culture consumed (March, 2024)

[hermionesviolin]

books

• read Abby ~14 picturebooks (and skim-read her 3 easy readers)
  • strong rec for There's No Such Thing as Vegetables written by Kyle Lukoff & illustrated by Andrea Tsurumi -- and this interview with Kyle Lukoff and Betsy Bird
  (I also skim-read a whole bunch of picturebooks myself, trying to pick out books for nibling #2's birthday -- most recently a bunch involving hedgehogs.)
  
  
• [climate change book club] The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

theatr

• [ASP] August Wilson's King Hedley II with Abby and Cate

  Part of August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle (or Century Cycle) -- 1 play for every decade of the 20th century, each set in Pittsburgh.  We saw ASP's Seven Guitars (1940s) last year and the titular character of this play (1980s) is the adult child of one of the characters from that play.

  The Wikipedia says, "The play has been described as one of Wilson's darkest," which tracks.
  

• [CST] Beyond Words with Abby, Allie, Cate, Bitsy+Matt
  
  Official blurb:

  Meet Alex and his friend, Dr. Irene Pepperberg. Alex is an African Grey parrot. Irene is a researcher at Harvard University. Over the protests of her male colleagues, Irene teaches Alex to meaningfully communicate and solve problems at the level of a five-year-old child. This highly theatrical new work tracks their 30-year research experiment turned love story and asks: in a world where we are rapidly destroying animal habitats, just who exactly are we sharing our planet with?

  That is definitely not how I would have summarized the play, but I did like the play and felt like I learned a lot.
  
  I later read a 2021 interview with the playwright which included:

  One of the scientists in the play, Howard Towers, does not get a very flattering portrayal. How do you think he’ll react to his characterization?
  
  Luckily, Howard Towers is not a “real” scientist. All the scientists in the play are fictions with the exception of Erich Jarvis who is presented briefly and those are not his actual words. Even Irene is a fiction in that she is my Irene. However, I strove constantly to tell the scientific and emotional truth of her life.

  This feels like a cheat since, um, Irene's husband (Rick Pepperberg, who is definitely a character in the play) was a real scientist.
  
  I knew some artistic license had been taken (there's a moment where a character learns -- after years in a faculty job -- that they're contract, rather than tenure-track, which feels like a thing it's almost impossible to not know upfront/early on), and I can understand creating this one character (Howie Towers) who embodies/exemplifies so much of the pushback to Irene and follows her around for much of her career. But I was also a little saddened to learn that this was an artistic invention, rather than hewing more closely to the actual history. I mean, Howie isn't Irene's only antagonist, and the play does a fair job of indicating how Irene was a woman who was pushing against norms in a field she wasn't even credentialed in -- but, I dunno.
  
  I think Lourdes Acevedo is heavily based on dolphin expert Diana Reiss. (When we first meet Lourdes and learn she works with dolphins, I thought of the dolphin LSD experiments I'd read about some years ago, but that was a different woman, a few decades prior.) Making her Puerto Rican allows the playwright to add some additional texture to a scene about why women may choose to stop fighting a particular fight/their priorities may change -- though it also felt a little tacked on to me, since this moment comes late in the play (though Irene is the protagonist of the play, and part of the point of that scene is her intense focus on her own stuff).

***

Currently reading: 

Having not been interested in most of the queer library book club books this season, I'm planning to be back for the next 2 books: The Selected Works of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde [edited and with an introduction by Roxane Gay] (Apr 11) and The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo (May 9).

The facilitator said:

Since April is Poetry Month and Lorde's poetry is included in this book I thought we could select some poems that speak to us and talk about them for our discussion. And of course if there is any prose in the collection that also speaks to you please feel free to share that too.

The book is like 350 pages long -- but only the last like half is poetry.  So I feel like book club is likely to be kind of a mess where no one's read the same stuff.  But at least poetry can read pretty quickly, so worst case someone names a poem and a bunch of people quickly skim-read it in the moment?

I, a completionist, have been powering through the prose section before I start on the poetry section.

Reading next: 

As I said, I'm excited to read How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue (fiction) for April climate change book club.

For feminist sff book club, we're next reading The Pomegranate Gate by Ariel Kaplan, which is quite long, so I'll also need to start on that, even though that book club meeting isn't until May.

Comments

[lunabee34]

I am also a completionist. If I starts it, I finishes it.