Cathy Jacobowitz's Blog, page 6

Publishing while white (C is for Cathy)

I’m guesting today on Diverse Pages, a blog devoted to diversity in science-fiction and fantasy writing. It’s Blogging From A to Z month, and I’m C! I wrote up my reflections on how white privilege affected my ability to cope with the unexpected emotional stress of self-publishing. Please check it out!

On the capital B

Readers of The One-Way Rain may note that the adjective “black” is not capitalized when used to indicate race, even though I now capitalize it on this blog and elsewhere. I don’t capitalize the word “white.” Someone asked me about this recently, and here’s what I wrote in response.

Before publishing The One-Way Rain, I had never been in the habit of capitalizing “Black” in my writing. It actually had never occured to me to do so until someone I really look up to and regard as a mentor asked m...

Belated nod to the Banner

In my last post I had fun with the Boston media I love to hate, but I completely forgot Boston’s excellent Black-owned and -edited newspaper, the Bay State Banner. And yes, I do attribute this to my own racism—here’s a paper I read every week and respect, but it happened to slip my mind while I was composing a lament for the state of the local press.

It takes a while to get to know a newspaper. That’s part of the compact I was talking about last week: I spend time becoming familiar with your...

Me versus the press

I

I’ve stopped reading Bay Windows. Not because of editor Sue O’Connell’s political missteps; frankly, it would take a lot more offensiveness to get me to abandon the LBGT weekly I’ve been picking up for fifteen years. And not merely because of the atrocious copyediting. No, I’ve stopped reading Bay Windows because the atrocious copyediting plus the evident carelessness with which the paper is assembled make me feel deeply disrespected as a reader. All too often, it’s obvious that articles hav...

Racist humor in The Pale King

Today in the Antiracist Book Club, mixed feelings about David Foster Wallace.

When I blogged about “Lost,” I referred to “the cracked majesty of any very long-running fictional enterprise”; I’m not sure I phrased that in the most felicitous way, but I’m drawn to feats of endurance in literature as well. Combine this with my ambivalent but enduring love of certain male artists whose work can be downright offputting (Kanye, Axl Rose, William S. Burroughs), and you’ll see why I was psyched to r...

She hated publicity

I should get that tattooed on me instead of the David Foster Wallace quote (start, end) I’m actually going for. It’s from one of my unpublished novels, Melly Mockingbird:

Clyde Fortenay had lived within earshot of Fenway Park since he was four years old. The Boston papers made much of this when he was drafted, and also of his age at the time (seventeen). If she’d known the fuss it would cause, Bronwyn said, she never would have let him skip a grade. She hated publicity, although she had been i...

The white passenger

EDIT: Rats. I watched a few more episodes and my argument about Quinn’s promotion got ruined.

Ah, “Dexter.” So many things to hate about you (spoilers): your gratuitous and often misogynistic violence; your unthinking reliance on hackneyed tropes in both action and dialogue; your racism both anti-Black (Mos Def notwithstanding) and anti-Latino (ditto Zayas and Vélez); your deliberate (or else just stupid?) misunderstanding of such matters as addiction and recovery, trauma, and psychotherapy;...

To my twenty-years-ago self; or, Unworldly

I’m about to turn 43. Inspired by Claire Andersen’s poem, I decided to write a letter to myself at 23. Twenty-three-year-old Cathy has just graduated from the creative writing program at U.T. Austin and is looking for a job that will allow her to write four hours a day (eventually, in order: hostess at Bubba’s Lone Star Cafe, operator at Harkness Answering Service, clerk at the University Co-op Bookstore). It is 1994. Here is what I would like to say to you, Cathy of twenty years ago.

Dear Ca...

Well, so much for that

I’ve always been one to put down novels very fast. A few years ago I judged mostly on prose, sometimes plot. Now I judge on those and the author’s treatment of race as well. If a character of color is introduced in a stream of stereotypes, I won’t make it through the rest of the book. Here’s something from a recent novel featuring a female private eye:

The minute she steps out of the elevator, Maxine can hear Daytona Lorrain down the hall and through the door, set to high-dramatic option, abu...

White Reflections on Black Power

This book from Kyle’s collection, by white Quaker activist Charles E. Fager, was published in 1967. I expected it to be informative, which it was, but what took me by surprise—I must be a slow learner, because this shit is always taking me by surprise!—was its relevance to my own journey and to being what today is called a “white ally.”

Fager devotes the first three-quarters of the book to deconstructing “liberal” criticisms of the contemporary Black Power movement championed by Stokely Carmi...