Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Amable Virgen de Guadalupe, madre y auxilio de todos los Christianos, las penas que me atormentan pongo en tus benditas manos. Santa Madre, jamas se oyo decir que alguno te haya implorado sin tu auxilio recibir, por eso con fe, humilde confianza y arrepentimiento lleno de amor y esperanza, te pido este favor. (Rezar un Ave Maria)

AMEN

• Sherman Alexie's Iowa Review Interview

  Sherman Alexie: Yeah I guess. I'm an important brown guy now. (Laughs). Being different helps. I'm not going to deny that it helps a lot. I mean the work has to be good, but the fact that I'm different makes it more attractive to magazines.

  Joelle Fraser: So you grant that?

  SA: Oh yeah. I'm a firm believer in affirmative action—nobody unqualified ever gets a job through affirmative action. Maybe less qualified, but not unqualified. Certainly I might get on lists or get opportunities because I'm different, because I'm Indian.

  JF: And it doesn't bother you?

  SA: No! Hell no! Reparation. (Laughs). Nobody white is getting anything because they're white. It doesn't happen in the literary world, never, never once has a white guy gotten more because he's white. But then you have that cabal of New York writers, young good-looking New York literary boys, and they have their own sense of entitlement. I'm not anywhere near that stuff.

• Tristan Risk: Littlemissrisk.com
• Valerie @ BIGCUTIES.COM - Also known as DCBBW
• Funniest damned comment I've read in a very long time

Right, got one of those from Die Puny Humans, but don't feel like opening the page and checking the entry. Find it yourself. It's a game that's fun for all ages.

Left work early today when I realized I was reading the exact same thing several times without making any sort of mental connection whatsoever. I probably should not be blogging in this condition either. Sleep now.

Title and intro text from the candle I'll not be lighting before going to sleep, since I'd rather not burn the building down, thank you very much.

Update: Added a quote from the Alexie interview, which is very, very much worth a read:

JF: You've said of writers who aren't Indian, like McMurtry, that they shouldn't write about Indians.

SA: Not exactly.

JF: Clarify that.

SA: At the beginning it was probably that but it's changed. People can write whatever they want—people accuse me of censorship when I say these things. But what I really want to say is that we should be talking about these books, written about Indians by non-lndians, honestly and accurately. I mean, they're outsider books. They're colonial books. Barbara Kingsolver's novels are colonial literature. Larry McMurtry's books are colonial literature. These are books by members of the privileged, of the powerful, writing about the culture that has been colonized. This is no different than Nadine Gordimer, who's a colonial writer, and she would call herself that.

So I think this illusion of democracy in the country—it's the best country in the world—but this illusion allows artists to believe that it isn't a colony. When it still is. The United States and South Africa: the only difference is about 50 years, not even that much. And people forget that. So when McMurtry does what he does, he thinks he's being democratic, but he's actually being colonial. I wish we could talk about the literature in those terms, beyond the quality of it, but actually talking about in terms of "hey this person doesn't know this—it's completely a work of imagination."

JF: How does this compare to, say, occupying the other gender?

SA: (Laughs). Oh that's the same thing.

See? I just quoted more of it.

Half-formed notion about how (some) women authors write better male characters than the converse (Chuck Conners All Stars), and similar with (some) people of color writing white characters -- remember trying to get through Primary Colors, and the "black" narrator's voice being so utterly jarringly wrong that it tossed me right out of the story. And the women characters didn't fare much better. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed, and wondered why so many otherwise sensible people seemed to be.

Other half-formed notion about how bloody difficult it is to write about certain topics without resorting to circumlocutions, since the words that you should be able to use have been repurposed for other shit. So, I can't say that some of those links are to adult web sites because, you know, "adult" as in "adult book store" seems to mean "for adolescent boys of all ages." And mature makes it sound like the things are for senior citizens. And intellectual is an insult in the US. And I'm still not up to the porn/pornography/erotica debate, thanks.

Like I said, all half-formed, and I still haven't managed to get to sleep, so this may not even be coherent. I'm not the best judge of that sort of thing at the moment. Hell, even on my best days, I'm not the best judge of that sort of thing.

On the plus side, my copy of Dance Dance Revolution Konamix arrived.

Perhaps soon I'll be capable of playing.