The Conversation
- Scapegoating our own (13)
- King: ^Yeah, but so did Obama 4 years ago. It’s inconsistent to think that Obama can have an arch of decision...
- Frank Chow: @King He definitely said he opposed “same-sex marriage”, that didn’t change....
- King: @ Frank But Manny didn’t even say what he’s been accused of.
- Facebook co-founder renounces U.S. citizenship prior to IPO (13)
- Raguel: This is a storm in a tea cup, a new five minutes of hate. This is because despite the outrage, people will...
- Frank Chow: “The country is not over-taxed; in fact, tax rates are near 60 year lows.” -source,...
- bigWOWO: Linda, Mark Cuban is rich (richer than me anyway), and he’s just as horrified as I am. I don’t...
- The Perversity of Human Biodiversity, a.k.a. “Scientific” Racism (428)
- LadyBlack: Hello, you who believe that some races are inferior and that some are superior. As a Black (in particular...
- bigWOWO: Thanks, Grover!
- Grover Porquel: Excellent roundup. I have taken on these “biodiversity” types myself over the years and...
- Higher education: the next subprime bubble (5)
- bigWOWO: Let’s think hypothetically. Let’s say they had quotas, such as a company of X number of...
- kobukson: In the past, a high school diploma was sufficient for getting a job. Things changed and a HS diploma...
- bigWOWO: I do agree with you, Ei, to a certain point. I have heard that some lawyers and engineers are having...
- Americans Eat the World’s Cheapest Food (36)
- bigWOWO: A week in, and: I liked the mock chicken, but the family didn’t like it. I don’t know if...
- King: ^ But isn’t Anthony Bourdain the same guy who recently called Paula Deen the “Worst Unhealthy Cook” for...
- kobukson: I like Anthony Bourdain’s take on vegetarians and vegans: “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like...
- Why Do Asian People Have Bad Eyesight? (37)
- Suing the Bachelor for racial discrimination (34)
- George: The problem with the entertainment industry is that they have already stated that blacks are not on the show...
- George: “Oh and prediction, you know the first female non white bachelorette will be Asian, and it will be...
- Chen: i’ve been reading about BFOQ cases, and it seems as if the entertainment industry wins unless they do...
- Reasons to eliminate black studies (23)
- Asian Men, Black Men, and the Competition for White Women (569)
- Raguel: Actually, white people may laugh at him even more, and that may be why they like him so much.
- Raguel: How does this nihilistic dog so filled with ressentiment and love of the slave morality even dare to mention...
- ChineseMom: (continued) Criticism of contemporary Chinese literature and Marxism Q: After the publication of your...
- Immigration records of Asian immigrants to be made available to public (2)
- American woman becomes hero to abused women in China (39)
- Chen: thats it. This woman got beat up, and that is wrong. I’m sure some assholes are going to use that and run...
- Eurasian Sensation: Patriarchal practices are incredibly ingrained in some countries and are extremely hard to shift....
- Raguel: Wasn’t it reported in one of the major american magazines like life, time etc that travelling ulamas...
- San Diego student left alone in cell for five days (3)
- bigWOWO: Haha…I know, Zach! This is the absolute worse kind of invisibility that there is!
- Zach Katagiri: Man — talk about asian american males being invisible!!
- Linda: this will be the next episode of “I survived….” I am surprised they don’t have video...
- Adventures of the Karaoke King by Harold Taw (Review and Question) (4)
- bigWOWO: Alpha, Glad that you see the precious metals rather than the ranking! Although I guess I should consider...
- Raguel: Why not make contact with other blogs and Asian American websites to feature your reviews? This way,...
- Alpha Asian: B, I know what you mean. A lot of reviewers just give very bland reviews and they don’t really...
- Asian women fetch high prices for egg donation (5)
- Dman: I don’t get the article Asian women in demand for donating her eggs. I did not see anything mentioned...
- bigWOWO: I think that buying an egg is financially easier these days than adoption from China. I know people trying...
- Linda: Also regarding about adoption. I think a lot of Americanized Asians are open to adoption in the US. (unlike...
- Re-Programming Your Mind (74)
- Chr..: I’m not making this up! I saw this guy in front of a Trader Joe’s here in NYC not too long ago as...
- Asian Women and the Invisible Chain (187)
- Chr..: @ King Yes, and what can the general masses do to stop with what’s going on right now? Not much I would...
- King: @ Chr Because the money, more than anything else, is ‘the system’ that affects everything else.
- Chr..: “The whole thing looks like a very twisted version of musical chairs, doesn’t it?” Why does this...
- Creative Monopolists (3)
- Asian husband-wife team on Shark Tank (3)
- Artists Who Refuse to Work for Free (5)
- Courtney: I have been drawing for 22 years. I think it’s really inconsiderate to ask an artist to sit down for...
- More Asian Americans Marrying Within Their Race (106)
- Chr..: “Look at some of the fatcats on Wall Street–a guy who can drop $800 on a single night out isn’t...
- The Richer Sex by Liza Mundy (Review) (12)
- Chr..: “dystopian mating marketplace where, like income inequality, the rewards of female sexuality will go...
- Whiteness and American TV (9)
- Linda: @hadoken – I don’t know why korean dramas are like crack. I go thru phases. since it’s a...
- Scapegoating our own (13)
Category Archives: Writing
Podcast: Interview with Jimmy Aquino
Last Thursday I had a podcast with Jimmy Aquino, one of the writers of Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. Download it here, or hear it here:
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It is 36 mB and runs just under 40 minutes. I’m consistently having problems with GarageBand, so I guess y’all will have to get used to the large file sizes. In this podcast, we discussed Jimmy’s career, his previous life as an html coder, his interest in comics, his involvement with The Minority Militant’s website and Project X, and his goals for the future as an Asian American writer.
Piracy Hits Print Media
Writers have remained relatively unscathed and unaffected by digital piracy. Until now. With the proliferation of E-books and digital devices, it’s only a matter of time before writers will face the same problems as recording artists and filmmakers. From the Times article:
Until recently, publishers believed books were relatively safe from piracy because it was so labor-intensive to scan each page to convert a book to a digital file. What’s more, reading books on the computer was relatively unappealing compared with a printed version.
Respect and Love
Article on Seth Godin’s blog about what makes a good presenter. He says it’s just two things: love to the audience, and respect from the audience.
I think this is true, not just for presenters, but also for bloggers and writers. You can’t be a good blogger if you hate the people who come to your site and are not trying to help them. You can’t write for people if you don’t care about them. I’ve seen some people try their hand at blogging who were so self-absorbed that they couldn’t type a sentence without the condescenscion coming out. Needless to say, they failed.
Call for Asian American Writers
(Pic from here.)
If you are a fiction writer of Asian American descent who writes about Asian Americans, we are forming a writers group. We have room for one more person. E-mail me (naruguard-44 at yah oo dot com) if you’re a writer who is interested in a writing group. If one group fills up, I can always introduce writers to each other so that people can form other groups.
D.I.Y. Magazines
Bare Magazine staff
It looks like HP is releasing a print-on-demand web service for magazines. From the description, it sounds like the new service MagCloud is similar to lulu.com, where a publisher creates the publication over the web and customers order it directly. The new service looks good–because HP is the king of printers, the service is capable of producing high quality glossy magazines.
Deep Pockets and Asian American Culture
(image from here)
The NY Times had a great editorial about Bernard Madoff and the allure of money: If Looks Could Steal. In the editorial, Daphne Merkin, sister of a Madoff investor, talks about how we as a society respect money and how money seems to validate everything that a rich person says. She brings up an example of a dinner with George Soros, and she describes it thus:
Posted in Activism, books, Writing
Tagged Activism, Asian American, books, money, Writing
2 Comments
Sylvia Plath's son kills self
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath
Very sad–the son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has killed himself. He hanged himself.
Their family history is quite tragic, and they have a long history with depression. Plath gassed herself while her children slept in another room. Feminist groups blamed her husband Ted because he had left her for another woman, a woman who ended up gassing herself and her own daughter.
Really sad.
Typewriter Envy
Olivetti-Royal Typewriter
(Picture from here.)
It’s part of the writer’s toolbox: the typewriter. I wrote longhand for the first twelve years of my life. When I moved to a new school, they required papers to be typed, so I learned how to type on a typewriter. This was back in the day before there were computers in every house. Typing on a typewriter tends to be a more pensive activity than writing on a computer; because it takes more time to correct mistakes, one has to think a bit ahead of one’s actual typing. From my experience, it’s much faster than writing in longhand, but it’s slower than computer typing since one has to wait for the mechanical parts to stop moving (electric typewriters tend to be a bit faster than manual typewriters).
Flannery O'Connor biography
Flannery O'Connor
Some of you writers may be interested in Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor. I saw this in the Economist. Writers these days often do research before writing, and many feel that they can’t write without research. Ms. O’Connor had the opposite philosophy:
One of the strengths of Brad Gooch’s biography is its elegant pooh-poohing of her claim that “experience is the greatest deterrent to fiction” and that “any story in which I reveal myself in completely will be a bad story.”
Forever Young
I saw this CNN video about Dora. As most parents of young children know, Dora is extremely popular, perhaps more popular than any kids show when I was growing up. Because we live in an era of total merchandising, kids can own Dora dolls, watch Dora DVDs, wear Dora backpacks and Dora clothing, and even use Dora toothpaste. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Dora is a huge enterprise. In this era of big money, Nickelodeon, according to the above video, is trying to extend Dora’s appeal by making an older Dora for tweens. They are doing this by creating a pre-pubescent Dora that the older crowd would find more appealing.
