twitterings

[saavedra77]

• 04:19 Got up freakishly early (stress). #
• 05:30 Up, ready, may as well go 2 work. #
• 05:34 Sleepless in ... Gah! #
• 05:38 Eerily quiet, few lights, lil traffic, no other pedestrians #
• 06:22 Brkfst @ taco truck ... Different. #
• 15:27 Leaving work "early" 9.5 hrs later ... #
• 17:13 Called my fav niece, caught up on diaz gossip. #
• 18:36 Hon-bau ... Mmm ... #
• 18:59 Friday night excitement: me, book, bed. #

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Comments

[cakeface.livejournal.com]

What's your actual Twitter name? Somehow, I'm not following you! I am carobean. :)

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

Same as here: saavedra77. :)

[aztecson23.livejournal.com]

And what book would that be? I just finished M Shelley's _Frankenstein_: I'm still reeling. I rented the Kenneth Branagh version (and starrer) because I heard it is the most faithful adaptation--meaning it's not our parents and grandparents' Frankenstein: green, with those metal slugs sticking out of his neck; the stitched forehead, blank stare and slow movement.

I'm watching it tonight.

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

I'm reading Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello, which is the kind of history that interests me, these days: searching investigation of a neglected, in fact obscured, hidden topic.

I'm also fascinated with the ways in which themes of (what we'd call) mestizaje and caste played out in the context of American slavery, and especially with how Virginians handled familial and other relationships across the color/caste line. Interracial relationships and mixed-race people were extremely common, but the relationships were illicit and no one liked to talk about how all of those mixed people got there. (I think one Southern writer later joked that they "didn't just fall from heaven" ...) Sometimes "Auntie" really was a white planter's aunt; which meant that she was also some other white man's daughter, another white's half-sister, etc. But that didn't necessarily change the legal or social caste relationship between them one iota.

The Hemings family's mixed background and their ties to powerful whites like Jefferson sometimes mitigated their lower-caste status, or (more rarely) even enabled their escape from it. But slavery and caste still circumscribed whatever breathing room they won for themselves: privileged dependence on individual whites (as with Sally Hemings' concubinage), working-class status if they managed to be legally freed, fugitive status if they just ran away, and "passing" (with all the denial and sacrifice and probable guilt that implied) for those who skin tone belied the African part of their heritage.

As one reviewer put it, Gordon-Reed's work demonstrates how Southern history is a lot more like Absalom! Absalom! than Gone with the Wind.

Re, Branagh's Frankenstein:

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

Yes, Branagh dispenses with Boris Karloff's lumbering undead brute and gives us something more like Shelley's lonely, angry, but much more articulate monster. The setting of Branagh's film is also much more faithful to Shelley's time and sensibility.

On the other hand, Branagh retains some Hollywood elements--particularly one from the Karloff Frankenstein's 1935 sequel ...