“[S]ometimes, one of the best ways to better understand racism is to just pick up a book.” As part of a recent tweet about his availability for racial consultation, Colson Whitehead recommended an evergreen Huffington Post piece entitled “16 Books About Race That Every White Person Should Read“, a list that includes Claudia Rankine‘s Citizen, T. Geronimo Johnson‘s Welcome to Braggsville, and The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which we reviewed here. We hope he’s collecting referral fees.
Dear White People
How The Room Was Made
Readers of Millions Originals ebook Epic Fail are deeply familiar with Tommy Wiseau’s heroically bad 2003 film, The Room. So, too, are people masochistic enough to sit through the actual movie. Together, they might be wondering how such a production came to be – and how it came to fail so horribly. Well, finally a new book co-authored by Greg Sestaro and Tom Bissell seeks to answer that question. You can check out an excerpt over here.
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Just let it be weird.
Mark Mann on going to the gallery and looking at art: “The fact is, nobody knows what art is or why people make it. This is blatantly disturbing.”
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The Book Club to End All Book Clubs
A long discussion of Tenth of December that includes George Saunders himself? Why, Rumpus Book Club, you’re too kind.
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Welcome Emily St. John Mandel!
To kick off 2010, we at The Millions are thrilled to announce that Emily St. John Mandel has joined us as a regular contributor. Emily lives in Brooklyn. Her first novel, Last Night In Montreal, was recently published by Unbridled Books; her second novel, The Singer’s Gun, will be published by the same press in May 2010. Her pieces for The Millions are collected here. Welcome Emily!
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Careless Cervantes
Ilan Stavans’s introduction to the quadricentennial edition of Don Quixote is available on the Literary Hub website. As he explains it, the narrative is both baffling and perfect: “What I like most about Don Quixote is its imperfection. I wasn’t wrong in my teens about the sloppiness of the writing; it is just that my attitude was too pedantic. It is, unquestionably, a defective narrative. Cervantes is often criticized as a numb and careless stylist.”
Oxford to the Rescue!
Ready to have your mind blown? There is an English word that rhymes with “orange.”
The Salmon Is Inedible
Recommended Reading: The inimitable Umberto Eco on how to travel with a salmon.
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Red Scare
“Marx the anti-Communist is an unfamiliar figure; but there were undoubtedly times when he shared the view of the liberals of his day and later, in which communism (assuming anything like it could be achieved) would be detrimental to human progress.” Wait, what? The New York Review of Books reviews Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life.
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““[S]ometimes, one of the best ways to better understand racism is to just pick up a book.”
Agreed, but not in the sense Colson means; what good will reading the same old rather obvious and polemical arguments do? (Also: Christ: enough with the logrolling, man).
If you want to be enlightened about Racism in its subtle and pervasive forms, read, for example, Paul Theroux’s “Sir Vidia’s Shadow”, Theroux’s attempt to hit back at VS Naipaul for cutting Theroux off; it is Theroux’s attempt, as well, to paint himself as a Sex/Race White Knight, at Naipaul’s expense, and it backfires *spectacularly*, especially if one read’s Patrick French’s depressingly-frank bio of Naipaul, in which we’re treated to Theroux’s own racist remarks (in letters to Naipaul, during the Writerly courtship). Theroux was a flagship White Liberal of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s… with a Conradian core.
Theroux’s case exemplifies the illuminating paradoxes of genteel Racism… whereas Claudia Rankine’s diary of Race-tinged micro-aggressions (even her publisher uses the term) doesn’t do much more than prove that Life in the big city is tough: people will diss you/ dismiss you for all kinds of reasons, including color/ gender/ weight/ age/ class et al.
It’s the strange (common) case of the Racist Humanists we’d do better to dig into. It’s like: we *know* George Wallace was not a nice man, but did we know about, for example, Kerouac calling a Black writer of his acquaintance a “blue-gummed N-word”… ?