Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Tuesday 5:27pm 8Jan07
Recommended a book to a girl friend whose mother passed away a couple days after Christmas. The book is Motherless Daughters written by Hope Edelman. The only book I've ever come across that focuses on the impact of a daughter losing her mother. I mention it here for any women who may be reading who have also lost their mothers.
You become really sensitive to other women who lose their mothers after you've lost yours.
I still haven't decided what I have to say about 50 cent and his new venture. There was an article in the The Globe and Mail yesterday about his G-Unit Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster's Pocket Books/ MTV Books. Reading the essays in bell hooks Remembered Rapture and her comments about the industry catering to mediocrity especially in the black community, do I even want to touch this with a ten foot pole? Do I want to get the pole dirty?
And there's the part that mentions that 50 cent wants to raise literacy levels of young male blacks. sigh! But what grade level do these books cater to, I wonder. 50 cent gets a top billing and a co-author credit on all the books in his G-Unit imprint despite not having written a word. He brainstorms ideas with the writers and then sends them off to do the real work of writing.
Yeah, okay, he's trying to be a role model, as wobbly as that is. He's trying to inspire kids to believe that with a little hard work they too can make beaucoup bucks. He's a brand. Good for him, more power to him, really but fuck his shit is insulting, isn't it?
Could you just imagine the meetings? "So Mister Fiddy, or shall I call you Mister cent? We'll put your name above the author's name on every book that comes out under your imprint. We'll make millions. No sir, you don't have to write a word. Just show up at the book launch and that will motivate your non-reading people to pull out their pennies and buy YOUR books. Of course you can offer ideas to the writers, having an idea is the same thing as writing after all."
50 cent is a fucking hero! He's showing kids that you can be an author without ever having written a word (spitting in the face of all starving artists everywhere). You can sit on the shoulders of your own people and get them to write the stuff while you laugh all the way to the bank. Of course there is always someone that will agree to it in a misguided belief that this is a stepping stone to serious fiction. 50 wants to be a mogul and good for him, I have nothing against that, but doesn't he see that this is no different than record companies pimping their artists talent and bitch slapping them when they ask for their fair share?
Yes kids, it's only bad when the white man does it to the black man. But when the black man does it to the black man (or woman) well, I guess that's enterprising.
Raising the level of literacy. Maybe in a few years Harvard will give you an honorary degree in literature, eh 50? You da fucking man!
EY
