Introvert on Campaign--What I'm Currently Reading

 

I was door knocking with a big volume to ground me and a resident asked. "Just comics" I lied. I was bored on Tufts Street when I opened to Dinesh D'Souza's essay "Ignoble Savages" which stunned me, and on the train home, I read Toni Morrison's essay "Playing in the Dark," which unpacks the oblivious racism: "On July 12, 1776, he records with astonishment and hurt suprise a slave rebellion on his plantation: 'Judge my surprise...Of what avail is kindness & good usage when rewarded by such ingratitude.' 'Constantly bewildere,' Bailyn goes on, 'by his slaves' behavior...[Dunbar] recovered two runaways and 'condemned them to receive 500 lashes each at five different times, and to carry a chain & log 'fixt to the ancle.'"

Three weeks ago, after receiving a housing questionnaire, I drew from Housing the Nation for inspiration posting of projects to social media. The Jennings in New York and the Aja are two mission driven public housing projects that shaped my thinking for the kinds of social housing, a contemporary inside view of which I grasped through Jonathan Tarleton's Homes for Living, and a history of which I benefited from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit. I believe social architecture is crucial to Somerville's future. 

"Gentrification," said a Florence Street, East Somerville, expressing her chief concern. Indeed, also CAAS key finding Community Assessment Report “Gentrification disguised as economic development in Somerville is the driving force of poverty in our city.” She pointed out across Pearl Street to the public housing, "That used to be a community school" she said. Perhaps if the Mayor made a decision not to build on Sycamore, that Winter Hill Elementary property might likewise become public housing--both brutalist exteriors, but not inevitable. I'm not a fan of building on the City's only remnant of common pasture at Trum Field, but as one of two-potential sites--and an eye on a need for public housing...just a thought.

Horribly Awful Dad Jokes was a kick Father's Day. My daughter Adira, 23 mos., visited with residents at Cobble Hill Apartments for their Father's Day Celebration. 

 Being Pride Month, I bought Tourmaline's biography Marsha of Marsha P. Johnson. Not since reading Troy Saxby's Pauli Murray have I had such a close seat to an icon of civil rights. Marsha, a performative sex worker, was both actress, and front-lines organizer for seventeen years defying heteronormative police violence from her participation in the Stonewall riot to her tragic, mysterious death. For our Somerville celebration, I attended a concert at The Jungle enjoying a rendition of the "The Wheels on the Bus" by the Plus Ones. Poignant, as the lead singer put it, "Just in case you had terrible memories, we wanted to give you your childhood back. Love you Somerville!"

Ahead of my birthday, my wife had gotten me tickets to Colum McCann's reading at Brattle Theatre. He was signing Twist for me when he asked if I had read any of Tempest Williams' work. I have now. Refuge sets from the inside jacket, the Great Salt Lake, as a main character, reminding me of an essay of hers I encountered in The New York Times in which she described an encounter of neighbors she hosted, mainly Trump supporters, however, all ardent lovers of their natural surroundings on the Lake. Her work is antedote to the Climate Scientist pessimissm I received anecdotally that an expert was giving up on mass education--it's too late, he argued--we should just get to know our neighbors because in the forseable climate storms coming our way--we'll need each other. 

I got a kick out of Erma Bombeck's Cope Book: How to Get From Monday to Friday...In 12 Days. Popular comedian of the 1970s, as a mother of four, she made her domestic insanity a counterpoint to the unhealthy images of the perfect mother, madonna or whore, depicted on the screen. I laughed about her coupon episode, recalling a handful of coupons for Market Basket I brought recently, now that the Carrot Card has expired.

The top essayist on democracy, Jill Lepore, assembled a powerful collection of her work in The Deadline. "In the Dark Hour" and "The American Beast" sample some of her work as the book came to publication during the impeachment trial of President Trump. In "The Disruption Machine" I thought of Knives Out 2 "The Glass Onion." After reading "The Cobweb" which opens as a young graduate employed in the MIT startup computer bubble and investigates The Internet Archive, I wonder if the political will could support our City Archivists trying to tackle inventory of the massive digitalization projects, so that we avoid citation rot, and help information access and promote budget transparency.

In my third semester of the MFA Nonfiction at Lesley University I write a Craft Essay. My topic is juxtaposition. I could be thinking of the air-pollution of particulates from I-93 traffic of residents like Joseph Farranzzani, quoted in a 2011 Somerville Times article:

"There are too many homes built near highways, and highways cut through neighborhoods and not enough being done about it,” he said.

Ferrazzani said he had been surprised when he suffered a stroke a few years ago, and while he did not know at the time that chemicals from the highway may have contributed, he said the findings made sense in concordance with health problems he and his loved ones had faced.

“Things get neglected all the time, people get hurt, they don’t know about it, what’s out there in the air,” he said. “I’m not a politician, but I think more people should stand up for it, and tell them not to take our property away and put up a highway.” 

The broadstroke of one argument I make is based on Eyal Weizman's Hollow Land and the opening of Achille Membe's Necropolitics in which he argues that sovereignty is the right to decide who lives and who dies. The detail of my thinking for it was informed by Ahmed Hashim's Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq and the transcript of "In the Dark" New Yorker podcast "What they Saw" Episode 4 with damning, shocking, triggering survivor testimony: "Then, a Marine appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. The bedroom where Safa was with her mother, her aunt, and her siblings, her sisters, ages 15, 10, 5, and three, and her brother Mohammed, age 8. The Marine was holding a grenade. He looked at Safa in her family, but didn't say a word. Then he threw the grenade inside the room, closed the door, and left." 

I think of neighboring veterans, survivors of trauma, moral hazard, moral injury, and I want us engaged together in conducting your courage back home. At local fire house on Broadway, I met several veterans asking for any endorsement process...a double fire just this past week--and we have an upcoming negotiation for contract this coming term. We've come along way since the scare in the summer of 1982 with 50 arsons across Boston, in large part due to improved building codes, as well as enforcement inspection teams staffed by dedicated, veteran fire members like my neighbor Christine Guelpa.  

In Raising Critical Thinkers, Julie Bogart, aptly summarized the decision --'we sometimes fling ourselves into encounter"--the decision to run for City Council means that on my morning walk I have an internal dialogue with my inner child, "I need your shy side with me." The part of me that just want s a safe corner to crawl up and read and experience the world indirectly--I bring that to this campaign today with this booklist.

Books Referred to Above or Soon to Read

Democracy

Gabriel Thompson's Calling All Radicals: How Grassroots Organizers Can Help Save Our Democracy

Working Class History Ed. Every Day Acts of Resistance and Rebellion

Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

Jill Lepore, The Deadline: Essays

[Fiction] Colum McCann, Twist

Parenting

Julie Bogart Raising Critical Thinkers

Environment

Terry Tempest Williams Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

Jane Brox's In The Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy

Sexuality/Manhood/Humor

Robert Glück, About Ed

Tourmaline, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson

Frederick Joseph's Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood

Horrible Awful Dad Jokes

Erma Bombeck's Aunt Erma's Cope Book: How to GEt From Monday to Friday...In 12 Days

Geo-politics

Ahmed S. Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq

Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation

On Housing

Alexander Gorlin and Victoria Newhouse Eds. Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture, and the Future of Affordable Housing

Rachel Bratt, Michael Stone and Chester Hartman Eds., A Right to Housing

Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America

Gary Rivlin, Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.--How the Working Poor Became Big Business

Ben Austen, High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing

Audrey Petty, High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing

Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Jonathan Tarleton, Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and A New American Commons

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir

On Race

Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas, Eds. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Eds. Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror

Faith

Nick Salvatore, Ed. Faith and the Historian: Catholic Perspectives.