The Magical Negro

The flip side to the negative stereotypes, from Strange Horizons.

"These days, however, I don't think the Magical Negro's existence is so conscious. I hypothesize that the Magical Negro in film continues to live because a lot of the less savory beliefs about race are still in the American public's psyche. And because so much of art these days is commercial, the great machine needs to "give 'em what they know."

"[Stephen]King's Magical Negroes most often fit the stereotype of a person of color with mystical powers. According to general racial pigeonholes, people of color, especially blacks, are more primitive than whites. And because they are more primitive, they are more in tune with their primitive powers, the magic of the earth and spirits. One may see a lot of these assumptions with Native Americans, also. It is also this stereotype that the myths of the oversexed black woman and the well-endowed black man spring from, for to be primitive is often equated with being more sexual. The stereotypical primitive person of color is familiar to audiences and thus instantly understood. To assume such a role implies a certain primitiveness about all people of color."

Reminds me of Jubilee, Dr. Margaret Walker's historical novel about her great-grandmother, in which a white woman's insistence that "colored grannies" are the best (midwives) paves the way for her family to settle in an all-white town after the Civil War.

Blacks as saints or sinners, but nothing in-between, I guess. Kinda like artists...hm, wonder if it's the outsider category coming into play. Scapegoats and messiahs, but not just plain folks.

Lose Weight! Get Laid! Find God!: The All-in-One Life Planner

"The Americans go for self-help books, the French buy unreadable philosophy books and the British buy books filled with trivia, which are often made up and generally aimed at being funny," Nielsen adds. "Those are the stereotypes, and they're not completely misleading."

Elephants' tears and ants' "arseholes" at the Guardian.

What's on your Christmas book list?

"In France, certainly, they buy a different kind of book. In amazon.fr's chart of the top 20 bestselling titles this Christmas is one by Schopenhauer. True, it comes in at 19, and it isn't the German pessimist's symphonic chef d'oeuvre The World as Will and Representation, but L'Art d'avoir toujours raison, a book on how to win arguments. But let's not spoil the story. As you know, Schopenhauer's most trenchant philosophical observation was that humans are eternally tormented by desire and it is only in the stilling of the human will - be it through disinterested aesthetic contemplation or ascetic renunciation - that one can elude the penal servitude of...our human fate."

Vegetarian vs. Local vs. Organic and Fair Trade

Is it better to eat locally grown food, or to promote imported crops grown sustainably that support the rain forests? If we don't support sustainable rain forest crops, what can the farmers do except cut the trees down to sell the wood to make a living?

Interesting article at SF Gate.

I'm reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, in which the author insists repeatedly that it is okay to kill and eat animals, when what we really need is to hear that it is okay NOT to -- at least those of us who were raised with the four food groups/food pyramid nonsense.

Cuke photo from Howstuffworks.com Sorry I can't get it to link to the page.

The Internet Was Not Our First Revolution

From Doris Lessing's Nobel prize acceptance speech, at the Guardian:

We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

More links here.

Top Ten Books of 2007

From the NY Times.

I wish I could say I've read more of these, although I usually disagree with anyone's top ten.

Censorship

In Bangladesh
In Turkey
In the U.S. in the 1990s.

The Top Ten
1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
and:
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

In Sudan, it's teddy bears they're worried about. You can't name them after the prophet. Here, we named them after a popular Teddy, and nobody made a fuss.

Was That Her Tongue? Bad Sex Shortlist

Is a doozy:

"Anne Hathaway's cow-milking fingers, cradling my balls in her almond palm, now took pity on the poor anguished erection..."

Read more.

And the winnah:

She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew.

Writing the McNovel?

Got idealistic dragons? Homoerotic vampires? Uh-oh. This was too good to pass up, from Paperback Writer via Nathan Bransford.

Bonus Mcpoints: you claim the novel is entirely your invention and has nothing to do with that other Brother McVampire series which you of course simply haven't had time to read yet.

Zippicamiknicks - Promiscuous Sex and Mindless Consumerism Vs. Totalitarian Paranoia

Margaret Atwood does Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Victoria's Secret:

"zippicamiknicks", that female undergarment with a single zipper down the front that could be shucked so easily: "Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though deflated on the floor."

I myself was living in the era of "elasticised panty girdles" that could not be got out of or indeed into without an epic struggle, so this was heady stuff indeed.

The girl shedding the zippicamiknicks is Lenina Crowne, a blue-eyed beauty both strangely innocent and alluringly voluptuous - or "pneumatic", as her many male admirers call her. Lenina doesn't see why she shouldn't have sex with anyone she likes whenever the occasion offers, as to do so is merely polite behaviour and not to do so is selfish.

Everyone is happy at the Guardian.

National Book Awards

Go Sherman and Denis! Two of my favorite authors, Sherman Alexie and Denis Johnson, have won in 2007.

Cover Story: Is this the End of the Hardcover Book?

Picador plans to publish most of its titles as "B format" paperbacks - of the kind used for paperback editions of novels by the likes of Ian McEwan and Anne Enright. The firm's publisher Andrew Kidd told The Bookseller: "We want to help well-reviewed authors get straight to their readers." At the same time, Picador's novels will also appear in limited hardback print runs, produced for the people who prefer to acquire books with cloth covers, boards, endpapers and so on, and who don't mind paying for those luxuries.

Such people, though, are few in number. So why have publishers persisted for so long in bringing out hardback novels, pushing for reviews and interviews with the authors, and waiting until everyone has forgotten about the publicity before issuing the affordable editions?

At the Guardian.

Does it matter if it is the end? I buy few books in hardcover, only those for which I can't bear to wait for the paperbacks, which I prefer -- easier to handle, lighter to carry, less space to store. And, yes, cheaper, so my book-buying budget goes a longer way. The same argument can be made for used books, which I do buy, but the rule I try to stick to is, once I have bought a used book by an author and liked it, I buy the next one new (in paperback, usually), to support the author and the publishing industry. (I bet they are happy to hear that. Well, they would be if they knew how many books I buy.)

The Over-Rated and the Dead

When the world speaks with one voice, it almost invariably gets it wrong. Thus, Norman Mailer, who died at the weekend, has been hailed as a great, if flawed, American writer, a pre-eminent chronicler of the 20th century. But it would be closer to the truth to characterise him as an arch-conservative who pulled off a stunning confidence trick.

Mailer hated authority, homosexuality, women and almost certainly himself, producing fiction and essays that would be comically bad if they did not display addictions to violence and abusive sex.

Then as now, few on the left cared that he was a hysterical opponent of contraception and abortion: "I hate contraception ... it's an abomination." It was left to one or two feminist writers, notably Kate Millett in Sexual Politics, to point out the contradictions that disfigured his work. Millett regarded Mailer as "a prisoner of the virility cult", a man whose "powerful intellectual comprehension of what is most dangerous in the masculine sensibility is exceeded only by his attachment to the malaise."

My feelings exactly. Read the rest.

Is the Story Alive or Dead, Would Somebody Make Up Our Minds For Us

After reading the article highlighted in a previous entry, I came across this one, at the Book Critics Circle blog, which is either confident or head-in-the-sand, depending on whose opinion you prefer -- the comments section is worth reading. My opinion? Well, not being primarily a short story writer, I don't really know. I think both sides have some interesting things to say, but I'm inclined toward the more negative view, unfortunately.

I Want One...Is There A Fork and Knife Version?

Japanese women with environmental concerns close to their hearts may one day be able to wear a bra which can carry their own personal chopsticks to cut down on waste.

And the bra has benefits beyond protecting simply the planet -- the chopsticks tucked in both sides of the bra will give lift to the breasts and "gently accentuate cleavage", Triumph Japan said.

At Yahoo.com.