Sci Fi Wednesday - (Veggie DAY NINE)

Nothing to report on the food front today; I'm eating leftovers for lunch and egg salad for dinner.

I'm more so in the mood for science fiction. Yesterday, while out enjoying the 60 degree weather, I finally read "All You Zombies" by Robert Heinlein. Tomorrow, I'm attending my first Think Galactic book club meeting. I hope it goes well. This morning, there was a Friday the 13th - The Series marathon on. Despite my penury, I'm feeling pretty great. The universe is randomly making my life a bed of fluffy, buttered rolls right now.

Now despite my love for the sci fi genre, I'm not exactly well read. (I've never finished Dune!!!) I have favorite authors, books, stories, and I reread them, over and over. It's really hard for me to step outside of my preferences and give new people/stories a chance, so I've decide to embark on a reading tour of the genre, entitled "WOOOOOooooOOOOO..." (Imagine my hands waving in front of your eyes in a menacing manner.)

This is the most accessible list of sci fi short stories on the web, so I shall go by this. Of the 100, I've only read 14, which leaves me 86 (Square one!!!!!). I can do this y'all. Since I still have to finish the book for tomorrow's meeting and read The Watchmen before the movie premiere, I'm not starting til Friday. Update then.

(Anybody wanna do this with me? Just drop a line.)

Let me take the time, though, to extoll the virtues of "Jeffty Is Five." It is an amazing, amazing short story. The kind of thing that forces you to care about the characters, and finds you cursing at the pages. Good stuff.

My Authors Keep Dying

Rest in Peace, Madeleine L'Engle. Your Murry children books were some of my favorites when I was an itty bitty.

Good Reading

© 1998-2007 Penny Arcade, Inc.

I do not read nearly as much as I used to. I think this is the major reason for my significant decline in intelligence over the years. When I was a kid/teen, I never went anywhere without a book, and because I had no adult responsibilities to contend with, I could read as much and as often as I wished. Now, I have a job and shit to worry about that sucks up my time and leaves me catatonic, unable to to anything but sleep and drool.

Luckily, I've found some time in the last few months to start a book, and I just finished it yesterday as Little Brother performed at the free Zune concert in Union Park. (Sorry y'all, I was listening.) Orson Scott Card, you've joined my pantheon of beloved authors simply on the strength Ender's Game. This book; oh, this book. Earlier this year I had decided to up my science fiction game, as I usually find myself rereading my old favorites (I, Robot, The Martian Chronicles, Cat's Cradle, Frankenstein) over and over again, so I made a list of SF classics that I simply had to read. This book fell somewhere near the top. As ComEd's shitty customer service would have it, our electricity was shot for an entire day, and instead of having a nervous breakdown over my inability to watch cable and eat food, I picked up Ender's Game and could not put it down.

I have no intention of reviewing it here, but I will recommend it. If you are the least bit interested in intergalactic scuffles with insect-like creatures, you'll love it. If you are the least bit interested in disturbingly bright adult-children with extraordinary abilities, you'll love it. Conflicted individuals with the weight of the world on their shoulders? Yep. Power and its sickly consequences? Uh-huh. For those of you who are a bit wary of the scifi identifier, first off, you're assholes. Secondly, don't be afraid. I tend to like scifi because it deals with the big ideas and is just cloaked in space travel and futuristic technology. Like all my favorites, this book takes a damn good look at our nature and creates an arresting story that forces you to keep reading. Pick it up, even if you think you'll hate it. You'll be mush by the second chapter.

[He's] Gone c) Hall & Oates

Well, dear readers. I've been lazily avoiding my blog because I've had much better things to do. I mean, 10-week grade reporting is tomorrow, and in true English teacher style, I have a stack of papers to rip through. However, this morning, while slathering that good virgin coconut oil on my legs, I heard the unimaginable, the unthinkable, the annoyingly inevitable ... Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

Yeah, there may be a thin veneer of humor here, of wryness. The trademark atrackbrown witticisms are present, but let me tell you people, I cried. As soon as Ellee Pai Hong or Dick Johnson (I can't remember which) announced the news, I automatically started a snotty, indecently unattractive crying fit that would rival any five year old's.

For years, Monica and I have been rhapsodizing about "it," the eventual death of Kurt Vonnegut. I mean, he was getting old, and had been bucking the odds with his continued cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption for decades. "How does one make it well into their seventies without any sort of psorosising of the liver or cancering of the lung?" we wondered. Plus, he was born in the twenties, and had been at the bombing of Dresden for god sakes. Yeah, he was truly an enigma for still being with us. So we joked, and shook our heads wonderingly at his immortality while knowing all along that Kurt Vonnegut would never die because, well ... because he was Kurt Vonnegut, dammit! The author of such ridiculously side-splitting wonders as Cat's Cradle (perhaps my favorite), Breakfast of Champions (a close second), Welcome to the Monkey House (a delightful collection of brilliant, quirky little tales), and the creator of Kilgore Trout, perhaps the most cantankerous, preposterous figure of all literary time, could not die. No, just like that annoying Bob Hope or George whatever (the dude with the cigar and glasses), Kurt would outlive us all (though, of course, the first two did in fact die, but didn't it seem like they never would?). So yeah, we allayed our fears by knowing that Kurt would continue writing his special brand of crazy and making disturbingly funny speeches at colleges across the US forever.

Yet, somehow, this was not to be. Somehow, someone failed to report that he had suffered a head injury at home and had been hospitalized for some time now. (Though that someone still had time to report on the father of Anna Nicole's baby. Give me a fucking break.) Somehow, Kurt proved to be human.

I guess I shouldn't be a sniffling pansy and should just suck it up. I mean, I've never even met the guy (and I totally had a chance to, but just like the time I passed on a Nina Simone concert, my stupidity saw fit to dissuade me from doing so), and he lived for 84 freaking years. That's a pretty long time. But it doesn't matter, I'm still sad and kind of scared. Kurt stands for so many things. I'm not talking about all his political causes, though I was usually in total agreement with him. No, I'm talking about those personal things that he stands for. I'm reminded of the days when Monica and I were best friends, and she introduced me to the Vonnegut. (Hell, sometimes, I even refer to her as Kurt Monnicut.) I'm reminded of the good ole days with Jason in A.P English when we'd laugh and act like asses and eat peanut M&Ms, for Jason too loved the Vonnegut. I'm reminded of those rare moments freshmen year of undergrad when I didn't quite hate being at the most boring and black peopleless school on earth, and my roommate Anisa borrowed my special edition of Cat's Cradle. And most recently, I'm reminded of my first week as a real adult as I taught "Harrison Bergeron" to a bunch of high school freshmen and smiled inside (yes, assholes, I'm allowed to smile on the inside) as a bunch of snot-nosed know-nothings actually displayed some good taste and ate it up. Yep, Kurt's been here for a long time. It's hard to imagine that he'll be here no more.


Rest in peace there Kurt

cannonize me

I have really gotta get back to my former reading habits. Lately, I haven't read much outside of the stuff I've been teaching, and we all know about required high school reading--canonical, but not necessarily relevant or panoptic. So yeah, I think I'll actually finish my Octavia Butler (RIP) anthology.

I'd be interested in finding out who read what in high school and college in the way of black authors. I have this theory, but it can't be validated until I gather evidence. Myself, I recall Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Jamaica Kincaid--the last being a hint of cultural partiality on part of my afrophile undergrad professor. It seems to me that predominately white universities and perhaps black ones (I wouldn't know, I didn't go to an HBCU) tend to cling to those books that describe the black experience in glaringly dramatic ways. Bigger, Sethe, Lucy--all tragic figures that were representative of blackness predominately by virtue of the tragic circumstances of their lives. Now I'm sure that there is more to the black authors-worthy of-academic-study equation, but people tend to cling to very extreme depictions of black life as the most authentic, and feel as if they can finally humanize us because they've found a bit of sympathy for our downtrodden characters. (Bigger Thomas is no more the prototypical black man than Peter Keating is the prototypical white man.) I think this phenomenon is more hurtful than helpful in that whites can point to these extreme portrayals and say, "Now THAT is racism. Clearly black people do not go through these things anymore and therefore do not experience racism anymore."

The thing is, though, that these representations have never been comprehensive. One of my favorite books by Morrison, Paradise, while still dealing with racism, is much more subtle in the handling of the subject and uses it as a parenthetical remark on the lives of the book's characters. Also, because I am absolutely obsessed with gender roles, this books appeals to me for its focus on the tension between men and women when the traditional order is broken. (When are we gonna start dealing with that bullshit, huh?) I think Paradise is every bit as good as Beloved and every bit as worthy of literary consideration; and though I know I'd get a lot of argument from many, because Beloved is almost universally considered the best thing Morrison's ever written, I stand by my assessment. But it is not about Paradise or even Morrison specifically, it's about including more comprehensive representations of black life in the mainstream.

It seems as if black people always have to be struggling for there to be an emotive response from the mainstream culture. If we're not stuck in "hood movies," we're being saved from that same hood by a benevolent white with a heart of gold (hello Hilary Swank). The truth is that we laugh too, and sometimes the struggle isn't as acute as having to kill some muthaphuckas (though we should and more often), but often the struggle is how to react to an underhandedly racist comment without appearing "bitter" or when and how to express ourselves without "offending" more entitled and oblivious people with delicate sensibilities. Black people experience little dilemmas and large ones, and they are all important. There are a zillion authors who know this and deal with the many shades of us delicately and with an intimate knowledge and gift that should be supported. Check the slideshow above. All of those people knew and know that we're nasty and mean and above repute and angelic and conflicted and funny and boring and gay and straight and transgendered too. It's about time we stop allowing the media to vilify or romanticize us; we are just human after all.

Good Reads:

The Farming of Bones (or anything, really) by Edwidge Danticat

Eva's Man by Gayl Jones

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Another Country (again, almost anything) by James Baldwin

The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara

If any of you would like to tell me about your school-related literary experiences, I'd be grateful. Also, if you've read any good books lately, let me know. I'm always looking for a new book.