It’s Tricia. Dr. Rose If You’re Nasty

My god I think I love this woman.

I read Dr. Tricia Rose’s first book, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, a couple years out of high school and it was one of the first pieces of critical text to really make the hard connections between Hip Hop, black inner city culture, technology and social justice.

Judging from this video , recorded at the Columbia College a few months back, it looks like Dr. Rose is still dropping jewels on the sometimes staid halls of academia.  Here she discusses the idea of a post racial America in the time of President B-Rock.

Props to The Black Report for the link.

Filed under: Activism, Authors, Books, Hip Hop, Politics

Literature 2.0? It’s about damned time

When Mark Amerika created Grammatron 16 (?) years ago, who knew it would take the rest of the world so long to catch up? 

Still, you have no idea how exited this article in the NYT makes me-enough to get me blogging again after umpteen months.

It’s always annoyed the hell out of me that writers were getting the short end of the stick in terms of cool digitools.  The itunes, DIY, online community model works for the music biz, but it took (and to be honest this is all still very new stuff) the creation of a functional and practical e-book reader (the Kindle, and it’s soon coming knockoffs) to actually make to idea of books integrated with media a tangible reality.  

According to the article, some enterprising capitalist types are finally seeing the light when it comes to the multimedia options available to authors.  

Filed under: Authors, Books, Marketing, Media

Mailer. 1923–2007. A Multimedia Tribute

One of literature’s most famous pugilist finally rests.

I never met the man and won’t claim to be the world’s greatest Mailer scholar, but I admired the hell out of his work and career.

Even if he tended to dip deep much into the art of spectacle, it was with a sheer force of personality you had to admire. Especially because the man behind the mess was full of such damned fine writing.

Like James Baldwin and Oscar Wilde, to me Mailer represents the ultimate man as artist. A champion of literature and culture-loud in life and brash in his search for truth-I admired his insistence that as writers, the work we create is necessary, even vital, in order to truly comprehend ourselves as humans.

Far better writers than I have summarized his life and death, so this will simply server as a link to some of his memorable moments-the sights, sounds and reviews. No matter if you loved or hated him, you’ve got to admit that we’ve lost one of the really important ones. We’ve got some big shoes to fill…

-kwan

Text

Norman Mailer Interview

The Naked and the Dead ebook

Mailer All Time Enemies List

Review of the Spooky Art

Synopsis of Mailer’s Films

Filed under: Authors, Books, Photos, Profiles , Norman Mailer, Obituary