It's one of those periods: my posts here are infrequent and insubstantial. This will continue until it stops. Be glad for me, partly, since partly it's because I'm buckling down and writing and have no time or brainpower for blogging. Be sad for me, partly, since partly I'm in a funk having just found out that a recommender for my July arts colony applications failed to send the recommendation letters by the deadlines so now I'm out of luck for a writing residency next summer and I'm out $50 in wasted application fees. She'd fairly gushed about how highly she was going to recommend me. I trusted her. Wah wah wah!
For now, then, here's some stuff.
Frederick Douglass on Haiti, via Sukant Chandan's blog Sons of Malcolm.
Venezuela cancels Haiti's oil debt, President Hugo Chavez noting that his country is in fact historically indebted to Haiti in many ways.
Fidel: 'We are sending doctors, not soldiers.'
This Friday, in 24 cities: Stand with Haiti. Here in NYC, we, led by members of the Haitian community, will march across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Federal Building to say the people of Haiti need material human aid, not a U.S. military occupation.
This is a couple of weeks old already, but there's an interesting post over at Contra James Wood about what books published by what corporations get noticed, reviewed, sold.
This too is not new, but, sadly, it doesn't seem to ever get old. There's a lot of righteous outrage about publishers taking books with people of color protagonists and wrapping them in cover art that depicts the characters as white. The suits keep making disgusting, lame and transparently racist excuses, primarily that, well, book buyers just don't buy books with Black people on the cover. It's particularly disturbing that this tactic seems to mostly take place with young adult and children's books. Rather than restate some of the very good, sharp commentary, let me just provide some links, each of which will lead you further on with more links to more words. Here, at her blog Fledgeling, Zetta Elliott has followed the issue in a series of posts. As has Tayari Jones, here. And there's much to chew on at Color Online.
