Why Will Smith Matters.

From the always on time Ta-Nehisi:

I see a lot of that in Will, when I watch him acting. Dig his style in Hancock or I Robot. Whatever you think of those movies, you can see hip-hop oozing out of dude’s pores. I make no brief for black exceptionalism here–this is how identity works. But I think one of the things that’s so cool about this generation–the Andre 3000s, the Jay-Z’s, the Colson Whitehead, the Junot Diazes–is how we claim our heritage but not to the exclusion of the rest of the world.

Junot Diaz is Better Than Your Favorite Author.

I’m about halfway through Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao — almost exactly halfway through it, actually, which means that I’ve read the first three chapters, about a hundred and sixty pages or so of constant shift, motion, and fluidity. I normally wouldn’t talk about a book before I finished it. I don’t even like to talk about movies before they’re over (although man, my mother sure does). I think it’s hard to judge something without seeing the whole, hard to really articulate what you’re experiencing before you’ve completely experienced it. And that’s true. I can’t completely tell you what I think about this book yet. But man, those first three chapters. And man — MAN — that third chapter.

If you haven’t read the book, maybe you shouldn’t even read this, although I won’t give spoilers, so maybe you should. I’ll do my best. So he’s telling us this story, or so we think, about a fat nerdy kid in Paterson New Jersey, and the kid can’t get laid, can’t live up to the machismo of Dominican culture, and he’s speaking Elvish, and he looks destined for either disaster or some kind of redefined greatness, becoming a novelist or a sci-fi writer or something, and we’re right along for the ride. And then we’re on the story of his sister, who runs away from home to be with a boy and escape her mother and we’re looking back at it all so we know roughly where she’s going to end up and how it fits into her brother’s life, and we’re with it, and we’re along for the ride.

And then.

And then.

We explode backwards into this amazing, heart-rending story of their mother, their impossible beautiful mother, the kind of Dominican woman — Dominican girl, really — you can conjure up in your head the second he starts talking about her explosion into womanhood, and it’s a story of Trujillo, of violence and desperation and violent desperate love. And it’s stunning, and he’s still telling us the story of the fat nerdy kid, and it’s not related exactly, but it informs everything, and really, that’s how life works.

I finished the chapter, and I put the book down, and I said “wow.”

I’ll write more when I finish it. But that could take a while. I’m savoring this one.

You Know The Semester is Over When…

1.  You finish a test, go straight to a bookstore (SHAKESPEARE AND CO, WHAT!), and buy three brand new books that are in no way school related.  Junot Diaz and Chuck Palahniuk are the best celebrations of a completed school year that I can imagine.

2.  You start a brand new blog that you will undoubtedly struggle to update regularly throughout the summer, and almost certainly abandon by the time school starts again in the fall.

3.  The semester isn’t really over, but there’s only that one last take-home essay/final that you’re confident you can bang out in an hour but will probably take several hours and you’ll be cursing your overconfidence all the way through.

4.  You’ve already gotten an A for a class you don’t think you deserved an A in.

5.  You’re making plans, big plans, to explore the fuck out of New York City all summer long, and these plans include puppets this week, Lauren Ambrose in Central Park sometime soon, the Brooklyn Cyclones as often as possible, and of course, a new digital camera.

I won’t yet tell you what my plans are for this blog, but I have plans, which is unusual for me.

I’ll try to stick to them.