• RT @mikecane: Forget Ads In Books, Lit-Lovers Face An Even More Hideous Prospect http://t.co/v1Yj16P PRODUCT PLACEMENT. #
• RT @aalbc: Why is Black Literary Fiction Languishing? – http://aalbc.com/tc/index.php?/topic/372-why-is-black-literary-fiction-languishing/ #
• A story from @tayari about the mysterious confidence-boosting case of mistaken identity http://twurl.nl/cqas8p #

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• I'm not surprised @Nnedi. She felt like a character who wouldn't want to let go easily, if that makes any sense. #
• Ha! I wouldn't be surprised @mikecane. My RSS feed is chockablock with breathless! raving! reviews. It has become an annoyance. #
• OK, I get it, book reviewers. Jonathan Franzen has a new book. It's called 'Freedom.' Y'all think it's great. Can we move on now? #
• Haven't read any Calvin Trillin in a while. Mayhaps I should put one of his on the list after I finish Negro With A Hat. #
• RT @sarahw: Remember the headlines saying the city of Laredo would have no bookstore? That's no longer true. http://is.gd/en8F1 #
• Yes, this. RT @negrita: RT @DiggsWayne: #note2females "females" is a term usually applied to animals, not humans. #girls #women #
• RT @meljean: Oooh, giveaway. @NaliniSingh giving away mass market copies of MUST LOVE HELLHOUNDS at Odd-shots: http://www.theoddshots.com #
• Testing (having some problems with this account in Tweetdeck). #
• And now…back to my book. #
• RT @furthamucka: Expanding the Horizons and Products of Archie Comics – http://nyti.ms/9XAUA9 #
• Baby woke in middle of night, now *I'm* wide awake. Thx to #Kindle #iphone4 app, can read in bed w/o getting up/waking hubby again. #
• RT @alexanderchee: Provocative and largely but not entirely wrong slam of American fiction: http://ow.ly/2p6ji #
• Exciting! Please let us know when it will air. RT @Nnedi: The Africa Channel is coming to my house today to film me. Kinda nervous. #

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• RT @mosaicbooks: comparative eBook sales triple http://nyti.ms/b9GY2J adding pressure to book retailers #
• RT @PurpleZoe: RT @BlueBlkAtlantis: Sci Fi Author Nnedi Okorafor talks Literature and #Afrofuturism http://tiny.cc/9rwwh #scifi #syfy #black #
• Finally getting around to experimenting with Apple's iBooks. Likey. #
• $15 for somebody to sharpen my pencil? I'm gonna go with 'no.' http://bit.ly/azZgqv #
• If I ever finish with this Marcus Garvey bio, I'll get on with the WEB Dubois 2-volume bio. Should be finished circa 2017. #
• RT @Mdotwrites: RT @whattamisaid What "so ghetto" really means http://ht.ly/2nNLI On a slang word loaded with race & class bias #

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• Have you faced Kindle prejudice? http://bit.ly/cKSGtQ #
• RT @SmartBitches: Many many words about #rwa10 and Kristan Higgins in a fountain: http://bit.ly/cFxQHZ #

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• Romance writers raise $61,550 for literacy http://bit.ly/cWdPyj #
• MT @Nnedi: interview w/ cyberpunk writer from Ghana. RT @johnnylaird The Afrocyberpunk Interview | johnnylaird http://bit.ly/9wBAYZ #
• Orlando's hot as romance writers share their passion, prose http://bit.ly/b4CGyt #
• Unauthorized celeb bios don't sell well http://yhoo.it/cTOZWK Haven't given this much thought, but it surprises me for some reason. #
• Now reading, finally: Colin Grant's 'Negro With a Hat,' which is a bio of Marcus Garvey. #

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Check out my review of the Nnedi Okorafor’s newest book, the sci-fi/speculative/fantasy work Who Fears Death, over at Carleen Brice’s White Readers Meet Black Authors.

Spoiler: I liked it, mostly.

• 56 pages into @nnedi's 'Who Fears Death,' and so far riveted. #
• Via @claudia_m, Frederick Douglass on "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?". http://bit.ly/cj3BV2 #

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• RT @claudia_m Guest Post: Human Rights and THE BLUEST EYE'S Global Reach: http://wp.me/pjzwn-16N #
• RT @ claudia_m Morrison's THE BLUEST EYE – 40 years later: Blogger's Roundtable begins June 28 http://wp.me/pjzwn-13g (Please RT!) #

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This post is part of a continuing series celebrating the 40th anniversary of Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye. See a complete list of participating bloggers at The Bottom of Heaven.

My skin is black
My arms are long
My hair is woolly
My back is strong
Strong enough to take the pain
Inflicted again and again
- Nina Simone

If I may be so bold: Beyond her contributions to the world of magical realism, in my world the enduring legacy of Toni Morrison will be her poetic destruction of the notion that black American women bear all sufferings quietly, without complaint and without negative result. Although Zora Neale Hurston and others kicked open the door, it was Morrison who got in the room and detonated a neutron bomb on, in and around that stereotype and made people wonder about the effects of the larger culture on black women and girls.

And it started with The Bluest Eye, which was published 40 years ago.

What The Bluest Eye as a work of fiction showed was that the ills of pre-Civil-Rights-Act era racism brutalized the psyches of black women as much as it had the psyches of black men (think Richard Wright) — and to make matters worse, for some of those girls, their own families couldn’t be a refuge from the problems of the larger world.

Then there was a whole generation of writers, black and white, who took the themes of The Bluest Eye and ran with them. Thanks to the invitation of The Bottom of Heaven’s Claudia, I re-read The Bluest Eye for the first time in about 12 years (on Kindle for iPhone!). I was reminded of one of Morrison’s own inspirations and struck by how many elements from this story had been borrowed later by some other works. Although several nonblack authors dug in similar trenches in the years after The Bluest Eye‘s publication (I think of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules and Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur right away), I’ll focus on black authors here. Obviously, I can’t get to everything.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. – Leo Tolstoy

• Plot: The relationship of two sisters helps them understand a complicated world where dark-skinned black girls seem of little value and a father impregnates his daughter. Book: The Bluest Eye? No. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which was first published in 1976. Although Morrison’s Claudia and Frieda MacTeer aren’t as brutalized as their friend Pecola Breedlove, they bounce thoughts and ideas off each other, much like Alice Walker’s Celie and Nettie. Both sets of sisters experience members of their community or family turning their own self-hatred outward. Would we ever have known Celie and Nettie if we hadn’t first connected with Claudia and Frieda?
• There’s also Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnnie (1991), a soupy book with a gothic, Morrison-esque family complicated by an uncomfortable attraction between a father and daughter (“…the fondling, probing, interconnecting arms and bodies you saw playing in a circle in the snow. Why had they never treated you like that?”), incest and an unthinkable, inconvenient pregnancy.
• Not least among these was Push, by Sapphire. Like Pecola Breedlove, who desires blue eyes, the dark-skinned, overweight Precious Jones also is plagued by insecurities about her looks, and like Pecola, she is impregnated by her own father. Strangely, although I have few problems with The Bluest Eye, I’ve been able to make it through Push just once, because it struck me as, mostly, a gross-out exercise in pathology. Push read as though Sapphire had been given some of the plots points of The Bluest Eye in no particular order and told, “write something like this.” As you know, Push was made into the Oscar-nominated movie Precious in 2009. After the jump, a clip.

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• From @racialicious: On dismissing one type of narrative for another http://bit.ly/d2sOYF #
• President Obama is writing the foreword to Nelson Mandela's book. http://yhoo.it/9LWqpe #

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