Everyone thinks I’m going to get into my grad program except me. In preparation for the inevitability of reapplying next year, I am reading Octavia Butler’s entire bibliography since I’ll write my (nonexistent) master’s thesis on her work and Afrofuturism.
I worry that grad school would cut into my dramatic network television watching though. Thinking of other ways to write and get paid that aren’t being an overqualified intern.
I’m funny! I vary my sentence structure! Pay me to write words!
Adding these to my to-read queue.
Another response to the policing of humanities: The irony of neo-conservatives challenging institutions is that they fetishize many other kinds of institutions. You know, the kinds that lock people up.
Why Teach and Study English? : The New Yorker.
George R.R. Martin
A cool discussion of my girl Octavia and the exclusion of women and authors of color in speculative fiction.
Political science fiction is real and important, and sci-fi nerds need to join forces with social justice ideologies and actively advocate for non-white, non-male authors and narratives.
Afrofuturism, y’all.
Octavia Butler and the Question of Diversity in Sci-Fi | Tokyo Jupiter.
50 Books That Define the Past Five Years in Literature – Flavorwire.
Another interesting list from Flavorwire on literature. This one includes my writer-crush Kate Zambreno’s Heroines and Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (which I obsessively gobbled up in two days, but everyone in the universe still loves to hate), so I forgive some of their weirder inclusions.
Can we just get over Jonathan Franzen already?
Can we appreciate for a minute how many of these texts are multi-genre creative biographies?
I am working on a nerdy writing project and running into some trouble adjusting my super-dense academic voice. It’s as though every piece of writing is either up for publication in a scholarly journal, or it’s a poem. I struggle mightily with anything in between these two. Maybe this is why I am funny in real life but can’t write funny?
Jesse Rice-Evans 