Black Ink

British author Caryl Phillips—who is now based in New York—is getting quite a lot of attention.  Firstly, he'll be appearing at The Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, so if you happen to be in the BC area, fill me in on the literary event that Kevin Chong has written about in The Globe and Mail.  Secondly, Phillips has a new novel out called Dancing in the Dark, which explores the life of West-Indian-born minstrel performer Bert Williams.  In the New Zealand Herald, Phillips talks about his novel in greater detail, he discusses the subject of race, and he also discusses his take on modern-day minstrel shows when it comes to black men and rap music in America.  Hmmm… I'm thinking he would probably like the message of hip-hop group Little Brother:

"There is a built-in commercial imperative to rap," says Phillips, digging into a plate of pasta. "But it's not much different to back then. Only now you are given a vulgar, violent, contemporary minstrel role to play — this is the dominant image of black men in our age — and whites say we will believe you more if you behave this way."
Phillips isn't the only writer in America to make this connection to the past. Stanley Crouch, the outspoken African-American jazz critic has done so as well, arguing that blacks have taken a step backwards since jazz figures of the 20s and 30s eclipsed minstrel shows.
"The problem is that the conventions of rock'n'roll, the conventions of rebellion have been projected as the identity of jazz," Crouch said in a recent interview. "In other words, people don't know that Duke Ellington and all of those guys were dressing beautifully, speaking perfectly, and playing all of that extraordinary music, that they were rebelling against the minstrel images that now dominate us again in the form of gangsta rap videos."

(via New Zealand Herald)

Ibi Kaslik, Esi Edugyan, Vanz Chapman and Kaie Kellough have the makings for becoming great stars of CanLit, as do many other young Canadian literary artists.  But with few funds and bad marketing they don't get the full glam they deserve.  For a while I was really excited about the emergence of the Urban Books imprint by Chapman back in 2004, but I only heard about one book and after that I was left hanging.  Now I can only hope Wayde Compton will follow through with some refreshing lit from his new imprint. 

If you've ever wondered where the future of Canadian fiction is going you now have an answer.  Apparently—as The Globe and Mail shows us—it's going nowhere:

For some time now, it's been argued that Canadian fiction publishers need to step up to the challenge of engaging new generations of readers who live in an urban, multi-ethnic, pop-culture-attuned Canada. The authors are out there, and if you look you'll find them, but so far publishers haven't found a way to connect younger readers to that talent. This country's equivalents to Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Michel Houellebecq and Haruki Murakami are serving coffee at Starbucks as CanLit relentlessly rewards mediocrity in the form of poetic lyricism obscuring soap-opera plots and parochial perceptions. Though attempts have been made, Canadian fiction continues to lose ground, and culturally aware twentysomethings are increasingly attuned to international imports. 

No kidding!  This is a very important point that can no longer be ignored. Some Canadian publishing houses have done very little to hire staff members that reflect the country's multi-ethnic population.  How do literary agents expect to tap into what's hot if they are completely disconnected from the communities that decide what's hot?  Some marketing strategies are outdated—it's not just enough to do a book tour and a few readings.  Twentysomething readers are interested in video games, weblogs and MP3 players.  They listen to indie alternative bands and underground hip-hop music.  You'd think more people in marketing would tap into that.  You'd think the powers of Canadian publishing would tap into Zed TV and find out what's going on with the young minds of this country.  It's called using your imagination.

You can tell from this article in the San Francisco Chronicle that Walter Mosley is quite happy with his latest novel, but I don’t think “mediocre” writing from anyone can be seen as a good thing:

Mosley says he's heartened by the growth in the number of books being written by African Americans. Many of the new works are gritty books about street-wise players on the wrong side of the law. "Ghetto fiction" is the label some apply to this movement. Mosley says there's more room for African Americans to write different kinds of books of various styles and quality.

"At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world (to be published). You had to be great," says Mosley. "Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good."

(via SFGate.com)

It is a dreaded subject for many writers: criticism.  You never know how you'll react to reviews until you read them:

And Kevin Guilfoile, author of Cast of Shadows, points out: "When you read all the reviews of the same book (and no one does this except the author) you realize how often they flat-out contradict each other. For example:

A. "(Cast of Shadows is) an always surprising medical thriller complete with elegant prose and well-developed characters." -NY Times Book Review

B. "Guilfoile's first novel impresses despite poor character development...and clunky prose." -The Cavalier Daily

A. "A gripping and original book that delivers thrills on an epic level." -Charleston Post and Courier

B. "Short on thrills for a thriller; the plot drives the character's actions." -SFReader.com

C. "(Cast of Shadows) jolts and tension are driven by character rather than plot." -Publishers Weekly

Proof, once again, that you can't make everyone happy.
(via Media Bistro)

We already know that in a world where Paris Hilton is a major celebrity, and the Internet and video games rule, great literary talent doesn't always equate with commercial success, but that shouldn't stop a writer from penning that complex 1000-page book if he/she desires to do so.  You don't do it for the fame or the groupies.  You'll only be disappointed. 
Harper's has posted an excerpt of Ben Marcus' defense of experimental fiction.  In his essay he examines the criticisms of Jonathan Franzen, an author who over time has become a self-anointed literary prophet:

Even while popular writing has quietly glided into the realm of the culturally elite, doling out its severe judgment of fiction that has not sold well, and we have entered a time when book sales and artistic merit can be neatly equated without much of a fuss, Franzen has argued that complex writing, as practiced by writers such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and their descendants, is being forced upon readers by powerful cultural institutions (this is me scanning the horizon for even the slightest evidence of this) and that this less approachable literature, or at least its esteemed reputation, is doing serious damage to the commercial prospects of the literary industry.

Apparently I share the same birthday with Toni Braxton, Yo-Yo Ma, Simon Cowell, Bishop Desmond Tutu, John Cougar Mellancamp and Amiri Baraka:

He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. From 1961 to 1963 he was co-editor, with Diane Di Prima, of The Floating Bear, a literary newsletter. His increasing hostility toward and mistrust of white society was reflected in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet, both written in 1962. 1963 saw the publication of Blues People: Negro Music in White America, which he wrote, and The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, which he edited and introduced. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on March 24, 1964. The controversial play subsequently won an Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play") and was made into a film.

(more at Poets.org)

If you haven't visited the Maisonneuve magazine website in a while, you should.   It was revamped and looks much more colourful compared to the older online version.  Matrix—another Montreal publication—could use a creative makeover, but you should still hop on over to their website to read an interview between Canadian writer and poet Wayde Compton, and american author Danzy Senna.  They discuss her novel Caucasia as well as a myriad of subjects including the war in Iraq, racism, Black Nationalism, becoming an American ex-pat, and we even learn of Senna's connection to Canada.  I'm not sure how long this has been available or when it was published, as I'm not an avid reader of this lit magazine.  But as usual, Wayde Compton does a fantastic job of asking the right questions and bringing key issues to the forefront:

Wayde Compton: One of the great things about your novel Caucasia is that it offers a representation of mixed-race blackness in North America that does not use mixed-race as a metaphor for social problems, but rather gives us fully drawn characters. How much do you feel like you are writing against older, less satisfying scripts of mixed-race? I'm thinking of the "tragic mulatto" cliché which white writers established, but which has been perpetuated by some black cultural producers (from James Weldon Johnson to Spike Lee), and has even been used by mixed-race writers themselves, like Nella Larsen.

Danzy Senna: I definitely had in mind the whole literature of the tragic mulatto when I wrote Caucasia. I'd been obsessed with the subject and genre for many years, and felt very much in conversation with writers such as Nella Larsen and James Weldon Johnson, who I had studied and written about in college.

But I wouldn't say I was writing "against" the old stereotype of the "tragic mulatto" as much as I was attempting to write through it and past it. It might sound like the same thing, but I think it's dangerous to write fiction with your mission being to "debunk stereotypes." You end up writing equally flat characters as the ones you're trying to debunk. So I tried to check the political and literary theory at the door when I wrote the book and to make the characters as real (as in complex) as the world around me. Then it seemed natural to me that they would not be tragic.

I think it's crippling for us as black/mixed artists to feel we have to be positive image police in the literature we create. I didn't want to romanticize what it is to be mixed in America - I didn't want the book to be a fetishization of mixed-race identity in the spirit of Tiger Woods and the like. That might please certain people, but it wouldn't make for good literature. 

(via Matrix)

In 2004, Andrea Levy's novel Small Island won the Orange Prize for women's fiction.  Now the Briton has taken the Orange Prize again.  This time it's for the 10^th anniversary.  I had the pleasure of listening to Andrea Levy in an interview with the CBC's Eleanor Wachtel on Writers & Company.  Levy also read and excerpt of her prize-winning novel during the interview.  If you ever have an opportunity to go to one of her readings do so.  She has the wonderful ability to make her characters come alive:

Levy's novel about the experiences of Jamaican immigrants in post-Second World War Britain has also won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the $57,000 Whitbread Book of the Year award.
Levy's latest award was presented to mark the 10th anniversary of the Orange Prize, which was created in response to a perceived lack of women on the shortlists of major literary prizes.
''Ten years ago, the Orange Prize for Fiction shook up the literary world when we launched one of the most controversial literary prizes,'' award co-founder Kate Mosse said Monday.  

(via The Brandon Sun)

For all you Phillip Seymour Hoffman fans out there, here is a great article on how the talented actor took on the role of Truman Capote:

Hoffman recalled growing up seeing Capote in his unproductive later years, holding forth on TV talk shows in the 1970s. His recollections were hazy, though, until he reacquainted himself with Capote's off-putting demeanor by watching interviews and Albert and David Maysles' documentary "A Visit With Truman Capote."
At that point, having agreed to do the movie, Hoffman began moaning, "Oh, what the hell have I got myself into?" he said, laughing.

(via NorthJersey.com)

I don’t know who wrote Michaelle Jean’s speech, but it is classic.

Read the full speech here.

 

Thanks to the media the young, artistic voices of New Orleans will finally have their day of national recognition.

 

Could Jennifer Weiner be the "Candace Bushnell" for plus-size women?

 

Wonkette says if cats can blog, so can you.

 

On the subject of Nigerian oil, I have not read this book as yet, but will probably do so in the future.  And you should too.

 

"Write a recipe like a screenplay..."