Volume 1, No. 33: Biographies (But Not of People) + Lebkuchen

Greetings, book eaters and treat lovers! It’s been rainy, cold, and dark for the past two days here in Western Mass. I can’t contain my excitement. We’re coming up on November, which is a month that does not get enough love. I will be incessantly praising its grays and browns, its early dark and bare trees and creeping cold, so get ready.

Anyway, books! This week’s books are nontraditional biographies. I don’t read many biographies, but I do love a comprehensive life story. These books tell the story of an idea (white rage), a performance project and activist art organization (Sins Invalid), and a time period (freshman year at Emerson College). None of them are biographies, but they all have the qualities I love in a biography: they examine their subjects from many angles, they’re thorough, and they’re illuminating.

The Books

Backlist: White Rage by Carol Anderson (Nonfiction, 2017)

In White Rage, Carol Anderson expertly lays out the history of America from the Civil War through the present. She examines how, after each important victory of Black progress, white supremacy (as wielded by white people in power) has responded in the same chilling way: by blocking that progress — legally, socially, politically, and often violently.

This is short and thoroughly researched book. The text is only 160 pages, followed by 60 pages of notes. I love how little commentary there is. Anderson lays out her thesis in the introduction, and she returns to it in the epilogue. She occasionally offers her own analysis and interpretation of various historical events, placing them in the lineage of white rage. Explaining this phenomenon in the prologue, she writes:

With so much attention focused on the flames, everyone had ignored the logs, the kindling. In some ways, it is easy to see why. White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. it wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation constantly drawn to the spectacular — to what it can see. It’s not the Klan. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up.

For the most part, however, the facts stand on their own. Anderson reports them. Every tenth sentence or so is followed by a citation. This is part of what makes the book so powerful; laid out like this, the pattern is so stark and obvious.

In five short chapters, Anderson outlines five major civil rights victories and how those victories were systemically destroyed:

After the Civil War, Confederate leaders were not arrested and tried for treason. They were given full power over their Southern states. This lead to the Black Codes, a series of laws severely restricting the rights of Black Southerners, and a swift evisceration of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.

During the Great Migration, rather than implementing laws to support and protect the wave of Black workers that poured into their cities, white northern leaders used housing discrimination to create segregated cities.

After the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision came decades of obstructionism. School districts refused to comply, shutting down schools and using public money to fund private (white) schools, leaving millions of Black children without access to education.

In response to the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, the Nixon and Reagan administrations launched the War on Drugs, ushering in our current age of mass incarceration.

In the wake of Obama’s election, voting rights were swiftly and shockingly gutted. And though this book was published before the 2016 election, we all know what happened next.

Obviously I’ve simplified the facts above, but it is the bareness of them that is so chilling. The pattern has been the same for centuries. We have yet to break out of this cycle of violence, oppression, and white supremacy disguised as “respectability”. This is a must-read history that proves just how integral white supremacy has always been to the politics and culture of the United States.

Anderson is a Ph.D. and though the book is academic, it is never dry. There is absolutely a place for personal and emotional books about the history of racism in America, and I’ve found many of those books equally stunning. But White Rage excels in a different way, in its even-handenedness. Anderson adds no commentary. The blatantly obvious racism imbued in the acts of history she writes about speaks for itself. These 160 pages are worth your time, and then some.

Frontlist: Fresh by Margot Wood (Fiction)

This novel is absolutely hilarious and sometimes over-the-top. Nineteen-year-old Elliot is bisexual, talkative, and has strong opinions about laundry detergent. She arrives at Emerson College with no idea what to study, but determined to make the most of freshman year. She proceeds to have sex with a whole lot of people, get herself into some relationship trouble, make some new friends, and generally learn a whole lot about herself.

One of my very favorite things in fiction is books that do whatever it is they set out to do extremely well. This book is like that; it’s the perfect college book. It reads like a biography of Elliot’s freshman year. And it’s just so…college. I only did one year of college, and my experience was nothing like Elliot’s. This book is full of parties, hookups, sex, intense friendships, angst, academic turmoil, family drama, discovering a new city, crushes. It’s a wild ride. I couldn’t relate to any of the specific experiences Elliot has, because I didn’t have a single one of them. I spent most of my one year at college walking around listening to sad music and wishing I was anywhere else. But that didn’t stop me from loving this book to pieces. I was all in.

Wood isn’t trying to document “the typical college experience.” Is there such a thing? I don’t know, and it doesn't matter. This novel is brilliant because of its specificity. Elliot may go through some things that a lot of young people at college go through, but it never feels forced or stereotypical or like Wood is trying to make some overarching point about college life. It’s just a really good record of one tumultuous year in the life of one college student.

So much happens in this book, but none of it is dramatic. Elliot does a lot of painful growing up. She hurts people, she gets hurt. She breaks hearts, she gets her heart broken. She experiences betrayal and betrays, often without realizing what’s happening. She’s self-involved but she cares a lot about other people. A lot of it is breezy and light, but there’s a serious, earnest undertone that’s just right.

This book features a lovely, slow-burn queer romance. We get to watch Elliot falling in love, even though she’s not aware the whole time that that is what’s happening. The buildup is brilliant, and the ending is so satisfying. But it’s also such a genuine new adult love story. The whole book is about self-discovery. Sometimes it happens slowly. Sometimes it happens in strange and roundabout ways. Half the time Elliot is so busy trying to have fun and be with her friends and have great sex and get her work done that she isn’t paying any attention to her own wants and needs. It takes a long time for her to slow down enough to listen to herself. It makes so much sense.

Elliot’s first person narration is also brilliant. It’s the best part of the book, and what makes the whole thing so funny and so hard to stop reading. She talks directly to the reader all the time, and it works. I can’t tell you why, exactly. It just seems like the kind of thing she would do. She’s constantly groaning and swearing and making dramatic proclamations and sighing and joking. Her personality comes through so clearly in the tone of the writing. It reminds me why I love first person narration so much, when it’s done well. I cannot rave about the audiobook enough.

Upcoming: Crip Kinship by Shayda Kafai (Nonfiction, Arsenal Pulp Press, 12/7)

This book reads a bit like a biography of an organization, Sins Invalid, a disability justice based performance project. In addition to putting on live and online shows celebrating disabled artists, they offer various educational initiatives (podcasts, workshops, etc.). Shayda Kafai’s book is a beautiful ode to the work of Sins Invalid, but it also goes far beyond the organization. In examining the art and activism of Sins Invalid, Kafai explores the possibilities of disability justice itself.

I like the framing of this book as a biography because the best biographies don’t just tell the story of a life — they explain why that life matters, how it relates to other lives, movements, moments in history. Crip Kinship is a wonderful primer on disability justice. It’s a living book. Kafai speaks with the artists and leaders of Sins Invalid about their personal and collective experiences as disabled artists and activists. She describes the power of gatherings of queer, disabled people of color. She offers concrete examples of the ways Sins Invalid embodies disability justice: through their commitment to access and education, the care networks they help nourish, and the work they do to name and celebrate disabled beauty and sexuality. Because so much of the book is stories, it never feels dry or overwhelming or academic.

One thing I’ve noticed, as I’ve started to read more and more about disability justice this year, is how much I love books that embody the principles they describe. Like Care Work, this book isn’t afraid to be messy. It’s full of citations, but these citations aren’t just perfunctory markers of where the quotes or knowledge come from:

The citations in this book create pathways of disabled, queer of color knowledge production. For me, they serve as a personal practice of uplifting community, giving shout-outs, and offering the magic of resistance writers and activists whose words arouse change."

This is such a simple thing, but it’s also a radical framing. This book isn’t meant to be a one-time thing. It’s not something you read from cover to cover and then put back on the shelf. It’s something to return to. It’s an opening, a portal that, if you let it, will lead you to so many other words, ideas, and people. I marked it up while reading, kept flipping through it from paragraph to citation and back, and I still feel like I’m not done with it.

I could go on and on about all the great stuff in here. There’s a chapter on the radical possibilities of crip sex and desire. Kafai describes one of Sins Invalid’s performances, in which Leroy F. Moore, a disabled artist and cofounder of Sins Invalid, does a spoken word piece about the beauty of drool.

Leroy invites us in the audience to wrestle with, question, and reconcile our own connotations of drool, and in doing so we are invited to collectively cocreate an erotic where all our bodyminds are desiring and deliciously empowered.

Of course reading about so many of these performances made me want to see them. But even the words on the page are powerful. All of these anecdotes and descriptions make the book feel intimate. It’s not just a set of theories. It’s rooted in the work and lives of real people. Every time Kafai introduces a new idea, she enriches it with stories from Sins Invalid artists.

Kafai also writes about the importance of crip kinship, and the vital role the internet plays in disabled communities. There’s a whole section on beauty, and what it means to claim beauty in an ableist society rife with messages that disabled, queer, and nonwhite bodies cannot be beautiful, sexual, desirable. What I’ve mentioned here is only the beginning.

It’s out 12/7 and you can preorder it here.

The Bake

I am deep in planning mode for my annual Cookie Extravaganza. You’ll be hearing a lot more about that in December — I’ll be sharing a lot of cookie recipes, get excited! If you’re wondering why I’m including a classic German Christmas cookie in this October newsletter, it’s because Lebkuchen is a cookie that requires a long rest period. I usually make them in early October. I’m a bit late this year, but I’ll be mixing up the batter this weekend. Ideally, the dough rests for two months so that the flavors can develop and the long-acting leavening agent can do its magic. But even resting the dough for a month works wonders.

Don’t be intimated by a cooke that needs to sit on your counter for a month! This dough is so easy to make, and so delicious. The cookies are warm and spicy and nutty, beautifully soft. The flavor lingers on your tongue. They make the perfect teatime treat, and they last for months — literal months! Bake up a batch in late December and they’ll still be perfect in February (if you can hold on to them that long).

Luisa Weiss’s Lebkuchen

This recipe comes from Classic German Baking, one of my most beloved cookbooks. I haven’t altered it at all. I am not a German grandmother; I’m not going to mess with a perfect bake. You do need a few specific ingredients: the spice mix, which you can make ahead of time, and potassium carbonate, a slow-acting leavening agent. It’s also worth finding high-fat European-style butter. It makes a difference.

Ingredients

For the Lebkuchengewürz (lebkuchen spice mix):

• 5 Tbs (30 grams) ground cinnamon

• 1 1/2 Tbs ground cloves

• 1 tsp ground allspice

• 1 tsp ground cardamom

• 1 tsp ground ginger

• 1 tsp ground mace

• 3/4 tsp ground anise seed

For the cookies:

• 250 grams (3/4 cup) honey

• 250 grams (1 1/3 ups plus 1 Tbs) brown sugar

• 7 Tbs (100 grams) high-fat unsalted butter, cut into small cubes

• 500 grams (4 cups) all-purpose flour

• 25 grams (1/4 cup) Lebkuchengewürz

• 2 tsp cinnamon

• grated peel of 1 lemon

• 2 Tbs cocoa powder

• 1 scant Tbs potassium carbonate (potash)

• 1 Tbs kirsch or water

• 2 eggs

Make the Lebkuchengewürz: Combine all the ingredients and stir well. The recipe makes more than you need for one batch of cookies, but it keeps well for at least a year.

Make the dough: In a small pot, heat the honey and brown sugar over low heat until the sugar dissolves. Do not bring to a boil. Once the sugar has melted, remove from the heat and add the butter. Stir until the butter is melted and set the mixture aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer (or a large mixing bow), combine the flour, Lebkuchengewürz, cinnamon, lemon peel, and cocoa powder. Stir the potassium carbonate into the kirsch or water to dissolve.

Make a well in the flour mixture and crack the eggs into it. Using the whisk attachment (or with handheld beaters or a wooden spoon), mix on low speed as you slowly add the honey-butter mixture to the bowl. Then, still mixing, add the potassium carbonate mixture. Don't worry if it smells weird; the scent will go away while the dough rests. Continue mixing for 5 minutes. The dough will be fairly stiff and shiny.

Scrape the dough into a ceramic bowl and cover it with a plate. Make sure the covering isn’t airtight; the dough needs to be able to breathe. Place it in a cool dark place for at least a week, and, ideally, for 2 months.

Bake the cookies: Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Scrape the dough onto a lightly floured surface, knead it a few times, and cut it into quarters. One quarter at a time, roll the dough to a thickness of about 1/4 inch. Cut the cookies using cutters of your choice. Lay them on the prepared baking sheet; you can place them fairly close together, as they don't spread much.

Let the cookies rest for 1-2 hours at room temperature. If you like, you can press blanched almonds, candied citrus peel, or glacé cherries into the dough. Bake for 15-20 minutes at 325, until the cookies are puffed and firm and dry to the touch. Let cool on a wire rack; repeat with the remaining dough.

If you want, you can brush the hot cookies with a simple sugar glaze. I usually use Dorie Greenspan’s recipe for leckerli glaze. You can also coat the cooled lebkuchen with chocolate. Melt chocolate over a pot of simmering water and dip the tops of the cookies into it.

The Bowl & The Beat

The Bowl: Pantry Pasta

This is the sort of dinner I make when I’m too tired to think. I almost always have the ingredients on hand; it comes together quickly; and it’s filling, warming, and comforting. It’s so simple that it feels silly to even write out the steps, but it’s what I cooked this week. I stand by it.

Thinly slice an onion or three. Sauté in olive oil until soft and glistening, at least ten minutes, longer if you have the patience. Add a jar of canned tomatoes to the pan and stir to break them up. Cook until the sauce is nicely thickened, another fifteen minutes or so. Add a pound of ground meat if you’re into that (I used lamb here, it’s my favorite). Cook until the meat is nicely browned. Toss with your favorite pasta, and serve with lots of Parmesan. (I was out of Parmesan when I made this, and it was also delicious with cheddar.)

The Beat: Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia, read by Shayna Small

I don’t read a ton of mysteries, but I do like to mix things up now and then and read outside my go-to genres. This is a historical mystery set in Harlem in the 1920s. Louise works in a cafe and spends her evenings dancing and drinking with her girlfriend and her brother. When several young Black women turn up dead over the course of a few months, Louise reluctantly gets involved in the case. I’m loving the narration (Shayna Small is one of my favorite narrators) and how quietly sapphic this book is. Louise and her girlfriend Rosa Maria live in the same boarding house. They’re in love, there’s rarely any tension between them, and though their relationship isn’t the focus of the book, it’s an important piece of Louise’s life.

The Bookshelf

The Visual

One of my goals for 2021 was to read 50 books by disabled writers. I don’t think I’ll get to 50, but that’s okay. I don’t set reading goals to reach an arbitrary number; I set them to help guide my reading life. I’ve read more books by disabled authors this year than ever before, and I am so excited to keep reading more and more! I’m planning on diving into this stack of recent acquisitions soon. (I’ve already read Brilliant Imperfection, but I didn’t own a copy and I wanted one.)

Uncomfortable Labels by Laura Kate Dale, Pain Studies by Lisa Olstein, Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun L. Harrison, Being Heumann by Judith Heumann, Brilliant Imperfection by Eli Clare, and Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer....

Around the Internet

For Audiofile, I wrote about how much I love listening to queer retellings.

The Boost

I came across this online journal, smoke + mold in Callum Angus’s newsletter. smoke + mold publishes nature writing (defined broadly) by trans and Two-Spirit writers. I really enjoyed reading the current issue. They’re hosting a fundraiser to raise money for contributor and editor payments.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: A lot of the leaves have blown off the trees in the recent stormy weather (which I love), but I’m still reveling in the fall golds and morning light.

And that’s it until next week. Catch you then!