extemporally

Lorrrrrd I am so behind on all of these. The only reason I'm reviewing these books now is they were due back at the library yesterday.

The Clocks, by Agatha Christie.

"Sheila Webb expected to find a respectable blind lady waiting for her at 19 Wilbraham Crescent - not the body of a middle aged man sprawled across the living room floor. But when old Mrs Pebmarsh denies sending for her in the first place, or of owning all the clocks that surround the body, it's clear that they are going to need a very good detective.

'This crime is so complicated that it must be quite simple,' declares Hercule Poirot. But there's a murderer on the loose, and time is ticking away..."

Agatha Christie is one of those mystery writers for me - she doesn't provide very much in the way of food for thought, but it's an enjoyable sort of munchiness anyway, but maybe I am just straining the food analogy to its very limits because I read this on the first day of Chinese New Year, in a cafe in Oxford, as I had a lunch of roast pork. Anyway! I find her outlook on life so intriguing - the mystery novel, obviously, is nearly a mathematical equation, one I have never been very good at, in the sense that you have your variables, some of which are relevant, and some of which you must learn to disregard, and a solution. As novels go they are very elegant, but also reductive. Characters are there for a purpose; so are subplots. The dead body in the front parlour - so shocking at first - is only instrumental. It's a very cynical worldview, I think. (Also this makes me want to think about the detective, potentially the only character Agatha Christie takes intrinsic delight in, in the sense that she reintroduces them again and again, as the sole agent of free will in an essentially-directed world - which is a position we'd associate more with the loneliness of Chandler's Philip Marlowe, isn't it? and god I really need to stop rambling.) ANYWAY. While we're on the subject of making wild, reductive generalisations, I've been reading Lacey's biography of H.L.A Hart and thinking about the English prestige conferred to philosophy in a way that doesn't translate across the Atlantic; and it is possible that the detective novel is also a philosophical problem.

But also, on the topic of (non-contemporary) Englishness:

'I do odd jobs here and there,' she said. 'Help out at parties, a bit of hostess work, that sort of thing. It's not a bad life. At any rate you meet people. Things get near the bone now and again.'

That phrase near the bone now and again just intrigues me, for some reason. Bla bla bla, failed actress, tramps on the margin, masculinised archetypes, female equivalents, etc!

Beyond Black, by Hilary Mantel.

"Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital road with her flint-hearted sidekick Colette, passing on messages from dead ancestors. But behind her plump, smiling persona is a desperate woman: the next life holds terrors that she must conceal from her clients, and her own waking hours are plagued by the spirits of men from her past. They infiltrate her house, her body and her soul, and the more she tries to be rid of them, the stronger and nastier they become..."

Man, I feel like this book had everything I find great - ghosts! grotesquerie! death! the working class! - but somehow all the threads didn't quite get drawn together, I think it's a failure of Mantel's ability to sustain interest. Or - I don't know, I find this quite endemic to a particular kind of (British) writing that I can't quite articulate without sounding like a knob, the kind of writing that gets bad and dull in spots and doesn't attempt to cover up its own dullness. British writing, when will you be great again???

And yet. This review articulated so much of what I find intriguing about the novel, thematically: "This is the inventive, delightful, subversive aspect of the novel. Its other aspect is dead serious: a tale of wastelands, unhappiness and ugliness. In Mantel's vision it's as if the whole of outer suburbia has been taken up by brown-fill, and everywhere the second best is taking over from the best. When mediums claim they are visited by the spirits of great composers — Beethoven, Liszt — and produce new compositions at their behest, what comes out is second rate, never the best work, always the worst, done on a bad day. For all we know, Purgatory is already here, creeping ever nearer the centre of our cities."

YES. That kind of dull, mediocre shittiness that we commonly attribute to modern life - I think what I meant to say was that Hilary Mantel devotes so much time to describing it that she at times ceases to be critical or acute about it and just starts being reflexive, which is a huge pity.

I tabbed, really, only two pages throughout the entire novel. Here is one of them:

A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.

If her writing had sustained just this tone of disappointed transcendence, I would have stayed invested all the way. Nevertheless - it's pretty good.

Feminism is for Everybody, by bell hooks.

I feel like a lot of what bell hooks said at the time was so revolutionary it's made its way into accepted thinking by now, if that makes sense? So there wasn't that sense of 'holy shit holy shit holy shit' you get from game-changers right at the start of their game-changing. Nevertheless, there were a couple of moments here that made me go 'YES' very loudly:

Given the reality of racism, it made sense that white men were more willing to consider women's rights when the granting of those rights could serve the interests of maintaining white supremacy. We can never forget that white women began to assert their need for freedom after civil rights, just at the point when racial discrimination was ending and black people, especially black males, might have at- tained equality in the workforce with white men. Reformist feminist thinking focusing primarily on equality with men in the workforce overshadowed the original radical foundations of contemporary feminism which called for reform as well as overall restructuring of society so that our nation would be fundamentally anti-sexist.

However feminist women in the West are still struggling to decolonize feminist thinking and practice so that these issues can be addressed in a manner that does not reinscribe Western imperial- ism. Consider the way many Western women, white and black, have confronted the issue of female circumcision in Africa and the Mid- dle East. Usually these countries are depicted as "barbaric and un-civilized," the sexism there portrayed as more brutal and dangerous to women than the sexism here in the United States.

A decolonized feminist perspective would first and foremost examine how sexist practices in relation to women's bodies globally are linked. For example: linking circumcision with life-threatening eating disorders (which are the direct consequence of a culture imposing thinness as a beauty ideal) or any life-threatening cosmetic surgery wo.uld emphasize that the sexism, the misogyny, underlying these practices globally mirror the sexism here in this country. When Issues are addressed in this manner Western imperialism is not reinscribed and feminism cannot be appropriated by transnational capitalism as yet another luxury product from the West women in other cultures must fight to have the right to consume.

YES. That thing about: the sexism there portrayed as more brutal and dangerous to women than the sexism here in the United States - still, today, yes yes yes.

By the late '70s women's studies was on its way to becoming an accepted academic discipline. This triumph overshadowed the fact that many of the women who had paved the way for the institutionalization ofwomen's studies were fired because they had master's degrees and not doctorates. While some of us returned to graduate school to get PhDs, some of the best and brightest among us did not because they were utterly disillusioned with the university and burnt out from overwork as well as disappointed and enraged that the radical politics undergirding women's studies was being re- placed by liberal reformism. Before too long the women's studies classroom had replaced the free-for-all consciousness-raising group. Whereas women from various backgrounds, those who worked solely as housewives or in service jobs, and big-time professional women, could be found in diverse consciousness-raising groups, the academy was and remains a site of class privilege.

FUCKING YES, you guys. I was discussing with a friend how weird and almost gendered I find it that her stuff about how love is radical and visionary was the subject of the most quotes I could pull up online, when the stuff she says about race and academia is... not so much referenced? ANYWAY I NEED TO READ HER WORK ON EMOTIONAL CARING AGAIN but anyway the point was yay bell hooks!!!