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“When Selasi coined “Afropolitan,” she understood that “the media’s portrayals won’t do. Neither will the New World trope of bumbling blue-black doctor.” Though there are two doctors in this story, she situates the characters within the context of the American privilege of movement, up and down through class boundaries, across oceans, by Amtrak trains and tro-tro. The Afropolitans of Ghana Must Go have a sense of individuality and humanity shaped not by what they do for a living or their material success, but by their desire and capacity for love.” -
“There’s not a single person out there whose life hasn’t been touched by the issue of consent.” — The Rumpus Interview with Susan Wright, founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom -
Maakies: Pinwheel by Tony Millionaire
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when Diana Prince spins, hernimbus fills me with glee and glow and whenI was a boy I wore my mother’s highheels and wrapped my Binky around my necklike a cape and then coiled it at my sidemy blanket of truth and I spun and spunarms outstretched and wanted that light to fillme, envelop me the way I saw itchange Lynda Carter on TVFrom Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger, reviewed today by Tory Adkisson
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“As any recovering alcoholic can tell you, practice works just as well in the realm of not-doing as anywhere else. My not-singing skills grew by leaps and bounds thanks simply to the fact that entropy takes its cut. Musicians are a bit like sharks. If they do not keep swimming, going through the specific physical motions of their music-making, their skills wither and die. I could feel muscle memory getting fuzzy, my instincts growing less reflexive. When it saddened me, as it inevitably did, I told myself I wasn’t a singer any more, and it could not possibly matter.” — Hanne Blank’s Deep Throat #4: On Being and Unbeing a Singer -
From Liam Golden’s marvelous Spotlight: Boco Watches the Sea
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“ The Drew’s community of River Heights is in many ways a typical Midwestern town, yet it presents serious challenges to risk mitigation due to the unprecedented number of carnivals, cults, traveling circuses, organized crime syndicates, and counterfeiting rings in its vicinity….
Dotted across this perilous landscape are myriad secluded inns, tea rooms, mansions, and castles which contain hidden staircases, secret passages, haunted spirits, buried treasure, and/or smuggled goods. These structures figure prominently in N.’s daily movement. They also explode and burn down with alarming frequency.
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“Speedboat somehow does without plot all the stuff that is usually plot’s responsibility… Literature, to get cute about it, isn’t about the story; it’s about the telling – the whole point of the fictive exercise is to impart feeling, not knowledge, or, because that really is too cute a sum-up, to effect some sort of emotional/spiritual response in the reader. It’s true that we’re hardwired in some infinitely mysterious way to tell, listen, and relate to stories, but at their core, stories are vehicles to smuggle the more real but less tangible stuff in – suspense, heartbreak, triumph, sympathy, beauty, sublimity, defeat, ennui, whatever it is that gets you off… All I’m saying is that literature isn’t as much about the story as it is about creating the space where the story happens. And Speedboat has, in the fullest, most praiseworthy sense, created a space, one dictated and propelled by an emotional, not a narrative, engine.” -
“The kiss wasn’t heavy or too high-stakes. It had come, I’d have said, in a natural way, just part of the conversation: a kiss that was really a thought of itself, if thought was a factor at all.” — In “Kiss of the Underachiever,” Scott Garson “turns the familiar ‘desire in a bar’ story into something uniquely propelled by the sound of the words.” Greg Gerke reviews Is That You, John Wayne. -
“I had just broken up with my boyfriend and moved into an apartment in Oakland with a German woman I found on Craigslist.
Not too long after, I walked to the bookstore and came out holding books by bell hooks, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde. I looked down at the books and thought, I guess this is what happens when you break up with your boyfriend. You go to the feminist literature.”— Links I Like by Zoë Ruiz
