“[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
Electric Literature v2.0
Electric Literature—first established as a cross-platform digital publisher, but best known for its popular “Recommended Reading” tumblog—has just relaunched itself as a literary advocate built around a strong website and social channels. C0-founder Andy Hunter tells the Washington Post, “Posting a cool photo on social media gets a much greater response than text alone, even in our audience of book lovers. While at first that might seem at odds with literary content, we’ve always felt that changes in the way we communicate create opportunities to reach more people.”
Sporadic Moments of Contact
“I realize that, like most fantasies, reality is likely to be more complicated. For starters, literary communities—like most communities—have echelons. They have cliques; they have ghettos. You are the wrong age, work in the wrong genre, don’t know the right people, don’t teach at the same program … Anyone who thinks this isn’t true is someone squarely at the center of his or her chosen circle.” On peripherality and the uncertain nature of literary community.
Tuesday New Release Day: Pamuk; Murray; Houellebecq; Smiley; Cantor; Shonkwiler; Vowell
Out this week: A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk; The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray (whom our own Mark O’Connell interviewed today); Submission by Michel Houellebecq; Golden Age by Jane Smiley; The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor; Moon Up, Past Full by Eric Shonkwiler; and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Appearing Elsewhere (Down Under)
I was a guest on the most recent episode of ABC (Australia) Radio’s The Book Show alongside Sophie Cunningham of Meanjin. We discussed literary blogging, how it’s evolved and its impact on literary culture. Have a listen!
Incorporating Elements
“I gave up on making a happy ending in the true sense a long time ago.” Japanese animator and film director Hayao Miyazaki is something of a legend. Over at The Literary Hub, Gabrielle Bellot takes a look at the expansive literary history of Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli.
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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”… ?