Should I be Writing at a Time Like This?
Some thoughts on creative work while the world burns
Good tweet: Some ideas for ways to honour Ursula K LeGuin
somebogwitch reblogged
… he claimed to be genuinely surprised when, in March 1956, he received a letter from one Sam Gamgee, who had heard that his name was in The Lord of the Rings but had not read the book. Tolkien replied on March 18:
“Dear Mr. Gamgee,
It was very kind of you to write. You can imagine my astonishment when I saw your signature! I can only say, for your comfort, I hope, that the ‘Sam Gamgee’ of my story is a most heroic character, now widely beloved by many readers, even though his origins are rustic. So that perhaps you will not be displeased at the coincidence of the name of this imaginary character of supposedly many centuries ago being the same as yours.”
He proceeded to send Mr Gamgee a signed copy of all three volumes of the book. However, the incident sparked a nagging worry in Tolkien’s mind, as he recorded in his journal:
“For some time I lived in fear of receiving a letter signed ’S. Gollum’. That would have been more difficult to deal with.“― J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography
Source: tolkiengateway.net
somebogwitch reblogged
miketalkstrash-deactivated20170
Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month
The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man.
That’s excellence.
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:
- chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
- grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
- he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
- even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
- (…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)
- famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
- for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
- and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
ALSO IMPORTANT:
SWAG
sugaryumyum
I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.
when this post first went around (a year ago apparently) I was like BUT WHAT ABOUT DADDY DUMAS THOUGH because basically
- daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman
- he invaded egypt
- the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
- then napoleon showed up
- napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
- the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
- this did not make napoleon happy
- in fact it made him jealous
- napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
hortensevanuppity
I was never taught that he was Black either. WTF.
General Dumas (aka Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie) looked like this…
…and like this…
…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…
:-D
I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…
He was also born in present-day Haiti. Back then, it was the French colony of Saint-Domingue.
somebogwitch reblogged
February 18, 2016
Today In History
‘Toni Morrison, writer and the first Black woman to be awarded the “Nobel Prize in Literature,” was born in Lorian, OH, on this date February 18, 1931. Morrison received the “Pulitzer Prize” for her book, Beloved, in 1988.’
(photo: Toni Morrison)
- CARTER Magazine
Happy birthday to my favorite writer Toni Morrison and to Audre Lorde, another gifted and talented writer. - Mabinty