Wed Reading Meme amongst other things...

[shadowkat]

1. Still reading The Raven Prince by Elizabeth Hoyt --which I'm enjoying a great deal. The fairy tale within the story appears to be loosely based on Beauty and the Beast and Cupid and Psyche.
Which is sort of interesting -- the fairy tale is about a man who is cursed to be a Raven by day, and all his followers are forced to be fowl. Unless he can convince a young woman to marry him of her own free will -- then he can be a man at night. But if she sees his true form, he is stuck being a raven for all time. So he convinces the youngest daughter of a king to marry the Raven in return for winning the King's war. In return she lives in a beautiful palace, surrounded by a lovely forest, and wonderful lands, each night made love to by a wonderful lover. But alas, she misses her father desperately. So the Raven lets her return, and her jealous sisters convince her to shine a light on her nightly lover, who she's never seen. And reveal who he is. Putting doubts in her head about him. So, of course she does this...and...

That's the story that begins each chapter, as sort of quote or metaphor for what is happening in the book - which is actually a historical romance novel taking place in the Georgian period. It's also sort of intriguing and subversive...it's about a widow who becomes a secretary for a widowed earl and falls for him. His face is marked with smallpox scars. She finds out that he is visiting a bordello in London. And, well, also discovers that women can put on masks and met men at the place, discreetly. So after befriending a prostitute with connections, she puts on a mask and arranges for him to meet her at the bordello. He, of course, has no idea it's the widow. Much chaos ensues.

2. There's a rather interesting book about the Poor White Working Class, most of whom were the Trump Supporters, entitled Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

In many ways, “Hillbilly Elegy” tells a familiar story. It’s a regional memoir about Vance’s Scots-Irish family, one of many who have lived and worked in Appalachia for generations. For perhaps a century, Vance explains, the region was on an upward trajectory. Family men worked as sharecroppers, then as coal miners, then as steelworkers; families inched their way toward prosperity, often moving north in pursuit of work. (Vance’s family moved about a hundred miles, from Kentucky to Ohio; like many families, they are “hillbilly transplants.”) In mid-century Middletown, where Armco Steel built schools and parks along the Great Miami River, Vance’s grandparents were able to live a middle-class life, driving back to the hollers of Kentucky every weekend to visit relatives and friends.

Middletown’s industrial jobs began to disappear in the seventies and eighties. Today, its main street is full of shuttered storefronts, and is a haven for drug dealers at night. Vance reports that, in 2014, more people died from drug overdoses than from natural causes in Butler County, where Middletown is located. Families are disintegrating: neighbors listen as kitchen-table squabbles escalate and come to blows, and single mothers raise the majority of children (Vance himself had fifteen “stepdads” while growing up). Although many people identify as religious, church attendance is at historic lows. High-school graduation rates are sinking, and few students go on to college. Columbus, Ohio, one of the fastest-growing cities in America, is just ninety minutes’ drive from Middletown, but the distance feels unbridgeable. Vance uses the psychological term “learned helplessness” to describe the resignation of his peers, many of whom have given up on the idea of upward mobility in a region that they see as permanently left behind. Writing in a higher register, he says that there is something “almost spiritual about the cynicism” in his home town.

Much of the personal story Vance tells in “Hillbilly Elegy” revolves around his slow and painful divorce from “hillbilly culture.” Hillbillies, he writes, are proud of their “loyalty, honor, and toughness”; of their fierce, unpretentious patriotism; of their work ethic, their tight-knit families, and the decisiveness with which they administer “hillbilly justice.” (“I earned my first bloody nose at five and my first black eye at six,” Vance recalls, of two times someone insulted his mother.) Vance, too, is proud to be a hillbilly: he uses the term in a dignified and respectful way throughout his book. All the same, he comes to believe that his community suffers from “cognitive dissonance”; there is, he writes, “a broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.” If family is all-important, then why are alcoholism and domestic abuse so common? If hillbillies are so hardworking, then why do so few people in Middletown work? Plenty of people, of course, work hard, often struggling to assemble a livelihood out of part-time jobs. But they live alongside able-bodied neighbors who are lifetime welfare recipients (and experts at gaming the welfare system). One friend quits a good job because he’s “sick of waking up early,” then takes to Facebook to bemoan the “Obama economy.”

In Vance’s view, the depredations of globalization have been sharpened by poorly implemented social programs, which, though well-intentioned, allow “a large minority . . . to live off the dole,” while breeding resentment and rage among everyone else. But “hillbilly culture,” which allows “the white working class to blame its problems on society or the government,” is part of the problem, too. Vance criticizes its violence, its stubbornness, its pride, its incuriosity, and its “bizarre sexism,” which, he thinks, all encourage “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible.” While communities elsewhere in America are enthralled by the prosperity gospel, Vance’s friends and family recite a disengaged catechism: “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society.” He concludes, “There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.”

This is true, actually. I know a lot of people who thought this way.

3. Also read an interesting articles on how our perception of reality may not be real, or rather how our brain views the world is not what is actually happening.

* The Case Against Reality - The World Is Nothing Like What We Perceive Through Our Senses

* A Few of the Many Ways We Distort Reality

I'm finding this interesting, because over the course of the past two years regarding the election -- I've noticed how people have skewed reality. Or their version of reality is skewed. Since the election, things that were always a problem have become suddenly magnified, while others diminished.
Our media and technology add to it. As do our interactions with others, and well evolution, education, etc. Begging the question - what is real, and what isn't?

During the election and since, actually all through 2016, the fake news online has quadrupled. And there's a lot of disagreement as to what is real and what isn't. I got into a fight with one person online about whether youtube or politico was more reliable. She believed youtube and that politico was biased, because of who owned it. Except it was run by journalists who used it to fact-check and had won a Pulitizer, but she believed that the journalists were liars and biased with a corporate agenda. My reality and her reality were so at odds, that we could no longer communicate and came to a dead end.

Comments

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

The extra step people reading Vance should notice is that... what is happening to hillbillies is what has been inflicted on American minority communities for generations. Perhaps compare "Hillbilly Elegy" to what Moynihan wrote about the Black community 40 years ago.