Arts Orbit

I think there is a bit of a disconnect between black people and our cultural narrative. During times of great oppression you unwillingly relinquish control of your stories over to people and forces perceived to be more powerful and our modern stories still rarely get told (and Tyler Perry doesn’t count). So, the idea that going back through history to find the source of this narrative seems rife with frustration, exhaustion, and possible dead ends. But in truth, black America has existed for a good long while now and our stories are everywhere; we take them with us wherever we go and I think it’s time we start discovering and sharing them.

Amina Harper on Virginia Hamilton’s Her Stories

"Being in the publishing industry, it’s like in medieval times when the French would attack the English and ram the castle gate down and everyone stormed in. The gatekeepers are gone, and the large publishers are standing on a bench and watching the tsunami come in. They’re pretending it’s not, but every day it’s getting closer. No consumer is loyal to a publisher; if a consumer can buy a book on Amazon and when it arrives it looks like they expect a book to look, to them it makes no difference that it’s [self-published]."

Mark Levine, author of The Fine Print of Self-Publishing and CEO of Hillcrest Media Group. Here’s how Minnesota publishers are adapting to the new wave of self-publishing.

s424h:

A short ode to one of my favorite books about Florida

I had torn through all the Little House on the Prairie books and I was looking for something more hardcore. “Strawberry Girl” was a natural option because it’s the most hardcore thing I’ve ever read, to this day. It’s about a girl and her family in the Florida backwoods and the foreword from the author seriously says:

“My material has been gathered personally from the Crackers themselves, and from other Floridians who know and understand them. I have visited in Cracker homes. I have made many sketches of people, animals, the natural surroundings, their homes-plans, furnishings and details.”

Rereading it today. Hilarious

Zadie Smith, at the University of Minnesota: “People who write on the Internet are not idiots”

“People who write on the Internet are not idiots,” said Zadie Smith by way of concluding her remarks October 23 at the University of Minnesota’s Coffman Memorial Union. With that benediction, I stood up from the spot on the floor that had been my vantage point in the over-capacity theater and walked out, grabbing a slice of literary cake on my way.

Smith, presenting the annual Esther Freier Endowed Lecture in Literature, answered several questions after delivering prepared remarks on the general subject of why one might want to be a writer—and what, exactly, that means. Though the acclaimed author reached back to sources including Alexander Pope and George Orwell, the elephant in everyone’s pockets was the Internet. The 36-year-old Smith, whose breakout debut novel White Teeth was published in 2000, belongs to the first cohort of writers who can’t ignore the rapid changes that the Internet is precipitating in the nature and distribution of literature.

Though she’s on record as a Facebook hater, in Minneapolis Smith sounded optimistic about the possibilities afforded by the Internet generally. She spoke positively of the quality and rigor of online literary criticism, and she said that she enjoys the creativity encouraged by Twitter, where during the presidential debates “you can see a nation becoming funny together.”

Ultimately, she concluded, what fundamentally defines a writer won’t change all that much: a writer is one who cares about language at a granular level, who can and does construct quality sentences that are assembled into compelling bodies of prose. New technology is making the means of distributing self-expression available to a far wider swath of the population, but writers will still be writers even if Random House and all its peers collapse.

Smith’s historical perspective was even-handed: as she illustrated via excerpts from a testy essay by Pope, specimens of the put-upon, thin-skinned writer existed long before there were trolls to leave anonymous comments or a Wikipedia to misstate facts. People who live in intimate relation to the written word, who aspire to (and sometimes succeed at) making a living by artful construction of sentences, have been dealing with upheavals in working conditions and job description from the days of stone and papyrus through the invention of the printing press and the development of the modern publishing industry. With text messages, chats, status updates, and e-mails, writing is more central to daily life—and in that respect, more important—than it’s ever been before.

At the end of her prepared remarks, Smith touched on another quality that differentiates writers in the literary sense from writers in the pragmatic sense: the quality not of self-absorption or self-actualization (often thought to define the role of writer) but of self-transcendence. The gift of the great writers, suggested Smith, is not so much self-expression as the ability to be multiple selves, and to allow readers to find themselves in that books—or e-books—they clutch tightly to their chests.

- Jay Gabler

(Source: tcdailyplanet.net)

Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X” coined the name of a generation.

What’s the generation-defining Millennial novel? Reply to this post, or submit your answer.

"I felt utter fury that this is the writing our culture assigns value at this point in time. My objection isn’t to the sex. It isn’t to the overnight success of the author. I am, in fact, a huge fan of both of those things. My objection is to the reductive message: the ‘romance’ that blossoms between an abuser and his captive. The ugly language. The fact that this is writing—so far as I know, because I must admit I cannot bring myself to read more than a few pages—that reinforces ignorance and closes off inquiry into the greater world."

Ann Bauer, “What’s the point of writing good books when all America wants is Fifty Shades of Grey?”

"The organizing committee for the 3rd Annual Twin Cities Anarchist Book Fair has announced the dates for this year’s fair. The fair will be held on September 15th and 16th at the Powderhorn Park Recreation Center at 3400 15th Ave. S. in Minneapolis. As in years past, the fair will include tablers selling books, periodicals and items relating to anarchism and other radical thought, as well as workshops, guest speakers and free food."

OR MAYBE, “ORGANIZING COMMITTEE,” WE’LL ALL JUST DO WHATEVER THE HELL WE WANT WITH OUR BOOKS AND FOOD AND TABLES! RISE UP! LIVE FREE! FUCK THE MAN AND HIS GUEST SPEAKERS!

Ernest Hemingway:
Domaine de la Perriere–Villes Vignes
Chinon 2006, $16
In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary. I often picked up a Chinon at the local marchand de vins with the few meager francs I scrounged from my pockets. Without airs or pretension, the honest and humble bottles seemed more distinctly of Europe than any Bordeaux or Burgundy, for me it was the genuine flavor of the earth.

How to choose a wine based on your favorite author

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