by Marshall Walker Lee
As opposed to wit, which is often just pedantic cruelty, more ingenious than funny, rarely instructive or heartening, Aphorism is, historically, a manly form, laconic, from the Spartan polis of Laconia. Spartan men were said to hold the rhetoricians and the poets in disdain; the Laconians valued bravery, austerity, and, as anyone who’s seen 300 knows, a direct and very un-pedantic sort of cruelty. The first “Laconisms” come from accounts of the Battle of Thermopylae, the bloody contest that pitted a small band Greeks and Spartans against a superior Persian force. Grotesque, frightening, often hilarious, these early Laconisms make the battle out to be a bloody lark. My favorite: when a Persian envoy sent to Sparta asks for a tribute of “some soil and water,” the Spartans throw him down a well; “Dig it out yourself,” they say.
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by A.L. Major
“The crazy thing is I’ve never been called a nigger to my face” begins Issa Rae’s blogpost. Issa Rae, for all those who do not know, is the creator, writer and star of the hit web series, “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.” In her recent article,“People on The Internet Can Be Hella Racist” Rae describes how after winning the 2012 Shorty Awards, her twitter and Facebook pages were inundated with racist comments, that ranged from horrific to downright deplorable: “I nominate @awkwardblackgirl for @shortyawards in #cottonpicking.” And then “#ThingsBetterThanAwkwardBlackGirl The smell coming from Trayvon Martin.” Most times, I’m not even sure these people are fully aware of what those words truly evoke in a historical context. These are people, who I imagine, outside of the internet are perfectly respectful to people of color, might even have friends of a darker complexion, might even have voted for Obama (Yes We CAN!), but somehow they traded in their civil decorum and decency for the internet’s anonymity.
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by A.L. Major
Samuel L. Jackson is the highest grossing actor of all time. I know, I was surprised too. According to the Guinness Book of World Records he has appeared in more than 100 films, that have in total grossed over 7.42 billion. So, I started an investigation —no this was not a form of procrastination to distract myself from writing, I swear. Over the course of two weeks, I watched and re-watched as many films starring Sam L. as I could, in the hopes of understanding what makes his films such a success. Most compelling of his performances, the thread that united his roles, was his voice. Perhaps his success lies, not in what he says, but how he says it.
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by A.L. Major
In November, I watched the National Book Awards ceremony via an online broadcast. A U of Michigan alum of 05′, Jesmyn Ward, was nominated for her novel Salvage The Bones , and if she won, I wanted to witness it. Of course, my impulse to watch the awards was a self-involved, highly illogical one: that if I am a U of Michigan MFA Fiction student and she is an alum of this same program, then I might be able to produce a work of similar notability and talent. When she won, I was surprisingly elated. As if I had won too. I bought her books, the hour after, not yet critical of why it hadn’t occurred to me to buy them before. Later, I realized I’ve become a complacent reader.
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by Marshall Walker Lee
If you believe the Times, and why not believe them, Google is developing everything from robot drones and driverless cars to a space elevator, which, so far as I can deduce, is a kind of hybrid, Wonkafied rocket-cum-slingshot. Great, I say go for it, Google! To tell you the truth, I don’t care about intelligent droids, wireless refrigerators or a dinner plate that loads my bio-feedback straight to Facebook. My interest is in that ‘X’ and it’s whispered hint of secret happenings. The sex of X, the intrigue, that’s what caught my attention, because—here’s my confession— I am obsessed with the letter X
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