Keeping Track

[saffronhouse]

I'm finally getting around to reading Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, and am finding it compelling. Crudely summarized, it proposes to find the traces of the ones whose existence has been vanished by majority culture, traces she calls hauntings. She points specifically to those who have been erased from

Comments

[excellency]

The good thing about detours is that you often see some great scenery that you would have missed your whole life long if you hadn't been forced to take that other, longer route by the road crew paving the regular street. Bookwise, it's more like going to the library with a call number for something you need, and then browsing the shelves nearby, and coming away with a stack of things that are tangentially related to the intended acquisition. Breadth is as important as depth in a topic sometimes, right? Wait, which are you getting now? I've gotten lost in my own metaphor. Or is it a simile? Damn.

[saffronhouse]

Oh, right! That's why I'm still wading around here in the depth (heights?) of weird religious ecstacies. I'm enjoying some of Hoffman's narrative solutions to the problems that can come up in a first person story. Like, how do you avoid letting the reader know what has just happened to the narrator , if the author doesn't want to reveal it just yet? Hoffman's solution? The "editor" keeps announcing that pages of the manuscript "are missing at this point.".
!

[excellency]

Hee, very Lovecraftian technique. I see it in Wilkie Collins a lot too, where one narrator quits and we have an explanation that somebody else's letters will be covering the next section of time for sometimes mysterious reasons.