Fun and rage
Jason Mittell on how to rip DVD clips for educators using their new DMCA exemption.
zvi linked to an excellent author website.
A 3-year-old recites Litany, by Billy Collins.
Rich Cohen, Sweet and Low: A Family Story: This entertaining book is the story of Cohen’s extended family, which founded the Sweet and Low business; Cohen also delves into the history of Brooklyn, sugar, dieting, and related topics, but very casually. Basically this is the story of a family that grew rich off of the idea of packaging sugar, and then sugar substitute, to replace sugar bowls and canisters that seemed unsanitary. The factory got caught up in a tax evasion/embezzlement/Mafia-related scandal, surviving weakened but still going, and Cohen’s branch of the family was disinherited, for reasons that Cohen can only ultimately gesture at, but the pleasure is in the telling.
Gillian Tett, Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe: Another view of the collapse, focusing on the bankers at J.P. Morgan, who largely stayed out of the stupidest and riskiest decisions but were swept up anyway, in part because they’d played key roles in developing the derivatives that were so badly misused in recent years.
For the record: if, as he’s hanging around a bar, your white protagonist’s response to another character he perceives as (1) Native American and (2) threatening is to worry that he might get scalped, your character is thinking racist thoughts. If you didn’t mean to write a racist character, you at the very least have a writing problem. Also for the record: if that same white protagonist is resentful because he was the only white kid in an inner-city high school and, despite being first in his class, he couldn’t get scholarships etc. because he was white, your protagonist cannot be from actual California. In actual California, any consideration of race in admissions has been banned since 1996, and, in response, the state system adopted extensive measures to get everybody at the top of their individual schools into college, as a means of mitigating some of the huge racial impact of formal colorblindness. Well, I should say: your white protagonist can be resentful if he’s wrong, though I can’t have much respect for his intelligence if he didn’t manage to figure this out. But narratives about white oppression are fact-resistant. And finally for the record: if you put both of these things in your story and see nothing wrong with them, it’s not your character alone who has the problem.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
zvi linked to an excellent author website.
A 3-year-old recites Litany, by Billy Collins.
Rich Cohen, Sweet and Low: A Family Story: This entertaining book is the story of Cohen’s extended family, which founded the Sweet and Low business; Cohen also delves into the history of Brooklyn, sugar, dieting, and related topics, but very casually. Basically this is the story of a family that grew rich off of the idea of packaging sugar, and then sugar substitute, to replace sugar bowls and canisters that seemed unsanitary. The factory got caught up in a tax evasion/embezzlement/Mafia-related scandal, surviving weakened but still going, and Cohen’s branch of the family was disinherited, for reasons that Cohen can only ultimately gesture at, but the pleasure is in the telling.
Gillian Tett, Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe: Another view of the collapse, focusing on the bankers at J.P. Morgan, who largely stayed out of the stupidest and riskiest decisions but were swept up anyway, in part because they’d played key roles in developing the derivatives that were so badly misused in recent years.
For the record: if, as he’s hanging around a bar, your white protagonist’s response to another character he perceives as (1) Native American and (2) threatening is to worry that he might get scalped, your character is thinking racist thoughts. If you didn’t mean to write a racist character, you at the very least have a writing problem. Also for the record: if that same white protagonist is resentful because he was the only white kid in an inner-city high school and, despite being first in his class, he couldn’t get scholarships etc. because he was white, your protagonist cannot be from actual California. In actual California, any consideration of race in admissions has been banned since 1996, and, in response, the state system adopted extensive measures to get everybody at the top of their individual schools into college, as a means of mitigating some of the huge racial impact of formal colorblindness. Well, I should say: your white protagonist can be resentful if he’s wrong, though I can’t have much respect for his intelligence if he didn’t manage to figure this out. But narratives about white oppression are fact-resistant. And finally for the record: if you put both of these things in your story and see nothing wrong with them, it’s not your character alone who has the problem.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.