New Gold City

Malcolm Little, around 8 The second set of observations while reading, in parallel, both The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Dreams from My Father . Preliminary research for my next novel.  Honestly, in reading the autobiographies of two of America's most defining cultural figures, you find a lot of similarities in their early lives. It's kind of stunning. However, one of the significant differences between how Barack Obama and Malcolm X grew up is that from a young age Malcolm's parents made him highly aware of his special skin tone, while little Barry's family seems to have actively sought to minimize any concern about pigmentation when he was young. Obama, in fact, had to figure things out on his own -- leastways, as he tells the story. Both situations are logical as far as they are described by these two. Early in his autobiography, Malcolm X notes that his parents seemed to treat him in opposite ways because his complexion was so much lighter than his siblings'...

The Autobiography of Malcolm X in the White House library (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In the old days, before the ubiquity of backpacks, we carried a pile of books and notebooks around school going from class to class, maybe returning to our lockers and swapping them out once or twice during the day. Always, at the top of that book pile -- clutched close to the hip for boys, double-armed to the chest for girls --  was the novel or biography, or whatever, being read at the time for pleasure. Yup, we had text books, spiral notebooks, and three-ring binders to carry around, but we also had a special paperback sitting on top of everything meant for free reading and enjoyment. This wasn't a requirement, it was simply a logical and important element of life as a teenager in America circa 1972. My first free reading book in junior high was Frank Herbert's Dune . My last, senior year of high school (1976), was Jack Kerouac's  On the Road . I remember so many friends back then carryi...

Source: Electric Lit notes "from The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo" Moral Craft: Issues of Plot and Prejudice This Electric Lit essay should be very interesting for anyone concerned with racism in literature. The true insight of Mr. Salesses's essay is the question of how racism seeps into a story (at least perceived) if the author did not intend it. The issue kicked up a lot of thoughts for me. Here's my full comment in the Comments section of the essay: Such a fabulous and provocative essay. So are the comments! This is one of those times where the comments are as supremely valuable as the original work. Honestly, all of you, I'm printing out this whole dang set of opinions for my file folder on "Trying to Understand Racism "  Can't help putting my two-cents worth in here. I want to point out that each of us in our daily lives constantly categorizes people and locks them into symbolic interpretation. That categorization and interpretation is dy...

Author Matt Johnson and his book cover floating next to him You will find a lot of articles online that came out in the summer of 2014 claiming that Asian Americans are the fastest growing minority group in America. They apparently had a growth rate of 2.9% from 2000 to 2010, overtaking Hispanic Americans who only had a rate of 2.1%.  Let's get this straight: In actuality, the fastest growing "minority group" in America is people who identify as mixed race. Results from the 2010 US Census show citizens who identify as "two or more races" had a 32% increase in numbers from the 2000 US Census. Read about it at HuffPost in "Multiracial American Population Grew Faster Than Single-Race Segment In 2010 Census." So, 2.9% versus 32%. Who wins? Hell yeah, Mulatto Nation! We rock! And the media, once again, is full of shit. Of course, us hybrids only represent 2% of the U.S. population. Asian Americans sit at 5.6%, while Hispanics represent 17.1% of the puzzle p...

Note: I just started reading Mat Johnson's new book,  Loving Day  today. Here we have a powerful voice for us gold-brown people who feel not so much disenfranchised as partial. More later as I churn through Johnson's very interesting novel that kind of lays it all out there. (I'm jealous). Click below to read a very interesting interview, if you can open your mind enough. " On passing, wishing for darker skin, and finding your people: A conversation between two mulattos | Fusion " Related articles Books of The Times: Review: Mat Johnson's 'Loving Day' Takes a Satirical Slant on Racial Identities The Great American Mulatto: Mat Johnson Talks Identity and Facing Ghosts Review: Mat Johnson's 'Loving Day' reaches beyond black and white "You get a cookie for being offended": Mat Johnson on the fine art of racial satire Not the Marriage Plot: On Men Reading Novels in the 21st Century

The Return of “The Curses, the Fates, the Races, the Fakes, the Faces, the Names of 'The Game of Death'; or, The Game of Death” | The American Reader An essay by Tony Tulathimutte Wow. This is one wild ride of an essay. It's as much about the the mind tricks that shake you down as a writer as it is about the aesthetic expression of racial identity. It's a big think piece that requires careful attention and a good amount of pausing and pondering. But it's well worth the price of admission. For those who need short and simple, don't go here. This is for the Big Kids who want to swim in the deep end. -dcb

The Millions : Paucity of Art in the Age of Big Data: A Dispatch from San Francisco This is a very interesting essay on the need for more digital tech in novels, the novel as a social data driven artifact, and the question of the big novel in modern times. Important to think about for anyone who cares about fiction and where it's going in this modern age.

" WHERE THINGS STAND" (an essay by Roxane Gay on POC and life in the publishing world) Roxane Gay There's a lot to note here in this rather short post by Roxane Gay. POCs are people of color. The graph she offers says it all, although it isn't a "scientfic" study. That said, I respect Roxane Gay immensely and think she's a very good analyst of real life in the book world, and a straight shooter to boot. Here's the main take away: nearly 90% of the books reviewed in the NYTimes are written by so-called Caucasians. What I find interesting is not that this may be evidence of how few books are published by POCs; rather, what's interesting is what these numbers say about books the NYTimes feels are important. As Ms. Gay writes in her Rumpus piece: "...if you are a writer of color, not only do you face a steeper climb getting your book published, you face an even more arduous journey if you want that book to receive critical attention." I pe...

Go to the online magazine, Talking Writing , to see my latest essay (co-written with TW Editor-in-Chief Martha Nichols). It's not just a re-hash of the pricing fixing case going on in NYC. We offer important insights for writers and readers everywhere about what this decision can mean for the future of books in America... Thank You, Apple, for Going to Court Over E-Books | Talking Writing Lead-in excerpt: "E-book “price-fixing” has a scurrilous ring, as if a bunch of shadowy hoods in business suits have been deciding the fates of humble readers. But in April 2012, that’s exactly what the U.S. Department of Justice accused five of the six big publishers and Apple of doing with e-book prices. To date, all the publishers—Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Penguin, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster—have settled with the DOJ. (The “Big Six” of corporate publishing are now down to five; Random House is merging with Penguin.) But when the publishers started settling last year, s...

Vanessa Veselka  (Click on her name) Read the excellent essay called GREEN SCREEN: THE LACK OF FEMALE ROAD NARRATIVES AND WHY IT MATTERS by Vanessa Veselka. It's quite thought-provoking. See my comments at the end of the essay along with others. There's a lot of food for thought here for anyone concerned about women's issues, our broader culture, and the frontiers of fiction that await those who have the desire to expand our national narrative. An excerpt of my comments: " In the end, we are all lost souls on the road to nowhere. You can't write about that unless you are willing to embrace that. At least that's how I see everything from The Hobbit to Cormac McCarthy's The Road -- Huck, Ulysses, Ishmael, Ahab, Leopold Bloom, Japhy Ryder, Holden Caulfield on the run, etc. etc."

Screwpulp .:. Free Books While the corporate houses mess around about pricing, there are entrepreneurs doing quite innovative things with ebook and indie distribution. You can get dozens of books for FREE or practically nothing, all just in exchange for a little help promoting through your social networking system. This site should be #1 on every "How to Show Some Love to Your Neighborhood Writer" list. Check it out.

Get Your eBook Single Included in Thin Reads' Database - BookBaby Blog There's no doubt this is an interesting resource for writers, but I hope readers are paying attention to this opportunity too. Long reads are worth the effort and investment.

Kaepernick with his parents. It's a small thing to most people, but for those of us mixed-race adopted folks, tonight will be special. Colin Kaepernick is playing in the Super Bowl.  I've written about what it feels like to grow up mixed-race and to be adopted. You'll find lots of posts here at The Formality of Occurrence. There is a sense of being completely alone in the world and wanting recognition that lies under even the deepest love and support from your family. Tonight, Colin represents all of us. When he's older and he has his own kids, he'll think back to what he did tonight and understand that little tiny thing that was in his mind trying to be acknowledged. You feel oddly disconnected to the world when you stand on a stage. But you also know quite well how to connect and express your love of life because that's what gets those of us who are adopted and hard-to-define through life. It's also what makes us special. Everyone's special, of course,...

I'm amazed at how many unbelievably talented writers there are in this world toiling away in every nook and cranny imaginable. Peeps in my raggedy-ass tribe of indie authors and bloggers live and work in India, Africa, Canada, South America, Great Britain, Australia, etc. as well as the U.S. There are thousands of astounding writers so easily discoverable all over the Internet now. It's like there used to be this small group of successful Super Men and Super Women or maybe it was a special guild of wizards, witches, warlocks, and magicians, I don't know. They were special and easy to spot. Their books congregated in stores that we shopped at. They wore lots of black, more often than not they had dark circles under their eyes, drank coffee when the sun was up and wine or whiskey when it was down...and smoked in secret.  But now we discover there's so many more of them. SO MANY. Imagine a comic book world where there's a superman on every block and superwoman in every...

Source: The McCain Train, Phoenix New Times Whenever our national politicians get seriously odd, you have to wonder if they know what they’re really saying. Attacks on Susan Rice, particularly by John McCain (who I’ve always felt was a decent and intelligent man with a balanced sense of decorum), over the past several months are a case in point. The general argument, somehow, was that she is either incompetent or a liar in the role she played communicating what happened in the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Things became seriously heated when a post-election Obama team began to bandy her name about as a successor to Hillary Clinton as Secretary State. On the face of it, this could just be a simple case of skewering the President at a time when there is a sense that he won a mandate from the people. Rice is a good friend of Obama’s and is certainly close to Oval Office personnel. For a party that lost a historical election and is now expected to back down on the bizarre...