“[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
Curiosities
Garth, Ben, Andrew and Max appear in today’s “Digest” at The Morning News. The topic is movies based on books. Also at TMN: the Tournament of Books is underway.Readers with an interest in sales figures for books and their drawbacks should take a look at the comments of our follow-up post on the Beautiful Children free book promotion. Several anonymous commenters, whom one suspects are probably industry insiders, have shared their insights.A quick but interesting interview with Paul Theroux. This summer, Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star will be published. In it, he retraces his path from The Great Railway Bazaar thirty years ago. (via)The National Book Critics Circle Award winners have been announced. In the fiction category, Junot Díaz took home the prize for The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. Díaz was a part of our Year in Reading in December.The finalists have been announced for the Kiriyama Prize, which recognizes books that “relate in some significant way to the Pacific Rim or South Asia, to a particular culture or part(s) of these regions, or to people from these regions.” Among them is I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen, which was reviewed here by Ben, from which a blurb was used on the Kiriyama Prize site.The Stranger reminds us of our bookselling days, chasing those damn book thieves down the street.The Observer reports on two new bylines arriving at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh and Ariel Levy of the New York Times and New York respectively. (via)Literary frauds are all over the news again, and the LA Times serves up a delightful accounting of hoaxers going all the way back to the 1700s. (via)We are all stereotypical readers: “The British buy books by television personalities, Americans are obsessed with self-improvement, French choices are more highbrow, the Germans like holidays while the Japanese have more eclectic tastes.” (via)A new issue of The Quarterly Conversation is out. Among the offerings: over- and underrated books and Sam J. Miller’s essay positing that short stories are far from dead, as some big names would have you think.Apple head honcho Steve Jobs told the New York Times in January that “people don’t read anymore.” The Raleigh Quarerly took umbrage and is now holding a contest that asks for submissions “featuring a main character named, uh, Steve, who reads something that transforms his life.”
The Crisis of the Canon
“I don’t start with disorder; I start with the tradition. If you’re not trained in the tradition, then deconstruction means nothing.” On Derrida, Foucault, and the deconstructionist defense of the canon.
The Handmaid’s Tale on TV
The Handmaid’s Tale is making its series debut on Hulu with Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men) starring as Offred. Get ready for Gilead.
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Rumaan Alam on Genre Snobbery
Brief Hideous Movie
Gawker posted the first trailer for the forthcoming film version of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
The Camera is an Author
Writing in the London Review of Books (Reg. Req.), Evgeny Morozov clued me onto how “scientists at UCLA – with funding from the Chinese government – have built an ‘image to text’ system that automatically produces text summaries of what is taking place in captured video.” A similar technology was also developed by NYU student Matt Richardson, whose “descriptive camera” can “automatically describe the scene in a camera’s viewfinder, which, when the image was uploaded, would make it easier to find.” Meanwhile one Twitter is describing typical Instagram shots in 140 characters or fewer.
““[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”… ?