At the moment I am reading The portrait of a lady and chapter 6 is about how smart and well-equipped Isabel Archer is.
When it comes to #cultureisnotacostume, I like to make it personal. The young ladies on Mustang FC - Marnie specifically - tried to attract one of their players back on the grounds that these experiences - aka parties - mean fun, friendship and fitness.
Ruby actually said [in the narrative] When will someone tell Marnie that culture is not a costume?
Culture of course is many things, as I learnt when I was reading Critical terrorism studies and Third world - the latter is the journal which printed and then retracted The case for colonialism.
I think people who do not know about "Culture is not a costume" frequently make their own cases - small and large - for imperalism and colonialism.
I have also been reading Debbie Reese's blog about The secret project which is a book about the Manhattan Project. The book begins with this empty [!] desert [!!].
If someone tried to write about the Maralinga that way, or about the Rainbow Warrior and previous and subsequent French nuclear testing in the 1980s and 1990s [chapter 13-14 of Third-formers at the Remedial School expresses my sorrow and shame - and my obliviousness; as does A mother lost a Chaser found - the latter is very litterature verite or actual/contemporaneous - you know, written at the time it was set unlike some of my later excursions into the past or the future] I would try to kick up a big stink about it.
And of course Trident which often appears on Fearless and when I read about in Spiked when James Woydhausen and Rob Lyons write about it.
When you have children and their illustrative desires to consider ...
The book I have just finished reading to read Portrait of a lady is Emily Ballou's Father lands. It was published in 2007 and shows a young girl - Cherry Laurel - and her sisters going to an integrated school in Wisconsin, Milwaukee. This is 1977.
16 March 1977 was the day that changed Cherry's whole life.
She creates this paracosm called Father Land where her father Jackson is. One of my favourite parts of the book is where Jackson and the sisters - Cherry; Ivy; Holly [ "The holly and the ivy when they are both full grown - of all the trees that are in the wood" ] work in the circus with Jackson's new partner Sabine. It is so good. Cherry seems to have a fear of - or prejudice against - clowns.
And so many people do have a fear of clowns. It became really big for me in the early 2000s when a Belgian woman called Florence had her avatar as a classic clown. And several people were afeared of it. A lot of people don't like masks - even of the Venetian and Florentian sort Isabel might have experienced as a kid when she was travelling with her Dad and sisters.
One of my favourite people to follow is "Safety Pat the clown" - otherwise known as David Alteri. Reward and Consent is the place to look.
In Kick meanwhile, there was a great quote about finding your role in the team and in the teams that you have been and will be part of and are part of right now. It's especially good for us who have not felt like or been team players up to now. And the 12s got to go to Coffs Harbour - they're playing really hard opponents like New South Wales and Queensland.
And Danny was really great when he finally talked to Ruby and told her you can't change teams mid-season in this league. So it was virtually a fait accompli when she stayed with the Mustangs FC.
Ruby is a very focused soccer player. She came from the US and her Mum is a very intense sports coach. She and Ruby practise together in the boxing ring and there are 50 punches with the punching bag. Some good cross-training and fitness involved.
And the part about squeezing avocados and treating them like hoon's cars. When the smashed versions cost so much - Danny has a point here too.
There were sensitive scenes about Anusha and the reader of Wuthering Heights. Would Heathcliff have helped Cathy shop for a bra? I think Earnshaw might have or Linton - getting my Wuthering generations right. The Wuthering Heights reader has blue hair and lives with Marnie for a few days in the week - so does Isabella.
And the party is super awkward because of the cultural appropriation and the diversity involved.
I will admit that I used to love parties like that, especially if they were out of our usual cultural comfort zone. Being complicit; actively participating. Of course the 1990s and 2000s were the time when I was establishing my reputation as an anti-racist or contre-racist [and maybe even a retro-racist].
So many good Hallowe'en memories. For example: bringing a massive pumpkin which had been grown in the allotment and brought to the festival for a pumpkin competition. And Halloween Light Shows are big! I picked the Lee London shows and the Tokyo Disneyland one.
In the early 2000s I would entertain with a weird and wacky record which had a green cover, and in 2001 I had my own record player until the first half of 2006. Now a gramophone is in the main house. There were always about six or seven songs which would be played.
After-school clubs focusing on subjects are brilliant. Or the general GATE lot. The ones I saw in So awkward were for maths [M and C ran that one] - geography and history. It turned out that History Club was watching movies like 10,000 years BC.
And Miss Briggs doing her predictive listening? Oh - the sacredness of listening is that you are in the moment with the interlocutor. She got Jes right - she and Alfie were working on their bucket list. Alfie's goals - a lot of them involve Martha Fitzgerald - and he does get on to the maths club.
Alfie's big talent and passion is cooking. He even thinks about food during the Maths Competition. He would be good for a Functional Maths or Consumer Maths mindset.
And they try to recruit a soccer player who really knows the angles and the physics of it all. Spatial relations.
Hope you use your spatial relations skills and your mathematical reasoning skills as you learn about the history and geography of Hallowe'en.
And remember:
Three months before Band Aid 30 I downloaded Real lives 2010 on my previous computer. And it was so good to create characters, play with randomised ones and put myself into their places. I kept playing it up until February 2016.
Perhaps there are good ones on your smartphone. And someone from the Majority World can share their games with you.
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