Cathy Jacobowitz's Blog, page 4

I went to the movies

My dear friend Rockclimber being in self-imposed exile in Georgia making knives, like someone in a Quentin Tarantino movie, I went to see “Ex Machina” by myself. It was pretty neat except that all the female androids had landing strips. Ha ha, seriously, it was deeply sexist in a way that can’t be defused by lampshading. But I still enjoyed it. Oscar Isaac’s upsetting beard reminded me of Bryan Cranston’s observation that “hair on the face and no hair on the head is the most intimidating look...

To the person who bought my book at Boomerang’s thrift shop in Jamaica Plain, MA

Thank you very much. I wrote it for you.

Background. I happen to know that the book was not only shelved at Boomie’s, but sold, because (1) Kyle works in the book department and was in fact the person who displayed it face out next to Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X, purely to make my day, and (2) I went past the next afternoon and checked the entire fiction section and it was gone. Also, I got six books.

Obviously I’ve been away from this blog for a long time. I will be updating its...

Comment on Racist humor in The Pale King by Cathy

Hey, Denny. Thanks for your comment. I love Wallace as well, although, as I say, with mixed feelings. In talking about racism, I and many others make a distinction between someone’s personal beliefs and the ways in which they may be propping up or participating in a racist system without realizing it—in other words, between personal and institutional/cultural racism. Of course this goes for sexism as well, and always (in my mind) doubly so for fiction. I may not be a “racist person,” but I ca...

Comment on Racist humor in The Pale King by Denny O'Donnel

Hey, Cath.

I come here as a long-time reader and passionate student of Wallace’s work, so it may be advantageous to take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt.

I kind of have to disagree with the idea that there was any sort of racism or sexism about Wallace’s work, which has made itself evidently empathetic and influential throughout everything of his that’d been published. “Gender and Racial Insensitivity” probably isn’t something we could attribute to Wallace directly, and even if it’...

Comment on One year later: Reflections on self-publishing by Lil

This is a post so realistic and helpful. I agree with you. Self-pub has a bad reputation, and you learn about it only after you did it.

On being a white novelist

I gave this talk last fall at Community Change. It has some points in common with another talk of mine, “How I Set Out to Write About the Revolution,” but it goes further and says more of what I’d really been wanting to say, for some time, about whiteness and writing fiction.

Hi, I’m Cathy and I’m white. I’m probably one of the whitest people you’ll ever meet. I grew up in an overwhelmingly white environment, in a place called Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and attended majority-white schools. My wh...

No comment

Many years ago, Ms. magazine had a “No Comment” feature on the back page. Maybe they still have it today. Anyway, the following literary microaggressions made me want to roll my eyes and say “No comment” . . . though I just might have a few.

From By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham:

We—we men—are the frightened ones, the blundering and nervous ones; if we act the skeptic or the bully sometimes it’s because we suspect we’re wrong in some deep incalculable way that women are not. Our impersonati...

Rewatching “The Wire”

If you follow my Twitter, you may know I’m getting #divorced. So far it’s going pretty well. Not to say I haven’t had some major feels, and more feel things will probably come my way, but overall, I can’t complain. Not when my alimony is being paid in pulps.

One of the things I decided to do for myself this post-divoss winter was re-watch every episode of “The Wire.” I couldn’t remember when I saw it originally, so I searched my Gmail, which is keeping my history for me (here’s a disturbing q...

Kissing in the rain while white

I recently gave a talk at Community Change called “On Being a White Novelist” (the writing of which took up some brain I otherwise might have used to blog). One thing I discussed was how I feel about novels with only white people in them. (Hint: They make me nuts.) On that topic, Pia Glenn observes:

Not unlike Iggy Azalea or Bethenny Frankel, Nicholas Sparks’ work has every right to be as annoying and mediocre and white yet popular as it wants to be. But when it is rewarded with contracts and...

One year later: Reflections on self-publishing

On August 16 of last year, a somewhat harassed man with a station wagon pulled up on the busy street in front of my house and unloaded eighteen cartons. They contained 1,000 copies of The One-Way Rain, the novel I had written and published. I was forty-two and had been writing books for roughly twenty-six years. I had a Master’s in creative writing from U.T. Austin and several files, both paper and electronic, filled with rejection letters from agents, journals and publishers. I knew my work...