Sunday Salon

The fireworks seem to have calmed down in my neighborhood this week--I'm almost afraid to write this lest I jinx it. Since they started on Memorial Day, I was not hopeful they would end with the Fourth of July, but they do seem to have slowed down for now at least. Hopefully, they emptied their stashes on the Fourth. My poor puppy hid under the couch in the basement for most of that night; we could just barely see his snout. My other dog will bark back, but she doesn't really care that much.

In terms of reading, it's been a somewhat productive week. In terms of writing, less so.

Reading This Week

• I've been reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell for one of my book clubs. I've never read a Malcolm Gladwell book before, although I've heard of him. I also did not realize he was half Black, as he alludes in the book. I thought he was White. The book is a set of premises with an extended parade of supporting anecdotes, some of which were more interesting than others. The premise that snap judgments can sometimes be just as valuable as well-researched decisions makes sense to me, as does the corollary that sometimes snap judgments can impede the decision-making process. I do wish more police departments would take this kind of training into account. It doesn't matter how many times you tell people not to be racist, if they're not consciously racist. The decision-making process needs to be slowed down so people can make conscious decisions and/or people need to practice making snap judgments involving race, crime etc. outside of life/death situations and need to form unconscious positive associations with peoples of different race, which takes time and has nothing to do with how good people's intentions are.
• I also started reading Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a while. I've also never read Baldwin before, and wow, his writing is incredible. It's also an interesting book to read from the perspective of time. The edition I'm reading is from the '90s and the back cover claims the protagonist is "caught between desire and conventional morality" and calls it "a highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart." Y'all...it's about gay love. I wonder if the back cover would be similar today. I think not. I bet it might even use the word "gay," although it's not clear if David, the protagonist, and his lover, Giovanni are gay or bisexual. They have both been with women, David is actually engaged to a woman in the book, but that may be because of social expectation. It's also surprising to me that Baldwin, a gay Black man, decided to make his protagonists explicitly White (David is a blond American; Giovanni is Italian), but perhaps he thought they might be more sympathetic to a White audience that way. 

Watching This Week

• This week, my husband and I watched the new Tom Hanks movie, Greyhound, about a U.S. Navy convoy crossing the North Atlantic in 1942. Needless to say, it was not my choice of film, but we agreed it's definitely an under-dramatized aspect of World War II. I didn't know 70,000 some men were lost to German U-boats before they even reached England.
• I started a new background binge sitcom on Netflix, Young & Hungry, about a private chef who's also in an increasingly annoying will-they or won't they with her boss,and there are so many racist and sexist stereotypes in this show, but also the protagonist is really cute, and food, so, I'm not proud of it, but it's an easy watch. Sigh. 

Writing This Week

• I have made some progress (over 1k words) and am increasingly almost finished with my novel, which is probably why I'm dragging my feet even more because *REVISIONS ARE SCARY*.