Wanderment & Concenstraction
-
Disney and Intersectionality: A short list of mantras for Women of Color So tumblr user mcharrilennostarr asked me to come up with a list of things to help empower women of color. I took a bit of time to think about it and here’s what I came up with.
- I will hold my head high when people expect me to be looking down at my…
This is so much better than Lean In.
-
hurricane: Reading through #coverflip, I’m wondering how many of these people... Reading through #coverflip, I’m wondering how many of these people realize that if J0hn Gr33n would have been a woman, he wouldn’t have been blown up into a ridiculously overhyped stereotypical Male Author like he has been? And that’s worth more conversation than book covers, isn’t it?
I think…
But that is the point. Doing the #coverflip project is just the creative challenge and funsies part of the greater, absolutely serious conversation on what privileges are afforded male authors and not female authors and, though Johnson doesn’t really touch upon it, white authors over authors of color.
The Game of Thrones books didn’t get their covers because a dude wrote them. They got them because the assumed readership is white males.
The assumed readership is white males because white males read things by white males because that’s what they’ve been taught is the only relevant type of literature. It’s completely related.
Don’t get me wrong, some of these #coverflip submissions are totally great, but if you’re going to go for a joke about male vs. female authors, you need to talk about male vs. female readership, marketing, race, sexuality, etc. Is there more conversation coming?
It’s not a joke. It’s a response to the very real issue that Johnson was trying to get people to engage with. I don’t get why it’s being perceived as a joke, because that completely misses the point. Are people only looking at this on Tumblr and not actually reading the two HuffPo posts about the project?
Also, this is marketing, which I am just repeating from Johnson and the tons of other people who talk about this all the time. This is just a bigger deal because it’s in a wider-readership area and not writerblogs and book blogs, where we all preach to the choir. But marketing stems from people assuming that male authors are going to be perceived as more serious, more for males, and more literary, so then they perpetuate that by choosing the covers and advertising they do.
So basically, strangerperson, I respectfully don’t understand what you’re saying or why, but I would love to have your thought process explained to me.
-
because getting a master’s degree in children’s literature is more than reading twilight and dr. seuss…
(and in fact we don’t really read a lot of that stuff because Dr. Seuss is really just not that interesting, yo)
I just started listening to the soundtrack of the Matilda musical and am being reminded of how much of a complete genius Roald Dahl was (if also a flaming racist/sexist/anti-Semite/general drinker of the Haterade) and how much people today (meaning gatekeepers who think that children need to be sheltered from all of the “dark” things) would really be troubled by him if they took the time to listen/read carefully. And that is why he is fantastic, because half the people who love him get what he’s doing, and the other half totally don’t even realize it because he’s completely over their heads.
But also, the soundtrack is getting tiresome. Thoughts?
-
24 years of being a voracious, avid, dissatisfied reader finally made sense today
[U]ntil you find yourself in printed literature you do not become a committed literary reader. You may read the prescribed texts at school, you may talk and write about them well enough to pass exams, but you do not read to live, and literature will always be peripheral, if present at all, in your daily life, and your sense of who and what you are.
-Aidan Chambers
There is so much I want to do with that quote and the entire essay it’s from, but until I have time to write things that don’t contribute to my final grade in my class, suffice to say that reading this out loud made me stop and think about how it is that I have spent my entire life as a reader (so I guess more like 20 years than 24) reading hundreds of stories and books and essays and ideas each year and yet remember so little about so many of them and find it so hard to say I have favorites, especially as I get older and more discerning. Some of that is #gradschoolproblems and not being able to say nice things about books because I’m so used to analyzing them, but also wow, I cannot for the life of me think of what book it was that made me a reader. Is that a thing other people can pinpoint?
-
dear jack gantos,
please just confirm for me that you named Rotten Ralph after the character in Forever… because then everything about my paper on that novel will be perfect and also I will win at life. kthxbye
-
thestarsgowaltzingout:emilytea10:invisiblecashews:
Actually, the photographs are spaced ten years apart, not sixteen.
1912 to 1922.
The young, homeless (but no less dapper) wanderer shown in the first survived the sinking of the Titanic and swam to the shores of West Egg. There he built a life and a large, empty house, in an effort to win the heart of the wealthy, upper class woman he’d fallen in love with a decade earlier and had been separated from against his will.
He shed his earlier identity, and changed his name to reflect his new station. Jack was now known as Jay Gatsby, the eccentric millionaire who threw parties every night in the hopes that one day his love would show up and spin with him as they had long ago in the dance hall of the lower decks.
holy shit
And then, at the beginning of Inception, he starts out washed up on a shore.
still no oscar
Leo’s entire film career of unrelated projects has better continuity than glee.
Reblogging for this comment about Glee…..
OMG So much THIS. Love that man. Love every one of these comments above because Tumblr has the best people.
-
“That ‘writers write’ is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”
—Renata Adler, SpeedboatExcellent. I am doing everything completely correctly. I win.
(via onlyaworkingtitle)
-
About white girls: I personally grew up in a diverse area & was exposed to issues a PoC faces everyday. I'm assuming that beyond obvious social, economic, & educational problems that cause this mindset, it's also an ego issue. Many ignorant white ppl will say "I don't see color" in attempts to be seen as good, instead of just acknowledging a problem still exists. So when they're told that's white privilege talking, their feelings get "hurt" because their good is now worthless. It's narrow minded
Ugh, “I’m colorblind lalala” is THE WORST, amirite? I completely agree with what you said, and I know that to be true, but I really meant my question completely literally, like what goes through your mind, if anything, when you say words that are so clearly inaccurate, let alone problematic? I can write and talk endlessly on the usual privilege discussion, but I’m really just curious about how people go about their lives lately when they’re not thinking about race semi-critically but are still thinking about it enough to notice skin color, ya know?
-
i completely understand why people like lena dunham have no idea that they live in whiteland
So whenever I read a throwaway sentence in a book and it says something like “She was Hungarian and very exotic-looking” (real sentence from actual book), I sigh and then I go, “Okay, white people like Lena Dunham, I completely get why you are shocked when people tell you you are crazy racist and that you live in lilywhiteland.” You had NO idea.
I seriously do get it. But also, seriously?
Like, problems with the term “exotic” in all of its forms aside, what do you DO with your heads when you see someone like me? Does your head explode? Or am I invisible?
I am being completely serious with my question, because I don’t understand. My (not actually white but light enough to pass because she’s half white and half güera Mexican) sister was once told, “Oh, that will look beautiful against your dark skin” when I was in the room, and we were both like “ASFLJADSLFJKADSLFKJ$#O%*@*O%UJ@IO#TJ” in our heads, because it Did. Not. Compute. Even when you consider that adjectives like “light” and “dark” depend on context, and my sister was certainly more tan than the person speaking, the context was also that I was in the same room.
Like, even if you live in what is a mostly white world, occasionally you see, like, an Asian shopkeeper or a Haitian cab driver, right? Do you just have a different set of vocabulary and color scheme for people of color than you do for people of whiteness? In all seriousness, I just want to understand this cultural phenomenon, this sociological curiosity, because I don’t understand why there are not more messes on the streets from all of the exploded brains. What do you do with yourselves when you see someone who is darker than a Hungarian? What is the language you use? Report back to me, please.
-
10 YA Books Featuring Cute Asian Boys!
Hi! Cindy here! So Malinda researches, gathers data, makes nifty graphs and charts for you, and I, I present to you books that feature cute asian boys! They are under-represented across all media in the US, including in young adult books. So spread the #cuteasianboys love, read and enjoy!
Oh, Cindy, you fetishist. Now that I have seen you tumblr, tweet, and say this phrase to my face multiple times, I know it to be true. ;-P
