Exceptions: The library is closed on Dec. 31 (Thurs.), Jan. 1 (Fri.), and Jan. 16-18 (Sat.-Mon.), 2021.
*Please remember that even when the physical Library is closed, or you are remote, you can:
Search the article databases (login when prompted with your campus Net-ID, same as for your campus email or Canvas) or Research@UWW (sign in to access all possible full text) and access online article text or submit ILLiad interlibrary loan requests for articles not available via UW-Whitewater’s libraries,
Ask a librarian for help using email or chat (UW-Whitewater librarians respond to the emails when the Library is open, but chat is covered 24/7 by non-local staff). You also can choose to make an appointment with a UW-Whitewater librarian, which can take place in person, over the phone, or online by Webex.
Posted inaround the library|Taggedhours|Comments Off on Andersen Library hours Dec. 20, 2020 through Winterim
But if your tastes gravitate toward gloomier topics, don’t despair. The title does not signify all buttercups and sunbeams and many of the themes center around human frailty, conflict, struggle, and heartache. At least one story is set in a post-apocalyptic world, which will be more familiar to L’Engle’s science fiction aficionados.
Many of these stories were written in the 1940s and 1950s, starting in the author’s college days and ending before the publication of A Wrinkle in Time. So they also chronicle the author’s developing talent and style.
If you enjoy Young Adult fiction, L’Engle is a master of the genre and the Library has a number of her books in the Curriculum Collection (and a few in the Main Collection).
The Moment of Tenderness by Madeleine L’Engle New Arrivals, 2nd Floor PS 3523 .E55 A6 2020
Emerson stated that “there is properly no history; only biography.” I like this quote because it captures my thoughts about this book which is a series of vignettes from Dr. Downs’ counseling clients who share their stories about being gay in a straight man’s world. One of my favorite genres is memoir (See Gay and Lesbian Review Newsletter). The life story of a person in a historical context is biography that I crave to understand historical events through the lens of others.
The stories in Velvet Rage are more testimonies than biographies or memoirs, but the ethno-autobiographical way in which the book is written is akin to my qualitative research style. I often capture pieces of my past in my writings. My journey as a gay man growing up in the segregated South in the ’60s is a tale of challenges and opportunities, and the rage I felt around my circumstances did not shackle me, but propelled me to move forward with my life and to focus on aspirations instead of setbacks.
Dr. Downs captures this pathos in his books when he states that most gay men are over-achievers who seek affirmation through accomplishments. The harder the trials and tribulations, the more glorious the triumphs. This is wonderful if the motivation is internal gratification, but the seeking of external affirmations can be limiting, short-lived, and disappointing.
One of the theories in the book is that gay men built their lives around lies. These lies that they tell their families and friends are conditional components of their upbringing. The fact that when I was growing up, I was a sexual outlaw. My interactions with other men were illegal in the United States in the 70s and throughout the 80s. Staying in the closet was the best solution. I often called this my straight drag in which I had to pretend to be dating girls and women. I did all the traditional high school male activities such as going to the prom, escorting women at the debutante balls, taking cotillion lessons in order to learn how to treat women, take them to dinner, open doors, and use proper etiquette for eating white table cloth meals. All of these pronouncements were perpetrations, not preparations and my youth was predicated with a series of lies.
The book surmises that this conditional lying entraps gay men and keeps them longing for absolution and forgiveness which causes them to crave love, honesty, trust, and integrity. As I read the book, I recognized that many of the theories in the book aligned with my journey to self-affirmation and actualization. I am glad that I am through those stages of development and can now chamber that part of my life off and learn from those challenges in order to strengthen my passage to my current realities. I have met my resolve and what might have been a velvet rage is now more of a silky sensitivity in which I reflect on my past in order to confront and comfort my future.
Summaries
Downs’s spry self-help manual is called The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World. It is becoming a touchstone in gay culture just as Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin was in the 30s, Larry Kramer’s Faggots in the 70s and Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Storyin the 80s. But The Velvet Rage is not fiction: it addresses the myth of gay pride and, after three decades of post-AIDS concentration on gay men’s physical health, turns inward to their mental wellbeing.
Along my actualization journey, I read each of these books and I agree that they were touchstones of history that enabled me to situate my present realities. Those books were dear to me because they gave me insights into a world I wanted to explore, but too terrified to venture into so I lived vicariously through the early explorations of others.
The gay male world today is characterized by seductive beauty, artful creativity, flamboyant sexuality, and, encouragingly, unprecedented acceptability in society. Yet despite the progress of the recent past, gay men still find themselves asking, “Are we really better off?” The inevitable by-product of growing up gay in a straight world continues to be the internalization of shame, a shame gay men may strive to obscure with a façade of beauty, creativity, or material success. Drawing on contemporary psychological research, the author’s own journey to be free of anger and of shame, as well as the stories of many of his friends and clients, The Velvet Rage outlines the offered profoundly beneficial strategies to stop the insidious cycle of avoidance and self-defeating behavior,
In many cases, I found that Dr. Downs painted a too tragic picture of gay-identity development. Yes, we have to find our way. Yes, there are no navigational milestones and we attach ourselves to the hetero-normative blueprint. But we are not all shameful and guilt-ridden. We all do not seek ways to harm ourselves and live suffering repressed lives. We are not all gorgeous, fabulous, flamboyant, and swimsuit-runway ready to strike a pose. We are self-constructed, nuanced people that defy stereotypes. One reviewer wrote, “We have created a gay culture that is, in most senses, unlivable. The expectation is that you have the beautiful body, that you have lots of money, that you have a beautiful boyfriend with whom you have wonderful, toe-curling sex every night… none of us have that. To try to achieve that really makes us miserable. The next phase of gay history, I believe, is for us to come to terms with creating a culture that is livable and comfortable.”
Like many of the reviews I read, I, too, am conflicted about this book. While I could relate to many of the author’s points on gay shame and how it affects us, I struggled with the position from which the author was writing. One comment stated, “Early on, the author puts forth a homogenous view of the gay experience, one that oftentimes seemed rich and White. With practically every example the author employs, there’s mention of fabulous wealth, executive careers, and many other hallmarks of affluence that I just couldn’t relate to in my experience. Early on, I had doubts whether or not this book could be applicable to me, given that my experience as a gay man differed so much from the experience the author painted.”
This book by physician and sociologist Jonathan M. Metzl travels across America, where he finds that racial resentment has impacted not only the health of people of color, but also the health white people. Particularly impacted are working class whites, the type who voted for and support president Donald J. Trump and other Tea Party politicians. Those people who want to “Make America Great Again,” but only for whites. This trend did not begin with Trump running for office and it certainly didn’t end there. According to Metzl, many southern and midwestern states have been electing politicians who enact laws that disadvantage working class people of all races for decades.
Over the course of eight interviews and much analysis, Metzl shows that the repeal of gun control laws, the cutback of school and social service funding, and the partial dismantling of Obamacare have directly caused white life expectancies to fall, gun suicides to rise, and school dropout rates to increase. He relates many stories over the course of the book and ends with the tragic story of Becca Campbell, a lower-middle-class white woman. In the wake of the Ferguson riots, she accidently shot herself in the head while waving her gun around in a moving car. The car struck the vehicle in front of her just at the moment she joked that she was getting “ready for Ferguson.”
Dying of Whiteness:
How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland
by Jonathan Metzl
New Arrivals, 2nd Floor RA563.M56 M48 2019
Andersen Library’s hours for the Thanksgiving holiday week are:
Mon.-Tues., Nov. 23-24: normal hours (7:30am-12 midnight)
Wed., Nov. 25:7:30am-6pm
Thurs., Nov. 26:CLOSED*
Fri., Nov. 27:8am-4:30pm
Sat., Nov. 28:CLOSED
Sun., Nov. 29:3pm-12 midnight
As of Monday, November 30th, Andersen Library will resume its normal fall semester hours through Saturday, December 19th. *What can you do if the library is closed, or you are remote? A lot! See the bottom of this blog entry!
Andersen Library’s hours between fall semester and Winterim (Sun. Dec. 20-Mon. Dec. 28):
Exceptions: The library is closed on Dec. 31 (Thurs.), Jan. 1 (Fri.), and Jan. 16-18 (Sat.-Mon.), 2021.
*Please remember that even when the physical Library is closed, or you are remote, you can:
Search the article databases (login when prompted with your campus Net-ID, same as for your campus email or Canvas) or Research@UWW (sign in to access all possible full text) and access online article text or submit ILLiad interlibrary loan requests for articles not available via UW-Whitewater’s libraries,
Ask a librarian for help using email or chat (UW-Whitewater librarians respond to the emails when the Library is open, but chat is covered 24/7 by non-local staff). You also can choose to make an appointment with a UW-Whitewater librarian, which can take place in person, over the phone, or online by Webex.
It’s getting dark outside early now… and cold… and now that classes are all remote after 11/20, you’re probably spending a lot more time in your dorm room….
Sounds like you need a handmade craft to brighten up that dorm room!
Come to the library on Wednesday 11/18 or Thursday 11/19, between 11:00a.m. and 4:00p.m., to make your own tea light candle holder. It’s an LED light candle — entirely dorm-approved and safe.
The pictures here might give you some inspiration. Or, check out Youtube for inspiration like this. Your only limit is your imagination! (well, and the supplies we have on hand, but we plan on a variety.)
Most everyone knows by know the horrible story of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, and in this trying year of 2020, one can be forgiven for passing by a story about that depressing time period in our recent past! But (being a librarian, of course) I noticed it because of the title, and I was rewarded in reading it. While the darkness of that time is certainly on full display through all the expected atrocities; so also is the prisoners’ resourcefulness to survive, the resistance of the human spirit, and the care and concern some people can show each other even in the worst circumstances.
The main character, Dita, is based on a real person who tended the eight precious books that managed to make their way into the Auschwitz “family camp” of Block 31. As an experiment, somehow the Nazis running Block 31 allowed some children to stay with their parents and even attend school during the day while their parents were working — ostensibly to be taught proper German history and culture, but the resourceful teachers (prisoners themselves) managed to teach Jewish culture and history alongside geography, math, and the more traditional subjects. They are aided in the effort by eight books — ranging from an atlas to a psychoanalysis text by Freud, a Russian-language grammar to H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World. More than the content of the books, it’s their mere existence, their attestation that a more sane world is still there and available to any who manage to survive, that gives the books their hopeful power — in Auschwitz, or to anyone in troubling circumstances.
While this book is classified as young adult fiction, the real Dita has also written an autobiography, A Delayed Life, which you can check out via UW Request.
The librarian of Auschwitz
by Antonio Iturbe, translated by Lilit Thwaites
New Arrivals, 2nd Floor F Itu
The art of Ramona Quimby : sixty-five years of illustrations from Beverly Cleary’s beloved books
by Anna Katz
New Arrivals, 2nd Floor NC975.5.C54 K38 2020
From the book jacket:
“Towards a form of aggressive nonviolence.
Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence.
Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.”
Posted innew stuff tuesdays|Comments Off on The Force of Nonviolence (New Stuff Tuesdays)
Many current and former students at UW-Whitewater have been curious about some of the legends of Whitewater related to witches, and these tales have often been associated with the spiritualism institute that existed in Whitewater from about 1889-1939. Carol Cartwright of the Whitewater Historical Society presented a local history program on Spiritualism and the Morris Pratt Institute online on Oct. 21, 2020, on the Irvin L. Young Memorial Library’s Facebook account. One of the few upsides of COVID is that interesting and educational programs like can be enjoyed after the fact if you weren’t able to attend live. Click below to view the presentation via YouTube!
For assistance with finding additional resources, such as articles or additional books, please ask a librarian (visit or contact staff at the Reference Desk, email, chat, or make an appointment).
Usually my New Stuff selections gravitate toward science. But this month, the physics book that intrigued me was way out of my league. So I settled on a title that sounded interesting, accessible, and socially significant. Besides, who can’t relate to second chances — at least getting them, if not giving them?!
After an unsuccessful stint as a high school teacher and then earning a creative writing MFA, the author began his law enforcement career as a probation and parole officer in New Orleans. His book tells the story of seven of his “clients” (aka, offenders). As he tells their stories, he shows how improving probationers and parolees chances at housing, health care, drug treatment, and a steady income can help them get on their feet and stay out of jail.
Incidentally, the author’s journey to law enforcement started with a late-night internet research session on mass incarceration. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, Research@UWW is a great way to begin looking for articles and books.
The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison by Jason Hardy New Arrivals, 2nd Floor HV9305 .L8 H37 2020
Andersen Library’s Winterim hours (Tues. Dec. 29-Fri. Jan. 15):
Andersen Library’s hours for the Thanksgiving holiday week are:
