The Reading Room

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12:29 AM

This is the creature I used to imagine a VERY important character in Binti: the Night Masquerade. 😃!! https://twitter.com/MBARI_News/status/993573805049204736

Tweeted by Nnedi on May 7, 2018 at 7:32 PM

1 hour later…

BESW

1:41 AM

"17 Literary Podcasts to Ease Your Commute," by Jo Lou for Electric Literature.

12 hours later…

Bookworm

1:16 PM

Q: Is Dorothea's nickname metaphorical?

In Middlemarch by George Eliot Dorothea Brook's nickname is Dodo. Or actually to be exact her sister, Celia Brook's nickname for her is Dodo. Is this an allusion to Dorothea's almost extinct kind? I am presuming her kind to be the 'Mother Teresa' type; which the book's underlying moral seems...

Christophe Strobbe

1:55 PM

Do we now create tags for character names? See the question about Dorethea Brook in Middlemarch.

BTW, I just got my Copy Editor badge :-)

1 hour later…

Bookworm

3:18 PM

Q: Equestrian statues and wooden logs, what's the connection?

Here's a quote from Tomas de Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater": Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves. De Quincey's clearly talking about the stupidity of the Turkish opium-eaters an...

meaning historical-context thomas-de-quincey confessions-of-english-opium-eater

2 hours later…

Bookworm

5:15 PM

Q: Looking for an old limerick mentioning a character named "Lady Jane"

In 1962, the famous British explorer Eric Shipton named one of the main summits of Cordillera de Darwin in Tierra del Fuego (Patagonia) as "Mount Lady Jane". After talking to a member of the expedition, it turned out that the name came from a limerick on which Lady Jane was a prostitute. The sto...

story-identification

3 hours later…

BESW

8:42 PM

@nowthisnews Someone get @donaldglover a @Nnedi book. Any of her books will do

Tweeted by jzycaramel on May 8, 2018 at 7:32 AM in reply to nowthisnews

user15026

@BESW I can understand though, wanting more than one person to point to, but yeah, get that guy some Binti

Mithrandir

"Save Barnes & Noble!" by David Leonhardt for The New York Times.

BESW

9:24 PM

@Ash Well, I mean. First off I think he's asking the wrong question: there need to be more black people writing about space, rather than black people being written about in space. And confining scifi to "in space" is kinda silly too. But he's also not even wrong. There's Octavia Butler and P. Djèlí Clark and Nnedi Okorafor and Toni Morrison and NK Jemisin and Nicky Drayden and Janelle Monáe and Sun Ra and Funkadelic and Victor LaValle and Brandon Thomas and Roger Robinson and...

The problem is not a dearth of black voices in speculative fiction, the problem is that they don't get heard.

user15026

@BESW I agree, although seeing the representation of "these people who look like me are doing cool shit in space" is important too.

user15026

@BESW I figured this was likely the real problem, as it so often is :(

user15026

So in a way, I can't really blame him for lensing this incorrectly, because if you have no idea anyone's writing this stuff, you don't expect to see yourself in it.

BESW

@Ash Aye. And the way we do that is by getting people who look like him in the author's seat, or we wind up with characters that are thin cutout imitations of people like him.

user15026

@BESW 10000% agreed.

BESW

9:27 PM

He has no excuse to not be aware of Janelle Monáe, and Childish Gambino has directly homaged Sun Ra.

user15026

@BESW facedesks forever

user15026

This is where my lack of music knowledge gets me because I don't know Sun Ra. Although I know more of Janelle Monae now thanks to you :)

BESW

Okay, we need to get some of the Parliament Funkadelic mainlined into you ASAP.

user15026

(Often my music knowledge can be summed up as "I don't listen to radio, and if I do, it's country, so my music tastes are "stuff people have shoved at me" or "country")

BESW

There's no particular reason to expect you to know about Sun Ra and the Parliament Funkadelic, but everyone should.

user15026

9:30 PM

(For example, I like some symphonic metal but the only bands I know was whatever my ex-wife would listen to.)

BESW

In the 1940s, Sun Ra pioneered Afrofuturist jazz via the persona of an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace.

user15026

I stay relatively up to date with country because if I put it on the radio I am likely to hear stuff I know, so I do that. I don't like just streaming new music because I don't like the idea of so much unknown and the large chance my ears will not like it

user15026

(Yes I am a weird person about sound)

BESW

With his band(s) Parliament/Funkadelic, Sun Ra became an extremely influential but not very chartable influence on rock & roll.

Janelle Monáe is, for obvious reasons, directly influenced by them.

There's also a Sun Ra scifi film, but I've not yet been able to sit all the way through it. I think I'm at a disadvantage because I don't do drugs.

Here are two tracks from Funkadelic: "Maggot Brain" is more smooth and jazzy, "One Nation Under a Groove" is more funky and upbeat.

user15026

I will check those out later when I am not at work :)

BESW

9:48 PM

They're long-ish, but fine for background listening and I don't think you'll find them aurally offensive.

2 hours later…

BESW

11:27 PM

Oh, and I forgot to mention Christopher Priest, who wrote a lot of the comicbook foundations on which the Black Panther film is built.

In 1998.

(Among other things, Priest created the Dora Milaje; they weren't in the Panther's stories for the first 30 years of the character.)

user15026

I still need to see Black Panther, and it's another thing where I wish reading comic books wasn't difficult for me. :(

BESW

Honestly, most of the Black Panther comics are skippable.

Even Priest's run keeps suffering from production oversight forcing him to include other characters that really don't fit.

But, like, all these things I'm mentioning? They're not in the limelight of broad American pop culture, maybe, but they aren't obscure references. Glover's public image is traded on being a black nerd, and Sun Ra and Christopher Priest and Janelle Monáe and Octavia Butler? If he isn't at least passingly aware of some of these major figures in black speculative fiction it's because he hasn't even tried to look.

Heck, in the wake of Black Panther every white-as-scraped-toast pop culture blog has fielded a list of "Black things because you liked Black Panther," and every list has mentioned at least one of those people.

And now those same blogs are writing about Glover as if they've also magically forgotten about all the black speculative fiction they were shouting about three months ago.

Meanwhile Okorafor and Jemisin have been giving talks every week across the country about the history and present of Afrofuturism.

LeVar freaking Burton has read multiple Afrofuturist stories out loud on his podcast in the last months.

user15026

@BESW I feel like some of it should have hit his radar

user15026

@BESW I love his podcast, although his voice also tends to make me sleepy so I use it to sleep, so some stories take me multiple nights to get through because sleeping

BESW

Hee.

If I wanted to give Glover the greatest possible benefit of the doubt, I'd guess that white guys wrote that skit for him and he rolled with it as a gracious guest of the show.

user15026

11:43 PM

Right, but then you'd think he'd be saying somewhere "so I did the thing but here are some things you should be checking out because they are great"

user15026

Or something

BESW

Aye.

And/or that more folks (outside the existing Afrofuturist community, who are all scratching their tilted heads) would call the skit out on something that's so easily pushed against: all the media outlets already did the research work three months ago!

I think that's what Jourdain Searles is getting at with this tweet.

(You know what black person actually DID go into space with record-breaking results in the same month as Black Panther? Meg Murray in a film helmed by a black woman. Hey, Glover!)

(A black woman went into space in a world-famous franchise last year, too, and she wasn't the first one. How's your nerd cred now, Glover?)

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