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Luka /bookwyrm/

luka@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 7 months ago

Slow reader. Computer music, sci-fi & critical theory.

luka.princic.studio

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Luka /bookwyrm/'s books

Currently Reading (View all 9)

2024 Reading Goal

16% complete! Luka /bookwyrm/ has read 2 of 12 books.

Jack Halberstam: The Queer Art of Failure (2011) 4 stars

"The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a …

Bégaudeau asks the students to think about what they have learned and write down one thing to take away from the class, one concept, text, or idea that might have made a dif f erence. Th e class disperses, and one girl shuf f l es up to the front. Th e teacher looks at her expectantly and draws out her comment. “I didn’t learn anything,” she tells him without malice or anger, “nothing. . . . I can’t think of anything I learned.” Th e moment is a defeat for the teacher and a disappointment for the viewer, who wants to believe in a narrative of educational uplift, but it is a triumph for alternative pedagogies because it reminds us that learning is a two- way street and you cannot teach without a dialogic re-lation to the learner.

The Queer Art of Failure by  (Page 13)

Ursula K. Le Guin: No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) 4 stars

From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of thoughts always adroit, often acerbicon …

I never wanted to blog before. I’ve never liked the word blog—I suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage (Oh, she talks that way because she has such terrible blogs in her nose). I was also put off by the idea that a blog ought to be “interactive,” that the blogger is expected to read people’s comments in order to reply to them and carry on a limitless conversation with strangers. I am much too introverted to want to do that at all. I am happy with strangers only if I can write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it, letting it speak for me.

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by 

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Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English: Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (2010, Feminist Press at the City University of New York) 4 stars

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses examines how women-led healing was delegitimized to make way for patriarchy, …

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses

5 stars

Astonishingly good, avoiding all of the traps that feminist writing of this era tends to fall into, and providing a excellent history of the "professionalization" (masculinization) of medicine in the United States.

This book does a excellent job of looking at the interlocking systems of gender, class, and race, and provides a essentially anarchist view of what "professionalization" means and how it operates — focusing on the medical context, but much more broadly applicable. The discussion of Nightingale nursing in particular was excellent — laying bare the class implications of it is a very different history than what I'm used to.

I wish there were more historical sources for some of the claims about witches in particular — while everything they say seems plausible, I would prefer to know thier primary sources.

Highly recommended.

Ursula K. Le Guin: No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) 4 stars

From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of thoughts always adroit, often acerbicon …

I think about cats and their adorable murderous ways. I think about the troubled human/other interface. Somewhere inside us, I think, we all carry the Mowgli dream—that the other animals will see and accept us as one among them. And then we fail this dream when the wrong animals ask it of us. We think we wish to join the wild animals in the jungle but will not tolerate the wild animals in our kitchens. There are too many ants, we think, reaching for the spray, when it is equally true that there are too many humans.

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by 

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Ursula K. Le Guin: Tehanu (Paperback, 2004, Pocket Books) 4 stars

Years ago, they had escaped together from the sinister Tombs of Atuan—she, an isolated young …

Review of 'Tehanu (The Earthsea Cycle, Book 4)' on Goodreads

4 stars

Wonderful unheroic postscript to the series, the view from age and infirmity and powerlessness of the breakdown of a society built on acquiring and wielding power. From LeGuin's afterword, "the anger of an underdog at social injustice. ... [transcending to] no longer identifying freedom with power, with separating being free from being in control."