I once wrote a piece on Medium about how Chinua Achebe took offense to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (How Conrad and Achebe Battled over Africa). Achebe felt Conrad’s story frames colonialism as a white man’s struggle and reduces Africans to props. In the second decade of the 21st Century, people want to have similar conversations about William Faulkner, the Coffee Boss, himself.

What to do about William Faulkner? asks the Atlantic. I’m not going to do anything about William Faulkner. Not tonight. I have a sink full of dishes.

A Matter of Interpretation

People should always consider and critique a story’s narrative viewpoint — whether it’s that of “the aggressor,” or “the privileged” and whether it perpetuates cultural hegemony. In the second decade of the 21st century, doing so (and posting about it on Twitter) is practically de rigueur. Part of basic literary interpretation is understanding when something was written, and by whom, what life was like for them at the time of writing, and the impact the story has had since. …

On September 22, an Asian television writer wrote to the New York Times to express reservations about her career writing Black characters. The Times’s ethicist, British-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, replied.

When engulfed in Twitter, I’m refreshed to hear what an actual philosopher has to say about identity politics. I would expect the chasm between heart and head to be too great for anybody to find his answers conclusive. Still, here’s what I gather from his response.

You can’t predict the effect of a self-denying ordinance

In literary circles, it’s common to hear people talk about privileged writers “taking the space” of a marginalized writer who’s “more qualified to tell their story.” …

I discovered Natalie Wynn through WNYC’s On the Media podcast in an episode titled “Making Sense of Cancel Culture.” Wynn, who is a trans woman, hosts the website/YouTube vlog Contrapoints. She’s a popular social commentator who has found herself cancelled more than a few times for infractions that, to an outsider, appear benign.

Like so much internet slang, this use of the word “canceling” started out on black Twitter where a few years ago people, well, mostly women, would tweet “cancel R. Kelly” and things like that. You know, it started out as this vigilante strategy for bringing justice and accountability to powerful people who previously had been immune to any consequences for their actions. …

Jill Criswell is a writer from Northern Florida. She took an MFA in creative writing from UCF, and, like me, she travels the globe. We haven’t met, but I think we’d be friends. Like her, I think world travel creates a perspective shift worthy of discussion. Unlike her, I’m not sure I’d say “everybody needs to do it,” especially when speaking to an audience of often-struggling writers in a genre sensitive to privilege.

Criswell plugged her book Kingdom of Ice and Bone in a September 1 blog post in the School Library Journal titled, “Want to be a Fantasy Writer? You need to Travel.” By September 6, it was burning out of control like that Labor Day fire in California that started with a gender reveal party, quickly surrounded campers, and later required military helicopter evacuation. …

Jessica Krug isn’t black. That was the big news yesterday, because the George Washington University professor was pretending to be black — and Latino — as she wrote, taught, and profited on her minstrelsy.

My mother, a pastor and counselor, once said, “when people have affairs, they should never confess it to their partner. It only serves to hurt the victim, and no good comes of it. An affair is between the cheater and their conscience.”

That is what I was thinking as I read Krug’s lengthy, unprovoked mea culpa on Medium. How many people did the mea culpa hurt and insult that would never have heard about her and her actions had she simply disappeared? …

I literally- literally!- got a headache trying to follow the cast of characters in Conor Friedersdorf’s story Anti-racist Arguments Are Tearing People Apart in The Atlantic. Without sticky notes on my wall, pieces of yarn connecting them, and a tube of lipstick so I can write on my bedroom mirror, I cannot trace the drama unfolding at — wait for it — a series of NYC Community Education Council District 2 meetings. What a bizarre series of events, and what grand theatre.

What happened (I think)

In New York City, fourth graders must test in to middle school. This system separates kids with higher test scores from kids with lower test scores and groups higher-performing kids together. It also benefits kids of privilege: whites and East Asians with more money, more resources, and more parental involvement. Critics argue this system perpetuates structural racism, and that kids learn best when classes are a mix of everybody. …

A few years back, before publisher Rot Gut Pulp took another direction, I spent two months writing pulp fiction. The experience was everything I wanted it to be.

My editor, Curt Sembello, was a drunkard with a cabin in Southeast Asia who forgot about the time difference and called me in the dark hours of the morning in fits of pique. He fired me thrice, fought with his staff on Twitter, and broke his arm trying to have sex in a hammock.

“More young adult pulp! It sells!” he cried, as if pointing a trawler into a sea full of fish. And so, a man ill-equipped to edit anything YA and a writer who writes formulaic pulp found a measure of success outside the parameters of either genre. …

Albert Richard Wetjen’s sea-story is poorly written and racist as hell, but remains a shining example of pulp structure.

Terror Island
⭐⭐⭐
By Albert Richard Wetjen
7,500 Words.
Action Stories, October, 1938.

The Author: Albert Richard Wetjen

Albert Richard Wetjen, who has a biography at Pulpflakes far better than this summary, was by most accounts an unseemly man. He was a drunkard who died at 48, and told inflated stories of daring-do like a Merchant Marine. In fact, he was a Merchant Marine. In many ways, this made him an ideal man to write for the pulps.

His father and grandfather were sailors, and he went to sea at age 14. He told stories of being shipwrecked twice, once by fire and once by fog. He also claimed to be a member of the crew that took the Sultan of Zanzibar to exile in St. Helena in 1916. He earned the Mercantile Marine Medal, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. He worked as an auto mechanic in London, lived in Africa, and in 1920 moved to Canada. He worked his way across the country from east to west and finally settled in Oregon where he became a writer. As legend has it, he looked up from reading Jack London and said “if one lug can make it, so can another,” and in 1921 started writing. …