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The Library of Congress will no longer use “aliens” and “illegal aliens” as categories.
 
Original article by By Walker Caplan
November 15, 2021, 2:20pm

At a regular meeting of their Policy and Standards Division, the Library of Congress confirmed it will replace the cataloging subject headings “Aliens” and “Illegal aliens” with the terms “Noncitizens” and “Illegal immigration.”

This decision comes after a long conflict between advocacy groups of the changes and elected officials representing populaces that didn't want the change. In 2014, students and librarians at Dartmouth, submitted a formal request to the Library of Congress for the “Illegal aliens” catalog heading to be revised to “Undocumented immigrants.” The Library of Congress announced that they would not change the heading; subsequently other librarians, including the American Library Association, continued to petition the Library of Congress to revise the heading.

The Library of Congress agreed to replace the subject headings in 2016—but a group of elected officials in Congress following their voting populace, added a provision to an appropriations bill that required the library to keep the “Aliens” and “Illegal aliens” headings.

"as expeditiously as possible. ...This update better reflects common terminology and respects library users and library workers from all backgrounds,” said ALA president Patty Wong in a statement responding to the change. “It also reflects the core value of social justice for ALA members, who have been at the vanguard of this change for years.”

MY THOUGHTS

I think patty wong is incorrect at a level. She says the terms: noncitizen or illegal immigrant are in line with common terminology but that is not true. If you go through legal papers from the states or the federal government it is clear, the most common terms historically are "aliens" or "illegal aliens". I am not suggesting they are sensitive terms, or unthreatening terms, but they are the common terms. In the same way colored or negro or blacks were the common terms for the often called african or afro american or black american in modern usa. She also is wrong. No terms respects all people. The people who didn't want the term changed are not being upheld by this terminology change. One of the great flaws in modernity, meaning the now, is the idea that a certain is better for all people even when it clearly is against the wishes of a segment of all people. And, utilizing another term isn't a negative or positive, but, when we lie and suggest it is common instead of radical, it is a dysfunctional act in the goal for better discourse.
 
ARTICLE LINK
https://lithub.com/the-library-of-congress-will-no-longer-use-aliens-and-illegal-aliens-as-categories/ 

Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk is under investigation for insulting modern Turkey’s founder—in a novel.
 
Original article By Walker Caplan
November 16, 2021, 12:48pm
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is being investigated by the government of Turkey.

Earlier this year, Pamuk was investigated on criminal charges of insulting the Turkish flag and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, in his latest book. Nights of Plague, a historical novel about a plague epidemic on a fictional Ottoman island, features a character—Major Kamil—who was read by the prosecutor as a parody of Atatürk. Pamuk and his publishing house denied the allegations, and the case ended in non-prosecution due to lack of evidence.

But the lawyer who made the initial complaint—Tarcan Ülük—appealed the case, and now, the investigation has been reopened. If Pamuk is found guilty under Law 1816 of the Turkish Penal Code, he could receive a sentence of up to three years in prison.

In 2005, Pamuk had to go to court after he told a Swiss newspaper that around one million Armenians were killed on Turkish territory in the early twentieth century. In 2020, the Turkish government jailed at least 25 writers and public intellectuals for their writings—the third-highest number of writers and public intellectuals jailed globally by one country that year.

“Pamuk’s writing has had a profound impact on the literary world, yet his reputation for having courageous and uncompromising politics has made him a target of the Turkish government’s ongoing and systematic effort to silence dissident voices,” said Karin Deutsch Karlekar, director of free expression at risk programs at PEN America, in a statement. “[The reopening of the investigation] points to the overall climate of repression against writers in Turkey and demonstrates how the legal system enables appalling authoritarian restrictions on free expression and creativity.” 

MY THOUGHTS

Artist's are all alike in at least one way, where they live may or may not be comfortable to what they create. But, a question arises. Is Pamuk Turkish? Now many will say, of course, he is. But I argue, like many who were raised in schools that mirror the culture of the white western european christian community, he has a mental rearing that reflects a non turkish culture and there lies the problem. The culture of the majority where an artists live need not be the culture of the artists, but the artists judgements of that larger culture warrant reprimand. When sojourner truth wrote about the essence of freedom, was she writing something indicative to the white majority of the time? no. Does this mean I oppose her writings? no. But I comprehend the risks any artists take when they have a stance that many in their geographic proximity oppose. And if you take the risks then you have to be ready to handle a potential burning. The USA loves to use the imperial demand through filtered reconnaissance, in this case pen america, and it is sickening. Turkey is not the usa, legally. And, Pamuk knows this. Is he writing with respect to Turkish law, or not? Should turkish law reflect the legal code of the usa? I say no.

ARTICLE LINK
https://lithub.com/nobel-winner-orhan-pamuk-is-under-investigation-for-insulting-modern-turkeys-founder-in-a-novel/

THE BLOOMINGDALE STORY: READ THE NEVER-BEFORE PUBLISHED PATRICIA HIGHSMITH DRAFT THAT WOULD BECOME CAROL (THE PRICE OF SALT)
A rare gem from Highsmith's newly released diaries and notebooks, with annotations from the author and her editor.
NOVEMBER 16, 2021 BY PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
VIA LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING

This draft of “The Bloomingdale Story” was written by Patricia Highsmith in 1948. It would later be expanded and significantly reworked before being published as the novel The Price of Salt, later titled Carol. The draft is included in the newly released book, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941 – 1995, published by Liveright Publishing, which has made it available here. Notes presented in the right margin were made by Highsmith upon revisiting her notebooks at a later date, accompanied by explanatory notes from her longtime editor, Anna von Planta.

READ THE COMPLETE DRAFT IN THE ARTICLE LINK

ARTICLE LINK
https://crimereads.com/patricia-highsmith-bloomingdale-story-draft-carol-price-of-salt/

Fragment of lost 12th-century epic poem found in another book’s binding
Scholars knew the work about Guillaume d’Orange and the bloody siege of his city existed, but until now believed it had been lost completely

Alison Flood
Thu 18 Nov 2021 07.32 EST

Guillaume kills a giant in an illumination from 13th and 14th century manuscripts of the 'Chanson de Guillaume d'Orange.' Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

A fragment from a 12th-century French poem previously believed to have been lost forever has been found by an academic in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Dr Tamara Atkin from Queen Mary University of London was researching the reuse of books during the 16th century when she came across the fragment from the hitherto lost Siège d’Orange in the binding of a book published in 1528. Parchment and paper were expensive at the time, and unwanted manuscripts and books were frequently recycled.

Scholars had believed the poem, which comes from a cycle of chansons de geste – epic narrative poems – about Guillaume d’Orange, existed, but there had previously been no physical evidence that this was true. The fragment only runs to 47 lines, but it proves the existence of a poem thought to have been completely lost.

The poem is set in the ninth century, during the reign of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son and heir. Atkin said that while it is believed to have been composed in the late 12th century, the fragment itself is from a copy made in England in the late 13th century.

A fragment from the Siege d’Orange. Photograph: Tamara Atkin/Bodleian Libraries

“Il li demande coment se contient il? / Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit / Tun frere n’ad ne pain ne ble ne vin / Garison nule dont il puisse garir / Mais ke de sang li lessai plein Bacin,” runs an early section of the fragment, which Philip Bennett, an expert on Guillaume d’Orange from the University of Edinburgh, has translated as: “He asks him, ‘How goes it with him?’ / ‘Badly,’ said Count Bertram. / ‘Your brother has neither bread nor corn nor wine; / He has no supplies with which to save himself, / Except for one basinful of blood, which I left him.’”

The quoted lines come as Bertram begs the king for help relieving the siege of Orange, a city in the Rhône Valley, describing the dire siege conditions. “In later parts of the fragment we hear him berating the queen (at one point he even calls her ‘pute russe’ or ‘red-headed whore’), who has objected to her husband leading a relieving army south,” said Atkin.

Atkin also found a parchment fragment from Béroul’s Roman de Tristan, telling part of the story of Tristan and Iseult, in the same book. The 12th-century poem is one of the earliest versions of the medieval romance, and until now the only evidence of its existence had been an incomplete 13th-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The fragment found by Atkin differs “significantly” from the manuscript, and shows the poem was circulated more widely than had previously been thought.

“When you find manuscript waste in a 16th-century book, it tends to be in Latin, and it’s almost always something theological or philosophical, and from the point of view of modern-day literary scholarship, perhaps not that interesting. But the fragments in this book were different,” said Atkin. “They were in French, they were in verse, and in one of the fragments the name Iseult immediately jumped out. I’m not a French scholar, and I realised I was going to need to bring in some collaborators. From there, it’s just been really fun and exciting.”

She approached academics from the universities of Bristol, Edinburgh and British Columbia to help. “I knew it was something important,” said JR Mattison, a French-manuscript specialist from the University of British Columbia who helped to identify the Tristan and Iseult fragment. “This piece of the poem comes from a significant moment when Iseult speaks with her husband King Mark. This fragment expands our knowledge of the poem’s audiences and its changing meaning over time and contributes a new perspective on how Tristan legends moved across Europe.”

Bennett said there had been “no physical trace” of the Siège d’Orange poem before. “There is much evidence from other chansons de geste that a poem about the siege Guillaume d’Orange suffered in his newly conquered city must have once existed,” he said. “The discovery of the fragment we now have fills an important gap in the poetic biography of the epic hero. This is a most exciting addition to the corpus of medieval French epic poetry.”

The team will now work to discover more about when and where the fragments were copied, and how they came to be bound in the 1528 book. “That manuscripts were made at all reflects the value once placed on the texts they contain. But manuscripts that were dismembered and reused as waste were no longer valued as texts. Their only value was as a material commodity – parchment – that could be used to reinforce the binding of another book. The manuscripts containing these French poems were probably recycled because the texts were considered old-fashioned and the language outdated,” said Atkin.

“It’s fantastically exciting to discover something that’s been lost all this time, but I do think it is also worth simultaneously holding the thought that actually, the only reason these fragments have survived is because at some point, someone thought the manuscripts in which they appeared were not valuable as anything other than waste. There’s a sort of lovely tension in that, I think.”

ARTICLE LINK
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/18/fragment-of-lost-12th-century-epic-poem-found-in-another-books-binding 

WHY SHOULD CHILDREN READ DARK BOOKS?
Katie Moench Nov 12, 2021

Scary books made to give readers the chills may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of “children’s literature.” Horror, whether it be books, shows, or movies, is often thought of as a more adult genre, especially when it depicts violent situations of terrifying outcomes. Death, dismemberment, and masked men with sharp, stabbing knives aren’t exactly the stuff of bedtime stories, and no parent could be blamed for wondering if their kid will never sleep again after reading ghost stories. But even though darker subject material may not be the most common type of children’s book, it can play an important role in the emotional development of young readers.

When children encounter new situations in books, whether scary or not, it gives them a chance to think through how they would handle such things, as well as experience new emotions from a safe and hypothetical place. As children’s author Cavan Scott puts it in his workshops on juvenile horror, “the world is a scary place.” By giving children scary books, Scott argues, young readers can be “pushed to the edge of their comfort zone,” but still get a resolution at the end. Since books for younger readers tend to end at least somewhat happily, children get the experience of being scared, but aren’t necessarily exposed to the more ambiguous endings dark books for adults might contain. If kids are not allowed to read anything frightening or shocking, then they won’t be able to develop the coping skills they’ll need when scary situations arise in their lives.

In addition to allowing children to develop skills for navigating difficult situations, scary stories can also warn young readers about dangerous situations. Even now, I can still remember moments where my favorite charcters in childhood books were put in danger, and how they reacted. Though it’s not healthy to be fearful all the time, books can impart important lessons, from the dangers of getting too close to wild animals to the need to be cautious around strangers. Kids can also think about, and discuss with the adults in their lives,how to stay safe and what kinds of choices they would make in such situations.

And, of course, dark reads can appeal to young readers simply because kids, like adults, like them. Children, in my experience, are their own best judges when it comes to what they find interesting to read and how difficult of stories they can handle. Many otherwise reluctant readers might love the Goosebumps or Tales from Lovecraft Middle School series, precisely because they are full of exciting and nerve racking characters and events, and reading these kinds of books can set children up as lifelong lovers of horror. When kids find books that engage them and that they enjoy, they are more likely to view themselves as readers and to feel like they have a place in the world of books.

No matter how much we might wish otherwise, children, like all humans, experience fear. We are programmed to fear new experiences and unknown things, and even if worries about monsters under the bed or shadows lurking in the dark might seem silly to grown-ups, to children they are very real dangers. Additionally, situations like starting at a new school, dealing with a divorce or death in a family, or moving to a new house can all bring up feelings of anxiety or even dread for kids learning to work through the emotions surrounding such events.

Whatever our age, books, and stories give us the opportunity to process situations outside of ourselves and to draw inspiration and comfort from how others have coped with similar, scary situations. While an adult might not immediately see the connection between being the new kid at school and a book about a kid who hunts ghosts, for a young reader, it’s an opportunity to see someone their age being brave. Just as the best horror novels play on our realistic fears, dark reads for kids can help them emotionally explore frightening situations through the safety of a book. Plus, kids might find they really connect with darker reads, and it can help set them on the path to being engaged and lifelong readers! If you’re looking for dark reads for the kids in your life, hand them some of the books below.

USE THE ARTICLE LINK BELOW TO VIEW THE ENTRIES SUGGESTED

ARTICLE LINK
https://bookriot.com/why-should-children-read-dark-books/ 

REFERRAL LINK
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/11/19/book-bans-the-national-book-awards-and-a-lost-poem-fragment-this-week-in-book-news/ 
 

I quote Variety: 
By backing #Oppenheimer, Universal is making a bet that the right director can still get audiences excited to visit cinemas for original content. The film, which isn’t due in theaters until 2023, will need to defy the odds to become commercially successful

The article

Why Christopher Nolan’s $100 Million WWII Drama ‘Oppenheimer’ Could Be the Last of Its Kind

By Rebecca Rubin < https://variety.com/author/rebecca-rubin/ >  

Christopher Nolan’s next movie “Oppenheimer,” a $100 million-budgeted historical drama about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb, could be considered one of an endangered species.

These days, it’s rare for traditional studios to pump nine figures into a film that isn’t inspired by popular toys, novels or comic books. Even before COVID-19 upended the moviegoing landscape, audiences had been gravitating toward superheroes and science-fiction spectacles — and not much else. That reality has made it increasingly difficult for Hollywood to justify the economics of greenlighting expensive movies that aren’t based on existing intellectual property. They’re a bigger risk, not only in recouping investments for studios, but also in generating profits, spawning sequels and leveraging consumer product riches. No matter how well people receive Nolan’s film, it’s unlikely J. Robert Oppenheimer’s face will adorn t-shirts or lunch boxes.

By backing “Oppenheimer,” Universal Pictures is making a bold bet that the right director can still get audiences excited to visit cinemas for original content. The film, which isn’t due in theaters until 2023, will need to defy the odds to become commercially successful. On top of its $100 million production budget, the studio will need to spend $100 million more to properly promote the film to global audiences. Because Nolan’s contract guarantees he receives first-dollar gross — an increasingly uncommon perk that grants the filmmaker a percentage of ticket sales — it will take $50 million to $60 million more to achieve profitability than it would take another film of similar scope. Consequently, insiders at rival studios estimate “Oppenheimer” will need to generate at least $400 million at the global box office in order to turn a profit.

That box office benchmark is one that Nolan’s films haven’t had trouble clearing in the past decade, with the exception of “Tenet,” which opened in theaters at a time when COVID-19 vaccines were still months away. And despite the circumstances, the Warner Bros. cerebral thriller — starring John David Washington and Robert Pattinson — managed to collect $363 million worldwide. “Tenet” cost more than $200 million, making it nearly impossible to turn a profit in those conditions. When it comes to Nolan’s other original properties, 2010’s “Inception” grossed $836 million globally, 2014’s “Interstellar” made $701 million globally and 2017’s “Dunkirk” collected $526 million globally. In other words, Nolan is a filmmaker with an enviable box office track record.

Those who closely follow the industry point out that “Oppenheimer” won’t be the kind of gripping mind-benders that audiences have come to expect from Nolan, such as “Inception” or “Memento.” Instead, it’s a historical drama that’s firmly rooted in fact and physics. Unlike “Dunkirk,” which captures the heroism of British forces during the early days of World War II, “Oppenheimer” tells a darker story, one that exists in the moral murk of the past and is not only divisive, but firmly American. That could limit interest overseas, where Nolan’s films tend to make the bulk of their revenues.

None of this means people in the movie theater business are betting against Nolan. The reason that Universal’s chairwoman Donna Langley made it her mission to court Nolan after his relationship with Warner Bros. grew strained is that he’s one of the few directors who can take a bold swing and rake in hundreds of millions at the box office. It’s especially valuable at a time when Hollywood appears to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for IP that can be spun into cinematic gold. Case in point: There are (real) movies in the works based on the card game Uno, the crunchy snack Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and the invention of Viagra. Because not every project can be derived from Marvel, Star Wars, James Bond, Jurassic World and Fast & Furious, studios are turning to filmmakers with unique perspectives who can launch a film based on their name alone. Privately, other Hollywood players have voiced their desire to see “Oppenheimer” succeed because it would encourage studio executives and financiers to take more chances on new ideas.

“[Nolan] is a unique talent with a very loyal fanbase. If you were to say someone else was doing a period piece about J. Robert Oppenheimer, I would say it would be difficult to get made,” says producer Peter Newman, the head of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts’ MBA/MFA program. “Here, you know you’re going to get something different and original.”

There aren’t many filmmakers who are given the opportunity to create movies around new and unfamiliar ideas at that budget level, at least, not at traditional studios. (In a sign of changing times, Steven Spielberg, once a streaming service skeptic, forged a partnership for his company Amblin to produce new feature films yearly for Netflix.) When they work, in the case of Quentin Tarantino’s ode to 1960s showbiz “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the studio and filmmakers alike can reap the benefits. Sony shelled out roughly $90 million to produce “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie and grossed $375 million at the global box office. When they flop, like Ridley Scott’s big-budget period piece “The Last Duel,” starring Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Adam Driver, or Roland Emmerich’s $100 million-budgeted war drama “Midway,” the losses can be ruinous.

Filmmakers like Jordan Peele and Judd Apatow have a similar ability to churn out hits, but their movies don’t cost nearly as much to make. Recent would-be blockbusters or adult-targeted movies with sizable budgets, such as Michael Bay’s “6 Underground,” Aaron Sorkin’s “Trial of the Chicago 7,” David Fincher’s “Mank” and “Red Notice” starring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot, were set up by or sold to Netflix. The streamer, as well as its competitors, doesn’t report box office grosses and relies on luring subscribers with fresh content, so it’s impossible to know what kind of financial impact those movies had. 

Nolan could have easily sold “Oppenheimer” to a streaming service, which would have guaranteed him a massive payday without being subjected to the scrutiny of box office reporting. But he’s a big supporter of the big-screen experience and the struggling film exhibition industry.

Since “Oppenheimer” isn’t expected to debut in theaters until summer 2023, plenty could change in the movie theater business by then — for better or worse. There’s a chance it could launch in an environment that’s even more hostile to tentpoles that aren’t of the comic book ilk. Or, moviegoers could be ready to look beyond the constant drip of Batman, Superman and Spider-Man adventures and watch something that doesn’t involve grown men in tights.

With an original property, marketing executives have to familiarize audiences with the property while also enticing them to watch the story in theaters. In the case of “Oppenheimer,” Universal has to make people aware that Nolan has a new movie and convince them they simply must watch the story behind the Manhattan Project on the big screen. Nolan is assembling an A-list ensemble — Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr. — around Cillian Murphy (who is playing J. Robert Oppenheimer) to elevate the movie’s profile.

Another challenge will be reaching its target demographic of adult crowds. They may be more eager to go to the movies two years from now, but while COVID-19 is still lingering, the age group has been most hesitant to visit their local cinemas.

“There used to be at least one level of uncertainty in how movies perform: execution dependent,” Newman says. “Now, it’s not only execution dependent, it’s pandemic dependent. It takes over a year to make a movie like this, and nobody knows what the health situation will be [at the time it comes out].”

MY THOUGHTS

If I am honest, I think this movie dies hard. When M Night Shamala did Lady In The Water or Last Airbender, it sounds a lot like Oppenheimer from Christopher Nolan. A director with a set of fans who expect a certain kind of narrative in a film and who will not be happy of the course change. The article says directors like Nolan can be banked on money but admitted, the failures of big budget films, like Ridley scott's , The Last Duel, or similar are examples to show it doesn't work and has many recent examples of failures.
The one name the article doesn't mention is clint eastwood. It refers to Jordan Peele or Judd Apatow but to be blunt, Clint Eastwood is the quiet king of the low budget hit machine, starting decades ago. And to that end is where I think directors like ridley scott/christopher nolan/shamala all made the mistake. The reality is, big budget movies from the usa need to be the providence of comics/superheroes/fast and the furious/toys. The article didn't even mention Villaneuve, who did the Bladerunner sequel and Dune and in both cases, you can argue for failure financially. 

It is an art directing a low budget picture , it demands the director stop all the bells and whistles and simply tell a good story and pick wise actors to present their characters as compelling within the framework of said story. Nolan will get paid regardless, but I expect this film will be an end and I don't think it is a problem. 

I end with a simple truth. No one is stopping original ideas from being made into films. if viewerships or audiences are too stupid or too manipulated to give movies a chance beyond metacritic scores and various judgements of others, then the audience or viewership is the problem.

POST SCRIPT

The point they made about Netflix's films is very poignant. Who can know a streaming service has success with a film? is it number of streamers growth? If quantity of streamers, people who paid for a subscription, doesn't elevate then how is a film on a streaming service financially profitable, outside stock price speculation 

The HArder They Fall
 

MEdia That Moves We

Black Daddies

some of my thoughts

My Media that moves we commentary

the film was influenced by all the genre's of western films in the usa, from the john wayne era to the spaghetti western  to the black films like posse or buck and the preacher

That is the brilliance of the film, it in the end is an entertainment , not a documentary or historical film. 

Nike, you precancelled , canceled westerns:)

YEah, Multiple review shows of this film have I Think missed one key point. if you want to make a film a certain way, own a film studio. At some point you have to reject the level of complaint to how the story is told. Own a studio and you can do what you want ?

and let's be honest, revenge is a constant theme of westerns of all sorts, denzel's magnificent seven differed from kurosawa's seven samurai or  brenner/mcqueen magnificent seven, where the gunfighters are trying to redeem themselves in a quiet little place. 

yes, they trained with their doubles so they could have a more john wickian fight choreography

I give my entertainment ranking a 10, I was entertained , love the womens fight:) in terms of black westerns , it is a high percentage, 7 or 8. I think posse or buck and the preacher are better as films. In terms of westerns in general , from the black and white silent black westerns and et cetera to now, 7 . In terms of historical quality in western films... a five. 
  

My Black Daddies commentary

Was jill scott offered the role? did jill scott reject it?

blacker than buck and the preacher... I don't know, it is clearly up there

the usa has a long history of film superstar collabs in westerns, this films joins that very long list

white zombia was a financial play, legosi reportedly was paid a lot for that film, and it was clearly designed to play on the fandom of "monster movies" the cultural aspects of white zombie is clearly negative but the reason it was made was purely financial

do you guys think disney has written the entire phase 4 already, or at least all the parts?

Do you think a cartoon of a fiscally impoverished family from a dying black town, can be made by a high profile company like disney?

What about danny glover get production money to direct his toussaint louverture movie if he does this?

if lethal weapon 5 makes money does another Beverly hills cop happen?

What about the detective jumps from a spacex ship to virgin galactic ship to solve a cryptocurrency theft

This was for entertainment, in the spirit of westerns movies in the usa. never real history, always an entertainment
 

MY THOUGHTS

Night of the living dead
circa 6:47 I have one of those:) I got mine traveling the motherland. Woosah moments!

We're coming to get Nike , Nicole, He's over there:) 
The first thing I want to know is what either of you will do if a man tries to scare you at a cemetary like that.

Great Trivia Nike, the first film was Night of the Living Dead, the last was Ganja and HEss. Dwayne Jones did an interesting role in a film around the City College of New York. 

Ladies, night of the living dead 1968 is one of those old black and white movies that is rarely shown. In the war film categry think paths of glory. A legendary film, like Night of the living dead, but one that predated the 1980s media surge, and didn't have the annual television power like star trek/twilight zone/its a wonderful life

Nicole, I think it is called listening to a story. The USA during the late 1970s to today was raised on the idea that visual interpretations need to be scientifically honest aside plot quality. Before, people had the idea that special effects was merely entertainment, not a mandate . 

Nike, I don't think Night of the Living dead's plot is so silly. The mist thing from space can be acceptable. But the movie's genious is the explanation to how this scenario came about is in the background, it isn't pushed forward in the story. The genious in the screenplay is, the focus on what do you do if the situation applies is the premise of the plot. The initial character is the woman fleeing from someone formerly dead. Why he is formerly dead doesn't matter. IT is alluded to but it doesn't matter.

Nicole, well said, they came all this way to abduct somebody. Are all humans jesus or something? 

Yes Nicole, the movie forces the question of survival onto the audience. If you are into the story, you aren't interested in aliens or nuclear winds, you are interested on what you will do if surrounded by your parents/children/stranger in the street that are now undead and need you for food.

Good trivia Nike, interesting, Germany banned it for the blood. Outside the usa, the rearing of children or guidance of media is not the same as in the usa. 

Yes, Nicole, but Grimm's fairy tales were softened versions of the original german tales meant for all ages, not just merely children like Grimms. 

Nike, good point, the military is "heroes" in the story, and the usa film industry supports positive images of the military usually. 

Nike, more importantly, than who survived is how they died, i think each character in or about that house's death served a narrative purpose on failure to survive and how it works. 

good question on film influence Nicole

Ladies, Funny how Diahann Carroll was not allowed to be the love interest in Paris BLues in 1961 to Paul Newman or for Sidney Poitier to have a white female love interest in the same movie, while in 1967, Poitier has a white female love interest, who was to be fair, a teenager in guess whose coming to dinner and Diahann Carroll had her own show.

Nike, the sporting world in general was the only place black or white men had any battles in media. Your correct boxing was the only purely violent place.

I will give Night of the living dead a 5 then or now. I think the story or acting still holds up. 

Nicole GREAT POINT, the reason they bring back things is cause they have fanbases and it is financially safer to make a remake over new ideas. 
I comprehend your point but the financial model of film/streaming/cable wants the best return and a totally new story. 
:) good memory Nike 38:59 your reaction Nicole:) thank you jesus, rocky horror picture show

I agree to you ladies, but the reality is, when was the last time the top ten movies were all based on an original idea. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nFruH-5TT0

TITLE: Words With Friends: On the Joys of Tandem Reading
I learned to read on my own when I was barely five (getting my parents excited about the possibility that they had a child prodigy on their hands, a notion quickly dispelled by my total lack of math skills), and from then on, I never stopped. I was, to put it mildly, not the most sociable kid, partly because of my constitutional shyness and partly because we moved to new countries three times before I turned eight, leaving me faltering to figure out schoolyard lingo in Italy when I’d just barely cracked it in Russia. Through all that, though, books were my constant and faithful friends. I know—barf—but it’s true; the joy I got from cracking a new Baby-Sitters Club book or Nancy Drew mystery remains close to unrivaled in my adult life.

Actually, that’s not true. There is something better than reading alone, I’ve discovered, and it’s reading side by side with friends who don’t judge you for wanting to hit “pause” on socialization and disappear into a book. In ninth grade, I struck up a tenuous friendship with two of the other kids who’d also come in from different middle schools. One, a rangy athletic type with a host of popular older siblings, quickly found her place in the upper echelons of the high-school caste system and promptly forgot me; the other, a quiet comedy nerd and fellow bookworm named Jazmine, is still my best friend to this day. Our history is long and complex, made up of old SNL clips and hastily chugged, illicitly obtained Smirnoff Ices and endless subway rides from the Bronx to Manhattan, but I knew we had reached a point of no return, friendship-wise, when we began to read together.

In case you’re tempted to think of Jazmine and me as preternaturally sophisticated New York teens who would rather discuss Sartre than socialize, I should emphasize just how wildly unpopular we were in high school. Nobody invited us to football games or homecoming dances or *Gossip Girl–*style, pill-fueled ragers in their rich parents’ empty brownstones, so we learned to make our own fun, trading a copy of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty back and forth and discussing the protagonist Zora as if she were the third member of our little group. Jazmine has always been a more ambitious reader than I am, tackling the Russian novelists and David Foster Wallace when I was still secretly paging through my middle-school copies of The Clique, but reading was a common ground for us, a place we could go and find one another. As our friendship endured into college and then into our 20s, we could reliably bond by locating a wine bar, splitting a bottle of something pink and fizzy, and obscuring our faces with our respective paperbacks as we reached to stuff our faces with bar snacks.

Amazingly enough, the adult world proved far easier to navigate, socially speaking, than the thorn’s nest of high school, and I found more friends whom I was comfortable reading. On a New Year’s trip upstate last winter, my friends Kate, Maya, Abby, and I all rotated a few copies of a particularly execrable piece of trendy literary-ish fiction that I’m too polite to name, joyfully reading the worst sentences aloud as the men in our group went hiking, or shoved each other, or whatever it is men do when I’m not paying attention. When my friend Natalie drove out to Texas with me for my long-planned move to Austin, some of our best nights were spent sitting silently in vaguely creepy Airbnbs across the American South, our noses buried in the reads we’d picked up at local bookstores from Asheville to Nashville. (As we were preparing to leave for the trip, my friend Eliza, who had lived with me in L.A. and traveled with me many times, warned Natalie: “Make sure to bring books, because Emma will just whip one out and start reading.”)

I don’t know exactly what it is about reading with friends that I treasure so much, but I think it has something to do with comfort, with a tacit closeness that nobody feels the need to name. When you’re getting a drink with a brand-new casual friend (as I often am these days, while I adjust to life in a new city), you’re as “on” as you might be for a first date, peppering the person across the table from you with questions about work and siblings and dreading the crashing thump of an awkward silence. With old friends, though, you’re free to check out, to stare into space, to—okay, fine—be a little rude, and nobody thinks you love them any less just because you’re deeply engrossed, in, say, Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, and absolutely need to know how it turns out.

I realize that putting an effort in is essential to making new friends, and that you can’t constantly hide behind a book and expect people to warm to you (or expect them not to call you a “Kirkland-brand Rory Gilmore,” as the case may be). Still, as I get older and strike up new friendships around the country, I’m all the more grateful for the women I feel absolutely no trepidation about reading with. There’s a moment in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha that’s always struck me. Reading on the couch while her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), knits, Frances (Greta Gerwig) suddenly says “This is interesting,” and reads her a quote from her book. Their closeness is casual, easy, nothing to write home about; this is clearly one night in a chain of similar ones when each friend feels comfortable retreating into the written word and only occasionally surfacing with a read-aloud souvenir. Is there anything more simple, or more lovely?

ARTICLE BY EMMA SPECTER
https://www.vogue.com/article/words-with-friends-on-the-joys-of-tandem-reading

Books by Sally Rooney will no longer be sold in two Israeli bookshop chains, after the acclaimed writer’s decision not to sell translation rights for her most recent novel to an Israeli publisher.
she had turned down an offer from the Israeli publisher Modan to translate her book Beautiful World, Where Are You into Hebrew. In a statement, she explained that while she was “very proud” to have had her previous novels translated into Hebrew, she would not sell translation rights to an Israeli-based publishing house for now, in order to support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), a campaign that works to “end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law”
ARTICLE from Lucy Knight
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/05/sally-rooney-novels-pulled-from-israeli-bookstores-after-translation-boycott

In the Philippines, educators and researchers are responding to a military crackdown on “subversive” books and documents by launching an internet archive of endangered books and materials frowned upon by the government.
 Aswang Sa Aklatan (Hands Off Our Libraries) < https://handsoffourlibraries.crd.co/ >
ARTICLE By Walker Caplan
https://lithub.com/a-group-of-teachers-in-the-philippines-have-launched-an-internet-archive-of-subversive-books/

REFERRING ARTICLE
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/11/05/stopping-a-merger-preparing-for-the-holidays-and-reading-with-friends-this-week-in-book-news/

DC Milestone (dcuniverse.com)

NEW VOICES. NEW VISIONARIES
IT’S TIME TO WRITE A NEW CHAPTER IN THE SUPERHERO STORY.
If stories are what shape the world we live in, then the storytellers should reflect that world. The Milestone Initiative is looking for the next generation of Black and diverse comic book creators.

DC Superhero
In 1993, four Black creators created Milestone Comics: a new universe of Black Super Heroes, brought to life by Black creators and other artists of color. Milestone didn’t just change the way our heroes looked. It built a pipeline for talent who had been excluded and marginalized for too long, and an ecosystem in which Black creativity could thrive. Now, with the relaunch of Milestone Comics and the creation of The Milestone Initiative, we want to honor the creators of Milestone by continuing their mission. But we can’t do it without you.

DC Superhero
MAKE YOUR MARK
Do you have a story to tell? Do your experiences, imagination, and perspective go beyond the limits of what you see on TV, in movies, and in other media? If you live and breathe comics, and you’re an emerging Black artist or writer —or a creator from an underrepresented group —we’re looking for you to join The Milestone Initiative.

The path to a sustainable creative career in this competitive industry will never be an easy one. You already know that —you’ve spent years honing your craft on your own. But with The Milestone Initiative, we hope to give you the support you need to make that hard work pay off. The next step starts here.

DC Summit
THE
SUMMIT
Participants in The Milestone Initiative will be invited to a one-week summit, hosted by WarnerMedia, DC, and Ally, where they’ll make connections, create community, and begin an immersive course to help hone creative skills and better understand the comic book industry.

WHEN
02.14.22 – 02.18.22

WHERE
BURBANK, CA

1. ARRIVE
If you’re selected to participate in The Milestone Initiative, your journey will begin with the Milestone Summit. You’ll travel at our expense to DC’s headquarters in Burbank, to meet legendary creators, editors, and executives in the comics and entertainment industries.

2. LEARN
Under the mentorship of some of the most prominent names in comics, as well as Ally’s team of financial experts, you’ll receive in-depth, substantive instruction about building a creative life and earning a living in this field. You’ll hone your creative skills, but you’ll also learn the business of the comics industry and receive advice on sustaining a long-term career. Following the Milestone Summit, you’ll go home and participate in an 8-week virtual course, where you’ll receive technical training through best-in-class cartooning and graphic art school The Kubert School.

3. CREATE
It won’t be easy —throughout this multi-week course, you’ll be working as well as learning, crafting stories with your fellow participants. At the end of this journey you’ll come away with polished work that will showcase your unique talents, new knowledge, and skills and you'll have a pathway into the DC talent community if you want to pursue it.

4. IGNITE
The Milestone Initiative doesn’t end with the the completion of the coursework. The team from DC will remain in contact with all participants in the months following and will work with them to find appropriate comics assignments and other work that will help them continue to grow as creators and further their careers with DC and in the comics world.

HOW TO APPLY
The Milestone Initiative is open to Black and other underrepresented creators who are ready to enter the comic book industry at a professional level. You’ve got the talent, you’ve put in the hours of practice, and this is the opening you’ve been waiting for.

Think you have what it takes? Get ready to dive into the application. You have a story to tell. We want to hear it.

PROCESS
DC Milestone
Now a quick reality check: we know you’re serious, and we’re serious too. So this application is going to take some time. We think it’s worth it.

STEP 1: 10-20 MINUTES
First, we’ll ask you for a bit of biographical information. We’ll also ask you to provide us with links to a few existing pieces of completed original work, to give us a sense of your creative voice and vision.

STEP 2: 5-7 DAYS
The next sections are where you should plan wisely. We’ll be asking you to put your talent and skills into action by completing a short assignment. If you’re an artist, that will mean drawing three comic pages based on a script we provide; if you’re a writer, you’ll be creating a script for an 8 page story based on a loose prompt we’ve created.

STEP 3: 2-3 DAYS
Finally, we want writers and artists to answer a few, short essay questions and tell us who you are as a creator. Describe your voice and your vision —what do you believe you have to offer the world? The answers won’t take long to write, but they will take some time to think about. (And artists, don’t be intimidated if writing isn’t your thing. We’re looking for substance here, not style.)

Got it? Get started. You don’t have to complete everything now —our system can save your work, just make sure to click “Save Draft” at the bottom of the page so you can begin now and tackle it a piece at a time.

DC Superpowered
WHAT IS THE MILESTONE INITIATIVE?
Superman wasn’t just the first superhero: he was an immigrant, an American, and an enduring symbol of our shared ideals. But as an explosion of comic book heroes took place over the second half of the 20th century, there was something missing. Despite an enduring Black readership, it took decades before the first Black heroes appeared, and once they did, they remained uncommon. Even the most prominent Black heroes usually appeared in stories written and illustrated by white creators.

Enter Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, and Derek T. Dingle. With talent, vision, and tenacity, these four Black creators carved a place for themselves in an industry that didn’t always welcome or understand them. Despite their success, they were frustrated by the dearth of other Black creators in their field, and the resistance they met in trying to tell stories that reflected their own experiences and perspectives.

DC story-1-480
So they founded Milestone Media —a company that placed Black superheroes at the center of the action with their Milestone comics line, and which would make an inclusive space for Black and underrepresented comic book creators to flourish and succeed.

Milestone hit like a space pod crashing to Earth —and its impact has continued to this day. Now, Milestone Media, is helmed by Reginald Hudlin and Denys Cowan, and DC is relaunching Milestone Comics and reintroducing its characters to new audiences, but we understand that there’s still much more work to be done to continue the mission of Milestone’s founders.

That’s why, with Ally as our partner, we’ve created The Milestone Initiative. While Milestone Media is about telling the stories of Black heroes, The Milestone Initiative is about empowering the creators who can tell those stories in ways that are resonant, real, and revolutionary. The program is part of DC’s talent development program, Next Generation DC (NGDC), and is designed to identify, educate, spotlight, and empower the next generation of Black and diverse creators in our field so that the stories of the next century are truly reflective of the world around us.

Throughout American history —in the comic book industry as well as in other creative fields —Black and other underrepresented creators have been consistent innovators and visionaries despite systems that work to exclude them. Now, as comic books take center stage in popular culture, DC, WarnerMedia, and Ally want to change that with The Milestone Initiative. The Milestone Media founders started the mission. It’s time for you to pick up their mantle.

DC story-2-480
READY TO MAKE YOUR MARK?
SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

DC Milestone (dcuniverse.com)

"All men can live together. If they wish to."

- Actress and civil rights activist Josephine Baker (1906-1975)

Craig gave candid thoughts, though, when discussing whether the lead should be a woman or an actor of color.

"The answer to that is very simple," Craig declared to Radio Times < https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/james-bond-daniel-craig-woman-next-newsupdate/ > . "There should simply be better parts for women and actors of color. Why should a woman play James Bond when there should be a part just as good as James Bond, but for a woman?"
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/daniel-craig-advice-to-next-james-bond-dont-be-s-231011388.html

An essay on the "lavender scare" if you don't know of it, take a look 
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/summer/lavender.html

James Webb was head of NASA during the mentioned lavender scare, his name is being placed on a telescope, some, not most, want his name disconnected from the device, regardless of his long or fruitful stewardship of Nasa, what say you? 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nasa-advisor-quits-agency-keeps-100633698.html

 I will use as an example a community outside of the usa . In the last century starting in the 1940s to this year , global media, dominated by the usa, and primariily administered by the jewish community in the usa, has placed in countless history books/countless movies/films/stageplays the negative actions of german nazi's against the non nazi german populace <romani/jews/disabled people/et cetera>. Every single german person living today knows a history of germany during the world war II era. I said a history cause what the sister above calls a real history of the usa, includes the negativities or complexities all to often absent. But in german nazi tellings the reverse is true, all the negatives or complexities are well documented. But the positivity is absent, like how the nazi's rebuilt a country being intentionally impoverished by its neighbors. How the nazi's had become the envy of so many countires or communities absent any financial aid or governmental alliance to said communities. Thus, The german people today have been given all the negative or complex elements of nazi history and yet, in germany the post world war II nazi community has always continually grown. Is that reason cause the modern germans don't know about death camps, they don't know about burning people alive. Don't know about all sorts of experimentations? They are fully aware of history, all to often more aware of the negative than anything else, but they still align philosophically with the nazi party of yore. The question is why? Based on the sister's assertion , these people are ignoring history but how can they ignore what is commonly present. The attacks on turkish people in modernity, muslims is that indicative of the nazi's. The reason why countries ways don't change is very simple, what the people want doesn't change. LAws change Nike. Media narratives change. But the desires of people , of communities they don't change the same way. Many german people still want german superiority, they still want germany first, they still want those they don't deem german out of germany. What people want is why things don't change, not knowledge. Strom THurman was a white man who had a secret child with a black woman , treating that child so well, that child still speaks of him favorably. Even though this is a man who consistently, yelled to high heaven about the need to deny the black community all things, all the while he is taking his black child/ mulatto in latin america, to the beach or other places away from the media, having a good time. Knowledge, acquisition of knowledge does not change one's desires.

for fans of the blade film , look at this 

It proves Blade was mismanaged and the lack of foresight by new line cinema which is in truth warner bros, is paralleled by warner bros. failures in total. The multiculturalism, the collective possibilites warner bros. had access to they snubbed with blade which had great possibilities in retrospect. 

in by July 2000, blade was second only to the original superman, that started the modern superhero film financial dominance era or the batman series of films which in retrospect was far more valuable than the superman franchise. 

in 2003, the daredevil movie with ben affleck, that many in media panned as a failure did as well as either of the blade movies... hmmm so daredevil from ben affleck was hard done by. Interesting how spider man financially is the king of marvel movies. I admit, I am not a fan of spider man . I don't hate the character but it isn't my first choice of comic book characters.

interesting how by 2008, spider man is showing itself is stewarded far better than superman or batman and shows the dominance of marvel's characters in film in general. 

2010, Interesting how batman has single handedly as a character saved DC in the film world and how batman is more closely like a marvel hero than the most popular dc hero collection 

2013, when marvel succeeded with the avengers and their long form of storytelling that provided a huge challenge to dc.. and dc hasn't recovered

by 2018, the original batman movie with michael keaton was still being watched? i find that odd. 

by 2019 what do you see? I know what I see. A genre started with the original superman film. A film about a aracial white male alien  with the most individual power, saving the world.  Has been replaced by two human rich white men who use their skills plus money to battle evil. An accidental hero in a teenager from fiscally humble origins, a black prince from a magical black kingdom that never dealt with modern history, a collection of superheroes representing various cultures or views saving the earth plus other worlds. 

Well... it is another Friday, another day to love, to Oxum, Oshun, Freya, or Venus, another day to Kizomba! Ebo & Nana, I love how they chose semi public settings. Part to dance is the ability to do it when people are watching and Nana, to be honest, has a body that is noticeable. For the first 48 seconds this routine is all about her, slowly rolling into a crescendo; they then go into some nice little steps, they love popping don't they. from 1:08 to 1:13 is a very nice turn popping all the way; she never simply move to his guidance; she always add her own subtle movement into every place he guide her; i have not seen a female dancer be that consistent using that style. I think Ebo has to get stronger. In the end, his dip could had been better or ill chose; I think a half turn into a dip would had been better, not forced, like the regular.  

Meghan Fitzmartin has placed Robin on a sexual journey. I say this based on her words. She never said strictly Tim Drake is a member of the LGBTQ+ community. She said he is on a journey of self discovery. The endpoint does not have to be what anyone thinks. 
I Quote the author in double brackets
<<
When Dave [Wielgosz] (my editor for Batman: Urban Legends) reached out about doing another Tim story, I was thrilled, ...We talked about where Tim Drake has been vs where he was at the time and came to the conclusion that it needed to be a story about identity and discovery. What was next for Boy Wonder?... Look, I don’t know if this is something that can happen, but this is the story, because it’s the only story it can be. ... I fully sat on the floor of my apartment for a solid two minutes in happiness as it sunk in. Ultimately, this wouldn’t have happened without champions at DC, like Dave and James Tynion IV, and I hope it is as meaningful for others as it has been for me. ...The greatest thing about working with an established IP, ...is that there are so many story decisions for characters that have already been made for you (often by people much smarter than you). [“Sum of Our Parts”] happened because this is who Tim is. I love this character very much, and as I went back to reread as much as I could to do Robin justice, it became clear this is the story Tim needed to tell. ... I wanted to pay tribute to the fact that sexuality is a journey, ... To be clear, his feelings for Stephanie have been/are 100% real, as are his feelings for Bernard. However, Tim is still figuring himself out. I don’t think he has the language for it all... yet.
>>
She has not written this to pabelize tim drake, even though all the articles seemed to do that. 

I quote the article in double brackets
<<
Kate Kane is the most prominent canonically queer member of the sprawling Bat-family. She debuted as Batwoman in 2006 in the company’s year-long weekly-TV style series 52, and immediately garnered shock headlines — even though she ultimately had a fairly minor role. Gotham City has slowly become a much queerer place since her introduction, but mostly with villains and secondary characters. The subtext of Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy was finally allowed to be text in the early 2010s. Before she (nearly) married Batman, Catwoman briefly had a girlfriend. Midnighter became a recurring supporting character in Nightwing stories. Police detectives Renee Montoya and Maggie Sawyer and the young vigilante Bluebird/Harper Row flitted in and out of continuity.
>>
I wonder, did Bob Kane leave any diaries or explicit thoughts to the world he created. I am not suggesting any artist should had been restricted. I am not suggesting any artist need to be behind a block. But, I wonder. Many artists after Bob Kane turned many members of Bob Kane's world into LGBTQ+ members, I am not certain Kane wanted that. 

SUB ARTICLE 
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/11/batmans-sidekick-robin-comes-out-as-lgbtq-in-new-comic
SOURCE ARTICLE
https://www.polygon.com/comics/22617395/robin-gay-queer-batman-dc-comics

Marvel and DC face backlash over pay: ‘They sent a thank you note and $5,000 – the movie made $1bn’
SUB ARTICLE 
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/09/marvel-and-dc-face-backlash-over-pay-they-sent-a-thank-you-note-and-5000-the-movie-made-1bn

PRH < Penguin Random House>  and Amanda Gorman Launch Creative Writing Award for Poetry SHARE FOLKS
This year, we are thrilled to announce that we are adding the Amanda Gorman Award for Poetry to our program. This award is one of five creative writing awards given by Penguin Random House. Other categories include fiction/drama; personal essay/memoir; and the Maya Angelou Award for spoken-word. In recognition of the Creative Writing Awards previously being centered in New York City, the competition will award an additional first-place prize to the top entrant from the NYC area. Full press release here.

The 2022 competition will launch on October 1. If you are a current high school seniors who attends public schools in the United States, including the District of Columbia and all U.S. territories, and are planning to attend college – either a two-year or four-year institution – in the fall of 2022, please check back in October to apply.

Contact us at creativewriting@penguinrandomhouse.com

SUB ARTICLE
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/87124-prh-and-amanda-gorman-launch-creative-writing-award-for-poetry.html
RULES
https://social-impact.penguinrandomhouse.com/our-awards/u-s-creative-writing-awards/

Dolly Parton to publish her first novel in 2022
The country music superstar has teamed up with the novelist James Patterson to write Run, Rose, Run, which will be published in March

I love the title

SUB ARTICLE
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/11/dolly-parton-to-publish-her-first-novel-in-2022

John Le Carré's final novel is coming in October — see the first look- I love the cover, very film noiry:) 

Le Carré wrote Silverview alongside his final two novels (Agent Running in the Field and A Legacy of Spies) and left his body of work in the care of his children. This last novel will follow Julian Lawndsley as he flees the big city for a job at a bookstore in a small town; meanwhile, a London spy chief arrives to the seaside enclave to investigate a potential leak. When it hits stands, Silverview will include an afterword from Cornwell, paying tribute to his father — along with his siblings and an archivist, he's currently cataloguing all of le Carré's work.

"This is the authentic le Carré, telling one more story," his son Nick Cornwell — a novelist who writes under the pen name Nick Harkaway — says in a statement. "The book is fraught, forensic, lyrical, and fierce, at long last searching the soul of the modern Secret Intelligence Service itself. It's a superb and fitting final novel."

Jonny Gellar, the author's longtime literary agent, adds that the new novel feels like a gift left for his legions fans: "Silverview is as urgent and alive as any of his past work."

SUB ARTICLE
https://ew.com/books/john-le-carre-posthumous-novel-silverview/
BOOK PAGE
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/703350/silverview-by-john-le-carre/

I Quote the article in double brackets 

<<
...
In July, the Hungarian government imposed an $830 fine on the distributor of the Hungarian translation of Lawrence Schimel’s children’s book What a Family!, citing a law that bans the depiction of homosexuality and gender reassignment in material aimed at minors. The book tells the story of two families with young children—one with two fathers and the other with two mothers.

That incident follows another in Hungary, in October 2020, when a member of parliament put a copy of Meseorszag mindenkie (A Fairy Tale for Everyone), which also features LGBTQ characters, through a shredder. “So the publisher reprinted it as a board book” said Schimel, whose book had the same Hungarian editor.
...
Schimel, an American living in Madrid, has published dozens of LGBTQ-themed works for children and adults. “It’s important for all families, not just those who are LGBTQ, to see and read these books which show just how normal these families are,” he said. What a Family! is now sold in Hungary with a sticker, warning readers that it depicts families “outside the norm.” It was originally published as two books in Spanish, and Orca Book Publishers is releasing it as two books in the U.S. in September.

Russia led the way in overt European LGBTQ censorship with the passage of its “anti-LGBTQ propaganda” law in 2012. Today, LGBTQ books are routinely suppressed there, and those that make it to market are sold with warning stickers.

“The campaigns by the populist governments in Europe, such as in Hungary and Poland, against the LGBTQ community are in direct violation of the principles of inclusion and the celebration of diversity,” said Michiel Kolman, chair for inclusive publishing at the IPA. He noted that in Poland, several towns have declared themselves LGBTQ-free zones, forcing LGBTQ residents to move, while in Hungary the transgender community was first targeted, and after that the broader LGBTQ community.

“The policies manifest themselves through censorship of books and other media that directly contradict the freedom-to-publish mission of the IPA,” Kolman told PW. He added that the Hungarian laws are likely an effort to deflect attention from the country’s dismal economic and Covid-19 track record.

Following the news of the attack on Schimel’s book in Hungary, the IPA, the Federation of European Publishers, and the European and International Booksellers Federation all reaffirmed their support for Hungarian publishers and readers, and their solidarity with LGBTQ communities in Hungary.

Also in July, the government of Belarus moved to dissolve the local branch of PEN after the freedom of speech organization released a report showing 621 instances of human rights violations, including arrests and imprisonments, against culture workers in the first six months of 2021. Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, was among those around the world who issued a statement in support of PEN Belarus. “When a government silences and stomps on its writers, it reveals a level of shame and decay that leaders are aiming to hide, but instead only expose,” Nossel wrote. “Belarus’ leaders may think they can suppress the truth by muzzling those who dare tell it, but the story of the will of the people and the scale of brutal repression will find its way to the world. We stand in solidarity with the writers of PEN Belarus and are determined to ensure that their vital voices are heard and their rights to express themselves vindicated.” As recently as last week, a dissident journalist from Belarus who disappeared was found dead in Ukraine.

Nossel told PW that this type of activity is an attempt by authoritarian governments to control the narrative, both at home and abroad, in a world where information is fast moving, freely available, and difficult to suppress. She cited China and the closures of bookstores and publications that express dissent in Hong Kong as particularly egregious examples of censorship. “[The Chinese] are reaching down to destroy the remnants of any challenge to their authority,” she said. “For organizations like PEN, fighting this is an ongoing battle.”

Nicholas Lemann, director of Columbia Global Reports, a publisher that offers short books on hot political and social justice topics, noted his house has been vigilant in covering the rise of authoritarianism, the curtailing of press freedoms, and China. In May, Columbia Global Reports published The Politics of Our Time by John Judis, a one-volume contemporary history of populism, nationalism, and socialism.

Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, said he routinely gets reports from former students about the rise in persecution of journalists. “In recent years, I have heard more and more often from journalists in India about Narendra Modi and in Brazil about Jair Bolsonaro and what they are doing to limit press freedoms,” he noted. “At the turn of the millennium, we thought that the triumph of the American economic system inextricably went along with the triumph of the American freedom of expression system. And we thought these would be globalized. Well, that didn’t happen,” Lemann said.

It has long been known that the Chinese government keeps a close eye on which books are distributed there and maintains control of the issuing of ISBNs. Officially, censorship is not a state policy. Publishers have long held that if a book does not become too popular or influential in China, it will be tolerated. But unofficial policy is flexible, and recent trends have shifted toward a narrowing of what is considered acceptable. For example, there’s been a crackdown in recent years on what can be published on China’s wildly popular writing websites, such as China Literature, and works that are deemed too “salacious” have been removed. Last year, Fang Fang, who lives in Wuhan and published a blog about the early days of lockdown during the pandemic, was vilified by the government. Her blog entries were collected into the book Wuhan Diary, published by HarperCollins.

In July, the Chinese government outlawed foreign direct investment in education companies. The law is aimed at companies that offer tutoring to Chinese students—a business that has ballooned to an estimated $100 billion per year. The law is likely to impact numerous foreign education publishers that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the sector. “The government is operating with the idea that liberal Western ideas may be damaging the children,” Nossel said.

Different countries have different means of controlling book publication and exerting censorship. In Turkey, authorities require that any book sold in bookstores has a government “banderol”—a sticker testifying to its “authenticity.” The government claims this is necessary to combat piracy, but in effect it acts as a means of regulating publishers.

In Venezuela, officially, publishers can publish anything—but they may not be able to acquire paper and ink to print certain books. The same happens in Russia, where a printer might suddenly become reticent to produce a potentially objectionable book for fear of government blowback.

IPA fights for the freedom to publish

The IPA maintains a committee that monitors freedom-to-publish issues around the world and presents an annual award, the Prix Voltaire, honoring courageous publishers that have faced oppression. To reinforce its mission to support global publishing during the pandemic, the IPA also recently launched a program to promote publishing, dubbed INSPIRE (International Sustainable Publishing and Industry Resilience). Two of the tenets of the program’s charter are maintaining that “freedom to publish is a prerequisite for diversity, creativity, prosperity, tolerance, and progress” and that “copyright and freedom to publish are mutually reinforcing fundamental rights that are essential to the practice and preservation of political culture, education, scholarship, and socioeconomic development.” The charter has garnered signatures from more than 100 organizations around the world, including Publishers Weekly.

“Many countries have introduced special laws to deal with the Covid-19 crisis,” said Kristenn Einarsson, chair of the IPA’s Freedom to Publish committee and former managing director of the Norwegian Publishers Association. “There is a growing concern that these might be maintained in the future, after the crisis has ended, and that some of them could be used to limit the freedom to publish and freedom of expression.”

Einarsson said in some authoritarian states, censorship can be internalized and become self-censorship. “The same fears that can affect publishers and lead them to self-censor can also infect authors, booksellers, and librarians. In the end, if these fears delay or stop the creation or publication of such reports and works, then it is we, the readers, who are deprived. Any discussion about what should be published is of course welcomed, but it is important that publishers stand firmly to defend the publishing of all that they deem worthy of publication, even—and perhaps especially—if those works challenge the boundaries established by the society they operate in.”
>>

MY thoughts... first, governments do have the right to ban anything. all governments ban artistic content. all governments. Sequentially, suggesting any government is bad or criminal based on banning requires all governments in humanity to be imprisoned. But, communities require rules. Individualism has functional limits when one does not live alone, and each human or humanity has never been alone on earth. 

Schimel's point encapsulates the problem. In most communities in humanity, the entire LGBTQ+ experience as a collection of communities or in parts is not common or public. Artist like him who want to make the activities public or common in the collective mindset have an automatic enemy in those who do not. In any community where most do not, opposition grows to where people have lgbtq+ free zones. In the usa, I don't recall any publicly touted lgbtq+ free zones. 

The problem with the word populist is it means of the people. IF a government in populists and you dislike its position. You are stating you want the position that most people have under a government to be opposed. If Majority doesn't rule then who does? If minority rules, how long will the majority allow before extreme violence hits? 

I wish people will stop using sars-cov-2 for everything. Every country that is doing something someone does not like is referred to in media as doing it because of the sars-cov-2 in some fashion. I wish modern media will kill that interpretation.

One thing I learned in the Ken Burns vietnam war documentary on PBS was that during the 1960s the polls was in favor of staying in the vietnam war. What is my point? Modern media makes it seem like most people didn't want to be in the vietnam war. But that is a lie. The problem with many governments in humanity is global media, global media defined as media between countries, is dominated by the usa and creates a narrative that most of the people in a country are opposed to the actions. Are most people in china, opposed to the actions by the chinese government toward HOng Kong? I don't know. I am not suggesting I support or oppose the chinese governments actions. But, I know I am not certain they are not what the majority of people in china want. And again, if the majority isn't in control, then the minority is, and how long will the majority be nonviolent to the in control minority? If the majority is in control then... what is wrong? If ninety-nine people are happy and one is not. The one person can't be in control over the other 99. The one person has to leave if they want things their way, or eat crow. 

Nicholas Lemann need to define who is we, when he said :"we thought that the triumph of the American economic system inextricably went along with the triumph of the American freedom of expression system. And we thought these would be globalized. Well, that didn’t happen" 
We didn't include the native american. We didn't black folk in black towns in the usa. If anything, Lemann proves why people like him failed, cause people like him assumed his agenda was similar to other people. Second, Lemann has to describe what the Statian economic system is. The USA financial model is simple. Kill a people for their land, enslave a people for their labor, and then maintain a system to maintain wealth in your community. He talks about freedom of expression. But if most black people, native americans, women in the usa circa 1865 couldn't read or write then outside talking who was expressing anything? Most of said people did not have the money<fiscal poor> or time<laborer> or situation<prison> to be at a pulpit. Lemann is wrong, Statian economic system or system of expression did become globalized. People like Lemann was confused as to what the usa was exporting.

The USA is the king of using unrelated things to cover agendas. Freedom was the cover for the financially profitable drugs or arms trading zone called vietnam. Improvement of non white europeans or peace in the USA was the cover for white financed negative anti native education camps called boarding schools for native american children or the white financed colleges or associations that were fiscal class covens for black people who demand nonviolence to all in the black community against all other black people. Sars-Cov-2 is the cover for an agenda of raising the cost of living, or making media more narrower through streaming channels, deemed as the best activities to keep people safe from a virus that only a person living in a viral blockading suit can be.  

SUB ARTICLE
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-news/article/87097-censorship-on-the-rise-worldwide.html
 International Publishers Association report "Freedom to Publish: Challenges, Violations and Countries of Concern" 
https://www.internationalpublishers.org/images/aa-content/ipa-reports/State_of_Publishing_Reports_2020/Freedom-to-Publish-Challenges-violations-and-countries-of-concern.pdf

Goodreads Ransoms, LGBTQ+ Robin, and Dolly’s Debut: This Week in Book News
MAIN ARTICLE
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/08/13/goodreads-ransoms-lgbtq-robin-and-dollys-debut-this-week-in-book-news/

my favorite cover is the heart man, i even like the title, i can see that as the movie poster. ... based on synopsis the most interesting for me is the life and death in paradise, which I think is a good title also. I can see #LDIP , I am a unashamed , unapologetic:) lover of film noir, old cheesy classic style , so the cops and robbers world they allude to speaks to the camp I accept most:) what about you? your favorite cover or interesting synopsis? 

Founded in 2011 on the sunbathed tropical island of Barbados, Beyond Publishing Caribbean was created by a coalition of passionate Caribbean artists and writers, themselves fans of comics, movies, anime, and books. It was established to be a platform for local and regional talent and creativity, with the agenda of advocating and popularizing their works under one banner. Brimming with a wealth of ideas and artistic acumen, Beyond Publishing comics highlight and incorporate Caribbean history, heritage, and culture in a variety of ways and genres.

From humble beginnings, Beyond Publishing has seen members come and go; and despite ongoing and daunting challenges, they remain resolute in their goal of producing quality comics with a distinct and authentic Caribbean flair. This avid commitment shared by its members over the past decade has resulted in progressive exposure on an international scale. Even with its small library of titles, the full breadth of its illustrative and narrative prowess is on display in every issue. Some of their prominent titles include:
READ MORE IN THE ARTICLE BELOW
https://blacksci-fi.com/beyond-publishing-a-caribbean-milestone/

MAry j blige plays dinah washington,Blige is a little more chunkier but great vocal choice since they are singing all the songs. Marlon wayans may finally play another role his sister or I can watch with him. ... I think one of the most amazing things about the otis redding song is how, aretha franklin did something many black musicians did through the years, still continue to do, ala every breath you take being turned into  a mortuary song. But she did it the best. She proves with her rendition of respect how underrated the way one produces an artwork gives them ownership. A person has to compose a song/write lyrics, but she proves with respect that the singing of a song is unique enough to warrant ownership. A point I think is underrated. And i know it is not legal cannon, but I think it is true musically. What would the usa anthem be without black singers? ... to the time period, ray charles/johnny cash/aretha franklin/i am forgetting the white female musican's name, the coal miners daughter, but they all came up at a time where the music industry was starting to lose its financial form from the 1800s. The days of ma rainey's black bottom where all musicians received nothing for their work was ending. 
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-08-06/jennifer-hudson-aretha-franklin-respect

How Jennifer Hudson found new ‘Respect’ for Aretha Franklin in the role of a lifetime

BY LORRAINE ALITELEVISION CRITIC 
AUG. 6, 2021 9 AM PT
Jennifer Hudson knew she had her work cut out for her when she agreed to play the Queen of Soul. “You just can’t wake up one morning and decide ‘I’m gonna be Aretha Franklin,’” said Hudson. “I mean, her voice. Her legacy. The songs. Who she is to all of us. It was daunting. There were times when I was like, ‘Jennifer, what have you done?’”

The answer is “Respect,” the highly anticipated biopic sanctioned by Franklin, who handpicked Hudson for the role before her death in 2018. The film chronicles the late singer’s rise from her father’s church choir to international stardom, shining a light on the talent and the stories behind the songs.

“‘Respect’ is the song and the hit we all love from the gifted Aretha Franklin,” says Hudson. “But when you add her life narrative around it, it’s that much more powerful. Understanding the era she grew up in and the courage that she had and her activism. Her relationship with Dr. King and Angela Davis. It’s like, wow, you see all sides of the human and the way she used her art to reflect herself and support others and be an advocate. So now it’s more than just the song. It’s more than just the artist. Knowing her history helped me understand her legacy and understand why her impact has been so great.”

The film, which hits theaters Aug. 13 after decades of planning and a year of COVID-related release delays, moves from Franklin’s religious upbringing with the charismatic but controlling Reverend C.L. Franklin to her hard-won stardom of the 1960s to a spiritual return to gospel music with her highest-selling album ever, 1972’s “Amazing Grace.”

Rather than lip sync to pre-recorded tracks, Hudson belted out The Queen’s material live on set during filming (“Aint No Way,” “Chain of Fools,” “Think”) as did the rest of the cast — which includes Tony award winner Audra McDonald portraying young Aretha’s mother and Broadway talents Hailey Kilgore and Saycon Sengbloh playing her sisters Carolyn and Erma Franklin (the women’s harmonizing alone is worth the price of admission).

But Hudson is a singular force. The former “American Idol” contestant, who like Franklin grew up singing in church, emotes with the same passion that won her an Oscar for 2006’s “Dreamgirls,” using her powerhouse vocals to re-create iconic moments in music history including the birth of Aretha’s own sound in Muscle Shoals’ Fame studio and a knock-‘em-dead performance of the film’s namesake at Madison Square Garden. With Hudson and other music-minded folks on board, “Respect” is the rare biopic where the celebrated artist’s compositions also land a starring role.

“I wanted to make a movie where music was front and center,” said director Liesl Tommy. Known for her work on Broadway, including her Tony-nominated direction of the play “Eclipsed,” “Respect” marks Tommy’s first time directing a feature film. “Aretha was capable of so much power when she sings and so much delicacy and nuance. I wanted the way that we feel listening to her music to be the way that we felt watching the film. Another thing that guided me is that she has so much emotion in her singing. I felt that the film should be emotional too because that’s who she was. And even though she was very protective of her private life, her private life is all over her music.”

Written by Tracey Scott Wilson (a playwright who has also written for TV series including “The Americans” and “Fosse/Verdon”), “Respect” stars Forest Whitaker as Franklin’s father, Marlon Wayans as her husband and manager, Ted White, and Tituss Burgess as the gentle Reverend Dr. James Cleveland. Mary J. Blige plays diva Dinah Washington and Marc Maron is pushy Atlantic Records exec, Jerry Wexler.

“Respect” follows in the footsteps of other biopics, such as “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Ray” and “Walk the Line,” that dared to tackle the legacies of treasured singers. And as American icons go, Aretha is right at the top. .

The pressure of portraying her was not lost on Hudson. “I was calm on set. The freakout came later,” said Hudson recently while in Los Angeles to promote the film. She arrived to the interview wearing a necklace that spelled out “R.E.S.P.E.C.T” in gold letters. She had it made as a memento of the film because “it’s not every day you get to be the Queen of Soul,” she said, slipping on pink, fuzzy slippers after shedding a pair of deadly high stilettos she donned for a photo shoot.

Hudson worked with acting and dialect coaches for the role, and she turned to the legendary Patti LaBelle for insight into the experience of Black female artists in the 1960s. “They had a lot less freedom and women took up less space” says Hudson. “Ms. Franklin spoke up with her music.”

Hudson took her job seriously, learning to play piano for the role: “I’m really still trying to get’ Dr. Feelgood.’ I got the piano part, but now I’ve got to figure out how to sing it while playing it. It’s a process.” Slipping into fabulous reproductions of Aretha’s wardrobe was easier, though Hudson counted 83 costume changes and 11 different wigs (the beehive was her favorite). “And I loved her clothes in the birthday scene. She’s wearing a gold dress and a big fur. I couldn’t help but feel royal.”

Hudson grew up in 1980s Chicago worshipping Whitney Houston, but by the time she auditioned for “American Idol,” her song of choice was Franklin’s version of “Share Your Love With Me.” Even the jaded Simon Cowell was impressed (still, she lost the competition in 2004 when she came in seventh). But Hudson’s personal associations with The Queen’s catalogue had its disadvantages when she was prepping for the film.

“Playing her is a completely different thing from being a singer and fan who sings her songs,” said Hudson. “I mean, thank God I already knew the majority of her material. That was one less thing I had to worry about. But I remember saying on the set, ‘She doesn’t know this song yet.’ Jennifer Hudson knows the song. We all know the song. We know what it became. But in Aretha’s life, in that moment, she doesn’t. She’s learning it. It hasn’t manifested yet. We can’t overshoot the story and speak of her as who she became because we’re in the beginning phases of the making of Aretha.”

Tommy said she too had to break from her own personal associations with Franklin’s work in order to approach the story with a fresh perspective. “When you listen to music and there’s a song that you love, you’re bringing yourself to that,” said Tommy. “It’s like it becomes your personal soundtrack and it’s about your life. So there’s a detaching from how I felt when I was 8 years old that I first heard ‘Natural Woman.’ It’s not about me sitting in a window looking at the rain. It’s something else. You just have to give over to her and her story and her history and that was the great joy of this — discovering the music in a brand new way.”

Tommy and Wilson did extensive research into Franklin’s life to ensure the film was as accurate as possible, from her pregnancy at age 12 to her plight in the studio as the only female musician to her friendship with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. For the religious and gospel references, it helped that Wilson’s father and grandfather were Baptist ministers.

Franklin herself had also reportedly been involved in the planning of her biopic up until a week before her death, and more recently, her family and estate made themselves available to the filmmakers. The scenario was quite different for another recent television biopic, National Geographic’s four-part limited series “Genius: Aretha,” which earned an Emmy nomination for star Cynthia Erivo but was blasted by Franklin’s family for its apparent inaccuracies.

“[Franklin’s family] really trusted us, which is a great gift,” said Tommy. “I will never stop being grateful to them for how they sensed our care and sensed that we were two Black women who would die before we let anything not be right in this film. ... In the past, these stories about Black people were pretty often written and directed by white men. Aretha was so real. She was so authentic. I wanted this film to feel like it was undeniably her world and it wasn’t from some kind of voyeur’s perspective. It was from a lived-in perspective. It was really important that her realness be present inside of the film.”

Hudson met Franklin when both women were doing what they loved best: performing on stage. “I got to open up for her in Merrillville , Ind. in 2003 at one of her concerts,” says Hudson. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, I get to sing at Aretha Franklin’s show. She allowed me to do this!’ That was a moment in itself. And then after I won the Oscar for ‘Dreamgirls’ [in 2007] we had a meeting about the possibility of me [portraying] her. ... Years later she called me when I was doing [the Broadway revival of] ‘The Color Purple’ and she said, ‘I’ve made my decision on who I want to play me. It is you. Don’t say anything to a soul.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, ma’am. I won’t.’ Now here we are. It was like holding my breath for 15 years.”

During that time, Hudson has released three albums, appeared in countless TV series and films (“Sex and the City,” “Empire,” “The Secret Life of Bees,” “Cats”), did Broadway and had a son with professional wrestler David Daniel Otunga. She also overcame the 2008 murder of her mother, brother and nephew by her sister’s estranged husband. Hudson has said she made it through the tragedy thanks to her faith.

The church is embedded in Hudson’s soul. And apparently, so is Franklin’s influence. “I didn’t realize until researching and even shooting ‘Respect’ that ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Precious Little Words,’ songs from her ‘Amazing Grace’ album, they were the same versions I grew up singing in church. I was brought up in a church too. We sang ‘Amazing Grace’ every Sunday. But to learn it was her renditions, it’s like wow. So she’s always been there.”

Hudson sang “Amazing Grace” at Franklin’s funeral, 50 years after Franklin sang “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” at King’s memorial. “She was courageous enough to take a stand,” says Hudson of Franklin’s involvement in the civil rights movement. “She used her platform to respond to the times. She fought so hard to get there, and that could have taken her down, but she did it. She left us an example — for us to keep pushing. That’s what got me through this whole thing — her saying, ‘Jennifer, go on.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I’m as courageous as you, but if you think I can, I’m going to give it a try.’”
 

100 Literary Jeopardy Clues from Real Episodes of Jeopardy!
By Emily Temple
https://lithub.com/100-literary-jeopardy-clues-from-real-episodes-of-jeopardy/

THE PI OF COLOR: WHEN IT’S ABOUT MORE THAN THE CRIME
JUNE 29, 2021 BY TRACY CLARK
"I had to acknowledge that diverse characters, in whatever genre, straddle a fence. One side of the fence represents who they are, the other represents how society sees and accepts them."

We all know the PI. You need only rattle off the names—Spade, Hammer, Marlowe, Archer—to conjure the picture. Tough, swaggering, fast-talking, busted nose, cigs, that Webley–Fosbery revolver.

They’re Bogie-like, usually, men sure of themselves and sure of their place in the world. They stand firmly at the top of society’s pecking order, even though they ply their shadowy trade by night, solo, down near the docks or in a dive bar, soaked in gin and regret.

But, thankfully, the world has grown a li’l bit since Hammett set Spade off in pursuit of “the bird.” The PI has grown up, too, broadened a bit. He, or she, is not as solitary, a lot of the gumshoeing is done from the comfort of their swivel chair, the gin is artisanal, not every last one of them by default looks like Bogie or Dick Powell.

More writers of color are writing PIs of color, which might explain the broadening. These non-Marlowes feel deeper, rounded, they’re often more complex than their Coolidge-era counterparts. And when these characters hit the page, they’re hitting it hard, bringing their communities, their identities, their unique perspectives on the world right along with them.
Here are the tropes for the classic PI. He’s an outsider scarred by life. He has his own code of ethics, often questionable. He doesn’t play well with others and wears sardonicism like a cheap suit. This guy fights the good fight, but he’s not above fighting it dirty. He defends the damsel in distress, thinking she’s Penelope Pitstop when she’s really Ursula, the sea witch. He’s a little thick, this PI, but he’s not dumb.

I was instantly drawn to the genre, I think, by the sheer stubbornness of all those slippery tecs. You were never quite 100 percent sure if they were good guys or bad ones, but I liked their tenacity, their bullheadedness. You could beat the stuffing out of a PI on Monday and Tuesday, and he’d be back bright and early Wednesday with a brace on his nose, talking smack, like he just KO’d Joe Louis.

When I sat down to write my PI, Cassandra Raines, I borrowed some of those tropes. She’s a bit of loner who doesn’t play well with others. She has her scars and flaws, which have been exciting to poke at as the series has progressed. She is headstrong, relentless, unapologetic, an outsider who thumbs her nose at authority, like a good PI should. I stopped short of the busted nose (I cringe just thinking about it). But when I made her Black and female, I was also acutely aware that I had firmly locked her into a specific worldview and had rooted her in a rich community. I knew that she would come to the page much differently than Spade came to Hammett’s. She would have to be an outsider by virtue of her profession but also by virtue of her sex and race. She was a woman in a man’s world, a Black woman in a society that looked at her as “other” everywhere but where she came from, regardless of how competent or intelligent I made her.

As a reader I can certainly put myself in Spade’s shoes, or Archer’s, and go along for the ride, but I know those shoes weren’t meant for me. My realm and theirs were worlds apart. So, as a writer, I created a PI that looked like me, who shared some of my experiences. I planted her in a community with the kind of people I was familiar with and gave her a place to live that looked and felt and sounded like the one I knew. Marlowe was great as far as Marlowe went, but I wanted my PI to “represent.”

Here’s where it got tough. What did that mean? What would representation even look like on the page? I didn’t want her to move through my book world having her race be the most defining thing about her. Who leaves their house every morning with a bullhorn and a proclamation on their lips? But her race isn’t an insignificant thing either. Could I tip a hat to the old PI, acknowledge the archetype, and then re-shape it so that it made sense for Cass?

I could make her capable, hard-driving, indefatigable. I could make her snarky like Spade, but I had to acknowledge that diverse characters, in whatever genre, straddle a fence. One side of the fence represents who they are, the other represents how society sees and accepts them. Cass has a foot planted firmly on each side of that fence. She’s a Black woman in 2021 up to her neck in “isms.” In contrast, Spade traveled around in a society that worked for him, one that was set up to work just that way. Things work differently down Cass’s way.

Justice, in principle, in execution, looks different to Cass than it does for Archer or Marlowe. Right and wrong might not be so black and white. Cass would understand the backstory on issues like grinding poverty, mass incarceration, the role of policing in black and brown communities, rampant homelessness, the ravages of drug addiction and the damage all these things cause to families and the home place, because she’s there where all this plays out, she’s in it. I can’t see any of those other fellas giving any of that all that much thought.

Where Cass comes from, Marlowe would be “other.” Marlowe may walk Cass’s streets, but he cannot know them like she knows them. The reverse is also true. But the fact that we now have stories about Cass’s streets and not just Marlowe’s is the change. A reader can now see things through a different set of human eyes. This change in perspective, in the way Cass thinks, based on who she is and what she knows, colors how she deals with the people she encounters. A junkie may be just a junkie to Marlowe; Cass may not think of addiction as a personal failing. Understanding goes a long way toward humanizing a character.
I didn’t invent this wheel. Writers of color have been writing PIs of color for decades. Take Rudolph Fisher’s “The Conjure-Man Dies” (1932), credited with being the first detective novel by an African-American author, or Chester Himes’s Harlem cycle of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Today, we have Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins and Gary Phillips’s Ivan Monk, Steph Cha’s Juniper Song, Rachel Howzell Hall’s Grayson Sykes, Cheryl Head’s Charlie Mack, Delia Pitts’ SJ Rook, Stephen Mack Jones’ August Snow. Black, biracial, Korean-American, male, female, straight, gay, each character is firmly planted someplace. Through their eyes we see a Detroit, Harlem, Los Angeles not many see and meet people we might never otherwise meet. No one knows these places, these people, better than the writers who write about them.

That knowledge, that familiar base, is important. Mosley’s Easy Rawlins comes out of the Watts area of L.A. Easy knows Watts better than Spade would know it. Alex Segura’s Cuban-American detective Pete Fernandez has Miami covered. Marlowe couldn’t know Miami as well as Pete knows it if he crammed for a thousand years. Spade would be lost in Cass’s Chicago, too, and I’m sure that if she encountered him there, she’d do all she could to ditch him in an alley. Who wants a swaggering Bogie-type trailing behind her? He’d stick out like a sore thumb!

In the end, I decided Cass didn’t have to represent, all she has to do was be. She lives on the page like most of us live off of it, matter-of-factly, eschewing the soapbox, the waving banners, quietly getting the job done. The story, like the play, is the thing (to paraphrase a line from Hamlet), and as I write her, I pair her toughness with empathy and her intelligence with compassion. The fence is not going anywhere, not for her, not for the other PIs, not for the rest of us out here in the real world. But there’s drama gold in the way she and all the non-Marlowes straddle it, and my job is to tell the truth about it.

So, the PI, yes, but not the old PI. Make fair use of the classic tropes? Why not? Who doesn’t like a good double-cross? But there’s a whole new world out there full of non-Marlowes now. Why not follow them home and see what they’re about?

https://crimereads.com/the-pi-of-color-when-its-about-more-than-the-crime/

Hungarian authorities have fined the distributor of a children’s book featuring same-sex parents.
By Walker Caplan
Hungarian authorities have fined the distributor of a children’s book for its depiction of homosexuality. The book in question, a two-part Hungarian translation of Early One Morning and Bedtime, Not Playtime! by Lawrence Schimel, portrays the daily routines of two children, who each have same-sex parents.
...
https://lithub.com/hungarian-authorities-have-fined-the-distributor-of-a-childrens-book-featuring-same-sex-parents/

MAIN ARTICLE
Delayed Discovery, Online SDCC, and Literary Jeopardy: This Week in Book News
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/07/09/delayed-discovery-online-sdcc-and-literary-jeopardy-this-week-in-book-news/

“I Probably Modeled Him on Something I’d Heard on The Wire”
The audiobook industry is collectively squirming through the cultural debate on representation and casting.
BY LAURA MILLER
Twenty years ago, Grover Gardner began narrating a series of comic mysteries whose title character is a white lawyer named Andy Carpenter. In the series—written by David Rosenfelt—Carpenter also has a partner, Willie Miller, who’s a Black ex-con, which means Gardner had to voice Miller too. Back then, he hardly gave any thought to the fact that he was a white narrator voicing a Black man. “I probably modeled him on something I’d heard on television, on Hill Street Blues, or The Wire,” Gardner said. Today, 14 books later, he’s still voicing Willie—but he’s changed his approach. “I’d think very hard about doing that kind of accent now,” he said.
In an era of heightened sensitivity to issues of representation and misrepresentation, it’s no longer acceptable to cast a white actor as a character of color in a movie or TV show. But audiobooks play by different rules. It’s customary now in the audiobook business to try to match a book’s narrator to the gender, race, and sometimes sexual orientation of a novel’s author or main character. Yet most novels feature characters with an assortment of different backgrounds, and this can require narrators to voice characters with identities very different from their own.
When audiobooks first rose to popularity in 1980s, the field was overwhelmingly white. Gardner, who has been an audiobook narrator for four decades and also works as a producer, recalls that, for the first couple of decades of his career, “the whole industry was geared toward middle-aged white businessmen” who listened to “books on tape” while on the road for work. There were hardly any narrators of color, and few female narrators back then, Gardner said. “I recorded Scott Turow’s [1990 novel] Burden of Proof. The narrator of that book is a Latino lawyer,” he told me. “I did it. We did whatever they sent us back then. But I wouldn’t do that book today. You would find a Latino narrator to do it.”
Apart from the amused response to the cartoonish accents Ronan Farrow rolled out when narrating the audio version of his 2019 exposé Catch and Kill, the audiobook world has so far been largely free of the sort of scandals that have triggered reckonings about representation in other creative industries, like magazine publishing and television. This is partly because it’s a low-profile, unglamorous field that doesn’t attract a lot of attention from the press. But many who work in the industry still feel the tensions around casting acutely. Amid a publishing boom in literature by writers of color, nonwhite narrators are being offered more work than they once were. Meanwhile, like most narrators, they find themselves getting asked to voice marginalized characters from backgrounds that bear no resemblance to theirs. January LaVoy, a biracial narrator who identifies as Black, said that cross-cultural audiobook narration is freighted in different ways for white narrators and narrators of color. “For many white narrators, it’s difficult because of fear [of backlash]. For many narrators of color, it’s difficult because of the weight of responsibility.” The industry is grappling with these issues daily. “It’s difficult for everyone,” LaVoy said.
Although some publishers have audiobook divisions, they usually function separately from the print division, and the audio rights for many titles get sold to separate companies such as Brilliance or Blackstone. The producer of an audiobook, who is employed by the publisher, acquires the rights and oversees casting and other big-picture decisions, such as opting for multiple narrators on a novel that often switches points of view.
Michele Cobb, a producer and the executive director of the Audio Publishers Association, told me that she and her colleagues have tried to figure out how they can sensitively ask narrators to provide producers with information about their backgrounds—such as gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability—that can be helpful when casting. Cobb explained that it’s an ongoing challenge to cast appropriate narrators for books by authors of color, while avoiding typecasting. In her own company, which publishes romance audiobooks, “I’ve definitely had authors come back and say, ‘Well, this character is white so I wouldn’t go with a Black narrator,’ ” a choice she feels obliged to respect.
Traditionally, both a director and an engineer, usually both freelancers, work on the recording with the narrator. Director Simone Barros outlined an exhausting list of tasks to me, from making sure the narrator doesn’t skip or add words to researching accurate regional pronunciations and maintaining continuity. “You can get to the last page of the book, and it will mention that a character had a German accent the whole time,” said Barros, speaks with the mile-a-minute lucidness of a person whose job is anticipating every contingency. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.*
In the case of some first-person narrators, such as the one in Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind, an audiobook Barros directed, the book is “written so much within the perspective of the first person that the ethnicity of other characters are specifically heard from the narrator’s perspective of them. More specifically in Antkind, the author’s very point is this shifting, mutable and even unreliable perspective, to shine a light on how too often minority characters go unseen, or only seen or heard through a bias cipher.” But with a book written in the third person, she and her narrator will work up a full voice profile—a cache of recorded dialogue and biographical information—for each speaking character. That way, if, say, a villain appears in a novel’s first few pages only to disappear for several chapters, the narrator and director can remind themselves of what he sounds like. Such profiles are particularly helpful with recurring characters in sequels and series, which may be recorded years later.
In the past, it was largely left up to the professionals behind the scenes to anticipate and head off any problems. Ten years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for a book’s author—the person most intimately acquainted with a title—to have no input at all in the audiobook production. But as audiobooks became a more mainstream and high-profile format, authors began seeking more oversight. Today, writers often get the final say on casting, and are often invited to choose a narrator from a selection of sample recordings and encouraged to provide crucial information about how characters ought to sound. Nathan Harris, a Black writer whose debut novel, The Sweetness of Water, is set at the end of the Civil War, knew the accents of his multiracial cast of characters, who include freed slaves, would be a challenge. “You can go down a very precarious road with how they sound,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t want to do it myself.” His publisher presented him with an audition recording by William DeMeritt. “They told me they could go in all sorts of different directions if that’s what I wanted,” Harris said. “But he just nailed it.”
Over the past few years, the crew of professionals who work on a given book has increasingly been whittled down to a bare minimum, putting greater pressure on narrators’ judgment—even though a narrator, who is in most cases a freelance contractor, doesn’t have much time to carefully screen a book for potential stumbling blocks before agreeing to the job. The exploding demand for audiobooks with the advent of digital downloads and, most recently, an increasing number of home studios built during the pandemic also means that more narrators have ended up doing most of the production work and key decision-making on their own.
Some narrators say they now turn down jobs when they feel unsure about voicing major characters. Cassandra Campbell—narrator of, among other things, Delia Owens’ bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing, a novel featuring several Black supporting characters—recalled narrating the first two in a series of books, which made her the automatic choice for the third. But when she discovered that the third book was told from the point of view of a young Burmese boy, Campbell, who is white, bowed out. “I just didn’t feel comfortable with it,” she said.
A multitude of minor characters can turn an audio book into a minefield for its narrator. Edoardo Ballerini, who was profiled in the New York Times Magazine last year as “a go-to voice for intelligent, subtle but gripping narrations of books,” says he’s now most often asked to narrate books requiring European accents. (His father is an Italian poet, and he was raised in New York.) Still, challenges do arise. “Take a James Patterson book,” he explained. “Let’s say it’s set in New York City and the detective is hard-boiled, an Italian-American. I can do that. His partner is a feisty woman and I think I can handle that.” But then the minor characters start showing up, sometimes slotted into uncomfortably stereotypical roles: “They get in a cab and there’s the cabbie, or they run into a perp who happens to be Black, or whatever it is. You have to voice them as well. And there’s really no way for anyone to say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do this book because there are a handful of lines by an Indian cabbie.’ ”
Meanwhile, many narrators of color—extra-conscious of the weight of representation—find themselves engaging in a lot of extra, unpaid work researching characters and voices that they may ultimately decide they can’t do justice to. Recently, LaVoy bowed out on a title in a children’s series she narrates about a group of middle school students who travel the world with their eccentric professor, encountering mythical creatures from the cultures they visit. “When we did one that took place in the Pacific Northwest,” she said, “we got a Native American linguist from the Muckleshoot tribe to work with me. I felt really comfortable,” she said. “But this one particular book took place in Cuba, and it was very heavily written in Spanish,” a language LaVoy doesn’t speak fluently. When she got to a part where the whole group begins singing the Cuban national anthem, she decided to pass. “They needed someone with a different mouth,” she concluded.
A character’s accent can be an evocation of her origins and identity, but it can also be—as was the case with Apu, the Indian-born convenience-store clerk on The Simpsons, voiced by white actor Hank Azaria—a mocking caricature. (Azaria recently announced that he would no longer voice Apu and expressed a desire to “go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize.”) “Actors love to do accents!” Campbell told me. “It’s fun to do vocal gymnastics, but we have had a moment of recognizing that there are certain accents where you’re appropriating someone’s culture.”
The one motto that nearly every audiobook professional I interviewed repeated to me when I asked about their strategies for dealing with accents is “less is more.” Kevin R. Free—a Black theater actor who began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago and has become the voice of both a soap opera–addicted cyborg in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series and of Eric Carle’s iconic picture books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, etc.)—laughingly recalled reporting for his very first recording session armed with a set of theatrically bold character voices, only to be told by his director: “I don’t want you to think of doing this book as doing a solo show. … There’s no reason for you to go all the way there.”* That holds especially true for cross-cultural accents. If Ballerini feels that “maybe I’m not the right person to give a voice to this particular character, let me just do it as plainly and as simply as I can. I think that’s a general trend that’s happening in the industry.”
Campbell explained that when voicing characters of color, she uses an acting technique that focuses on the character’s intentions rather than on more superficial markers of identity like accent. “What does the character want from the other person in the scene? What is the conflict of the scene? Play that fully without relying on cultural stereotypes.” In Campbell’s recording of Where the Crawdads Sing, she audibly dials the rural North Carolina accents of the Black characters further down than the accents of the white characters they interact with.
Sometimes, however, an accent shouldn’t be underplayed, because it serves a crucial role in the story. That can create conflict with the production or postproduction staff, if they’re not familiar with or sensitive to the cultural context of a book. Barros directed the audiobook of Simon Han’s 2020 novel Nights When Nothing Happened, about a family of Chinese immigrants living in Texas. The wife in the book becomes annoyed when her husband leaves an outgoing message on their answering machine pronouncing the family’s surname as “Chang,” as the Texans around them say it, rather than using the Mandarin pronunciation, which is closer to “Cheng.” When narrator James Chen’s recording went through a postproduction process called quality control, or QC, Barros and Chen received orders for “pickups” (short rerecordings edited into the final audiobook to correct errors) on every instance of the family’s name, instructing them to pronounce it the Anglicized way—as the Texans do. This was, as Barros put it, “not only totally wrong,” but a literal replication of the assimilation that so bothers the main character’s wife. In that instance, the producer backed Barros and her narrator, but that’s not always the case; January LaVoy wincingly recalled the time that, at a director’s insistence, she recorded pickups replacing her correct pronunciation of Latinx with latinks.
Deciding whether to use the Anglicized or loanword pronunciations can be fraught for bilingual performers. Emily Woo Zeller, a Chinese American narrator, has sometimes clashed with directors and QC over whether to Anglicize the pronunciation of words taken from other languages, such as tofu or kung fu. She is also one of the few narrators I spoke with who took the step of contacting the author of a book that she found objectionable. “I won’t name names,” she told me, “but it was a white author,” and the scene involved what Zeller called “misplaced comedy,” in which the author “mixed up Chinese and Japanese culture, and the comedy was about the way characters looked and the fact that wanted to do kung fu and they were Communists.” Deciding “this can’t come out of my mouth,” Zeller brought her concerns to the author, who, she said, was “very apologetic and willing to change it.”
 Hers was an unusual move. Audiobook narrators tend to see their role as strictly interpretative. Their job is to convey the book from the author to the reader in a way that remains true to the author’s intent. This includes texts like classics, books whose authors can’t be appealed to for changes, and books that contain words, passages, and characters that are now deemed offensive. There also remain plenty of contemporary authors who, as Cobb tactfully put it, “haven’t caught up yet,” and narrators will continue to have to figure out how to perform those books.
For Grover Gardner, four decades in the audiobook industry have taught him that “where there’s ignorance, you fall back on the only things that you’ve seen or heard, and chances are very good that, if you’re an older person, you’re drawing on a stereotype.” He’s had to work to transform some of his ongoing roles from vocal clichés into full characters. In the case of the former convict Willie in the Andy Carpenter mysteries, for instance, he has consciously tried to lean less on an exaggerated accent as an actorly crutch. “I’ve tried to focus more on attitude,” Gardner said, “on the real person.”

Correction, June 23, 2021: This article originally misstated that Simone Barros is Black. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.
Update, June 23, 2021: This article has been updated to add additional comments by Barros about the narration and perspective in Antkind.
Correction, June 22, 2021: This article originally misstated that Kevin R. Free began narrating audiobooks five years ago. Free began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago.

ARTICLE
https://slate.com/culture/2021/06/audiobook-narration-race-accents-casting-racism-representation.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20June%2022%2C%202021&utm_term=lithub_master_list

How Stories Change When They Move From Page to Voice
Laura Lindstedt on the Different Ways We Read a Book
By Laura Lindstedt, translated by David Hackston
June 14, 2021

To all intents and purposes, a psychoanalyst’s couch is in fact a bed—after all, it lacks a back and armrests. And yet, this item of furniture must be called a couch. Nobody would offload their traumas on a psychoanalyst’s bed unless, that is, they were in a relationship with said psychoanalyst.

In October 2019, I found myself sitting in the Silencio recording studios, headphones over my ears, reading aloud my novel My Friend Natalia, which had been published in Finland six months earlier.

“‘Natalia’ was one of my first clients to lie on her back without prompting,” I read and continued: “When I showed her round my office, which I had rented in an apartment next to my house, I told her about the couch.”
These two consecutive sentences are from the opening chapter of the novel. Reading these sentences aloud irrevocably sprained something in my brain.

When one reads a book aloud as an audiobook, the visual aspects of the text all disappear. Of course, one could read the word couch, which appears in italics, in a slightly different way, perhaps by holding a short, artistic pause before the word. But this is not the same thing. Italics are not the same as a short pause.

The therapist, the book’s narrator, gives the patient the code-name “Natalia.” Under the cover of this anonymity, the therapist then proceeds to divulge intimate details of Natalia’s life to the reader, then at one point removes the inverted commas from Natalia’s name “as I might remove the safety catch from a gun”. When read aloud, this sentence is absurd: the listener cannot hear the inverted commas around Natalia’s name.

*

Let’s be clear: I am very skeptical about the practice of turning works of literature into audio recordings.

If audiobooks become the primary way in which we interact with books, it would be strange if at some point this did not have a direct impact on how people write literary works.
Will writers—either consciously or subconsciously—start writing books so that they sound good when read aloud? The succinct speech between Me (the writer) and You (the reader) works well when spoken aloud, so the current appetite for autofiction is unlikely to dwindle any time soon. A linear narrative, in which we already know (or think we know) something about the end point, is also easy to listen to. For this reason, celebrity autobiographies and so-called true stories make for successful audiobooks.
However, complex narrative structures, shifting perspectives, narrative polyphony, long, meandering sentences and the visual aspects of a text find themselves increasingly under threat from a medium that relies solely on hearing. If linear narrative becomes the only acceptable form of complex literary expression, our thoughts will be the poorer for it. Imaginary worlds and possibilities will shrink because such worlds and possibilities are not “content” that can be detached from “form,” they are not statements, suggestions or questions isolated from their rhetorical devices.

*

That being said, I’m not a militant opponent of audiobooks. To my mind, it is simply important to recognize that there is a significant difference between the printed book and the audiobook. Written material turns into vibration, letters become sound waves. They always come from a concrete source that guides our interpretation, a source that is completely different from the reading process heard through our “inner voice.”

A new element appears between the book and its recipient: a voice that shapes how we receive the text. It is a sound born of a human body in a unique way and that is (generally) readily identifiable as the voice of a man or a woman.

In the audiobook of My Friend Natalia, this unavoidable fact becomes a poetic problem in its own right. Throughout the text, I have scattered conflicting clues as to the sex of the therapist, the novel’s first-person narrator, but I was careful never to define the therapist as either a man or a woman. With certain exceptions, in many languages a writer and a translator can easily disguise or at least avoid the matter of the narrator’s sex. A writer can also play with this ambiguity, as is the case in my novel My Friend Natalia.
Some readers have been convinced that the narrator is a man, others have considered the therapist a woman. Several readers have told me that their perception of the matter changed as they were reading. Readers always read a text through the prism of their own experiences, preconceptions and cultural stereotypes.
For this reason, I wanted to read the Finnish audiobook of My Friend Natalia myself. I am a woman, but because I am the book’s author my voice is above all an authorial voice, and in this way I feel I managed to resolve the dilemma described above.

But my relief was somewhat premature. I was once again forced to confront this matter in early 2021 when Penguin Random House Audio began to produce the English-language audiobook of David Hackston’s translation of My Friend Natalia (W.W. Norton/Liveright).

PHR Audio’s producer kindly sent me a number of audio samples to listen to. All these samples were very professional and of the highest quality, but still they were unsuitable for my novel’s narrator. I started to lose hope. Was it at all possible to find an actor whose voice was neither that of a man nor a woman, a voice that wasn’t too young as it should be a voice that conveys the therapist’s wealth of professional experience? The voice also needed dash of pompous embitterment, stemming from the fact that nobody seems to value the therapist’s subtle genius.

But we were lucky, and eventually we found an excellent voice, that of the actor TL Thompson, who identifies as non-binary and whom I chose as the English-language reader for My Friend Natalia.

Thompson’s voice is characterful, mesmerizing and unforced. To my own ear, Thompson’s voice sounds more masculine than feminine, or perhaps it’s the whisky baritone of an elderly lady. However, the voice is not remotely “gender-neutral,” a voice-type that we tried to look for at first and whose very existence I have seriously begun to doubt. Thompson’s voice made every sentence oscillate between the two. I have not written such oscillation into my novel, let alone a gender-neutral narrator’s voice: the question of the therapist’s identity opens up—if, indeed, it opens up at all—when readers find themselves indulging in assumptions that the text does not affirm.

I can say quite whole-heartedly that I love Thompson’s reading. Yet in the same breath, I must reiterate what I have already said: an audiobook is a different entity from a printed book.

*

For me, the act of interpretation is specifically that of thinking with the book. It requires stops, pauses, flicking through the pages, making notes in the margins. The book takes on markings, layers that are missing from digital products, which are perpetually new.
We can browse with our eyes but not with our ears, as my partner, who works with sound, would put it. The ear is more sensitive to chaos and clamor than the eye. Sound operates like a one-directional timeline, a surge that is hard to control. A detailed auditive perception of a large space is simply impossible.

It is to these very layers that I return when trying to form an understanding of the kind of book I am reading. I can easily locate markings I have made by flicking through a book, even if it is a book I read 20 years ago.

The various temporal strata of my home library provide a shadow story of what has touched me and who I have been throughout my reading life. Last summer I awoke to the immeasurable value of these little scribblings when going through my grandmother’s estate after she died at the age of 100. From the collection of religious books, treatises and notebooks, I saved those in which my grandmother had left some kind of mark—and exclamation mark, a line under a section of text, or a Biblical verse in the margin. These markings reveal not only what touched her and who she was; they also say a lot about where I have come from, what kind of supra-generational reality I carry with me.

ARTICLE
https://lithub.com/how-stories-change-when-they-move-from-page-to-voice/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20June%2014%2C%202021&utm_term=lithub_master_list

New works from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives will finally be published, starting next year.

By Dan Sheehan
June 23, 2021, 11:21am

The publishing giant HarperCollins has reached an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to acquire world publishing rights to the late Civil Rights leader’s entire archives—a collection which contains some of the “most historically important and vital literature in American history.”

As reported by Publishers Weekly earlier today<  read below  > , the mega-deal gives HarperCollins world rights “to publish new books from the archives across all formats, including children’s books, e-books, audiobooks, journals, and graphic novels in all languages.”

Given the significance of the books in question, it seems strange that a deal like this one wasn’t made sooner, but this is welcome news nonetheless.

More welcome still is HC’s assertion that it will hire a dedicated archivist to oversee the project, and “engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life.”

Way back in 1958, HC’s predecessor company Harper & Brothers published Dr. King’s very first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, which detailed the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott and described the conditions of African Americans living in Alabama during the era.

The first MLK titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022, to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

ARTICLE
https://lithub.com/new-works-from-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-s-archives-will-finally-be-published-starting-next-year/

HC Inks Deal with MLK Jr. Archives
By Rachel Deahl | Jun 23, 2021

In an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., HarperCollins has acquired world publishing rights to the archives of the civil rights leader. The publisher said the collection features some of the "most historically important and vital literature in American history."

Judith Curr, president and publisher of HarperOne Group, negotiated the deal with Amy Berkower, president, Writers House and agent for the King estate; and Eric D. Tidwell of Intellectual Properties Management, manager of the King estate. The deal gives HC world rights to publish new books from the archives across all formats, including children’s books, e-books, audiobooks, journals, and graphic novels in all languages.
HC said it plans to hire an archivist who will oversee the material in the archive and make it "available to all HarperCollins editors globally." HC added that it intends to "engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life."

HC also has history with King. A predecessor company to HC, Harper & Brothers, published King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, in 1958.

All current his King titles, including those published by Beacon Press, will continue to be publishing by their current rights holders.

“We are thrilled to be the official publisher of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives,” said Curr in a statement. “We view this as a unique global publishing program."

The first King titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022, coinciding with Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

ARTICLE
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/book-deals/article/86731-hc-inks-deal-with-mlk-jr-archives.html
 

SOURCE ARTICLE
Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, Books for Palestine, and an Intro to Booktok: This Week in Book News
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/06/25/kobo-emerging-writer-prize-books-for-palestine-and-an-intro-to-booktok-this-week-in-book-news/
 

THE PROBLEM HUMANITY HAS WITH RICHARD MATHESON'S "I AM LEGEND"

To be honest, the video poster below has flaws. I read "I am legend". MAtheson in the video said the real problem and I amend it is with most of the movies; said problem is,  it isn't his story.

Are Fictional Characters Protected Under Copyright Law?
July 14, 2021 by Kathryn Goldman

Today’s post is from intellectual property attorney Kathryn Goldman (@KathrynGoldman) of the Creative Law Center.

Jack Ryan, the analytical, yet charming CIA analyst, made an appearance in federal court in Maryland earlier this year. The heirs to Tom Clancy’s literary legacy are fighting over him. Unlike in the movies, he’s not in a great position to fight back.

It all started when Clancy signed the publishing deal for The Hunt for Red October where Jack Ryan made his debut in 1984. In a departure from common practice, Clancy transferred his copyright in Red October to the publisher. A few years later, Clancy realized his mistake and was able to negotiate return of the copyright for the book. He immediately transferred the reverted copyright to his company.

Here’s the crux of the current court battle: When Clancy mistakenly transferred his copyright in the book Red October to the original publisher, did the copyright to the character Jack Ryan go with it? Or did Clancy retain the character copyright? In normal practice, the sale of the right to publish a copyrighted story does not stop the author from using its characters in future works.

If Clancy retained the rights to the character when he signed the initial publishing contract, then the rights that reverted from the publisher would not have included the copyright for the character. The reverted rights Clancy turned around and transferred into his company would not have included the character rights. All of which means that the character, Jack Ryan, is part of Clancy’s estate and not controlled by the company he set up.

Jack Ryan is a valuable character with his own copyright separate from the copyright in the book. Everybody concerned, the owners of the company and the heirs to the estate, wants a piece of him, or all of him. And it’s not clear where Mr. Ryan currently resides.

Fictional characters are not listed in the copyright statute as a separate class of protectable work. There’s no application at the Copyright Office for them. But over the years, the law on character protection has evolved.

Courts have held, in certain circumstances, that fictional characters are protectable in their own right.

This is important because characters with independent copyright can be licensed separately from the stories in which they originally appeared. It’s another way for authors to divide their rights to create multiple income streams. That’s the beauty of copyright. It’s divisible. An author can keep some rights and license others. It’s what Clancy did and his company/estate is still doing with the Jack Ryan franchise.

Not every character can be protected by copyright. Stock characters cannot be protected—a drunken old bum, a slippery snake oil salesman, a hooker with a heart of gold, a wicked stepmother, a gypsy fortune teller, and so on. They are essentially ideas for characters, vague and lightly sketched. Copyright does not give anyone a monopoly on ideas. Protecting stock characters would prevent as yet untold stories from being told. Depriving the world of new stories is exactly the opposite of what copyright is intended to promote—the creation of more stories, more art.

A character must be well delineated to be protected.
It must have consistent and identifiable character traits and attributes so it is recognizable wherever it appears. Think James Bond and his distinctive character traits: his cool demeanor; his overt sexuality; his love of martinis “shaken, not stirred”; his marksmanship; his “license to kill”; his physical strength; and his sophistication. Bond is protected by copyright. The Bond character is identifiable regardless of who depicts him.

Defining the well-delineated character can be difficult. Characters that are central to a story tend to change. They evolve. They are built up throughout the book until they are fully formed in the mind of the reader. Without character transformation there is no hero’s journey, no story. Characters can become more delineated and more protectable over the course of a series of books. Bond developed over the course of 14 books written by Ian Fleming and continues to develop on film.

Characters that are less developed are less likely to be protected. Those characters are less expression and more idea. There’s a gray area that needs to be navigated when balancing the protection for original characters but leaving character ideas in the public domain free for all to use.

Public domain characters cannot be protected
But new characters created from public domain works can be protected. Consider Enola Holmes, the younger sister of Sherlock. The Sherlock Holmes stories have been slipping into the public domain for years now, to the chagrin of the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle. The creative elements of Sherlock Holmes stories that are in the public domain can be used by others to build new stories.

Enola Holmes was introduced to readers in a series of young adult books written by Nancy Springer. Enola does not exist in the Conan Doyle canon; she was created by Springer. She has distinctive traits (high intelligence, keen observational skills and insight, skills in archery, fencing, and martial arts, an independent thinker who defies Victorian norms for women) that combine to make her well delineated and protectable.

Another wrinkle: “The story being told” test
The “well delineated character” is the most widely accepted legal test used to decide whether a fictional character is protected by copyright, but it is not the only one. The other is “the story being told” test. Sam Spade is responsible for this test.

Dashiell Hammett created Sam Spade when he wrote The Maltese Falcon. Hammett licensed the exclusive rights to use the book in movies, radio, and television to Warner Brothers. Hammett later wrote other stories with Sam Spade. Warner Bros. complained that it owned exclusive rights to the character and Hammett couldn’t write about him anymore.

Ironically, the court protected Hammett’s right as the creator to use Sam Spade in future stories by deciding that the character was not protected by copyright. Sam Spade is just a vehicle for telling the story and is not the story itself. He is the chessman in the game of telling the story. It was the story that was licensed to Warner Bros., not the chessman.

A character is protected under the “story being told” test when he dominates the story in a way that there would be no story without him. This test sets a high bar for character protection. To protect the character, the story would essentially have to be a character study. The Maltese Falcon is not a character study of Sam Spade.

An example of character protection using the “story being told test” is the Rocky franchise. A screenwriter wrote a story on spec using the characters Rocky, Adrian, Apollo Creed, and Paulie. The work was considered to be an infringing use of the characters. The characters were protected because the movies focused on the characters and their relationships, not on intricate plot or story lines. The characters were the story being told. The writer could not avoid the infringement touchpoint of substantial similarity when he took the characters and used them in a new storyline.

In summary
Fictional characters can lead a new and independent life completely separate from the original work in which they appear. They are an additional creative asset in a writer’s intellectual property portfolio. There is no straight forward way to register for character protection with the Copyright Office other than as part of the larger work. Authors will be well served to think about protecting the rights in their characters when signing publishing contracts and licensing agreements.

Kathryn Goldman
Kathryn Goldman is an intellectual property attorney and Editor-in-Chief at the Creative Law Center. She represents, writes for, and teaches creatives and entrepreneurs about copyright and content protection, trademark basics and branding, and business building. She can be reached at Kathryn@creativelawcenter.com.

ARTICLE LINK
https://www.janefriedman.com/are-fictional-characters-protected-under-copyright-law/

COMMENTS IN ARTICLE
Fan fiction is a hot button for many professional writers. Broadly speaking, if the fan fiction is written by a non-professional and is non-commercial then it is more likely to be considered fair use, an exception to infringement. However, even if the work is not professional and not commercial, many writers consider fan fiction an infringement.
My purpose in writing this post is to make writers aware that their characters can have individual protections. It is a concept that should be considered when licensing the work, in an option agreement for instance. I have seen requests from producers to option not just the work, but certain characters in the work. Writers need to consider how they want to deal with those requests when they come. You do not need a multi-million dollar franchise to start thinking about it.

I will say one thing first, lawyers always reveal the most interesting legal battles in various subjects. I knew of none of these incidents. Thank you Ms/Mrs Goldman and as always thank you Jane Friedman for sharing. 
I admit I wanted to have my first fan fiction this year and I failed. I like to create something I never did before each year.  But this article made me realize I made two errors. 
My first error was my inability to make a fan fiction. I am an original creator and every time I tried i kept making a world or characters that have no plot connection to the source fiction or characters. Imagine a story supposed to be set in the same world as harry potter but is primarily concerned with a magical detective agency in calcutta during the mughal era where the magicians don't use wands and the plot never goes to europe or the usa or mentions any spells in harry potter or any of the references of the movies or books. Is that fan fiction? or merely fiction that a writer has to say is based in the harry potter world?   
But after this article, I made a second. I didn't put enough thought into the whole activity of fan fiction, especially to work that is not in a public domain. I am glad I failed to continue the use of the world or characters in the material I wanted to make fan fiction for. I still will like to try it. but I will start with a better dialog with the author. that is first 

COMMENT ON FACEBOOK POST 
Wiley Saichek
Jane Friedman My client Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (we ran an excerpt from her book on writing a few years ago) is one of those writers who are extremely protective of her characters and does not grant anyone the usage of her characters in fan fiction, even in amateur publications, not for profit outlets. From her point of view and her lawyers at the times, distribution is a key factor, not whether the infringing fan writer makes any money off of it.
My personal suggestion is if anyone wants to use a character they did not create, ask the copyright holder's permission and respect their decision. I.e. Quinn has written stories in the Holmes universe but got permission from the estate and had rules to follow.
Quinn's most serious case of infringement happened in the 1990s, she wrote two essays about it in a SF publication in 1992. In her case she was asked and said no, and the fan writer wrote it anyway and it ran in a fanzine with a note acknowledging CQY declined permission but they were going to run it anyway and hope she will forgive them. I think they actually used three of her recurring characters.
Many fans and writers disagree with how she handled it, but she has zero sense of humor about it.

FACEBOOK Link
https://www.facebook.com/jane.friedman/posts/10159604823112417?__cft__[0]=AZXv6tqLEho3qt9e6ECOp5g8Bm4JmEefiGUqUC07rvEpR6crPews6VYpt6oZ--49mda_yRlyZRU7ZZzwkjlNy5dcdppQGrPoVf3IqR2fe0CYcoVHMDkNisftkhyxdUO_YtU&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R
 

Superman will be Black
VIDEO

MY REPLY
He makes a few points. 
1st- news to me, I didn't know superman is going to be negro. I concur, old characters develop followings over time. King Arthur is not gay. If someone tried to make it where he was sleeping with lancelot it will be rejected. 
2nd- he is correct that initially black comic book characters have made money. But he misses DC/Warner bros problem. 
Take away Milestone, take away Marvel characters like Blade or the XMen or Spider man that now all are under Disney's roof. Name the top 5 DC black characters? 
Warner bros. see's money in courting the non white male. But DC Comics don't have a black panther/blade/storm/Luke Cage/Moonstone/Psylocke. so... 
3rd Both DC or MArvel are guilty of trying to court non white audiences by forcing a race change on a character. Look at what marvel did with captain marvel, a character that has a long complicated history of changes, and made a muslim girl captain marvel while captain marvel is still the blond haired woman flying in the stars...
4th- As Anthony McKay said, I am paraphrasing, I Am not playing Falcon, Falcon is being played by me. I think sometimes you get a personality like Momoa playing a lower character like Aquaman. You see the same thing with Deadpool/Doctor Strange/Black Widow/Nick Fury... as the actors who played them dominate their perception but that is cause none of them were well known outside comic circles beforehand, and the actors who portray them have a large media profile or following before them. That is why Downey Jr was able to dominate Iron man in a way he wasn't sherlock holmes. I never forget people saying with the first film, what is this martial arts? I have to admit the street fighting took me by surprise. I never forget how some fans ecried when Jackman was in his last wolverine depiction. Wolverine is not dead, but the audience is influenced.
5th- I end with , the video creator is correct, the goal is not to make money. The goal is to supercede the money made and that is where the problem resides. If Warner Bros/DC focused on a Black Lightnin project, as he is their first black titular character. It will make money but it will not make superman money and that is what the studios fail to realize is their problem. 
Going forward, an issue about new characters. I argue that DC spent too much time rebooting batman/superman and gave to little time to bringing in new characters. why is it: martian manhunter/green arrow/hawk woman or hawkman/black canary/mister terrific not have a film yet? These characters are as old and still remembered, I argue DC or MArvel is missing a trick by focusing on a narrow set of characters. TO be blunt, huntress/black canary warrant a standalone movie, that birds of prey was premature.  Marvel's problem is simple, can they move on from iron man/captain america. Can Marvel let characters die and stay dead, that is the question. The avengers don't need captain america or iron man or vision or black widow to come back. I think they should all stay dead. The black widow movie is a temporal prequel. I think they need to respect the world they created and make Shuri black panther. It makes sense. Tchalla died by some rare space disease or whatever. Make sHuri the black panther. harry potter fans still complain about gambon as dumbledore

The Story Artist Lab
Sponsored by Netflix and produced by Triggerfish, The Story Artist Lab builds on the success of their Mama K’s Team 4 all-female writers lab, which saw nine African women placed in the writing room for the first animated Netflix series from Africa.

The next African Story Artists
The purpose of the Story Artist Lab is to find talent and upskill the next generation of Story Artists for the African animation industry. The Lab positions will be awarded to young citizens of an African country who show outstanding potential in the creative arts and visual storytelling.

“Story artists translate screenplays into animatics, the loose first version of the movie that then shapes every step of animation that follows,” says Tendayi Nyeke, Triggerfish’s Zimbabwean-born development executive. “So having skilled story artists from the continent in control of how their stories are told is a gamechanger, not only in grooming the next African directors but also in giving pre-production artists the opportunity to establish their own voice as they bring African stories to life.” Triggerfish is calling for entries for a pan-African Story Artist Lab.

Triggerfish is always looking for great visual storytellers and this opportunity will put the selected participants on their radar for many more opportunities on great African projects.

So who can apply for the Lab?
Anyone with a love of storytelling, film, and visual language.
The Lab is targeted at experienced and inexperienced storyboard artists. There will be multiple tracks within the Lab for different experience levels.
Applicants must be citizens of a country on the continent of Africa and women are specifically encouraged to apply.
Knowledge of Photoshop (or similiar) is a requirement
Applicants may upload a storyboarding portfolio (if you have one), but all applicants must do the Storyboarding Test. Details about this test below.
Matriculated school leavers and older may apply.
The nitty gritty
The Story Artist Lab is a paid skills development programme.
The Story Artist Lab is made up of 2x 6 week Phases. Selected artists will do Phase 1 after which there is a reduced number of artists that move to Phase 2.
PHASE 1 runs from 2 August - 10 September 2021
PHASE 2 runs from 13 September - 23 October 2021
Selected artists will be required to be available for daily and weekly sessions and training.
Remote working is encouraged.
But I have no Storyboarding Experience?!
Don’t worry, here’s your chance. Some artists will have natural talent. We will be looking out for you and the idea behind this Lab is to give you an opportunity! If you have no storyboarding experience currently, check out these videos below and then go ahead and do the Storyboarding Test.

Citizens of an African country can apply from Wednesday 23 June until Friday, 23 July 2021 (end of day).

All applicants are required to apply by clicking on the link below and completing the application form as required.

All applicants will need to upload the prescribed storyboarding test.
< https://www.triggerfish.com/careers/index.php?do=signin&applyjob=Story_Artist_Lab_Applicant > 

The Storyboarding Test
A storyboard is essentially a hand-drawn version of the movie, and helps the artists working on the film with diagrams of the action and the dialogue. The storyboard is the blueprint for the film.

Watch this clip about choosing Storyboarding as a career with Story Artist Kwabena Sarfo:

Animation as a Career: WATCH: Career Options - Storyboard Artist

This module from Pixar in a Box about the Art of Storytelling is really informative.

The art of storytelling | Pixar in a Box | Computing

Ready to Test?!
Step 1: Read the Brief
All applicants need to read the following brief

< https://www.triggerfish.com/careers/uploads/storytest.pdf > 

Step 2: Set aside a day with no distractions!
When you are ready to engage with the brief, set yourself the challenge of boarding this sequence in 1 day. Don’t go over this if you can. We want to see what raw talent you have and what you can get through in 1 day. Have fun!

Step 3: Do the Test
Whether with pen/pencil or in Photoshop (or any other storyboarding software) we will accept ONE pdf file upload.

Read through the scene and start by breaking it down to the story beats and start storyboarding from there.

Once these story beat panels are in place fill in the extra panels.

Compile your storyboard panels in the right sequence please before uploading. Imagine you are not in the room and the reviewer needs to understand the sequence you are pitching.

Upload only ONE file with your application. Individual .jpgs won’t be accepted please.

Step 4: Apply online and upload your file!

< https://www.triggerfish.com/careers/index.php?do=signin&applyjob=Story_Artist_Lab_Applicant > 

WEBPAGE URL
< https://www.triggerfish.com/careers/index.php?do=storyartistlab >
 

I concur with the article but I want to add one question the article doesn't go into. Why was the work of the Reids not popular? the Cosby show was around? why wasn't the work of the Reid's popular? I think I know. The Reid's work like Good Times in its John Amos side Esther Rolle years tackled issues. And, the sad truth is, the black audience that as enamored with the cosby show was ashamed /disinterested/wanted freedom from/didn't want to tackle issues that go beyond, feel good/feel better/all you have to be is about you

Tim And Daphne Maxwell Reid's Pioneering Work In Film And TV Was Ahead Of Its Time
 
Tim and Daphne Maxwell Reid probably haven't quite gotten the appropriate acknowledgment for their pioneering work in TV, over the course of about a decade (late 1980s to 1990s), with 3 TV series created over that time period, on 2 different networks (they both appeared in other TV shows, but I'm emphasizing those that originated with them). In a time when showrunners of African descent like Shonda Rhimes and John Ridley are common, and who are celebrities in their own right, it might be easy to forget the likes of the Reids, who came before them, and, we could even say, paved the way.

In addition to the critically-acclaimed Frank's Place, which aired on CBS, but didn't last long due to weak ratings, the Reids also created a Showtime half-hour dramedy series titled "Linc's" which was set in a black-owned Washington, D.C. bar and grill. And there was also Snoops, a Hart to Hart-esque scripted dramedy series that centered on a crime-solving couple, which also aired on CBS, and, like "Frank's Place" and "Linc's," didn't last very long.

Frank's Place tackled sensitive issues and was a hit with critics, but it just never found a big enough audience, which was unfortunate.

Snoops wasn't as critically-acclaimed, but was fresh enough (how many other series in the late 1980s, early 1990s centered on a black husband and wife criminologist couple who solved crimes?). However, it too never caught on with audiences. I like to say that, with both series, the Reids were maybe a bit ahead of their time. I'd like to believe both series (especially Frank's Place) would've been far more successful a decade+ later. I think revisiting/rebooting them today might be worth a consideration, especially as TV networks are remake/reboot happy currently.

And Linc's,  which came years after the first two series, was an ensemble comedy starring Steve Williams in the title role as the pub's conservative owner; also Frank's Place alum Pam Grier co-starred, playing Eleanor, a children's activist and Linc's liberal love interest; and Georg Stanford Brown played Johnnie, an ethically challenged lobbyist. Also, Golden Brooks would make her TV series regular debut on "Linc's" which also featured numerous guest-appearances including Phylicia Rashad, Kadeem Hardison, Dennis Rodman, Richard Roundtree, and many others.

Tim Reid stayed behind the camera while Daphne appeared in a few episodes.

Linc's was the first TV series to be shot at Reid's own New Millennium Studios, a stand-alone movie and TV studio in Petersburg, Va., he had up and running for a year at the time. And that's another noteworthy item to consider as part of their legacy - they owned a physical studio where films and TV shows were sometimes shot. However, as we mentioned a couple of years ago on this blog, they had to sell the studio because business wasn't as active as they needed it to be, to continue to own the lot. As I recall, Reid spoke of a lack of incentives to attract filmmakers to Virginia, so business overall was dry for them, and they sold New Millennium - a 60-acre backlot - to a company that said they'd use the space for storage. Except for Tyler Perry's studio in Atlanta, throughout recent film and TV history, there haven't exactly been many black owners of massive studio lots, where Hollywood and non-Hollywood films and TV series have been filmed.

Dozens of studios that made so-called race movies flourished early in the 20th century, however, Reid's was really the first attempt in the previous 50 years to replicate that brand of self-reliance. Linc's was filmed at New Millennium Studios.

They also produced a few feature-length films, like Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored, which Tim Reid directed as well.

The Showtime series gave the husband and wife team some freedom in terms of what they could do, since it was on a premium cable TV channel. So there's obviously some adult language use, "sexual situations," although nothing explicit (but to see an ensemble cast of mostly 50-something-year-olds being sexually active in a TV series isn't exactly common); and they also took the opportunity to be "politically incorrect," and, like Frank's Place, tackled a variety of issues of importance to the black community, not necessarily afraid to be controversial - at least, as controversial as Tim and Daphne Reid could be.

Like Frank's Place, Linc's had no laugh track, which was a good thing. It aired on Showtime for two seasons from 1998 to 2000 before being canceled. After cancellation, it was briefly syndicated on BET.

But like Frank's Place and Snoops, Linc's isn't available on any home video format at this time - at least, nothing easily accessible. I recall that, in the case of Frank's Place, Reid mentioned some music rights issues which were getting in the way of a proper DVD/Blu-ray release of the series. That was at least 7 years ago; and nothing's been done (nothing that I'm aware of) since then, despite the fact that there's an audience for it today - those who remember it, and those who have never even heard of it, but who may want to visit it, especially in this era of binge-watching old TV series on Netflix, am*zon, Hulu, etc.

This is recent black TV history that's being entirely unacknowledged, and I think that's unfortunate. Some props are due here for what the Reids accomplished as TV content creators who came before the current crop, creating and producing 3 different series over a decade, affecting the landscape in terms of representations of black people on-screen, and owning a massive studio lot as well.

Editor's note: This post was originally published by Shadow and Act founder Tambay Obenson in 2016. 

Article
https://shadowandact.com/tim-and-daphne-maxwell-reids-pioneering-work-in-film-and-tv-was-ahead-of-its-time
 

The first paragraph of the article entitled: "white bears in sugar land: Juneteenth, cages, and afrofuturism",  end with the following in brackets <  Liberty, emancipation, independence, without brotherhood or equality or justice or peace, presume utopia. Any alternative imagining can only be fiction. > 
That paragraph ending encapsulate the theme of the article. The theme is freedom is not enough. Freedom must come with equality between all living beings, positive comradery between all living things, peace for all <with peace defined as happiness>, justice for all with the caveat that justice leads to emotional or spiritual redemption. 

The article author, Tochi Onyebuchi, uses an episode of the show Black Mirror to encapsulate said point.  The article author restates, I quote in brackets <  If your organizing principle is freedom, maybe all you’ve done for yourself is fashion another cage. And a cage does not need metal bars and concrete walls to be obvious. Count on the Brits to expose American absurdity. > 
But is it absurd? IT being, the idea that freedom is all that is needed. The question is, what is freedom, liberty, emancipation, independence? The character in the Black Mirror episode who is forced to be mentally tortured isn't independent, emancipated, liberated, or free. She is in a system that judged her and deemed her existence is to be totally enslaved. 
This is why I have always said that the Black American, Black American defined as people from modern day Canada to Argentina who look in the phenotypical range I label as Black, have only one instance of liberty, freedom, emancipation, independence in their modern history, modern history defined as the past 500 years; said one instance is in HAiti. 
To restate, Black Americans, people of the phenotypical range labeled black who live in what is modernly called Canada to Argentina,  only achieved freedom/emancipation/liberty/independence in the last 500 years in Haiti cause to achieve freedom/emancipation/liberty/independence one or a group can only achieve it in completion. 
What is absurd, or beyond the muted , in an enslaved woman being mistreated by her enslavers. 
The ability to do what you want from the most cruel to the most loving is the only sign that you have freedom. The moment any of your actions or yourself are judgeable or controllable by an external , you do not have freedom/independence/liberty/emancipation. 
Now some may argue, what about government? Government is however the free, in parallel the most powerful, in a community decide the rules of a community to be. 
Human government can have any set of rules within human imagination, no set of rules are right or wrong or good or bad; they merely exists as they must. 
The idea of a moral code/ an equalizer of justice, a loving of relationships being necessary for positive society is false. 
As the Haitian freeing proves, once free you can be cruel, cause you are free to be. 

The article author then explains the position in a temporal sequence, beginning with the unearthing of buried enslaved people in modern day texas in early 2018. The bodies were dated being between 1878 and 1910 at the time of death thus legally, they should not had been enslaved.

The next moment in time is June 19th 1865 , the source day for Juneteenth. I want to say as a mere sidenote, I don't see Juneteenth as a day of freedom for black people in the usa. The author quotes General Order Number 2 and states the truth that some at Galveston will be in that cemetery unearthed in 2018. The author state, I Quote in brackets < An even cursory reading of General Order No. 3 reveals just how conditional freedom was in the post-bellum Re-United States. Despite “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves,” the freedmen “will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” Nor will they be allowed to “collect at military posts.” Whether they served the Union or the Confederacy, they will be left with nothing but the scarred skin on their backs. There will be no government assistance, no 40 acres, no mule, no “help them get back on their feet” allowance. Liberation pure and simple. A typical American blunder to mistake emancipation for justice, liberation for peace. To mistake the light up ahead for the tunnel’s end and conclude that the hard work has been finished. >
The problem I have with the author's position is the suggestion that freedom is obtained but it is the absence of justice that leads to the abuses in the future. But again, haiti proves this is wrong. 
The problem isn't that freedom was achieved circa 150 years ago in the usa and justice was evaded. The problem is freedom wasn't achieved over 150 years ago by Blacks from whites. Slavery like all things come in levels/grades/ranks. 
A people don't need to be completely shackled or sold on auction by another to be enslaved. A people can have mayors/presidents/billionaires/sanitation workers/generals in the army or other modern overseers while they are all in truth, still enslaved , to another people. 
He cites a book I have not read, and I will probably not read. The posthumous work of Ralph Ellison, check the bottom of this post. I am very suspicious to any posthumous work. The book was originally titled: Juneteenth. I can concur with the article writer that Ellison was clearly going to make a critique of Black joy in the USA. But I oppose the idea that Black joy comes from the gaining of freedom while the absence of justice. Black collective joy in the usa or the greater Black American community or the greater Black world, please note my stated definitions as not all black people are african, comes from the lessening of slavery not the gaining of freedom. 
The 13th amendment to the constitution, the civil rights act, Juneteenth or other general orders, the emancipation proclamation, the golden law in brasil, the end of slavery in the british empire , or similar were not the gaining of freedom for black people; each stated instance was the lessening of slavery of blacks to whites , but not the absence of slavery of blacks to whites. Black people were and do cheer steps to something that has never been achieved absent violence/cruelty/hate. 

The next moment is July 22, 2013, where the author reveals experiences of his life in Ramallah, a palestinean city in Israel former Palestine, and after as a growing lawyer in various systems of incarcerations. I Quote him in brackets < Spend enough time on the outside looking at people held in cages and you might shake your head, look for confetti under your shoes, and begin muttering to yourself, “the whole thing was a hoax.” >
I will not speak for the author but based on my own personal journey I say that freedom isn't a hoax for those that truly have it. Too often people think they are free but to quote agent smith in quotations  "the problem isn't that we are free the problem is that we are not free" 
IT is the illusion plus allusion of being truly free that is the problem. An image of freedom is presented or freedom is suggested in communication that has no basis in reality. 

The next moment is September 15, 2018 where the author focuses on the United States of America. I quote in brackets < Liberation is one of the principal themes in the myth of the United States of America. ...  Clean-up is for later.>.
I concur, the USA was founded on myth over reality. But in defense of the USA, the founding fathers, all financially wealthy human owning men of white european descent, never told anyone not in their specific race to think they are free cause they are in the usa. 
It can be argued that the myth of the USA says more about the needs of some people to manufacture possibilities of freedom based on lies they tell themselves.
I have not read the George S. Schuyler book , Black No More, but the description from the author suggest it is afrofuturism based on the description of afrofuturism provided. I quote in brackets < [S]peculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture,” that is how Mark Bould defines Afrofuturism in “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF.” > 
The author spends half of this section on his personal activities as a writer, events around modernity. The point is to state the potency or growth of black writers or moreover, writers of the militaristically oppressed. 
I quote the article in brackets < that liberation without justice is not liberation, it is simply a hoax. > 
In prior prose I stated a simple truth. Rightly or wrongly, positively or negatively, the black community of the usa has been led by a philosophy of merit side equality. Sequentially, when one desires a moral code of equality, they accept restrictions which by default is unfreedoms. Thus, of the writer or the many adherents in humanity who share a similar view, want all to accept a level of slavery that allows one to feel free while it doesn't deny any equality while it accepts restrictions or slavery to maintain said equality.

The last moment is May 30, 2019. Where he speaks of being inspired to write his second book by a friend, who the white owned system has guided into its negativities. 
I can add only hope that tomorrow is better. Real power is a fleeting thing in humanity, very few humans can touch real power in humanity. Absent that real power, one can only hope. Absent true freedom, one has to ask. 
Maybe in afrofuturism, someone will write the first fictional future where all humans are free while not in each others, or any other life forms, way. Maybe it will be me.  Maybe the author of the article. But the idea is needed. 

THE ARTICLE IN COMPLETION

We resist enclosure. Deer roam forests. Vines colonize abandoned Coliseums. A human being held in solitary confinement will self-harm, scream, plead, kick doors, smear feces on their cell walls, and refuse food if there exists even the promise of seeing the sun for fifteen minutes of their day. There are many words in English for what that human being quests for: liberty, emancipation, freedom, independence. So much of the American project has been dousing its cultural fabric in these colors. No mention of brotherhood and precious little of equality. Justice is nowhere to be found. Peace, somewhere far off in the distance. Over the horizon, in fact. Those messy words presume an After, and they presume that this After is other than post-apocalypse. Liberty, emancipation, independence, without brotherhood or equality or justice or peace, presume utopia. Any alternative imagining can only be fiction.

An episode in the second season of Black Mirror, titled “White Bear,” dramatizes precisely this conundrum. The protagonist, a woman played by Lenora Crichlow, awakens with amnesia, haunted by a symbol that flickers on the television screen in her room and hunted by unreasoning pursuers. People on the street catch sight of her and immediately raise their cameraphones to record. Even as her pursuers shoot at her and those who have decided to aid her, the spectators remain just that. Spectators. They’re being held captive by a signal from a transmitter at a facility called “White Bear.” Get to White Bear, destroy the transmitter, and free the world from their stupor. When she and her confederate reach the transmitter, two hunters attack. In what is supposed to be the episode’s climax, she wrestles a shotgun away from one of her assailants, aims, and pulls the trigger.

Out comes confetti.

The whole thing was a hoax. Her name is revealed, as well as the fact that she and her fiancé had murdered a child, her sentence for which is daily psychological torture. Relive the same day over and over and over again, with no memory that it has ever happened before.

Emancipation with no hint of peace. Some would watch the aftermath of that reveal, the woman being driven back to her compound while those spectators from earlier curse her and damn her and spit at her, and say that’s justice. They might say that, in punishing her, whatever justice system that exists in the world of this episode is simply operating out of procedural fidelity. Maybe the algorithm decided this, and an algorithm sees neither color nor sex nor gender nor faith, that renders us equally as numbers. But of the many things I came away from that episode holding in my chest, nowhere among them was any sense of justice.

Black Mirror places the episode somewhere in our future. An After, as it were. The paradox of progress here is that it takes our imaginations to create an After where there are no Afters, revealing the mistake inherent in founding your identity on the sole item of liberation. The light at the end of the tunnel, brought to you by lamps that have been hung up in the next portion of tunnel. If your organizing principle is freedom, maybe all you’ve done for yourself is fashion another cage. And a cage does not need metal bars and concrete walls to be obvious.

Count on the Brits to expose American absurdity.

In early 2018, the Fort Bend Independent School District broke ground in Sugar Land on the site of what was to be a new technical center. It was in February that the first remains were discovered. By July, archaeologists had discovered a total of 95 bodies. The bodies were buried in individual wooden caskets. Initial analysis places the youngest of the deceased at 14, the oldest around 70. Analysts deduced, early on, that the bodies showed evidence of severe malnourishment and physical stress, pointing to a history of hard labor. Prison labor.

A former prison guard, Reginald Moore, had told officials in the fall of the previous year that there might be a cemetery there. Since his term as a corrections officer in the 1980s, he had adopted as his mission excavating the land’s past and serving as caretaker for the Imperial Farm Cemetery, also in Fort Bend County.

It is speculated that the bodies were buried between 1878 and 1910. Technically, none of the buried could have been slaves at the time of their deaths. Slavery had officially ended in Texas 13 years prior.

June 19, 1865
Union Army General Gordon Granger stands on the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa. Maybe there are banners commemorating the occasion. Maybe a flag hangs from somewhere. Maybe he has bathed, maybe he has not. The previous day, the General had arrived on Galveston Island with 2,000 federal troops to occupy Texas on behalf of the federal government. Just over two weeks prior, on June 2, the last of the Confederate forces, the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, had formally surrendered. Maybe they hadn’t believed reports of Robert E. Lee’s formal surrender on April 9 of that year. Maybe they thought it Union propaganda. Maybe the officers leading that corps had lost the mail. News, back then, didn’t travel as quickly as it does now.

But on June 19, 1865, General Granger unfolds a piece of parchment and reads aloud from what is marked “General Order No. 3”:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

The once-enslaved rejoiced in the streets.

The 14-year-old boy, whose destiny is a shallow grave near the Brazos River, is one year old. Born a slave before the moral border crosses him, and he’s suddenly freed. In thirteen years, he will be buried alongside the rest of the prison labor.

An even cursory reading of General Order No. 3 reveals just how conditional freedom was in the post-bellum Re-United States. Despite “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves,” the freedmen “will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” Nor will they be allowed to “collect at military posts.” Whether they served the Union or the Confederacy, they will be left with nothing but the scarred skin on their backs. There will be no government assistance, no 40 acres, no mule, no “help them get back on their feet” allowance. Liberation pure and simple. A typical American blunder to mistake emancipation for justice, liberation for peace. To mistake the light up ahead for the tunnel’s end and conclude that the hard work has been finished.

The After that these freefolk walk into is a Texas whose economy depended heavily—too heavily—on sugarcane, a Texas whose economy had depended almost entirely on free labor. So two Confederate veterans, Edward Cunningham and Littleberry Ellis, sign a contract with the state in 1878 to lease the state’s prison population. The Vagrancy Act of 1866, also known as the “Act Providing for the Punishment of Vagrants,” drafted and ratified by the Virginia state legislature, forced into imprisonment for a term of up to three months anyone who appeared to be unemployed or homeless. It is only one example of the type of legal regime that proliferated over the United States. So-called Black Codes declared, among other things, that if a freedman left employment without the employer’s permission, he would be denied his wages. Also declared was the fact that a worker could be fined $1 for acts of disobedience or negligence or 25 cents per hour for every missed hour of work. In Texas, a system of apprenticeship was enacted, along with a host of vagrancy laws.

Cunningham and Ellis suddenly had their workers.

In many instances, men were handpicked, noted for their heavy bearing or their workers’ hands or their strong backs, innocent men, targeted as they walked through the thoroughfare because they looked like good laborers, arrested, and swept into the machine of convict leasing.

That year, 1878, the 14-year-old boy, if he is not already serving time in a cell or on a plantation, will arrive at his destination and not last the year.

Out comes confetti. Emancipation? Freedom? The whole thing was a hoax.

By the time he died, Ralph Ellison had compiled thousands of pages of notes and drafts and pieces of drafts on what was to be his second work of long fiction, the novel that would follow his masterwork, Invisible Man. He never lived to see it completed. Looking at the themes it examined, perhaps unfinished is its most natural state. There is a dying race-baiting Senator who once was maybe a small black boy destined to be a preacher. There is a parodic exploration of filmmaking culture as an allegory for Franklinian ambition, the American ideal: reinvention. There’s jazz in the prose and in the story. There’s a tragicomic scene where Senator-to-be Sunraider, as a maybe black boy, is raised out of a tiny coffin by his adopted preacher daddy during the course of a rousing sermon only to see a white lady from the congregation loudly claim him as her long-lost son. The story is ostensibly a satire, but the shape-shifting of the maybe black preacher’s son to race-baiting United States Senator brings to mind more fantastical creatures, the werewolves and sprites and witches and vampires who all, in one way or another, embody our fears and hopes and lusts. The werewolf’s human form is a seduction, and so is the promise, in Ellison’s unfinished second novel, of whiteness. Of freedom.

Long after Ellison’s death, a near-comprehensive collection of what was supposed to be this novel was released, titled Three Days Before the Shooting. Previously, the material had been compiled, condensed, and published by his editor as a novel coming in under 400 pages.

Its original title was Juneteenth.

July 22, 2013
I arrive at the Ofer military court for the first time. It wasn’t that far from the office in Ramallah. We took a service taxi to the gates, offloaded and got into a van that operated much like a taxi the way a plainclothes cop is police and we crossed the first major threshold, whereupon we passed through the first metal detector and showed our passports to the bored guard behind the glass. When we came out from beneath the shelter of that first station, we walked down an outdoor corridor to a waiting room where waited family members of those whose trials were scheduled today, along with men and women in the process of attending their own hearings, often for parking tickets.

In May of 2013, I began work at an organization that represented and advocated on behalf of Palestinian Arabs detained in Israeli prisons. At the time, I occupied a flat in Ramallah with a classmate of mine from law school. She was working on women’s rights. I was at the Ofer military court on this day with a supervisor and a few colleagues, one of whom was a student like myself, from Harvard Law School.

My supervisor took our passports into the main booth and then after a wait, we went through. Shoes and belts removed, pockets emptied, then we came out on the other side with our belongings. Down another corridor and into a courtyard that looked very much like the prison courtyards in the US, only this was populated with family and friends of the to-be-incarcerated. Heat blanketed everything, and people bounced in and out of the shade, waiting, joking about what they’d do if they couldn’t get rid of the parking ticket. I talked career paths with this fellow intern and movies, I think, with another. Inside a small shack-like building that resembled a mini airport waiting station, I practiced my Arabic script and a fellow intern taught me some new words and I worked on my numbers. With us, at that time, were the wife and the brother of one of the detainees we’d come to see, a man who had worked and researched with our organization and who had been arrested and detained the previous September. We were here for his sentencing hearing.

Our colleague is being held in Trailer 4. There are four prisoners in the box here to our left. Less chaos than hearings earlier in the day. There’s one dignified hijabi woman who looks like defense counsel. New witnesses enter, and we play musical chairs to shuffle so that the men sit in an unbroken line.

The translator here has a wide, sharp face, stubbled, shiny blue eyes, looks like so many kids I went to school with. A Billy club hangs from his back pouch.

A dumpy middle-aged prosecutor charges his phone in the wall behind him.

The prisoners here are older than most of us in the audience. Much older.

One of the prisoners received word from his wife, behind me, seated amongst the spectators, that his friend had just died. “My God,” he said, “rest in peace.” The expression on his face is beyond my ability to describe. Before he can fully process the news, his attention snaps back to his hearing.

The prisoners are handcuffed in pairs and led out. That was it.

It turns out the hearing for the man we had come to see was now moved to July 29, 2013, a week from today. Four hearings in five minutes.

On July 28, 2013, the night before our colleague’s trial, I’m in Jerusalem with yet another colleague from work. The friend she’d brought with her had on a Metallica shirt.

It took quite a bit of cajoling on my colleague’s part to eventually get me to Jerusalem and while the three of us sat on the roof of the Austrian Hospice with the sun gilding East Jerusalem, waiting expectantly for the muezzin so that we could begin eating the sweets we’d picked up in the souk, she asked why I’d waited until my last week in Palestine to come to Jerusalem.

I thought of the Qalandiya checkpoint that I’d seen numerous times and had occasionally passed through and how the very sight of all those Palestinians herded like cattle through the stations, many of them waiting in lines in a shack reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic Six Flags, made my hands start shaking. I thought of how comfortable I’d gotten in Ramallah, even as this place had begun to wear on my spirit. It was familiar. More familiar than leaving.

And I thought of everywhere else I’d traveled to. All the other countries where voyaging was an effortless thing. A wish was all it took to put me on a train in Paris that would spirit me to Amsterdam. Being stranded at the Kosovo-Serbia border and having to negotiate my way through Macedonia, cut a path through Bosnia, to wind up back in Croatia again, that was an adventure. Rabat to Tangier, an inspired odyssey.

Here, though, freedom of movement didn’t seem to exist beyond the contours of Ramallah. There were passable barriers, but the trouble of negotiating them overwhelmed me so that it took as long 10 weeks for me to see a city that was but 10 kilometers away. There was security behind bars. Should our imprisoned colleague eventually be released, this is what would have been waiting for him. More tunnel.

So, when my friend asked me why it took me so long to get to Jerusalem after I’d been in the Territories for almost ten weeks, I shrugged and said I was scared.

The next day, our colleague went on trial. Again.

After my ten weeks in Ramallah, I would return to law school where I would be put on the habeas corpus case for a man who had been wrongfully convicted and held in prison in my home state for over 18 years. I would write a long and heavily-researched paper on carceral philosophies fed and watered in the US and exported to El Salvador and the Occupied Territories. I would later graduate and spend a year at a job, part of which required observing minors held in solitary confinement. After that would come Rikers.

Spend enough time on the outside looking at people held in cages and you might shake your head, look for confetti under your shoes, and begin muttering to yourself, “the whole thing was a hoax.”

September 15, 2018
Liberation is one of the principal themes in the myth of the United States of America. Liberation from tyranny, liberation from savagery, liberation from taxes. Hell, early Americans even liberated themselves of imported tea. What a mess they must have made on those ships docked in the Boston Harbor. Clean-up is for later. As is the burial of convicts leased out for labor. As is the release of the modern American incarcerated. And with a largely monochrome literary lineage, American letters has largely allowed myth to morph into accepted wisdom, some facsimile of fact. American letters gave Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind a Pulitzer Prize. And though the film The Birth of a Nation is largely credited with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, it was adapted in part from the first two novels in Thomas Dixon Jr.’s Ku Klux Klan trilogy: The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the Whiteman’s Burden – 1865-1900 (published in 1902) and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (published in 1905). Less sanguine a patrilineage but just as alabaster, one may start somewhere around Washington Irving or even Edgar Allan Poe and work one’s way through Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Mailer, etc., etc. etc. American myth.

Those works that did exist to scrub away some of the varnish, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, more often than not written by those on the margins, largely concerned those on the margins. Even after the tiff between Henry James and H.G. Wells results into the greater beef between “literary” and “genre” fiction, that writing by the racially marginalized, in order to be seriously considered as a work of merit, need by definition concern the racially marginalized.

So the first alleged science fiction novel by an African American isn’t about aliens. It isn’t about other planets. The novel figures our own is strange enough.

Its author is one George S. Schuyler. Its title is Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933-1940. And at its center is a scientific procedure. Protagonist Max Disher, after having been spurned by a white woman in a Harlem speakeasy on the simple fact of his blackness, reads of a scientific procedure that could result in the complete bleaching of his skin. “Black-No-More” claims to be able to turn a black man white.

The scientific procedure grows in popularity, throwing the social and economic order of the country—predicated on a strictly delineated racial hierarchy—into bedlam. NAACP leaders with their Talented Tenth aura hate it. Southern segregationists, desperate for a critical mass of Other to hate, despise it. Meanwhile, Max Disher, now Matthew Fisher, wins the white girl. The novel’s hijinks involve a potential mixed-race baby, a jet plane and mutilation at the hands of animalistic, atavistic Mississippi whites.

“[S]peculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture,” that is how Mark Bould defines Afrofuturism in “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF.”

And lately, the word “Afrofuturism” has received a lot of purchase, eagerly slapped on any story in which black people and magic (or sufficiently-advanced technology) are co-pilots. It’s another attempt to categorize and catalog, some way to trace genealogy and link Schulyer with Octavia Butler with Tananarive Due with Sheree Thomas with Samuel Delany with Andrea Hairston with Colson Whitehead with N.K. Jemisin with P. Djeli Clark. A justification for putting them in the same cupboard, aside from the fact of their shared blackness. That would be too gauche a reason.

But the fact of the matter is that the aforementioned authors resist sameness. Time travel, galaxy hopping, climate catastrophe, zombies, broken cities with burnt skies, they are at the business of excavating myth and pulling humans out of it, same as any other bushel of writers. The fact of their blackness does not mean that they are obligated to allegorize black death or black anguish or black angst (whatever those reductionist terms may mean or entail) or that the entirety of their oeuvre must stem from the primordial wounding.

If they were to address injustice and un-freedom and the paradox of progress, it would be by choice.

It is a Saturday. September 15, 2018. At a place called Roulette on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Somewhere in the emails, perhaps on the Gala invite itself, there’d been dress code instructions, but due to characteristic failure of foresight, I arrive at the venue wearing jeans and a black t-shirt that reads “Abolish ICE.” My worries are assuaged by a young man in a rumpled, dark-colored button-down waiting in line just in front of me for the bar.

It’s my third time at the Brooklyn Book Festival, second time as a dude who wrote a thing. And, thus, my second time at the pre-Festival gala. So many of the writers I’d been lucky enough to have befriended or known over the previous two year are in attendance. Crystal Hana Kim, author of the Korean War love epic If You Leave Me; essayist and novelist Naima Coster; R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries. In the low lighting, I’m sure there are others I would recognize if only they came affixed with name badges.

After enough time has passed, we are urged to our seats. I and friends take our seats in the balcony. In June of that year, it had been announced that the Best of Brooklyn Award, given annually by the festival, would go to N.K. Jemisin. The previous honoree had been Colson Whitehead.

In the time between her name is called and she makes her way to the stage to accept her award and give her speech, everyone rockets to their feet. There can’t be more than a few hundred of us in that hall, but it feels like we are one thousand strong. Applause thunders. And thunders. And thunders.

The previous month, Jemisin had won her third consecutive Hugo Award for Best Novel, making history twice over as the first author to threepeat and the first to win for every novel in a series. For a series of novels quite explicitly about injustice and un-freedom, into which can be read with remarkable ease black anger and black pain and so many of those other complex weavings of emotion that stem from having buried somewhere deep in one’s genealogy that primordial wounding. In short, a series of novels that not only stars black people, but that thematically concerns itself with the business of being black in the United States of America. A series of novels about having too little and too much power simultaneously, about loving in the face of loss, about the separation of families, about containing in one calcifying body both God and woman.

UX Designer and theorist Florence Okoye writes: “Afrofuturism dares to suggest that not only will black people exist in the future, but that we will be makers and shapers of it, too.” < https://howwegettonext.com/there-are-black-people-in-the-future-d2fd9f1a38ea >She ties the Afrofuturist project to a reaching back. Far from operating from the blank slate baseline that results from the wholesale obliteration of one’s history by the triangle slave trade, “we can reach back to our past to inspire our futures.” We’ve snatched the pen, the tablet, the laptop from the hunter and type out, with our claws, the true story of the savannah. Oppression seeks to pulverize the possible, to atomize hope, to granulate not only dreams but the very act of dreaming. What control does one have over the slave, the sharecropper, the convict in a capitalistic enterprise if they can imagine another Now, if they can build, in the cathedral of their mind, an After? No, better to erase their name, indicate only their present physical features on the bill of laden, amputate their familial bonds by scattering the children into plantations all over the country. A century later, however, rappers walk the streets of New York City with Africa pendants hanging from their necks, at work, knowingly or unknowingly, repairing American injury. Telling story the way Schuyler told story, the way Butler told story, the way Jemisin will tell story. Afrofuturism is exhuming the bodies buried in Sugar Land and reanimating them. Afrofuturism, this imagining of Afters, pushes the laborer toward the tunnel’s mouth. That warmth? The feel of the sun on your face. Prison still persists, environmental racism aggravates illness, material and professional advancement will still be thwarted, but there is nothing like the moment when a prisoner the first night of the 1971 Attica Uprising, stares up at the sky from a D Yard crowded with other prisoners crafting a civil rights moment, and says, tears leaking down his face, that he hasn’t seen the stars in 22 years. We resist enclosure.

I think of the Broken Earth trilogy and the word that comes to mind is liberation. Authors from marginalized backgrounds may, to varying degrees of success, deny the more pernicious aspects of American publishing and refuse to write their marginalizations, to allegorize them even, or to reduce themselves and their demographic to suffering. What matters is the choice. Because should a black author face the plight of black Americans in the United States since before its inception and allegorize that, excavate from the mythmaking of Irving and Thoreau and Hemingway and Mitchell a series of humans the same color as her, the result can be a piece of writing so powerful and painful and daring that we can’t look away from that most essential truth it purrs, screams, weeps, shouts, whispers into our ear: that liberation without justice is not liberation, it is simply a hoax.

May 30, 2019
On this day, a Thursday, someone dear to me begins his jail sentence. He was convicted in Connecticut for a crime he is alleged to have committed in Connecticut, and when he is released, he will, absent permission from a probation officer, have to remain in Connecticut. His sentence is for one year. He will be eligible for parole in eight months.

He is a college graduate and a veteran of the Air Force. He enjoys difficult video games, then, bafflingly, replaying them at higher and higher difficulties. By turns brooding and articulate, reluctant and insistent. He loves potatoes, eats irregularly, and his metabolism is so powerful that whatever food he digests seems to vanish entirely, leaving no trace in his stomach or his ass or his chest or arms of its ever having been. If we are not plagued by the same haunts, the same principalities that swing us not from happy to sad but from ecstasy to sorrow, that render life for us in nine dimensions, that set whatever’s inside our ribcages on fire, if we are not whispered to by the same voices, then, at the very least, those phantasms, like the bodies hosting them, share DNA.

The afternoon of the first day of his sentence, I sat at a table in the Jacob Javits Center and, for ninety minutes, signed copies of a novel I’d written. It is difficult to say that anything other than providence had a hand in placing me here and placing him there, but there it is.

When he is released into probation and given his set of instructions, his list of constraints, and whatever methods they’re going to use to continue monitoring him, I hope I’ll be able to look at him and think of his time inside and now his time outside, his having lost a year in the prime of his life, him leaving a house of Corrections for a world of ankle monitors and check-ins, to look at him at the end of all of this, the entirety of his sentence, and not say out loud, “the whole thing was a hoax.”

Between the time he went in and the time he gets out, I will have published two books, the second of which is about, in part, a young man in jail. I wrote it because I think science fiction, fantastika, is one of the best tools I have to help build an After. Imagining justice. Imagining equality. Imagining peace. Cleaning up the mess American mythmaking has made of this place. I hope he is able to read this book. I hope he is able to read Riot Baby and know that I tried my best.

I hope he makes it to the end.

I wrote it for him.

Originally published June 2019.

Tochi Onyebuchi’s fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, and Omenana Magazine. His non-fiction has appeared in Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. He holds a B.A. from Yale University, a M.F.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a J.D. from Columbia Law School, and a Masters degree in droit économique from L’institut d’études politiques. His debut young adult novel, Beasts Made of Night, was published by Razorbill in October 2017, and its sequel, Crown of Thunder, was published in October 2018. His next YA book, War Girls, will hit shelves on October 15, 2019, and a novella, Riot Baby, will be available from Tor.com Publishing in January, 2020.

Footnotes
1: Science Fiction Studies 34.2 (July 2007): 177–186.

ARTICLE URL
https://www.tor.com/2021/06/19/juneteenth-cages-and-afrofuturism/

Juneteenth from Ralph Ellison 
Text https://www.kobo.com/ebook/juneteenth
Audio https://www.kobo.com/audiobook/juneteenth-4

Three days before the shooting
Text https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/three-days-before-the-shooting
Audio https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/three-days-before-the-shooting-2

George s. Schuyler book
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/black-no-more-a-novel
 

JEsse Eisinger is a eporter for propublica, for the public, here is his ProPublica page, the transcript to the episode is below for those that want to read and not hear. To hear you can click the image above or the link append to the transcript

TRANSCRIPT

 NOW THEY ARE SOME OF THE WEALTHIEST AND MOST POWERFUL MEN IN THE WORLD.

JEFF BEZOS, MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, WARREN BUFFETT, ELON MUSK JUST TO NAME A FEW.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNING PROPUBLICA REPORTER JESSE EISINGER HAS DELVED INTO THEIR TAX RETURNS.

THESE BUSINESS MOGULS ONLY PAY A FRACTION OF THE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IF NOT BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF THEIR FORTUNE.

HERE WE ARE SPEAKING WITH THEM HOW THEY MANAGED TO LEGALLY WORK THE SYSTEM.

THANKS.

JESSE EISINGER FROM POE PUBLICA JOINS US.

THERE ARE ONLY TWO THINGS GAUR AN 250ED.

DEATH AND TAXES.

HOW DID YOU FIND THIS?

WE HAVE OBTAINED -- PROPUBLICA HAS OBTAINED OVER 15 YEARS OF INFORMATION, TAX INFORMATION, TAX RETURNS AND INFORMATION FROM SCHEDULES THAT GO INTO THE RETURNS FROM THINGS LIKE STOCK TRADING, GAMBLING THOUSANDS OF THE WEALTHIEST INDIVIDUALS.

THIS IS REALLY JUST THE 1% OF THE 1%. WE'RE NOT COMMENTING ON HOW WE OBTAIN THE MATERIAL.

WE'RE TRYING TO PROTECT THE SOURCE OR SOURCES.

WE ARE EXPLAINING THAT WE VERIFIED IT EXTENSIVELY AND ARE BEING VERY CAREFUL STEWARDS OF THE INFORMATION.

WHEN YOU LOOK AT THIS, THIS IS A FIRST OF YOUR SERIES OF REPORTS, BUT YOU SEE A GLARING PATTERN HERE.

MOST OF US ANECDOTALLY THINK, WELL, THE RICH PROBABLY HAVE BETTER ACCOUNTANTS, ET CETERA, BUT WHAT YOU'RE SHOWING IS A STRUCTURAL FLAW IN THE SYSTEM.

YEAH.

EXACTLY.

THIS ISN'T ABOUT EVADING TAXES EXOTICALLY AND ILLICITLY, THIS IS ABOUT ROUTINE AND PERFECTLY LEGAL TAX AVOIDANCE STRATEGY.

YOU DON'T NEED A FANCY ACCOUNTANT FOR THIS.

WHAT WE SHOW IS THE SYSTEM AND THE SYSTEM'S ESSENTIAL UNFAIRNESS, WHICH IS THAT AVERAGE AMERICANS ARE STUCK IN THE TAX SYSTEM.

WE HAVE NO CHOICE IN THE MATTER.

WE WORKED TO LIVE, WE HAVE TO WORK.

WE GET SALARIES AND TAXES GET EXTRACTED FROM OUR PAYCHECK.

THE WEALTHY, THE ULTRA WEALTHY ESPECIALLY ARE COMPLETELY OUTSIDE OF THE SYSTEM ENTIRELY.

THEY DON'T HAVE TO TAKE INCOME.

WHEN THEY DO TAKE INCOME, IT'S IN THE TIME AND PLACE OF THEIR CHOOSING AND, THEREFORE, THEY CAN REALLY LOWER THEIR TAX BURDEN OR NOT HAVE A TAX BURDEN AND WHAT WE SHOW IS THAT SOME OF THESE GUYS, JEFF BEZOS, ELON MUSK, MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, CARL ICAHN, THEY ACTUALLY PAY ZERO IN FEDERAL TAXES IN RECENT YEARS.

SO JEFF BEZOS, LET'S TAKE A LOOK AT HIM FOR A MOMENT.

YOU HAVE A CARD ON YOUR WEBSITE.

IT SAYS BETWEEN 2014 AND 2018 HIS WEALTH GREW $99 BILLION BUT HIS TOTAL REPORTED INCOME, WHICH IS DIFFERENT THAN YOUR WEALTH GROWING, IS $4.22 BILLION, THAT'S ABOUT 4% OF HIS WEALTH.

AND ON THAT HE PAID $973 MILLION IN TAXES.

NOW, PEOPLE ARE GOING TO LOOK AT THAT NUMBER AND SAY $973 MILLION IN TAXES.

THAT'S A LOT OF TAX.

RIGHT.

WHAT'S THE POINT YOU'RE MAKING?

RIGHT.

IT DOES -- IT'S AN ENORMOUS NUMBER.

WE CAN'T EVEN CONTEMPLATE THAT NUMBER MUCH LESS THE $100 BILLION THAT HIS WEALTH GREW, BUT THE ESSENTIAL NUMBER HERE IS THAT IT IS A FRACTION, A TINY FRACTION OF HIS WEALTH GROWTH AND WHAT WE'RE ARGUING IN THE PIECE ESSENTIALLY IS THAT WEALTH GROWTH IS THE TRUE MEASURE OF HIS INCOME.

THE EQUIVALENT OF AVERAGE PEOPLE'S INCOME.

AND SO WHEN YOU COMPARE THAT FIGURE, THAT FIGURE OF ALMOST $1 BILLION TO $100 BILLION, IT'S ABOUT 1%. IT'S SLIGHTLY LESS THAN 1%. THE AVERAGE PERSON INCOME WHEN IT'S TAKEN OUT FOR TAXES, IT'S ABOUT 14%. SO THE AVERAGE PERSON MAKING 60 OR $70,000 A YEAR IS PAYING $14 IN TAXES EACH YEAR AND JEFF BEZOS ON THE RELEVANT FIGURE IS PAYING LESS THAN $1.

WHY DO WE THINK THIS IS THE RELEVANT FIGURE?

WELL, EVERYTHING EMANATES FROM WEALTH GROWTH FOR THE ULTRA WEALTHY.

THEY -- ALL OF THEIR POWER, ALL OF THEIR INFLUENCE, ALL OF THE WAY THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE LAVISH LIFESTYLES, JEFF BEZOS IS BUILDING A YACHT FOR HIS YACHT.

A YACHT THAT WILL TAKE HIS HELICOPTERS, WORTH ABOUT HALF A BILLION.

HE BOUGHT THE WASHINGTON POST FOR HALF THAT, $200 MILLION.

IT AFFORDS HIM POLITICAL INFLUENCE.

ALL OF THAT COMES FROM HIS WEALTH.

WHAT'S INCREDIBLE TO US, WHAT'S ASTOUNDING TO US IS THAT ALL OF THIS WEALTH GROWTH IS REALLY OUTSIDE OF THE TAX SYSTEM, ALMOST ENTIRELY BEINGS AND JUST NOT TAXED BECAUSE OF WHAT WE CHOOSE TO TAX IN THIS COUNTRY AND WHAT WE CHOOSE NOT TO TAX.

IN THOSE YEARS YOU HAD JEFF BEZOS FILINGS AND HE TOOK A TAX CREDIT.

IN 2011 HE REPORTED A VERY MODEST AMOUNT OF INCOME AND WAS ABLE TO WIPE THAT OUT WITH DEDUCTIONS AND BECAUSE OF THAT, HE HAD SO LITTLE INCOME HE WAS ABLE TO CLAIM THE CHILD TAX CREDIT FOR THEN 2 CHILDREN, $4,000.

SO HE ACTUALLY HAD NEGATIVE INCOME.

HE HAD CREDIT FROM THE U.S.

GOVERNMENT.

HE WAS THEN IN 2011 CLEARLY ONE OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD BUT EVERY DOLLAR COUNTS.

WHERE DO THE ULTRA WEALTHY GET THEIR MONEY TO SPEND, RIGHT?

I MEAN, YOU AND I HAVE CHECKING ACCOUNTS, SAVINGS ACCOUNTS, MAYBE A RETIREMENT ACCOUNT IF WE'RE LUCKY.

WE HAVE AN INCOME THAT COMES EVERY COUPLE OF WEEKS AND WE SAY, OKAY, THIS IS MY BUDGET.

IF YOU'RE SUPER WEALTHY AND YOU AREN'T GETTING AN INCOME, A LOT OF TECH BILLIONAIRES WILL ACTUALLY JUST WORK FOR A DOLLAR A YEAR, WHERE ARE THEY GETTING THAT MONEY?

YEAH, THAT'S A VERY GOOD POINT.

THEY DON'T TAKE SALARIES.

OSTENTATIOUS DISPLAYS OF SALARIES LIKE MARK ZUCKERBERG, SERGEI BRANDON.

WHERE DO THEY GET THE MONEY?

THE ANSWER IS, NOT FOR EVERYBODY, BUT OFTEN THEY'RE BORROWING.

THEY'RE BORROWING AGAINST THEIR STOCKS.

THEY PUT UP THEIR STOCK COLLATERAL AND THEY'RE BORROWING.

SOMEBODY LIKE ELON MUSK DISCLOSES IN A SECURITY FILING THAT HE'S PLEDGED TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF STOCK AND BORROWED AGAINST IT AGAIN FOR TENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS.

AND THIS IS HOW THEY FUND THEIR LIFESTYLES.

THERE'S NO -- WE DON'T HAVE ANY EVIDENCE BEZOS IS BORROWING.

HE MAY BE, HE MAY NOT BE.

NOT EVERYBODY HAS THE SAME HYMN BOOK.

WHEN THEY BORROW THEY'RE NOT TAKING INCOME, THEY'RE NOT SELLING THEIR STOCKS, THEY'RE NOT PAYING CAPITAL GAINS ON THAT STOCK THAT THEY'RE NOT SELLING.

THEY'RE KEEPING CONTROL OF THEIR COMPANIES AND WHEN YOU BORROW, YOU DON'T PAY ANY INCOME TAX ON THE BORROWING.

SO IT'S A WIN WIN WIN IN ALL OF THE WAYS THAT YOU CAN IMAGINE.

SO IF I AM A BILLIONAIRE, I DECIDE TO GO TO A BANK AND SAY, YOU KNOW I'M GOOD FOR IT.

I'VE GOT MULTIPLE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN STOCK, WHY DON'T YOU JUST, WHAT, LOAN ME A COUPLE OF HUNDRED MILLION AT 2 OR 3% BECAUSE THAT'S CHEAPER FOR ME TO PAY YOU BACK THAN IT IS TO PAY UNCLE SAM IF I ACTUALLY CASH THAT OUT AND LOOK LIKE I MADE 200 MILLION?

YOU ARE THINKING SMALL, COUPLE HUNDRED MILLION.

CARL ICAHN HAS ESSENTIALLY SOMETHING LIKE A MORTGAGE FOR A BILLION TWO THAT WAS IN HIS TAX FILINGS, AND AS I SAY, ELON MUSK HAS TENS OF BILLIONS AND LARRY ELLISON OF ORACLE DISCLOSED IN SECURITY FILINGS YEARS AGO THAT HE HAD A $10 BILLION CREDIT LINE.

START THINKING A LITTLE BIGGER BUT, YES, BANKS ARE HAPPY TO OFFER THESE GUYS, THEY ARE GOOD FOR IT, AND THEY CHARGE RELATIVELY LOW INTEREST RATES AND YOU JUST ROLL OVER THAT DEBT ALL THE WAY -- SOMETIMES ALL THE WAY UNTIL YOU DIE.

WE'LL GET TO THAT IN A SECOND, BUT THE WHOLE STRATEGY IS ENCAPSULATED BY THE PHRASE BUY, BORROW, DIE.

THAT'S ED McCAFFREY PHRASE, HE'S A PROFESSOR FROM USC.

YOU BUY YOUR ASSETS, BUILD YOUR ASSETS.

OBVIOUSLY BEZOS AND MUSK BUILT THEIR COMPANIES.

YOU INHERIT, THE WALTON AND MARS FAMILIES HAVE INHERITED GREAT FORTUNES.

THEN YOU BORROW AGAINST IT.

THEN YOU CAN EVADE OR ESCAPE OR AVOID -- NOT REALLY EVADE BECAUSE IT'S ALL LEGAL.

YOU CAN AVOID TAXATION AT DEATH.

YOU CAN ESCAPE THE TAX MANEUVERS.

THEN ESSENTIALLY YOUR GREAT FORTUNE HAS BEEN ALMOST UNTAXED THROUGHOUT YOUR LIFE AND INTO DEATH.

HERE'S THE THING.

SOME OF THE PEOPLE THAT YOU PROFILED, YOU MADE BASEBALL CARDS OUT OF WARREN BUFFETT, MICHAEL BLOOMBERG.

THESE ARE PEOPLE WHO MICHAEL BLOOMBERG ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL CAMPAIGNED FOR CHANGES IN TAXES.

WARREN BUFFETT FAMOUSLY HAS COME OUT AND SAID THIS DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE THAT I PAY LESS TAX AS A PERCENT THAN MY SECRETARY DOES, RIGHT?

SO WHAT DID YOU FIND ABOUT WHAT THEY'RE DOING LEGALLY?

YEAH.

WELL, THAT'S A VERY INTERESTING QUESTION, BUFFETT, BECAUSE WHAT WE FOUND IS THAT NO ONE HAS AVOIDED MORE TAX FOR AS LONG AS WARREN BUFFETT.

AND HE'S REGARDED AS KIND OF GRAND FAIRLY FIGURE.

HE'S BELOVED AND OF COURSE HE HAS COME OUT, TO HIS CREDIT, AND SAID THAT THE WEALTHY DON'T PAY ENOUGH IN TAXES, BUT WHEN HE'S TALKING ABOUT THAT, HE'S TALKING ABOUT IT IN THIS EXTRAORDINARILY NARROW WAY WHERE HE SAYS, TAXES ON INCOME ARE TOO LOW FOR THE WEALTHY AND CAPITAL GAINS TAXES ARE TOO LOW.

HE SAID I HAVE CAPITAL GAINS SOMETIMES AND I PAY A VERY LOW RATE COMPARED TO MY SECRETARY.

HE'S RIGHT, HE PAYS A RELATIVELY LOW RATE.

BUT WHAT'S REALLY EXTRAORDINARY ABOUT WARREN BUFFETT, HE TAKES SO LITTLE INCOME.

HE TAKES TINY FRACTIONS OF HIS ENORMOUS WEALTH.

NOW HE'S WORTH OVER $100 BILLION.

HE TAKES TINY, TINY FRACTIONS OF THAT IN INCOME AND PAYS A VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE OF THAT.

WHEN WE MEASURED HOW MUCH HE PAID IN TAXES COMPARED TO HIS WEALTH GROWTH, HE ACTUALLY PAID 10 CENTS FOR EVERY $100 THAT HIS WEALTH GROSSED.

10 CENTS FOR EVERY $100 THE WEALTH GROSSED.

THE WEALTHY, THE TOP 25 PAID 3.40 DWZ FOR EVERY $100 THEIR WEALTH GREW.

THE RICHEST 25 PEOPLE IN AMERICA.

MEANWHILE, AS I SAY, THE AVERAGE AMERICAN WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT INCOME TAX, WHICH IS REALLY THE WAY THEY ARE TAXED, IT'S $14 FOR EVERY $100 THEY BRING.

IN YOUR ANALYSIS, THE 25 RICHEST AMERICANS SHOWED BY THE END OF 2018, THOSE 25 WERE WORTH $1.1 TRILLION, IT WOULD TAKE 14.3 MILLION ORDINARY AMERICAN WAGE EARNERS PUT TOGETHER TO EQUAL THAT SAME AMOUNT OF WEALTH.

THE PERSONAL FEDERAL TAX BILL FOR THE TOP 25 IN 2018, JUST THOSE 25 PEOPLE, WAS $1.9 BILLION.

THE BILL FOR THOSE WAGE EARNERS, THE 14 MILLION WAGE EARNERS PUT TOGETHER WAS $143 BILLION.

THOSE AVERAGE WAGE EARNERS ARE NOT ONLY PAYING A DISPROPORTIONATE SHARE OF THEIR OWN TAXES, THEY'RE PAYING MORE IN RAW NUMBERS AS WELL TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

ABSOLUTELY.

AND THAT ASTONISHING FIGURE WAS DONE BY MY COLLEAGUE WHO HAS WORKED WITH ME ON THE STORY, AND WE REALLY WANTED TO HIGHLIGHT THIS BASIC IMBALANCE, THIS STUNNING IMBALANCE WHERE THE ULTRA WEALTHY CAN DEVELOP ENORMOUS SUMS FROM WHICH, AS I SAID, ALL OF THEIR POWER AND INFLUENCE EMANATES AND ALL THEIR MEANS EMANATES.

THOSE 14 PLUS MILLION PEOPLE ARE INSIDE THE TAX SYSTEM.

THEY'RE PAYING THEIR FAIR SHARE.

WE HAVE STRUGGLED TO ADEQUATELY FUND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

PERIODICALLY THEY ARE CONVULSED IN FEAR MEDICARE WILL GO BROKE.

ROADS AND BRIDGES ARE CRUMBLING.

WE NEED TO PROVIDE NATIONAL DEFENSE.

IF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS CONSTRAINED BECAUSE THE PEOPLE WITH THE MOST WEALTH ARE NOT PAYING THEIR FAIR SHARE, THEN WE WANTED TO HIGHLIGHT THAT SYSTEM AND REALLY SHINE A LIGHT ON IT.

THERE ARE A LOT OF WEALTHY PEOPLE, WARREN BUFFETT INCLUDED, WHO SAY I DON'T WANT TO GIVE IT TO UNCLE SAM.

I'M GOING TO GIVE 99.5% OF MY WEALTH AWAY, PHILANTHROPIC GIVING.

I THINK I'M A BETTER STEWARD OF MY HARD EARNED MONEY THAN THE GOVERNMENT IS.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THAT IDEA?

HE SAID EXACTLY THAT.

I DON'T WANT TO HAVE MY MONEY BEING PAID -- HAVE THE DEBT PAID DOWN TO CHINA WHEN I CAN ALLOCATE IT TO SOMETHING THAT WILL DO MORE FOR SOCIETY.

ONE ANSWER IS, BOY, I WOULD LIKE TO ALLOCATE MY TAX DOLLARS THE WAY I WANT TOO.

I BET MOST PEOPLE HAVE PRETTY STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT HOW THE DUFUSSES IN WASHINGTON ARE SPENDING MY MONEY AND I COULD DO IT BETTER THAN WE DO.

THAT'S WHY WE HAVE ELECTIONS, WHY WE HAVE A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY.

WE HAVE A SHARED DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY TO ELECT LEADERS TO ALLOCATE OUR TAX DOLLARS THE WAY THE MAJORITY THEORETICALLY WANTS.

THE OTHER THING IS PHILANTHROPY DOESN'T SOLVE THINGS.

PHILANTHROPY FOR THE ULTRA WEALTHY ARE WAYS THAT THEY CAN PUT FORWARD THEIR OWN POLICY CHOICES, TRY TO DOMINATE THE CONVERSATION, HAVE DISPROPORTIONATE INFLUENCE.

SOMETIMES THEY FUND POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS.

SOMETIMES THEY RIDE THEIR HOBBIES AND OBSESSIONS.

IT'S NOT REALLY THE WAY WE WANT TO RUN SOCIETY.

IT'S A DISTORTION OF SOCIETY TO HAVE BILLIONAIRES AND ALSO BE SUBSIDIZED BY TAXPAYERS.

ONE OF THE PUSH BACKS IS GOING TO BE CORPORATE TAXES, RIGHT?

WARREN BUFFETT SAYS BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY PAYS A TON OF CORPORATE TAXES.

WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM HERE?

IF I HAVE MY MONEY IN THAT, MY CORPORATION IS ACTUALLY PAYING THOSE TAXES, I'M NOT TRYING TO STEAL FROM THE GOVERNMENT.

YEAH, THAT'S A VALID POINT AND THERE'S A LOT OF DEBATE AMONG ECONOMISTS ABOUT THIS.

WHAT I WOULD SAY ARE TWO THINGS.

ONE IS WE'RE IN A GOLDEN AGE OF CORPORATE TAX AVOIDANCE SO COMPANIES LIKE am*zon, APPLE, FACEBOOK HAVE GONE TO GREAT LENGTHS TO MOVE OPERATIONS OVERSEAS AND AVOID AMERICAN TAX.

SOMETIMES THEY ALSO PAY ZERO IN TAX.

SO, YOU KNOW, am*zon IS A TAX AVOIDER BOTH AT THE CORPORATE LEVEL AND AT THE OWNERSHIP LEVEL.

THE SECOND THING IS THAT CORPORATE TAXES DON'T SOLELY FALL ON THE OWNERS OF THE CORPORATIONS.

PROBABLY, THIS IS A MATTER OF DEBATE, BUT CONSUMERS PAY CORPORATE TAXES.

WORKERS PAY CORPORATE TAXES.

AT LEAST SOME ECONOMISTS THINK SO.

SO THIS IS SORT OF DISBURSED.

THAT'S NOT A DIRECT TAX ON THE OWNERS OF THE COMPANY.

NOT A DIRECT TAX ON BEZOS OR MUSK.

SO ONE WAY TO SOLVE THIS WOULD BE TO HAVE MORE DIRECT TAXES ON THE OWNERS OF THE COMPANY.

JESSE EISINGER, PROPUBLICA, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Article
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/top-25-u-s-billionaires-pay-almost-no-income-taxes/
 

This week on the podcast we are joined by Lateefah Zawistowski to discuss all things OverDrive. As an account manager for OverDrive, Lateefah gives us the inside look at how OverDrive works, how authors can add and market their books on OverDrive, and how libraries utilize the service. She also shares some advice on pricing your books for libraries, what trends she’s currently seeing in library sales, and she discusses the impact of the pandemic on libraries.

• Lateefah tells us about her role as account manager at OverDrive and why she believes publishers and indie authors alike should consider opting their books into OverDrive
• She discusses the borrowing habits of readers and how they change based on the genre, and she tells us why the library is such a great tool for discovery, especially for backlist and midlist titles
• Lateefah explains how libraries purchase books from OverDrive, the multiple purchasing models available to authors and libraries, what time of year libraries are most likely to be purchasing books, and she gives some advice on how to price your eBook for libraries
• She gives us her predictictions for library trends in 2021 and beyond, and explains why the surge of new library users at the beginning of the pandemic, while great, isn’t necessarily enough to support local libraries
• Lateefah discusses OverDrive promotions and she explains how merchandising is essential to discoverability on OverDrive
• She explains the global reach of OverDrive and how many different markets they’re available to, from public libraries to education to corporations, and she discusses the different language markets outside of English Language books
• Lateefah talks to us about current trends in library sales, what books have sold the best during the pandemic, and she explains why genre fiction is having a big moment right now

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW OR READ THE TRANSCRIPT USING THE ARTICLE BELOW

KWL - 245 - Optimizing OverDrive with Lateefah Zawistowski - Kobo Writing Life

Happy Audiobook Month! What better way to celebrate than by uploading your audiobooks directly to Kobo! Especially because it’s incredibly easy to do.

How easy, you ask? You can upload your audiobook in only ten steps (and one of those steps is signing into your account)! Here’s how:

Log into your Kobo Writing Life account here: https://www.kobo.com/writinglife

Select the Audiobooks tab on your dashboard. Don’t see the audiobook tab? Send us an email at writinglife@kobo.com and we can activate it for you!
Click “Create new Audiobook”. Once on the audiobook uploading page, you can start inputting your audiobook information. You will first be asked to describe your audiobook. This includes: the title and subtitle (remember to only include text that appears on your book’s cover!), the series name and number if your book is part of a series, the contributors including your narrator, your synopsis, publisher name and imprint, your publication date and release date, your ISBN (this must be a unique ISBN and cannot be the same as your eBook or print book!), and finally the language of your audiobook and whether it’s abridged or unabridged.
You will then be required to enter the categories for your title. These categories will determine how your audiobook is labelled and categorized in the Kobo Store. We recommend selecting three categories for each book to ensure that customers who are browsing through our store have a better chance of finding your titles.
Next, you will need to upload your cover image. We accept cover images in .png, .jpg and .jpeg file formats. We recommend the minimum size of audiobook cover images be at least 600px by 600px. Covers for audiobooks should be square; if they are not, they will be automatically adjusted. Please note: cover images cannot exceed 5 MB in size.
Now you are ready to upload your audio files! You can drop files directly from your computer into the Upload Audio Files section or select the folder on your desktop that contains your audiobook files. We only accept audio files in .mp3 and m4a formats. An individual file cannot exceed 200 MB in size and all files combined cannot exceed 2 GB in size. Please wait for your audio files to be completely uploaded before moving to the next step. You will know when files have been successfully uploaded when the “Listen to confirm content” prompt appears .
Once your files have been completely uploaded, you can then start to make your Table of Contents. The Table of Contents organizes your audiobook to make sure it is in reading order. You can move the files up and down to ensure they are in the correct order and provide the chapter title for the file under the “Name of Content” section. Please note: What you list in the “Name of content” section will appear in the Table of Contents customers use to navigate your audiobook on our apps.
You will then be asked to provide the geographic rights for the title. Please select the countries you own the rights to sell your title in. 
The final step is to set the price for your title. Please input the price of your title in all the available currencies. Audiobooks pricing is slightly more complicated than eBooks. The royalty percentage thresholds are as follows:

35% royalties for audiobooks priced $2.99 or lower
45% royalties for audiobooks priced over $2.99

Please note: If a customer redeems a free trial token for your audiobook, the royalty amount will be 0. If they redeem using a paid token, the royalty amount will be 32%. Otherwise, the royalty amount will be the values displayed above.
Once all steps have been completed you can then select publish! If you have missed any steps, you will receive an error message. Otherwise, your audiobook is in good hands and has been sent for processing. It will soon be available on the Kobo store in 24-72 hours. 
Be sure to let us know when you’re publishing new audiobooks so we can add them to our audio new release calendar! < https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdy1Hzav1WCotnQqd9zOmrUYj5OMcQcqQ-YJl_erliV6apuYQ/viewform > 

Happy Audiobook Month! - Kobo Writing Life