Black Writers in a Post-Racial Age?

By now, anyone who's been paying attention knows that post-racial is just another myth among America's press clippings. I doubt that the publishing world has ever believed itself to be post-racial though. Consider the watermelon joke at the National Book Awards ceremony just last year when Jacqueline Woodson received her award for Black Girl Dreaming.

And it's hard to ignore that some bookstores still segregate writing by black writers from that by white writers. Even Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison has been sometimes cordoned off. So, there's not much more to say about that.

Still, I share this link to an extraordinarily beautiful and provocative essay by Saeed Jones at BuzzFeed, "Self Portrait of The Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer." For a number of reasons this article resonated with me. I especially appreciated his honesty about the pressure for black writers to be more polite and docile than white writers if they want to have careers:

You can make yourself crazy simply by paying attention. The publishing industry on which my work depends is 89% white. And so, when one of those white people puts their hands in my hair, it’s difficult for me to speak up in the moment, or even months later, because I want to have a career, not just one book. I suspect there are limits to the literary elite’s willingness to tolerate an insistently “angry black writer” in their presence. Writers who speak out too loudly, too often will never be told explicitly “you’ve bitten the hand that feeds you” but there are so many ways to starve.

Yes, the need to eat and live indoors is a thing.

Jones also tells of his experience going to and being at a party with the nearly all-white literary elite and how he felt about that experience as a young, black, gay male. He acknowledges that creepy impression we black writers sometimes get that we are a trophy in someone's effort to prove she or e's open to everyone, even black people. It's a cleansing read.

Toni Morrison's Amusing Interview with Stephen Colbert

The Colbert Report
Colbert Report Episode Guide,  More Colbert Report Videos,  Comedy Central Full Episodes

I don't know what I was doing in November 2014 that caused me to miss Stephen Colbert's laugh-out-loud interview with great American novelist Toni Morrison. She is just as funny as he is when discussing her work. But they also discussed race as a social construct and her work's influence on President Obama before he was POTUS.

What intrigued me most is her admission that she had only recently read Beloved from beginning to end. Of course, she read it when she was working on it, but when she read it last year, she read it not as its author but as a relaxed reader. She saw nothing she'd change, she said, but she would make a change to the Bluest Eye if she wrote it again.

I've taken the Paper.li plunge with Bell, Book, and Scandal

Having run an actual newspaper/magazine before, I was fascinated when I saw the first Paper.li paper tweeted to me on Twitter. I don't remember who tweeted me all those months ago, but before long it seemed that every other day someone sent a tweet directing me to his or her Paper.li paper.

Since I had already been thinking about narrowing my focus to books, publishing, entertainment, and politics, in that order, I began to toy with the idea of creating my own Paper.li paper that curated just those topics. Now, I've done it.

My paper is called Bell, Book, and Scandal, a play on the name of a movie I loved in my youth, Bell, Book, and Candle starring Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart.

The movie is about a witch (Novak) falling in love with a mortal (Stewart) after casting a spell on him to make him fall in love with her. She initially goes after him, however, because she doesn't like his fiance. The spell backfires, and as a result she falls in love and loses her magical powers. Her mind-reading cat plays a big role in the film. You can see how she uses him to cast her spell in the video below.

The movie's title may itself be a play on another use of the phrase. According to multiple sources, an obsolete ceremony for excommunication from the Roman Catholic church was also called "bell, book, and candle" because those three items were used during the the ritual. Phrases.org.uk says, "In the excommunication ceremony officials close the book, quench the candle and toll a bell, as for someone who had died. The phrase is old and first appears, in Old English, circa 1300." The entry adds that the phrase appears in Shakespeare's King John: "BASTARD: Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back, When gold and silver becks me to come on."

I've found a few articles on the excommunication ritual, which was done in secret, but here's an overly-dramatic video with graphics that explains it, albeit with sensational music.

While my paper, Bell, Book, and Scandal, may occasionally curate articles on paranormal activities and events (I live in New Orleans, so how can I resist?), it has nothing to do with witches or secret religious rituals. The bell in its name represents the Liberty Bell (politics),  the book, all things literary, and the scandal, arts and entertainment coverage that happens to favor ABC's Scandal. But I will also have my eye out for news of How to Get Away with Murder and science fiction and fantasy-oriented shows such as SyFy's Helix and HBO's Game of Thrones.

It's my hope that by narrowing my focus, I'll hunker down, read more books, and devote more time to creative writing.

Quickly, Quicky: My reads from Edgar Allan Poe facts to airplane fights

As numerous headlines zip across my screen daily, I end up hitting the "favorite" or "like" buttons often, not because I've read whatever it is, but because I want to read it. Here are a couple of articles I skimmed today that I hope to return to and some that I've read.

And speaking of what I want to read, I am seriously thinking about blogging my bookshelf because I've collected a number of books that were either assigned but remain barely read or I purchased that I have had not yet read. File that under self-accountability.


7 Things You Probably Didn't Know about Edgar Allan Poe
Rhyming headline aside, if you're a Poe fan, this article at Huffington Post should intrigue you. I didn't know that he went by "Eddy" to some people, nor did I know that he used multiple secret identities or sobriquets.

Toni Morrison's 1975 lecture on race, politics, and art freed me to say, "Do your own work!" (Audio)

Here is the audio of a lecture novelist and scholar Toni Morrison delivered in 1975 in Portland, Oregon. It includes the question and answer period and is posted on the Portland library's Sound Cloud page. Portland University's Special Collections describes the audio:

This discussion, presented by the Portland State Black Studies Center, was Part 2 of 2 in a "Public Dialogue on the American Dream Theme." Panel members were novelist Toni Morrison, poet and PSU professor Primus St. John, Lewis & Clark professor John Callahan, Judy Callahan, and Lloyd Baker.

The audio quality could be better, but I listened to it and then searched for the transcript, which I found at Dr. Keisha E. McKenzie's website.

Here is the Morrison quote that resonated with me:

"[K]now the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing."

When I first saw that quote on Facebook, before I knew its source in Morrison's ouvre, I felt it so deeply that I immediately knew it was true, and grasping that truth liberated me. I decided to stop blacksplaining Black people to White people, which is something too many White people on the Internet demand that Black people do. They approach with direct questions or uninformed comments. "How can you say that?" or "Slavery's in the past. Why can't Black people get over it?" or "If you people wouldn't talk about race, we would not have these problems."

Some White people think it's Black people's obligation to explain to White people the Euro-American (White)-construct of Blackness that White people's ancestors created and White people living today perpetuate. They demand that we explain how it operates to oppress us, never acknowledging that structural racism exists and continues to oppress us. They also seem to think that they get to define what racism is and is not just as their ancestors sought to define us.

I don't mean that I won't ever write another essay on race in America. I mean that I will attempt to avoid answering those White people in depth who rudely or disrespectfully respond to anything I've written or said in a way that shows me they either did not read my essay or blog post. I tend to provide links and sources to support what I say, so I think commenters are stupid when they ask questions for which a detailed response is readily found in the essay itself.

If someone doesn't have enough respect for the work on the page or screen to read what's already been said and to check out the links or sources before they challenge assertions, then I don't have enough respect for that person to respond to the foolish comment. Usually people's resistance to reading and checking out sources indicates they really don't want to know about the Black struggle and are set on insulting my intelligence, so then I'm through. It's as simple as that. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a dumb question or comment.

And I will take and have taken this approach with Black people, too, who don't know their own history and ask questions disrespectfully or whose comment shows that they are coming strictly from an ideological perspective without any foundation in history and current facts. In general, I mean Black people who think that because they are Black they can say the same dumb crap that racist White people say and engage me. NO. For instance, don't begin speaking to me with false statements such as, "If our youth would pull up their pants, everything would be wonderful and the police would not bother them."

However, if the person seems to sincerely want to have a conversation and listen because they read my essay or post, then that's different. We can talk. I'll listen to them and respond. But I reserve the right to respond with a reading list.

Here is the Portland lecture:


I also appreciated this clip from an interview with the author.

We say 'rabid,' you say 'feminist.' Rabid. Feminist. Rabid feminist, brought to you by Oxford Dictionaries

I love the Merriam-Webster site, m-w.com, but sometimes, when I'm in a hurry, I use the dictionary that Google pops up, and sometimes Google draws the definitions it displays from the well-respected dictionary company, Oxford Dictionaries at OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford Dictionaries are quite proper, so an example of a typical way to use the defined word appears immediately after the definition.

According to Oxford's first definition, the word rabid means "having or proceeding from an extreme or fanatical support of or belief in something," and a typical use of the word would be as a modifier for the word feminist: "a rabid feminist." That dictionary doesn't come out and say that this usage is common, but it does present "a rabid feminist" as its only example of usage under the first definition.

"A rabid feminist." Just that one example. Perhaps in England it's common to say "rabid" before feminist. I doubt it, but maybe.

Some feminists are extremely radical out there, but are they so common that "rabid feminist" should be an example in the dictionary? Of all the other possible examples Oxford Dictionaries could have chosen--such as rabid fan which is one of Dictionary.com's examples, or rabid supporter, which is M-W.com's example--what's up with Oxford's choice?

What the Oxford Dictionary has done with its example is a form of naming or labeling. As theorists quoted in the Sourcebook on Rhetoric explain, "the process of naming or labeling is never benign or without consequence."

I think that when an adjective is attached to a noun repeatedly in media or permanently in prominent records, especially when the more powerful in society have already promoted an image of that noun which the adjective reinforces, then eventually that usage cements to the noun the label that the adjective confers. I mean, Christmas is supposed to merry and supermodels must be thin, right? Both those notions are the result of an adjective being cemented to a noun. Increasingly then (especially since the Oxford's example for rabid gets displayed first and prominently by the number one search engine), the attributes of rabid may increasingly be transferred to the word feminist in human consciousness.

Is this a transference feminism can afford or that it should not bother to combat? Rabid, after all, implies violent and angry, and it's not as though the patriarchy hasn't already been successful at moving the public, even many of today's young women, to view feminist as a dirty word. See "feminazi," see "bra-burning bitch," see "man-hater."

What if under dumb the dictionary's usage example were "a dumb blonde"? Or if under anti-Semitic, "an anti-Semitic German"? Would we say then that the dictionary was showing an unkind bias?

True, some people and institutions strive to be unbiased, especially in use of language, and dictionary publishers are one of those institutions we expect to be neutral. But generally the best any person, group, or company can do is nurture their desire to be unbiased, try to be so, and keep up a facade of neutrality.

Whenever we craft information for consumption, we inject our subjectivity. We inject it through our edits--what we choose to leave in, what we choose to take out, what examples we choose or do not choose to use, and our choices can shape readers' perceptions and opinions of issues, situations, ideologies, and what we mean to each other. Consider that for years people justified calling black people the n-word because in Webster's dictionary, one definition for the n-word was "a Negro." How often have you settled an argument about the correct meaning of a word by whipping out your dictionary?

The editors of dictionaries indeed influence human perception of the world and attitudes toward certain objects or phrases. Through examples, it can even shape the meaning of the word feminist when feminist is not the word the reader looks up.

The image of the "rabid feminist" is one conjured and promoted most often by people who don't like feminists. In the case of the word feminist, the potential for damage through this labeling or subtle propaganda is exacerbated by Google's use of the Oxford Dictionary.

I speak here as a Black woman who knows about the power of the same adjectives used repeatedly to re-shape the image of people, places, and activities. For instance, how did the image of Black people being ape-like or bestial take hold? It happened through the process of labeling. And it was only by objecting and protesting the use of adjectives such as ape-like, savage, and bestial to define Black people that Black people have moved closer to self-determination.

Words create symbols and build hierarchies, establish moral codes and taboos, who may be desirable and undesirable. So, let's think about this: our sons and daughters may google the word rabid. When they do so, the first example for that word will be a frothing-at-the-mouth feminist. Is that what we want for our future? Should we demand that Oxford change its usage example or that Google stop using Oxford Dictionaries or both?

The devil's coming round now honey: So, you want to write music for films? Start here.

Today I learned about writing for music libraries, which is considered a viable way of making a living. And it's all due to a promotional commercial for the TV show CSI.

The song with the lyrics "The devil's comin' round now honey, you better lock your front door," appeals to me. I've only heard it in the CSI commercial. What liking this song says about me, however, I don't know. It's dark, bluesy, and thrusting.

There's case, there's no way to embed the song that I can see, but

Banned Books: Their Eyes Were Watching God

          Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (Janie Crawford is the main character.)

• Challenged for sexual explicitness, but retained on the Stonewall Jackson High School's academically advanced reading list in Brentsville, VA (1997). A parent objected to the novel's language and sexual explicitness.

ALA.org

Author courts readers by insulting J. K. Rowling and Potter fans, Anne Rice objects to vicious writer on writer attack

I tried to make the title of this blog post as sensational as a Daily Prophet headline. Did I even come close?

While up past my bedtime, I came across the following status update last night on the Facebook page of author Anne Rice. Rice, a former resident of New Orleans and the author of bestsellers such as Interview with the Vampire and Wolf Gift, voices strong disapproval of another author's attack on Harry Potter novelist J. K. Rowling.

       "If JK Rowling Cares About writing, She Should Stop Doing It," says novelist Lynn Shepherd in this vicious, cynical, resentful and thoroughly ugly article. It's appalling. Never have I seen anything this malicious ever directed towards an actor, a painter, a ballet dancer, an opera singer, a film director. No, this is the kind of petty, spiteful condescending criticism that is for some reason reserved for writers in our world. And that it was written by some one who is a writer herself makes it doubly nasty and shocking. I appreciate Jaclyn Qua-Hiansen bringing this to the page. My very best wishes to JK Rowling and to all authors out there as they face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in their creative journeys. In my life as a novelist, I've come to believe we are only in competition with ourselves when we strive to do our best; there is plenty of room for a multitude of successful endeavors in the ever changing world of books and readers, and there always will be. [Words of Anne Rice]

Here is a link to the article that Rice objected to: "If JK Rowling Cares About Writing, She Should Stop Doing It."

I have one question: Who in the hell is Lynn Shepherd and why has she offered herself up for Web execution? -- Publicity stunt. Publicity stunt. And an exceptionally dumb publicity stunt. Shepherd not only insults Rowling but also Rowling's fans:

"I didn't much mind Rowling when she was Pottering about. I've never read a word (or seen a minute) so I can't comment on whether the books were good, bad or indifferent. I did think it a shame that adults were reading them (rather than just reading them to their children, which is another thing altogether), mainly because there's so many other books out there that are surely more stimulating for grown-up minds." [Lynn Shepherd writing at the Huffington Post]

File under suicide attempts and other self-inflicted pain.



**The End**

Does Pharrell's hit Happy sound like another song to you?

You may also enjoy
"Yes, Pharrell,
subconscious plagiarism
is a thing."

As the writer Oscar Wilde said, "Talent borrows, genius steals." I take that statement to mean that a talented person recognizes the value of another's good work or art and imitates it. A genius, however, takes imitation to a new level, sometimes improving upon the original so much that observers, readers, or listeners don't even recognize the theft. The genius makes it his or her own.

I submit that creative genius is also an ability to take disparate parts and recombine them into something new and fresh that stands on its own.

Perhaps what we see often today is the cycle of creation and re-creation at work or maybe what we see today is evidence that the human mind has run out of ideas. Artists and writers, however, have been facing charges that they have copied or "borrowed from" each other more than they should since the invention of the printing press. The charge is not new, and neither are efforts to explain how and why this copying or "borrowing" occurs. The great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817 addressed this issue in his preface to Prometheus Unbound.

But how did I end up on this topic today? A Facebook discussion.

Sometimes I look up and I realize that I've written so much in response to a Facebook discussion that I might as well post whatever I've said at my own blog. Does that ever happen to you? When I read a debate on the public Facebook page of talk show host Lisa Durden today, I had that experience. We debated whether Pharrell Williams's super hit "Happy" from the movie Despicable Me 2 sounded like Stevie Wonder's "Fingertips" and "Cool Jerk" by the Capitols.

Honestly, I knew "Happy" felt familiar, but the song did not seem close enough to a specific song to me to matter. I felt what Pharrell had captured was one of the sounds of an era more than a particular song of that era (the 1960s). But full disclosure here: I love "Happy."

Here is what I had to say on FB:

Similarity between songs is not enough to constitute actual theft in the legal sense. Musicians (and poets) have long borrowed from each other and imitated styles in sincerity as well as in tongue and cheek. Tongue in cheek examples of borrowing in music would be Stevie Wonder himself playing "Mary had a little Lamb" at the end of "Fingertips," and Rufus featuring Chaka Khan drawing in the bass line of Bobby Womack's "A Woman's Gotta Have It" at the end of "Stop on By." Paying homage and so imitating sincerely is what "Alicia Keyes did when she borrowed part of Prince’s “Adore” for her song "Like You'll Never See Me Again." But unlike Stevie and Rufus did with their tongue and cheek borrowing, Alicia plays almost the same notes but off; hence, she alludes to “Adore;” she doesn’t steal it. In poetry, both the tongue and cheek and the paying homage types of borrowing usually fall into the allusion category. In the case of "Blurred Lines," Pharrell and Thicke went overboard. Also, Thicke made a definite effort to make "Blurred Lines" clearly echo "Got to Give It Up," but now wants to claim otherwise. And again, it seems to me that, they went overboard. Sections of the “Blurred Lines” can be played over "Got to Give It Up Part II" with little disturbance in listening, meaning the two songs almost mesh. [The founder of SameThatTune.com says that the Pharrell and Thicke definitely pushed the boundaries of the tribute song with "Blurred Lines"] The same cannot be said of "Fingertips" and "Happy." The similarity between those two comes with imitating a style, not a specific song. Even the similarity between "Cool Jerk" and "Happy" in this instance is not enough to constitute theft but more a case of style imitation. Just as theft in print is determined by how much is borrowed as well as a denial of borrowing, in music it depends on how much of the song is ripped from the other song and a refusal to acknowledge the “borrowing.” [SameThatTune.com also has an opinion on "Happy" and other songs, and they explain it in musical terms.] The best legal cases are when it's so obvious even a first-grader can tell it's the same song. For instance, most people who've heard "He's So Fine" more than once immediately recognized George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" was the same song. Harrison lost in court. His theft was classified as "subconscious plagiarism." Nevertheless, when it comes to beats and bass lines, musicians constantly borrow from one another, sometimes evenly openly admitting that they've done so as is the case in one of the songs I've mentioned in the post I've linked to here, but usually there's some variation: a speeding up of the riff or a slowing down, a change of a note here and there. And when the same beats and bass lines or sounds are borrowed often enough, then the music becomes a style the same way that in poetry certain poem arrangements eventually become poem forms. And Stevie [Wonder] may be cutting Thicke and Pharrell some slack on “Blurred Lines” because he’s giving the variation more weight than the similarity. [This was written in response to someone else in the conversation saying Stevie Wonder said "Blurred Lines" and "Got to Give It Up Part II" are not the same.]

That's all I said on Facebook, but since I'm writing here again about musical similarities and sometimes out-and-out copying, here is a "borrowing" aka a sampling that I pointed out to another friend of mine, Steven Hart, that made him gasp, "You're right!" When I first heard the opening of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" (the Valkyrie's cry) I immediately recognized the theme from the 1960s TV show Get Smart.  You be the judge; I've posted both below:




Related:

• "Borrowed Groves: The Clash, Katrina & the Waves, Robin Thicke, and Pharrell"
• Alicia Keys's love affair with Prince

Happy Birthday, Alice Walker!

I didn't realize when I watched Beauty in Truth, the American Masters documentary on Alice Walker that aired February 7, had aired then because Ms. Walker's birthday was coming up. Today, February 9, is her birthday. Born in 1944, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author turned 70 today.

The PBS documentary is a loving portrait of the writer, educator, and activist. If you missed it, I recommend you find out when it will air again. I was unaware of all that she'd sacrificed to speak during the Civil Rights Movement, and there are other details of her personal life the documentary reveals that illuminate my understanding of her fiction.

As a result of the film, Ms. Walker's life and literary career have been examined in a number media outlets in the last week. While reading about her, I came across some of Ishmael Reed's criticism of her and her work again. Also, a clip of Mr. Reed railing against Walker and The Color Purple is included in the documentary. In that clip he notl only shows disapproval of Walker's prize-winning novel, but also of lesbians. One his objections to The Color Purple was its inclusion of a lesbian relationship between Celie and Shug. I don't know whether he's changed his mind about lesbians since then, but his attitude toward Ms. Walker remains the same

I remember all the backlash against the book during the 1980s, and the people who objected reminded me of those who command, "Don't air our dirty laundry in public." Today such objections get listed under "respectability politics." There's a long-standing belief among some black Americans that we'd be treated better and make more gains in society if we appear to be saintly in all behavior. Others argue that good behavior doesn't matter in terms of changing the minds of some people about black people: if racists believe people of African descent are inferior, then living above reproach probably won't change their minds. For me, there's a grain of truth in both positions.

I understand that as a people we, African-Americans, see more than our share of negative imagery of our kind in film, online, and on television, so one of the better arguments against books like The Color Purple or Sapphire's Push, to name another, is that they only add to the burden of negative imagery. I also understand why some black men are highly sensitive to negative portrayals of black men (a very specific complaint ).

Many white people don't know any black people well and those they do know represent a narrow segment of the black community. Consequently, whites often project the negative behaviors and attitudes of typical black fictional characters onto all black people, except that one smart black fellow they know. They see the one smart, honest black person they know as the exception to the obvious rule supported by negative tropes and pictures.

The great number of negative images and their repetitions should not be dismissed as "just pictures" because images have power. Pervasive and persistent scary or demeaning images and stereotypes have a rippling harmful effects. For instance, if hiring managers believe all black men are drug dealers and rapists, then they're less likely to hire black men.

However, one of the responsibilities of good literature is to tell the truth, to represent real experiences in the real world.  Ms. Walker writes powerful stories that do that and that also give voice to women, especially marginalized women of color who have too often been silenced. She says she's done it because it's too easy to simply blame white people for every ailment. Some ailments, some bad behavior is the result of being born human and misguided, and we can work to change what we have the power to change. I'm of the same mind as Ms. Walker. It's true we face injustice and racism, but we still need to examine our own dysfunction if we want to recover and heal.

Furthermore, writers write what they know, and Walker said in Beauty in Truth that for The Color Purple she drew on stories about some of the men in her family and their friends (her grandfathers' and great-grandfathers' generation).  So, there's a Mister and a Harpo somewhere. Can we fault writers for sharing their own experiences through their own authentic voices?

Opening this post, I said that when Beauty in Truth aired, I didn't know today was Ms. Walker's birthday. While I didn't know that, I did know about Mr. Reed's and others' hostility toward Ms. Walker and other female writers who are feminists. I have not commented on his issue much because Mr. Reed is also a literary light and award winner. He's entitled to believe what he wants to believe; he can only relate to the world through his own experiences and knowledge. Nonetheless, I won't give him a pass to misrepresent what other luminaries have said in order to lure people to his way of thinking.

I was disappointed to find that he'd misrepresented the words of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison in one of his columns regarding Ms. Walker. Therefore, a few days ago I took the time to set the record straight on that. You can read more about my finding at this link: "Now, hold up, brother: Toni Morrison did not blast Alice Walker."

All that said . . . Happy Birthday, Alice Walker!

I'm a writer, so you'd think I'd journal more, but noooo

I just read a blog post at Flamingo House by Denise about art journaling and some Filofax thingies and she's been doing something in or with her journal every day. It sounds so organized and committed. She says that the month of January didn't go as she'd planned, but still, I'm intimidated.

And she's Instagraming her life, too.  I haven't taken to Instagram yet or Vine or Pinterest. I've lost my early adopter mojo, it seems.

But every year I tell myself that I'm going to keep a journal or diary (Notice it's not lose weight. That's so 15 years ago). I even bought this fancy journal last year with leather and a latch and everything, but I've only written in it about three times since I opened it.

My problem is that I forget that I'm supposed to be keeping a journal. Even if I do it for say five days in a row, if something distracts me on day six, I'm done. A month may pass before I say, "Oh, yeah. I was writing in a journal. Where is that thing?"

In 2013, I even forgot to write on my blog half the time, and that's probably because I went through a bit of a depression after my father passed away, followed by my brother (my only sibling) six months later. But this year will be much better. I'll be much better, I hope.

J. K. Rowling's Crime Novel Rejected at First: Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith

The UK Telegraph reports, "Publishers have been left red-faced after discovering that they rejected the latest novel by J. K. Rowling, one of the world’s best-selling writers." Apparently, the Harry Potter author has written a crime novel under the penname Robert Galbraith, but despite her book, The Cuckoo's Calling, receiving good reviews while Rowling remained in anonymous, the novel hasn't been selling so well. Fewer than 500 copies had moved prior to the Rowling reveal, the paper says.

I believe Rowling when she says on her website that she wanted to keep the secret longer because, as we all know, "she doesn't need the money." But by now, in this digital age, we also know that it's hard out here for a book pimp. Publishing is first a business for profit. So, is it any surprise then that the Galbraith persona has been unmasked as industry phenom J. K. Rowling? The big reveal is a gift to Mulholland Books (Little, Brown and Company) sales.

Notwithstanding that conclusion, per the Telegraph, the Sunday Times "investigated" speculation that the unknown Galbraith had a writing style that seemed eerily similar to a certain famous female novelist. Uh-huh. Maybe, but I'd love to know who dropped that breadcrumb in the reporter's ear.

Rowling writes that being Galbraith has been "a liberating experience" for her:

It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback from publishers and readers under a different name. The upside of being rumbled is that I can publicly thank my editor David Shelley, who has been a true partner in crime, all those people at Little, Brown who have been working so hard on The Cuckoo’s Calling without realising that I wrote it, and the writers and reviewers, both in the newspapers and online, who have been so generous to the novel. And to those who have asked for a sequel, Robert fully intends to keep writing the series, although he will probably continue to turn down personal appearances."

She's always had, as we know from the Potter series, a keen sense of humor.

Naturally, some editors have admitted that they rejected the book and feel just awful about it. The book, while written well, they declare, did not seem unique. Editors have to "fall in love" with the work of new novelists in order to buy their work. Publishing industry experts assert that point often.

Well, this Rowling news is worth a weakly raised eyebrow, if that, because writers who pay attention to the publishing industry know that this kind of thing--the rejection of perfectly acceptable books--happens all the time. Why should Rowling's experience under a fake name be any different from that of thousands of unknown writers everywhere who pursue that elusive bird, the traditional publishing contract? David Vinjamuri's article, "Publishing Is Broken . . .," will shed light on this topic, if you're unfamiliar with this aspect of publishing and its evolution.

Lorrie Moore's "Paper Losses" read by Gary Shyteyngart

Slowly at this blog, I am working toward writing more about books, fiction, poetry, and writing in general. In other words, I am attempting to focus Whose Shoes Are These Anyway on a particular pair of shoes, that of creative writer and devoted reader. For reasons only a psychoanalyst would understand, I have avoided doing this in the past.

Lorrie Moore

A feature at the New Yorker today pushed me closer to this focus. I listened to its podcast of novelist Gary Shyteyngart reading Lorrie Moore's short story "Paper Losses," a tale right up my emotional alley. It's about a couple heading toward a bitter divorce. However, that's not what drew me to the story. I listened and read along because I like Lorrie Moore. If you haven't read her work, you should. The first story I read by her was "You're Ugly, Too." She's funny and insightful. Her stories come alive through her exceptional observation and interpretation of human behaviors. (Get a .pdf of "You're Ugly, Too" here.)

A treat for writers: At the end of the podcast, Shyteyngar discusses Moore's work and his own with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. Treisman recollects that Moore writes the beginning of a story, then the end, and then goes to the middle and connects the beginning and the end. Hmm. Shyteyngar, who does not write short stories, says he's never tried that. He writes linearly.

The Day After the New Orleans Mother's Day Shooting

This post supplements a longer post at BlogHer.com.

I received an email on Monday (May 13) from BlogHer's News and Politics Editor Grace Hwang Lynch looking for people willing to write about the Mother's Day shooting. When I saw it, I was annoyed. No. I was angry in a way I couldn't understand. I figured that people not from here thought the incident was another "mass shooting story" like Newtown or Aurora, but I knew better.

I figured New Orleans would be all over the news for the wrong reasons again, CNN, ABC, NBC up in our faces aiming their cameras at our freakish dysfunction. I kept thinking, these people aren't here. They won't understand. They don't love us. Some of them will just watch like we're a train wreck, too. Oh, I hope they catch these guys, lock 'em up, and throw away the key.

Testy, I wrote to the editor:

Why does [your website] want to cover it? It's bangers shooting into crowds, which unfortunately is not that unusual down here now and not the kind of story [the website] has covered before. I'm not against the coverage. I'm just curious. Why now and what's the angle? It happened in my ward. I drove through the crowd about two hours before it happened.

Grace wrote back very graciously explaining her ideas on a possible angle. She thought that perhaps people would see a connection between this story and the gun violence/control debates that emerged after Newtown, the discussion that seems to have been shelved. She mentioned the 5-year-old who shot and killed his sister and the numbers of young people dying from gun violence around the country. She also said that perhaps the story was that the New Orleans shooting would not be perceived as the Newtown shooting had been.

Still on edge, I wrote back:

In the case of the Newtown shooting, gun violence got attention mainly because it was children who were shot in an otherwise "non-violent" middle-class area. The New Orleans shooting should not be perceived the same as Newtown unless it is proven that the person shooting was a lone gunman who is not connected to the circumstances behind our typical shootings down here. Usually, it's some impulse-control-deficient idiot who sees a rival from another gang and doesn't care that he has to shoot into a crowd to shoot that rival.

The kind of gun violence that goes on in New Orleans will not be solved by ID [background] checks. ID checks assume gun violence is far more simple than it is. I'd be shocked to learn the shooter in last night's incident bought his gun from a legitimate dealer. And yet, the kinds of solutions it would take to curb the violence in New Orleans are unlikely to ever be undertaken by legislators that can't even bring themselves to pass legislation as simple as ID checks.

I don't know what to say. I guess I'll wait to see what [another writer who offered to cover it] writes. I'm somewhere between numb and raving mad about this shooting. So, I'm having trouble seeing how a blog piece related to gun violence in general can even come close to approaching the depth needed to address the trouble we're having in New Orleans.

All I can say is that we've had these troubles long before the Newtown shooting. Gun violence in New Orleans is connected to poverty, the disproportionate number of black people being sent to prison, the criminalization of drug use, a lack of jobs, a dysfunctional education system, and other issues. Yesterday's shooting is not the same as the Newtown shooting and the only comparison that can be made is that somebody had a gun.

Look at how quickly the outrage over Newtown faded. If America can't force Congress to address gun violence in the wake of mostly little white children being shot, what hope is there for families suffering in a city like New Orleans?

Below are just a few of the [gun violence] stories I have either mentioned or [have] been aware of or [have] been connected to in the last year. I add them so that you or anyone else reading will know why I am so frustrated.

• Yesterday morning, Mother's Day, a big front page spread on our daily paper's front page of mothers who've lost children to gun violence, one of whom is a friend of mine. Her daughter was shot last year by someone who was after the girl's boyfriend.
• [At my on-again/off-again blog The Urban Mother's Book of Prayers] December 17, 2012: Stray bullet from shootout hits child in school bus, New Orleans.
• September 2012: Drive-by shooting through Midcity (stray bullets, very Wild West)
• [Affecting me more directly] August-October 1 of 2012: Cousin shot and paralyzed, neighbor shot and killed, friend's daughter shot and killed
• May 30, 2012: 9 shot at birthday party, New Orleans. Five-year-old dead.
• March 3, 2012: New Orleans mothers of gun violence victims featured on CNN.
• Beginning of last year: 47 shot in 12 days.

There was nothing wrong about the editor's query. She made a reasonable request, but the Mother's Day shooting had undone me. Years of worry and stress fell on me at once, it seemed. . . . Return to my BlogHer.com post.

Currently Watching "Bad Writing," the Movie (Video)

BAD WRITING from Morris Hill Pictures on Vimeo. This movie, directed by Vernon Lott, is streaming for free on Vimeo the entire month of January, and it has a Facebook page, www.facebook.com/badwritingmovie. H/T to Paul Constant.

The documentary features interviews with well-known nonfiction and fiction writers and poets, including David Sedaris, Margaret Atwood, Nick Flynn, Steve Almond, and Louisiana's own Yusef Kumonyakaa.

According to an artilce at The Atlantic, "How Bad Writing Became a Great Movie," the project sprang from Lott finding "a group of boxes in his mother's basement (in 2009 when he was 34). He realized, with horror, what he'd uncovered: thousands of terrible poems he'd penned during his teens and early 20s."

The rating for this documenatry is 4.8 on IMDB, but I like it.

Jersey Grit Propels Steven Hart's Novel, We All Fall Down

If you’re in the mood for a well-crafted, gritty page-turner focused on crime and punishment in New Jersey, then Steven Hart’s We All Fall Down is the novel for you. Hart spins a compelling story and shapes his heroine, Karen McCarthy, into a believable woman.

Karen McCarthy is the only female cop on a police force that makes misogyny its battle cry daily, but she holds onto her job and wises up as this mystery unfolds. Running from a fight is not her style. Readers will see quickly that Karen makes mistakes, such as seeking comfort in the wrong places from the wrong men, but they'll root for this young woman nonetheless; she is flawed but seeks justice.

While many of her fellow officers in the book's fictional Jersey town tarnish law enforcement's brass shield, not all the men on the force slip easily into blue-gang mentality and zero in on any evidence of female imperfection. Hart avoids painting a flat landscape of black and white in this dark crime drama, so Karen McCarthy’s world ripples with shades of gray and red. Lots of red. Bodies drop and drop in this thriller, but for the sake of humanity, the reader may nod that some of Hart's seedy characters deserve to die.

At other times, readers may feel themselves fearing for the lives of itchy thieves and risk takers like meth-head Charley Murphy and his loyal girlfriend Noorie. The writing will make attentive readers care. They will also laugh occasionally at the colorful words popping from these characters' mouths. Hart’s shady misfits, wannabe cop kings, and hard-working humans just trying to get by will suck police procedural fans in, and his characters' stories will stick with those readers long after they’ve read the last page of We All Fall Down.

A Writer Talks about the Benefits of Walking

Here is a video of Maira Kalman that I found through Poets & Writers Magazine. Kalman is a children's book author and illustrator, and in this video she talks about the importance of walking and physical movement to get her writer's brain read for new ideas.

The Social Media Diet

As I work at putting my life in order, which means doing the things I've always said I would do before my time runs out on this planet, I realize that I'm spending less time online. That's a good thing, but it's also a strange thing given how much time I've put into the Internet since 2002 and even earlier. I should probably elaborate, but I've got someplace to go right now and later it's exercise, thesis research on Marcus B. Christian, and more work on the novel. :-)

Walter Mosley on Making America Great

I stumbled across this Booknotes TV interview with novelist Walter Mosley. It's fascinating. He's fascinating far beyond his novels. He talks about everything from the birth of Easy Rollins, to his growing up in Watts with an African-American father and Jewish mother, to his vision for making America better. The man is a deep thinker who considers how we can improve the world, which is how he ended up collaborating on the book Black Genius and writing Workin' on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History.

He also talks about how he has been stopped in restaurants and bookstores by people who question his right to be there because he is a black man.

I was in Beverly Hills two days ago and I had three experiences. I went to a jewelers with my mother because my mother needed to do something with a ring. I walked in and they looked at me and I said, `Who do I talk to?' And they said, `What do you want?' It's a jewelry store. What else would I want? You know, but I--I got over that and we did this thing. And then I went into a bookstore, and a woman came up to me and says, `What do you want?' So I said, `It's a bookstore.
What do I want?' And she followed me until I asked her could I sign my book? And then she stopped following me and she let me sign my book. And finally, I went to a restaurant at night, and I was stopped going into the restaurant. And they said, `What are you doing here?' I--I'm coming to meet somebody. You know? And, I mean, you know, it happened to be somebody that they knew. And so then they were nice to me.

My experience in America is that I'm a black man in America and that I get stopped, you know? It's not as bad as it used to be. But it's
still--you know, people--at first, they wonder--they say, `Well, we don't recognize you here,' you know? And so there--therefore, I'm a black man in America, but they define me, not me. You know, my definition is I'm Walter Mosley.

While he talks about race, he believes that race is not the biggest challenge that we will face in this millennium.

He used to be a computer programmer, and he didn't start writing fiction until he was 33 years old. He advocates people going 90 days without TV, radio, and electronic media, including the Internet. While he believes something is terribly wrong with capitalism, he is not a Marxist. He hopes we can come together and figure out something better for the common good. A perceptive and introspective man who says fiction is true while non fiction pretends to be true.

The interview was conducted in 2000. Watch here.