Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Words And Constraints
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2009 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I am not yet ready to publicly join the conversation on cultural appropriation in fiction. However I wish to draw your attention to Rachel Chalmers's warm, smart, funny book reviews, which she posts in a LiveJournal community whose members seek to read more books by people of color. 1, 2, 3, 4 so far. The Atlantic should get Rachel to replace whatever they have Hitchens doing.
Psychological complexity of the kind I look for in books is an artefact of the bourgeois novel tradition as an outgrowth of an emerging leisure class almost by definition....You could read it [Octavia Butler's vampire story Fledgling] as a provocative and extremely effective satire on venture capitalism, if you were, say, me.
Today's my last day before the new job starts. I spent part of it in a park working on a poem that rhymes and scans.
Comments
Julia
http://www.m14m.net/julia
13 Apr 2009, 21:27 p.m.
I totally sympathize with not being ready to join that conversation. I'm just watching quietly. That community is one of a few really neat things to come out of the whole mess. I'm looking forward to hearing how your WisCon experience goes.