Category: Totally Anecdotal

Library Haul 1/22

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Library Haul 1-22 (1)

I had to pick up some books for my thesis and I wound up digging deep into my library’s film and literary criticism section despite the fact that I only needed ONE book from that section.

Here are the books I took out today, maybe you’ll find something you like!

  1. J-Horror: The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge, and Beyond by David Kalat
  2. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film by Harry M. Benshoff
  3. Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan edited by Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker
  4. Supervillains and Philosophy edited by Ben Dyer
  5. Good Girls & Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation by Amy M. Davis
  6. Vader, Voldemort, and Other Villains: Essays on Evil in Popular Media edited by Jamey Heit
  7. The Thrill of Repulsion: Excursions into Horror Culture by William Burns
  8. Batman Death of the Family by Greg Capullo and Scott Snyder
  9. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley
  10. Batman: Harley Quinn by Paul Dini, Yvel Guichet, Aaron Sowd, Don Kramer, Wayne Faucher, Joe Quinones, and Neil Googe
  11. Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
  12. Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 02 by John Wagner, Pat Mills, and Brian Bolland
  13. The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland
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Totally Anecdotal: Stitch’s Brush With Racism in Education

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I wanted to start my review of Jason Reynolds’ Miles Morales: A Spider-Man Novel with a slightly relevant anecdote on an experience I had as a teenager.

As an adult that was once a Black kid in the US education system (in Florida, natch), one racist teacher can make your school life a living hell even if they’re not part of a creepy (but absolutely plausible) plot to disenfranchise and subjugate Black people. So I wanted to talk about that.

But this got long and no one wants to read this sort of thing literally on top of a review so…

Separate post!

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Ten years ago I was a senior in a mediocre charter high school. I was sixteen and had just skipped a grade (taking 11th/12th grade English at the same time) so that I could graduate early. Up until this point, all of my teachers were aware that I had “Bored Genius Syndrome” and that if they didn’t keep me engaged in the school work, something else would.

So they kept me busy.Read More »

Let’s Talk About “Alice”: The Fragility of White Womanhood in Grad School Spaces

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AKA “There’s a fragile white woman in my class who doesn’t seem to handle criticism very well and we’re probably going to fight by the end of the semester… or next week”.

There’s this woman in my Wednesday night grad school course who is going to hate me by the end of the semester if she doesn’t already.

Let’s call her Alice.

Alice has had some bad opinions over the past two weeks of our classes. Near the end of our first class after I’d already given this passionate defense of audiobooks as another valid way of reading, Alice looked me dead in the face and said “No offense, but… I still don’t think audiobooks count as reading.”

I let it slide because it was the first class of the semester and her first literature class. I told myself that Alice would be better the next class.

Alice was not better the next class.Read More »

The Author In Their Times (Unless That Author Wrote A Comic Book)

Stitch

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One of the three graduate courses I’m taking is a class called “The Author in their Time/s”. It’s a class that looks at authors writing fiction about a period in history as they lived in said period. This specific class, taught by a professor that reminds me a bit of Heathcliffe (the cat, not the Wuthering Heights dude), is about the Cold War.

A huge issue that I’ve been having with academia – even before the Literature degree in-progress – is that a lot of the people who teach my classes or who are in said classes have no idea that comic books could even remotely fall underneath the banner of respectable literature. We learn about the same white guys and gals and the same types of Literature on end until it’s all but beaten into us that academia only cares about certain types of narratives.Read More »

A Political Stitch

Stitch

Note: if it’s not clear (but it should be), this is a celebration of my identity and my Blackness because February is Black History Month and it’s taken me this long to put my thoughts together.

“I didn’t know you were so… political,” my supervisor says to me on September 11, 2015.

It’s not a compliment.

What it is is a rebuke about the discussion I’d been having (mostly with myself) as I collected information about the Iran Deal and US interference in that part of Asia for a friend’s project. Because apparently, talking about the fact that the United States needs to get out of that part of Asia and stop interfering the way its done for like sixty years is problematic. My voicing that the Iran Deal was a good step forward to all of this was apparently disrespectful on September 11th.

I disagreed then and I disagree now, but what stuck with me was the idea that I suddenly became political that day.

Not when I spoke to one of my coworkers about her focus on making fun of AAVE or when I pointedly shut my office door on a discussion of who had it worst throughout history. Or not even when I spoke about my (a)sexuality with these people I thought were also my friends.

I was apolitical until what I was saying was too much to ignore.Read More »

Obligatory X-Mas Post

Stitch

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I like saying that I’m in it for the presents, but let’s be real:

I don’t get up at 5:30 in the morning for stuff. We’re celebrating the fact that almost everyone in our family is together and able to share gifts, positivity, and love. I enjoy watching my niecelings tear into gifts and scream when they see something they wanted all year.

This is the second year that our mom has missed Christmas because she’s still in the Virgin Islands and her absence is missed. We still have her wrapped gift from last year and we’re hoping that she can come back soon.

Don’t get me wrong, the stuff is nice. It’s great. I got some good stuff and I always feel like my family notices me and what I’m into. (The Cassandra Clare book made me ugly laugh for figurative hours because she’s such a huge guilty pleasure for me.)

But I’m also invested in watching J howl when she opens a new type of make up, M mean mugging for the camera, and Tiny T cackling with delight when she gets a new doll. My nieces are getting bigger and bigger every year and I love seeing the way that their interests and reactions change. These are my babies and they’re getting so big. I’ve got to bask in it while I can.

Today wouldn’t be half as fun without my family.

Even if they did wake me up at five thirty in the freaking morning…

So happy Xmas if you’re into that sort of thing (and happy Friday if you’re not). I hope you all get to spend time with the people that you love!

My Ultimate Nerd Secret

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When the bestie (Bianca) and I saw Crimson Peak on Saturday night, most of the trailers were kind of well… blah. Except of course for the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer that was packaged with the movie. (The one embedded above!)

That wasn’t blah at all.

I teared up so hard at that trailer that Bianca totally could have used best friend privileges to mock me. It was that intense and embarrassing.
Read More »

Selfie Love

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This is a post about selfies, self love, self loathing, and how I learned to see myself for who I was. Like me, this topic is a work in progress and I plan to return to it as time passes.   I have never thought of myself as pretty. Or conventionally attractive. In my mind’s […]