Why Has Beatrice Gone Dark Temporarily?
On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, along with many other websites, I am “blacking out” my content as a protest against two bits of proposed legislation working its way through the United States Congress: a House Bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act and a Senate bill called the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has perfectly described why we’re against this legislation, so I’m just going to quote her:
“I do not think PIPA and SOPA are the correct response, and find them to be much too large a hammer, one that serves those who funded the development of the bill than any actual progress against the relative threat of piracy. They serve to hinder development more than they could ever stop piracy.”
CNET explains what’s at stake, as does the BBC, and Reddit’s Jason Harvey really digs into the details.
Because one possible long-term effection of SOPA/PIPA, should either of them become federal law, would be to suppress both American citizens’ expressions of free speech and their access to other people’s expressions of free speech, I am joining several other websites in a temporary demonstration of what a federally censored Internet could take away from end users like you and me. Normal service will be restored at the end of the day. In the meantime, if you’re as concerned about these bills as I am, call your U.S. Senator or your U.S. representative and let them know where you stand.
18 January 2012 | uncategorized |
Whatcha Reading, Diana Abu-Jaber?
Diana Abu-Jaber describes her latest novel, Birds of Paradise, as an integral part of coming to terms with the move she and her husband made from Portland to Miami several years ago. “If we were going to have a child we were going to raise it in Miami,” she explains. “A commitment to a child was also a commitment to a place. I wanted to fall in love with Miami. I knew that living there wasn’t going to suffice. I had to start giving myself to the place and demanding that it give itself to me.” As she began writing, she discovered that the novel was tapping into a fear she hadn’t even known she’d had. “The local news was all about missing kids and runaways and I realized that was one of my big parental nightmares,” she says of the decision to base her story around a family coming to terms with the eighteenth birthday of their runaway daughter. “Writing a book about what scares me is a way of trying to become braver.”
Abu-Jaber still teaches at Portland State University, and she told us about the reading lists for her two classes this semester. For a course on modern Arab-American literature, she’s assigned books by Randa Jarrar, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Mohja Kahf, “all of them approaching cultural difference from unique perspectives, and talking about what it feels like to be caught in that collision between places.” She’s is also teaching a course on the art of writing the novel, and she’s picked out several books that are “masterful in the way they approach the construction of the novel” and can give other writers valuable insights into matters of craftmanship like character, voice, and structure. Those books include:
- Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
- The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud
- Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
- Tinkers, Paul Harding
- Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
- The Maytrees, Annie Dillard
22 December 2011 | uncategorized |
