Cathy Jacobowitz's Blog, page 3

Comment on The backpack incident by David

I can understand her bristling *sometwhat* at you going after the ally cookie, but to turn it around 360 degrees on you like that? You were only given to assume she shared your views because she had said she admired your backpack. It’s not like you sought her out or stuck your message in her face – she responded to it first. I don’t believe her level of hostility as you describe it was warranted.

Comment on The backpack incident by Cathy

Thanks for your careful read & comments David! See clarification above.

Comment on The backpack incident by David

Cathy, I read this after Kyle posted the link on f——k. I appreciate your writing and your perspective. I left a couple of comments before Kyle informed me you wound’t see gthe, as I probably should have guessed. So I’m re-posting here:

David Hewitt
I don’t know how I feel about that. The woman says she admires what you have on your backpack, then turns on you. Seems pretty uncalled for to me. Why ‘smack’?

Rebecca Stimpson
Rebecca Stimpson ha. obviously i’m white, but i sort of get where the w...

The backpack incident

Ever been smacked in the head by your own whiteness, assuming you are white?

I’m in the supermarket waiting to buy a pound of salmon when I realize someone is trying to get my attention. “Ma’am? Ma’am?” she says to me. She is a brown-skinned woman with her hair in a ponytail. “I was just admiring your”—here I assume she’s going to say “coat,” as I am wearing a truly awesome garnet-colored vintage bouclé coat—“backpack.”

The thing about my backpack is until recently it said “Black Lives Matte...

The Trojan horse of Ice Cream Star

Last weekend I had the strange and wonderful experience of reading The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman. I had put off starting it because the whole thing is written in an invented post-apocalyptic dialect and sometimes you just don’t feel like doing all that work. Well, it was work, in the best possible sense—immersive, rewarding and exhilarating, the best kind of reading there is. In fact, you can get a feel for Ice Cream’s language and grammar within a few pages; what’s really da...

Presumably

I normally confine my quotation mania to my Tumblr. But this one required a bit more formatting than Tumblr allows.

The literature is not clear on whether R2m–1 may be replaced by W2m–1 but presumably the answer is well-known to experts.

—Howard Jacobowitz, “Convex Integration and the h-Principle” (Research Institute of Mathematics, Seoul)

I particularly like the absence of a comma. It somehow transmits my father’s happy combination of meticulousness and insouciance.

Some real machinery inside our guts

I had a day where I saw two movies. It was a Sunday in August, and a life-change sort of thing was happening, or continuing to happen, that made me want to get out of the house. My priority was “Hitman: Agent 47,” which unfortunately proved quite negligible. But first I went to a 10:25 AM showing of “The End of the Tour.” This two-hander about David Foster Wallace was so moving to me, I started to cry about fifteen minutes in.

I’m not an uncritical fan of DFW, or I should say I’m a not-uncri...

This author gets it

Tomorrow in Race and Fiction Writing we will discuss the question: How Do We Write Characters Whose Race Is Different Than Ours? Meanwhile, I struck gold on the reading-copy shelf a few weeks back. I got fourteen books! Plus Charles Bukowski, On Cats, which I gave to a friend.

One you can’t see in the picture is The New and Improved Romie Futch, by Julia Elliott. Romie is a South Carolina taxidermist who undergoes a sort of flowers-for-Algernon experiment and emerges with greatly enhanced men...

Racial justice is not a zero-sum game

On Friday I took a pleasant walk down Garden Street in Cambridge to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I was there to facilitate a discussion about whiteness with students and professors at the Banneker Institute, a summer research program for students of color led by Professor John Johnson. I arrived ready to lay down knowledge. But, of course, I was the one in the room who learned the most.

That's how the Institute rolls: Minimize chi^2, minimize effects of systemic racism, a...

Reading white supremacy against the grain

I read a jaw-dropping book by Howard Jacobson called J. Jacobson is known for writing about what Philip Roth terms “that topic called The Jews.” So this dystopian fantasy set in some kind of Anglo-Teutonic coastal village seems like a real departure at first. Until you notice that every single character has a Jewish name. And that a very Jewish sense of dread hangs over everything. And that the one word never used in the book is “Jew.”

Spoilers! In this world, Jews were eradicated in an apoc...