Ever.

Något bara kvinnor kan. Normer, biologi och graviditet by Ulrika Lorentzi (Swedish only)

Swedish journalist Ulrika Lorentzi has written a great book about pregnancy and, to some extent, parenthood. Great intervews with queer feminist Tiina Rosenberg and feminist Ebba Witt Brattström. Read it. Get it here.

Lorentzi's blog (in Swedish).

Baby Love - Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence by Rebecca Walker

Baby Love is a memoir in diary form, written mostly during Rebecca Walker's pregnancy with her first child. She writes about the ambivalence she's been dealing with, the worry that she would lose herself and that it would complicate her already complex relationship with her mother (more about that relationship in this book).

"With a few small power plays—a skeptical comment, the withholding of approval or praise—a mother can devastate a daughter. Decades of subtle undermining can stunt a daughter, or so monopolize her energy that she in effect stunts herself. Muted, fearful, riddled with self-doubt, she can remain trapped in daughterhood forever, the one place she feels confident she knows the rules."

Well.

"It seemed that these mothers did not realize that they had to give adulthood to their daughters by stepping down, stepping back, stepping away, and letting the daughter take center stage. These mothers did not seem to know, with all their potions and philosophies, their desires to rehabilitate ancient scripts of gender and identity, that there is a natural order, and that natural order involves passing the scepter to offspring with unconditional love and pride.

Or pay the price."

To protect her unborn child, Walker decides to not have too much to do with her seemingly indifferent mother.

"I can see the importance of making decisions that enable your child to be not just physically safe in an environment, but emotionally and logically safe as well. If the well-being of my own child doesn't inspire me to break through my ambivalence about a person or situation and act more decisively, I have no idea what will."

She also recalls her mother telling her as an adult that she had had to decide to, choose to love her as a child. After Walker's own son is born, she finds that there is absolutely no choice for her loving him. And that bringing him up finally might help her heal her own painful childhood - the divorced parents, the moving all over the US every other year...

It is a quite wonderful book. Read the first chapters here and an interview here. Lastly:

"Human beings create narrative because we glimpse the universal through the specific and feel less alone."

Black White and Jewish - Autobiography of a Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker

All ye betweenshippers and shape shifters out there should read this one. It reminded me very much of a childhood spent trying to fit in: in school, at home, with my father and his Chinese friends. Reminded me of a time I had wanted to forget: the early teens.

Made me laugh. Made me really sad. A tad too long, but well written and quite engaging. Spending my X-mas in another town, far from my copy of the novel, I gotta remember to write down a few more of my fave passages later on.

Once again, read an excerpt here.

Currently (Still) Reading: Walker

Sometimes I have to leave it be for a while, Black White & Jewish. Reading it is like revisiting my own childhood, something I can only do for brief moments at a time.

Rebecca Walker writes about her early life moving back and forth over the US, between her african american mother and her white jewish father and his new wife.

"[Mother's] presence at the table would grant me the great luxury of being able to love my family unreservedly, to take them irrevocably as my own. As it is, the specter of my mother, of race, really, and the inability of my relatives to deal with it, leaves me somewhere on the periphery of my own experience, unable to commit to fully being there. Haunted by her absence, I pull back cautiously and feel, even as I laugh and play with my cousins, as if some part of me is alien to the others, as if I am in the family through some kind of affirmative-action plan and don't entirely belong."

Currently Reading: Walker

Had to start with Black White and Jewish even before finishing the Mixed anthology. I am intrigued.

"I wonder what it is like to harbor a primal loyalty to your family: grandmothers, aunts, uncles, brothers. To put them, those others connected to you by birth, by name, before those you choose to claim as your own. To consider the ones you were born with your first layer of protection, your inner sanctum, the blood in which you live that cannot be diluted by the water you drink. I am fascinated by this emotion, this human device that creates purpose and meaning, self and other. Is it something we are born with, or is this subtle belonging cultivated, a by-product of the endless repetition of rituals: setting the table, driving to school, walking the dog?"

Read an excerpt over at Multiracial.com.

Currently Reading: Mixed

I came across Rebecca Walker's memoir Black White and Jewish in the Women's Studies section at Borders, Kuala Lumpur. And then I couldn't help reading her introduction to the very promising anthology Mixed - an Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience. Now I am wondering how it's possible to write a mere 5-paged forword that can make people cry.

"But not one of us has ever been a cracked plate. We have only held the fractured projections of others, innocently imbibing harmful judgments that were not our own. This mindless absorption of the negative mythologies of others is a source of great misery in our lives. I fear this self-sabotage much more than garden-variety racism, for it has the power to destroy from within that which outwardly, physically cannot be denied. Namely, that multiracial people exist, that we call all categories into question, and that, if we can survive this internal battle, we embody a different tomorrow. But if we remain mesmerized by the idea of ourselves as eternally broken, we all but guarantee the loss of our lives as fully functional, whole human beings."

More info on the anthology here.

Sveda by Cecilia Persson

Recently read an interesting interview with Cecilia Persson in the latest issue of the great Swedish periodical called Slut (as in the Swedish word for end, nothing else), about her novel Sveda - on growing up with a mentally ill mother and, to some extent, about Sylvia Plath. The book contains a little bit of everything: clippings, poetry, prose, letters. It didn't really leave me with much, but made for a fairly good read, especially as the subject does interest me a lot.

Get it here.

Currently Reading: Sontag

Susan Sontag by Annie Leibovitz.

Reading Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, as I've been meaning to do since I read the first sentences a few years back:

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds a dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

I'm looking forward to finishing it.

Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski

I am on a Diski roll.

Skating to Antarctica by Jenny Diski

The last thing I heard before boarding the first flight towards Antarctica in February, was H. telling me to read this. I already knew about it, but had been hesitant to read it; before this trip Antarctica was a dream that I didn't want to spoil with other people's recollections of it. And when I suddenly found myself going there, I didn't want to be disturbed by other experiences of it, wanted to find my own words to describe it. Naturally, I found the book in the M.S. National Geographic Endeavour library, opened it every now and then, decided not to read it, came back to make sure it was still there and not in the hands of any of my fellow American passengers... This went on during the whole trip.

If there is something I am good at, it's knowing the right time to read a certain novel. Sometimes I start reading a book that opens so fantastically that I have to leave it be for a while (which is why I still haven't been able to read Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphor, Lotta Lotass' Min röst skall nu komma från en annan plats i rummet, or Harry Martinson's Aniara). Now almost four months have passed since I returned, and the other day I just couldn't resist this Skating any longer, as I felt a sudden pang of loss walking about a bookstore, missing the ice so much.

"I am not entirely content with the degree of whiteness in my life."

Jenny Diski is almost too on point. The way she describes her trip and the other (mostly American) passengers:

"Photography is a modern, miniature form of colonization."

And also her recollection of a quite disturbing childhood and the teenage years spent moving between mental institutions and foster care; her mother leaving her when she was 16 never to return, never even calling, writing.

There is so much about this memoir that I can relate to, there's no wonder it took me such a long time and all this lingering about to read it.