Category: words

“We continue to be transfixed by upper-crust lifestyles in a primitive, almost unconscious way, equally covetous and condemning of all that glitters, just out of reach. What is absent, it seems to me, from our sense of the wealthy, is an understanding of their flesh-and-bloodness—of the fact that they, like Shylock, bleed when they are pricked and have miseries peculiar to them, against which immunity cannot be bought.”

“On one hand, Google has scanned an impressive thirty million volumes, putting it in a league with the world’s larger libraries (the library of Congress has around thirty-seven million books). That is a serious accomplishment. But while the corpus is impressive, most of it remains inaccessible.”

In response to the controversy over his decision to include “Yi-Fen Chou’s” poem in the Best American Poetry anthology even after discovering that Yi-Fen Chou was actually a pen name that a white poet named Michael Derrick Hudson used in order to get published, Alexie admitted that, to him, dumping the poem would have undermined his decision to use racial bias in his selection process. Excluding the poem, he said, “would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity.”

Hua Hsu on the Yi-Fen Chou/Best American Poetry affair (which he calls “Orientalist profiteering”): “It makes a mockery of whatever ‘life story of a Chinese American poet’ the name Chou might have stood in for. It ridicules the ambient self-doubt that trails most people from the margins who enter into spaces where they were never encouraged to belong. As though it were all just a game, meant to be gamed.”

The district paid Reading Horizons $1.2 million for a new reading curriculum for kindergarten through third grade. When teachers got the books, they found an illustration of an American Indian girl titled “Nieko the Hunting Girl,” and another with a black girl called “Lazy Lucy.” The books also referenced Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America, a historical milestone no longer taught in many schools.

“In exchange for $725 million, the National Geographic Society passed the troubled magazine and its book, map and other media assets to a partnership headed by 21st Century Fox, the Murdoch-controlled company that owns the 20th Century Fox movie studio, the Fox television network and Fox News Channel.”

“It was one of my earliest interests as a writer” – see his largely forgotten first novel, Grimus – “and I’ve just taken a long time to circle back around to it. It was also a reaction against writing my memoir. I’d spend two or three years trying really hard to tell the truth, and by the end, I was sick of the truth – enough truth, let’s make some [expletive] up.”

“Tattered Cover customers have been fiercely loyal through past transitions. Years ago, when the store moved across the street, hundreds of customers helped lug boxes of books. Their only reward: a t-shirt, a sandwich and a strong sense of community.”

The strange tale of “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” by Michael Derrick Hudson, alias Yi-Fen Chou – and how, when Hudson came clean to this year’s editor, Sherman Alexie, Alexie included it anyway.

Brian Spears: “The implication [is] that the writer’s lack of whiteness was, in this case, a help rather than a hindrance to getting the work noticed. I am here to say that Hudson and his defenders are full of it. … In poetry, as in pretty much every other walk of life, there is no greater advantage to publication and all that follows from it than being a straight white male.”