Spinning into Butter

My first reaction to the play occurred when I first started reading it. With a title like "Spinning into Butter," I expected a play taking place one or two hundred years earlier, in a farm or rural atmosphere with family strife/bonding somehow being connected with the act of churning butter. Obviously, this illustrates two points: a.) that I did not read the back and b.) that I am not very imaginative when it comes to plays.

Being the protagonist, Sarah's character was the most intriguing to me - not because she was the protagonist, but because there were so many facets to her character. Being a white female, I could associate with some of the earlier points she made, such as with Patrick Chibas. Why would a person object so strongly to a title of race in exchange for a twelve thousand dollar scholarship? To me it seemed as though she was trying to help him out. Even when reading his motivations for the protest, I still can't claim to understand fully what goes on in his head.

Learning of her racist tendencies was both surprising and anticipated. I suspected that there were some misconceptions due to ignorance on her part, but never fathomed just how much she hated black people, and therefore the cruel irony at being hired for the sake of becoming a racial liason of sorts.

I don't understand the big deal about her dislike of Toni Morrison. Of course she won't like it; she is more accustomed to a different style of writing, no matter how many courses she took on the subject. And really, everyone's tastes run differently; would my dislike of Ernest Hemingway make me sexist against men, rather than simply being unable to enjoy his writing?

Upon reading her opinions of Morrison's Beloved, I sought out some criticisms of the work, and found one that addressed the very aspects Sarah disliked in it. The article states the following: "In a process of personal and social transformation, Beloved's spaces and times change through geographical and structural movement and through storytelling. Narrative processes are linked to spatial formations and communal configurations. Morrison's simultaneous working through of history and memory by describing bodies and social structures makes the novel useful not only for projects of remembrance and revision, but also for building new social configurations of family and kin." The rest of it can be found here.

I do have to agree that, in my experience at least, everyone does the picking and choosing on a train or a bus - not necessarily due to race, but individual criteria that everyone has. I, for example, will admit that I would rather sit next to a woman older than me (what I view as the least physically and socially threatening), preferably away from children of any kind. In fact, I am curious about this possibility; does anyone else have any criteria for a potential seat on a hypothetical bus?