Pulitzer Prize – …on the B.L.

I Like to Watch by Emily Nussbaum

August 1, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read Absolutely
Length 384
Quick Review Emily Nussbaum is a Pulitzer Prize winning critic. I’ve heard of her in passing, but I fell in love with her in I Like to Watch, a collection of new and published essays.

Reading *I Like to Watch* by Emily Nussbaum on Top Sail in North Carolina. | Bikini Bottoms | Bikini Top | Beach Towel |

I don’t read a lot of critiques because I don’t like to be influenced one way or the other, but maybe I should start reading Emily Nussbaum’s critiques because, damn, she’s spot on. After reading I Like to Watch, I am officially an Emily Nussbaum fan.

TV is seen, by many, as a waste of time. As the work-from-home, freelancer, hermit, stay-at-home dog mom type, I’m a huge fan of TV. Other than Beau, television is my constant companion. I don’t always broadcast my love of TV, but I have always defended shows I find smart and compelling, which others tend to throw away as “girly.” Idiots. I might like Nussbaum because she bolstered my opinions, but she’s very smart and has been published in a lot of the best publications. I have watched to completion almost every show reviewed and mentioned in I Like to Watch, so maybe I need to be more productive, or maybe I should go into TV criticism… But she has a Pulitzer, and I have a blog.

Nussbaum was on her way to a doctorate when her future changed during an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned her into a TV critic.

Nussbaum is an amazing writer with deep insights, a sense of humor, and a complete lack of herd mentality. Her opening and closing sentences to her essays are amazing. I aspire to those kinds of clinchers. Though I Like to Watch focuses on TV, Nussbaum dives into more like the Me Too movement, Weinstein, and the fall out. Television is more than just mindless entertainment. It is a way to show people other ways of life, open minds, sway opinions, and dive into the nitty gritty. There has been a decent amount of uproar about rape depictions on TV, but representing dark and gruesome is not a bad thing, “Well drawn characters …. may be rape survivors, but that’s not where their stories stop. They’re more than their worst days.”

I live in this world as a woman. There are some great parts about being a lady, but there are a ton of downsides. I am not represented in the media to my fullest complexity, and it is far worse for people and women of color. I have known this for awhile, but there are shows I couldn’t totally pinpoint why I didn’t like them until I read I Like to Watch. In several highly underrated shows, Nussbaum agreed with the things I’ve been saying for, well, since I saw the shows. Shows like True Detective and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel were fun but lacking in my opinion because, as Nussbaum explains, they completely lack female characters of any depth or humor or qualities making women complex entities. I liked them, but they weren’t great. I guess I like my shows to have men and women with personalities. Shows poo-pooed by friends, critics, and randos like Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are great. They are smart and funny but belittled because they’re shows for women. Fuck the patriarchy. I binged Sex and the City last year because I’d never had access to HBO, and all I’d ever heard was how girly it was. I was hooked because it showed flawed, complex women working at friendship, relationships, and their goals with really great clothes and shoes, “High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, Sex and the City was a brilliant, and, in certain ways, radical show.”

By the way, I fucking loved Nanette. I watched it the day it came out. Hannah Gadsby is a delight. It is a special I keep thinking about and recommending to anyone who has an interest in comedy, art history, feminism, LGBTQIA rights, or existing on this planet.

This is not a collection of glowing critiques, but it is an honest collection. There are good, pans, and some in between. I Like to Watch is an array of previously published and new essays from Nussbaum’s career as a critic. I seriously enjoyed this one, and I keep recommending it to people.

Memorable Quotes
“It was elitist screed, nostalgic for an America that never really existed…”
“Criticism isn’t memoir, but it’s certainly personal, so you dan consider these essays to be a portrait of me struggling to change my mind.”
“Jokes were a superior way to tell the truth – and that meant freedom for everyone.”
“…there’s a risk to Schumer’s rise: When you’re put on a pedestal, the whole world gets to upskirt you.”
“Bigotry is resilient, because rejecting it often means rejecting your own family.”

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Man interrupting my photo shoot on a public beach. How dare he!!!

Title: I Like to Watch; Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution
Author: Emily Nussbaum
Publisher: Random House
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9780525508960

Books

Red Famine

December 26, 2017 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 384
Quick Review A heartbreaking and in depth look into the Holodomor: pervasive famine during 1932-1934 in Ukraine killing over 13% of the population. Applebaum argues it wasn’t mother nature but Stalin.

I have a Bachelor’s in Russian, among other things. When I heard news of Red Famine being published, I knew it was something I wanted to read as soon as possible. Anne Applebaum is a renowned journalist having written incredible books on Eastern and Central Europe with an emphasis on communist eras. She has garnered popular and critical acclaim even winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2003 book, Gulag.

In Ukraine there was a famine killing over 13% of the population between 1932-1934. Famines are viewed as the result of mother nature. Applebaum argues there was more at play than a cold winter and lack of food. She argues the famine was a strategic weeding of Ukrainian citizens by the Russian government: Stalin. The famine may have started in 1932, but the events leading to the deadly epidemic started well over a decade before.

I could include a whole bunch of “fun” facts, but you should go read the book for yourself. I will include an important factoid about the famine. It is known as Holodomor. This term comes from морити голодом, which is translated as “to kill by starvation.” As a Russian speaker, I think this title is incredibly powerful; much of the power being lost in translation, of course.

This is an era of history often looked over pertaining to a country often lumped in as a side note to Russia, Poland, and other dominating countries. It would be easy to lose people’s attentions or bog them down in the history necessary to explaining the famine; however, Applebaum does neither. She captivates the reader with anecdotes, dates, and arguments far from the voice of a stodgy history professor one would expect to tell the tale of communist Ukraine. I’m not just saying this because I love Eastern European history; I get bored with the droning too.

Applebaum successfully brings the oft forgotten yet not that long ago Holodomor into the modern consciousness.

Memorable Quotes
“The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state.”
“Ukraine – the word means “borderland” in both Russian and Polish”
“Many refuses to recognize the name “Ukraine” at all.”
“The authorities … later altered death registries scrum across Ukraine to hide the numbers of deaths from starvation, and in 1937 scrapped an entire census because of what it revealed.”
“In the years that followed the famine, Ukrainians were forbidden to speak about what had happened.”
“The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather causes the famine in Ukraine.”

Title: Red Famine; Stalin’s War on Ukraine
Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Doubleday Books (Penguin Random House)
Copyright: 2017
ISBN: 9780385538855

Books, Fiction

Interpreter of Maladies

August 10, 2017 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 198
Quick Review A collection of eight short stories exploring the meaning of disappointment and unfulfilled expectations.

I had never read anything by Jhumpa Lahiri, so I was excited to experience her writing for the first time. She did not disappoint. Lahiri explores the meaning of disappointment and the feeling of unfulfilled expectations. In most of the stories, the hopes and expectations of the characters are met in a drastically different way than they hope; driving home the message that life gives us what we want, it may not be how we want. Lahiri shows the build up, the enjoyment of living in a world filled with expectation, the realisation, and the mourning period when the inevitability of life is so painfully tangible.

The following eight short stories are in the order they appear in the book. They are each around twenty pages in length, give or take a few.

A Temporary Matter
Shukumar and Shoba were both born in the US. They are of Indian heritage; unlike Shoba, Shukumar does not have childhood memories of visits to India. They are going through a difficult time in their marriage after the stillbirth of their first child because the pain has become a barrier dividing them instead of bringing them together. They reconnect during an hourly power outtage every night for a week.

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine
A young girl and her family open their home to Mr. Pirzada, a Bengali man working on his degree in the US while separated from his family. The girl is torn between feeling like an outsider in her own home and excitement for having a new person visit every evening. She is also beginning to understand the difference between her family’s culture and that of the one she is surrounded by.

Interpreter of Maladies
Mr. Kapasi is a driver for tourists on the weekend, but during the week he works as an interpreter for a doctor.. He is driving a young family and developes a small crush on the wife. As they begin to talk, he realizes she is just as flawed as everyone else in the world and not a perfect creature.

Sexy
A young, career woman, Miranda, began an affair with an older married, Indian man, Dev, as she listens to her coworker, Laxmi, console a cousin whose husband is having an affair. To keep her affair alive, she spends money on a beautiful dress and lingerie hoping to wear it for Dev one day. Miranda ends up babysitting for the son of Laxmi’s cousin, who is aware of the affair his father had. Through an afternoon spent with a young boy, she becomes aware of the consequences her situation can have.

Mrs. Sen’s
Mrs. Sen watches Eliot after school, as she is trying to learn how to drive a car. Mrs. Sen is learning to drive and function in a new society. Mrs. Sen hates being far away from her home in India where she has whole fish and independence without a car. She has everything her family believes the could want like a rainbow of saris and a professional husband, but she misses the comfort of home.

This Blessed House
Twinkle and Sanjeev are newly weds in a house. Sanjeev isn’t sure he loves his wife but he’s irritated by her love of finding and keeping the Christian items left throughout the house by the previous owners. At their housewarming everyone is dazzled by Twinkle, and Sanjeev realizes he enjoys the status of his new, beautiful, young, charming wife.

The Treatment of Bibi Haldar
Bibi Haldar was plagued by an illness no one could diagnose or fix – which was probably epilepsy. She dreamt of having a husband to take care of. It was her only hope, and she couldn’t stop talking about it. After a particular episode, she was prescribed marriage to ease her symptoms, but no one would take her on as a wife because of her reputation as a lune. After a difficult few months of seclusion she was found pregnant. She never married, but, instead, had a son who she cared for without being plighted by another episode.

The Third and Final Continent
He was born in India, studied in London, and worked in Cambridge at MIT. His wife Mala joined him in the US having been married for six weeks but only spending five days together. They were strangers at the beginning of their journey, but looking back on their life in Cambridge they can’t imagine not knowing each other.

Memorable Quotes
““I only spoil children who are incapable of spoiling.””
“… life, I realized, was being lived in Dacca first.”
“It means loving someone you don’t know.”
“He did not know if he loved her.”
“ She wanted to be spoken for, protected, placed on her path in life.”

Title: Interpreter of Maladies
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Copyright: 1999
ISBN: 9780395927205