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An ‘Unexpected’ Treat For Octavia E. Butler Fans
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By K. Tempest Bradford
When a writer passes before her time, readers and fans often mourn not only the loss of her presence in the world, but the loss of the words she may yet have written. Such was the case when, in 2006, speculative fiction writer Octavia E. Butler died unexpectedly at her home in Seattle. Butler is one of the most celebrated authors in the genre, her novels and short stories regularly graced with Hugo and Nebula awards. She was the first speculative fiction writer to receive the MacArthur “genius grant,” a prize whose name perfectly summarizes Butlers work: She was a genius.
Its depressing to know that there will never be another new Octavia E. Butler novel to read. However, Butlers papers went to Huntington Library, where scholar Gerry Canavan is even now poring over them, unearthing fragments of the novels and stories she was working on. At some point during the excavation, two short stories emerged: “A Necessary Being” and “Childfinder.” Both written in the 70s, one was apparently left unpublished by Butler herself, the other part of a famously unreleased anthology. Both are finally seeing the light of day in an e-book called Unexpected Stories.
The first story, “A Necessary Being,” is fantasy set in a world where leadership is biologically determined and leaders are utterly necessary to the proper functioning of society, even when they are unwilling and forced into it. Characters struggle with the tension between biological imperative and personal choice and freedom, a theme Butler would return to many times in later works.
In sensibility, it resonates with another of Butler’s stories — “Bloodchild” — though the plots are entirely different. In that story, a human boy struggles with his role as a future host for alien offspring — a role that will mean his death even as it helps ensure the comfort and survival of his loved ones. But while the young alien host has no real choices, the characters in “A Necessary Being” seize agency at the first opportunity.
Read More Review: Unexpected Stories, By Octavia Butler : NPR.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Arts and Culture, books, E-book, fantasy, fiction, literature, Octavia E. Butler
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How I lost my middle-class life
By Jayme Reid
Recently I read an article in the New York Times Magazine by Dominique Browning, the former House and Garden magazine editor who lost her job when the magazine folded in 2007. Like “The Bag Lady Papers,” a recent memoir by Madoff victim Alexandra Penney forced to “scale back dramatically” by, among other things, cutting her maid’s hours, it was one of those “how I lost everything and discovered what’s really important in life” stories the media is so fond of these days. Browning writes vividly of the dislocation and loss unemployment brings, about her grief at selling her “forever” house. But her despair has a silver lining: She took her retirement income and moved to a second house in a coastal Rhode Island town, where she found peace communing with nature, playing Bach on the piano, and enjoying a slower pace of life. By losing everything, she gained happiness.
This is not one of those stories.
I’m an older single mother with four children under the age of 12, two dogs and a cat, and since September 2009 we have lived in a 26-foot travel trailer in Southern California. Our story is very different from those of Penney and Browning, but we’re not all that different from thousands of Americans who don’t have wealthy and influential friends, robust retirement accounts or second homes to which we can retreat when the bottom falls out of our lives. Our story doesn’t have a silver lining.
Two years ago my children and I were living in a nice five-bedroom house in Colorado, and the decline of the housing market was just an abstract worry. I had plopped down almost all of my life’s savings (including cashed-out retirement funds) on the down payment for our house to keep monthly payments low. I was employed in the environmental-permitting field and able to pay the mortgage. My worry was more personal: My young son was not growing. Adopted at age 3 with a successfully repaired heart defect, he had weighed 28 pounds for the nearly two years we had lived in Colorado. After what seemed like endless tests and failed fixes, we learned his lungs had suffered permanent damage in the 18 months before his heart was repaired.
“If he were my son,” the doctor said, “I’d move to a lower elevation.”
Read More How I lost my middle-class life – Salon.com.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged economy, Great Recession, life, middle class, money, motherhood, Mothers, recession, United States
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50 Years After Freedom Summer, America Needs a Revived Movement for Racial Justice
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The Editors
On the last Tuesday in June, six-term Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran narrowly won a hard-fought Republican run-off election against his virulently anti-government Tea Party challenger, Chris McDaniel. The reason, the pundits quickly concluded, was an unprecedented surge in black Democrats—some 13,000 or more—crossing over to support Cochran. “It should send a message,” said retired school principal Ned Tolliver. “It shows that we have the power to elect who we want to elect when the time is right.”
Around the time the polls closed, a very different view of Mississippi was playing out on PBS, in the form of the documentary Freedom Summer. A gripping account of the 1964 movement that brought hundreds of college students to register black voters, the film is part of a flood of fiftieth-anniversary commemorations of that epic struggle. In grainy black-and-white footage and interviews with the heroic Americans who risked beatings, firebombings and even death, the film reminds us of the long struggle of African-Americans for the vote and celebrates those who made it possible.
There’s much to celebrate. Mississippi, where only 28,000 blacks were registered to vote in 1963, now boasts more black elected officials than any other state—including the recently re-elected mayor of Philadelphia, scene of the brutal 1964 murder of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.
The White and Colored signs have long since come down, and a black man now sits in the Oval Office. But fifty years after Freedom Summer, America faces the greatest assault on voting rights since the Jim Crow era, with the Supreme Court eviscerating the Voting Rights Act last year and twenty-two states passing new voting restrictions since 2010. Poll taxes and literacy tests have been replaced with burdensome new laws that keep 3.7 million eligible black voters unregistered across the South. And an estimated 2.6 million ex-felons—including nearly 8 percent of all black adults—are barred from voting, despite having served their sentences.
Read More 50 Years After Freedom Summer, America Needs a Revived Movement for Racial Justice | The Nation.
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Do Most Christians Even Know the 10 Commandments?
By Valerie Tarico
Now, I should note that a young non-religious friend once came home from school with a bright green Gideon’s New Testament that she later touted as a reserve of fine rolling papers, which may explain why the household average isn’t a solid 5.
But most Americans treat the Bible with some degree of deference.
Among adults who responded to the survey, 56% were classified as “pro-Bible” meaning they think it is the actual or inspired word of God with no errors. More than a quarter said that they read from the Good Book daily or at least several times a week. Fully half said the Bible contains everything a person needs to know to lead a meaningful life.
Read More Do Most Christians Even Know the 10 Commandments? | Alternet.