I like big books and I cannot lie
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48% complete! Eivind (like the Terrible) has read 48 of 100 books.
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life …
'Playground' follows four lives - a marine biologist, an artist, a schoolteacher, and an AI …
My mother didn't want to wreck her perfect body with childbirth, but my father needed someone he could play chess with at home, any time of day or night. I don’t know how they settled the matter.
— Playground by Richard Powers
'Playground' follows four lives - a marine biologist, an artist, a schoolteacher, and an AI pioneer - that intersect on …
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life …
Baldwin skriver så godt, og jeg blir så rasende av å lese han. Det er skildringer av hvordan det er å leve med rasisme og under hvit overmakt i USA, men jeg mener det er mer relevant for norske forhold enn det de fleste liker å tru. Det går an å trekke ei linje fra Baldwins USA til Frp's suverene posisjon på meningsmålingene i Norge i dag.
Det var i en forlengelse av Baldwins USA at BLM-protestene begynte, der den andre bølgen var så kraftig at det til og med skvulpa såpass i Norge at liberale Kommentatorer så seg nødt til å sette seg ned å fundere på vegne av majoritetsbefolkinga "men hva med meg oppi alt dette? Risikerer jeg å bli stemplet som en fordomsfull rasist med mindre jeg legger ned bittelitt egeninnsats?"
Og når den voldsomme reaksjonen kom fra ytre høyre, da var Norge fullt på …
Baldwin skriver så godt, og jeg blir så rasende av å lese han. Det er skildringer av hvordan det er å leve med rasisme og under hvit overmakt i USA, men jeg mener det er mer relevant for norske forhold enn det de fleste liker å tru. Det går an å trekke ei linje fra Baldwins USA til Frp's suverene posisjon på meningsmålingene i Norge i dag.
Det var i en forlengelse av Baldwins USA at BLM-protestene begynte, der den andre bølgen var så kraftig at det til og med skvulpa såpass i Norge at liberale Kommentatorer så seg nødt til å sette seg ned å fundere på vegne av majoritetsbefolkinga "men hva med meg oppi alt dette? Risikerer jeg å bli stemplet som en fordomsfull rasist med mindre jeg legger ned bittelitt egeninnsats?"
Og når den voldsomme reaksjonen kom fra ytre høyre, da var Norge fullt på høyde med de mest entusiastiske utland, og det er denne reaksjonære bølgen som fortsatt skyller inn over oss. Det er et, sikkert ikke fullt ut bevisst i mange tilfeller, ønske om å sette minoriteter som ei kort stund fikk tak i mikrofonen og minna storsamfunnet på den strukturelle urettferdigheten i samfunnet tilbake på plass som driver den voldsomme reaksjonen og får hvite folk til å lengte tilbake til ei tid da hvitt overherredømme var strengere håndheva. Og det er denne reaksjonen som har blåst Frp til topps i Norge.
Så sett gjerne Baldwin på pensum i skolen.
Of all the men I ever knew, you’s the man who ought to be hoping the Bible’s all a lie—’cause if that trumpet ever sounds, you going to spend eternity talking.’
The Word tell us,’ he said, ‘to let the dead bury the dead. Why you want to go rummaging around back there, digging up things what’s all forgotten now? The Lord, He knows my life—He done forgive me a long time ago.’ ‘Look like,’ she said, ‘you think the Lord’s a man like you; you think you can fool Him like you fool men, and you think He forgets, like men. But God don’t forget nothing, Gabriel—if your name’s down there in the Book, like you say, it’s got all what you done right down there with it. And you going to answer for it, too.’
For she never grasped—not at any rate with her mind—what, with such incandescence, he tried to tell her on these Saturday afternoons. She could not find, between herself and the African statuette, or totem pole, on which he gazed with such melancholy wonder, any point of contact. She was only glad that she did not look that way. She preferred to look, in the other museum, at the paintings; but still she did not understand anything he said about them. She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. It frightened her because she felt that he was reaching for the moon and that he would, therefore, be dashed down against the rocks; but she did not say any of this. She only listened, and in her heart she prayed for him.
There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South which she had fled; there was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other.
Richard had not been born in Maryland, but he was working there, the summer that she met him, as a grocery clerk. It was 1919, and she was one year younger than the century. He was twenty-two, which seemed a great age to her in those days. She noticed him at once because he was so sullen and only barely polite. He waited on folks, her aunt said, furiously, as though he hoped the food they bought would poison them.
The sun did not rise or set but that Gabriel saw his lost, his disinherited son, or heard of him; and he seemed with every passing day to carry more proudly the doom printed on his brow. Gabriel watched him run headlong, like David’s headlong son, towards the disaster that had been waiting for him from the moment he had been conceived. It seemed that he had scarcely begun to walk before he swaggered; he had scarcely begun to talk before he cursed.
This was the first time they spoke in the yard, a frosty morning. There was nothing in that morning to warn him of what was coming. She offended him because she was so brazen in her sins, that was all; and he prayed for her soul, which would one day find itself naked and speechless before the judgment bar of Christ. Later, she told him that he had pursued her, that his eyes had left her not a moment’s peace. ‘That weren’t no reverend looking at me them mornings in the yard,’ she had said. ‘You looked at me just like a man, like a man what hadn’t never heard of the Holy Ghost.’
Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.
Ett nybyggt bostadsområde i Ystad fylls med invandrare och låginkomsttagare under 60- och 70-talen. För Leena och hennes finska föräldrar …
