Not for the weak of mind and spirit...

Soon I may become an employee at a bookstore chain. If I can get through this interview, I will be on my way to becoming more self sufficient. Of course, I probably won't make enough money to pay the rent in DC. It's starting to get pricey to live in even in the "bad" area here let alone the "okay" area. I'm considering opening up a high yield interest savings account.  I want to be able to buy a laptop or pc, so I could at least keep up with my online activities.

Yesterday I crocheted a white hat. I am working on a brown hat to make the scarves I made.

 It took a week for me to try to come up with a great review for this book; however, I feel that part of the introduction by Deborah McDowell will be better. So here it goes:

"On it's face Plum Bun (1929) seems to be just another novel of racial passing. It has all the generic features of a passing novel: a mulatto protagonist, seeking to avoid the constraints of color prejudice in America, decides to cross the color line and pass for white, a deception attended with many anxieties and frequently penetrated. After  learning that life on the other side is not without it's hardships, the heroine, Angela Murray, develops an appreciation for black life and culture, and returns "home", psychically if not  physically to the black community.

While Plum Bun certainly displays the most salient features of the novel-of-passing, to read it simply as such is to miss its complex treatment of the intricacies of gender oppression, as well as the irony and subtlety of its artistic technique. Plum Bun is a richly textured and ingeniously designed narrative, containing plots within plots and texts within texts that comment upon one another in intricate combinations. Within this tapestry the passing plot constitutes just one thread, albeit an important one, woven onto the novel's overarching frame- that of the bildungsroman or novel of development."

Jessie Redmon Fauset, the author, played a passing joke on the people who pick up the book based on it's racy title. It wasn't uncommon for blues singers like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith to sing lyrics like " Jelly roll, jelly roll ain't so hard to find / There's a baker shop in town bakes it brown like mine / I got a sweet jelly, a lovin' sweet jelly roll / If you taste my jelly it'll satisfy your worried soul. " There was an author named Carl Van Vechten who written N***** Heaven that was a successful novel about the "lower strata" of black culture. Those who liked that kind of novel expected Plum Bun to be the same way.>

This review seems incomplete to me, but I had to put something in this journal. It was about to cause writer's block, and I can't have that wretched feeling again.

grrrrr, the lj cut isn't working.