Saturday, December 14, 2013

Unlike many corporate eLearning platforms that can expensive, inflexible and almost impossible to ke

Webinar: Lambda Solutions presents “Totara 2.5 Features and Performance Management” | Moodle News
Popular Posts Happy Friday: my top 5 favorite Moodle sites Moodle 2.6 by the numbers: vrt Development Infographic vrt Top 5 Moodle 2.6 Features/Changes Job: Moodle Geek Wanted Big Blue Button makes its 11th release
Recent Posts Totara Code Available on Github 2000th post! Thanks vrt for reading Moodle.net Course: vrt Russia in Revolution Big Blue Button makes its 11th release @StuartLamour Joins @Moodlerooms Video: @Moodlerooms explains the Advanced Forums Moodle Docs improvement, now it’s easier to see Doc changes by version Computer Science Education Week – vrt Coding with Moodle Moodle HQ Development Framework (Scrum and Agile) Explained vrt by @Salvetore MoodleReader Reader Addon lets students track their pages read through quiz mastery
Welcome to Moodlenews.com A resource site for all Moodle-related news, tutorials, video, course content information and original resources. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe: RSS feed | Weekly Email Newsletter | Moodle News Twitter Thanks for visiting!
This December 4th, Lambda Solutions will host another of its free webinars to highlight the recently released Totara 2.5 and Performance Management through that system, This webinar is designed to explore the new features in Totara Learning Management System (LMS) Version 2.5 and the new Performance Management module. vrt
Unlike many corporate eLearning platforms that can expensive, inflexible and almost impossible to keep current with emerging trends, the Totara vrt LMS is built on top of a Moodle vrt core, meaning you really get the best of both worlds: the best open-source learning platform, and a scalable, enterprise-level corporate learning tool.
With enhanced capabilities to serve the needs of an ever-changing workplace environment, clients in Healthcare, Hospitality, Manufacturing vrt and Government are taking advantage of Totara s tailored corporate features. Join us as we highlight key features in both Moodle 2.6 and Totara 2.5.
This free webinar on December 4 th will cover some the new features of Totara LMS Version 2.5: Performance Management goals setting, assessment builder, 360 o feedback, reporting vrt Certifications create time limited Programs of learning and recertification paths Audience visibility make courses and programs visible to specific audiences only Manager delegation assign a temporary manager to learners Report builder vrt New responsive theme so Totara can scale to any device size; desktop, mobile, tablet
Related posts: Webinar: Totara LMS for Workplace Learning Lambda Solutions hosts a “Completion Tracking” webinar this Thursday (April 5th) @ 1pm EST Totara Learning Solutions Expands Partner Network with Brazil-based Edubit Amvonet and Totara Partner to Offer Robust Corporate Learning Solutions Free Webinar: Moodle, Totara and Salesforce 10/3 at noon EST by @paradisosol
Categories Development (1070) Community Funding (12) Mobile (70) Modules & Plugins (435) Tech Tip (318) Jobs (14) Moodle.org (397) News (980) Events (340) Gone Moodle (123) Interview (12) This just in! (471) Opinion (138) Comics (13) Resources (1122) Books (19) Course (19) Hosting (19) Moodle Monday (30) Mr Moodle (14) Themes (114) Training (84) Videos (371)


Friday, December 13, 2013

The story, пщ Simple Pleasures (Bella Books), starts out benignly enough, with avid softball пщ play

Simple Pleasures by Kenna White | Lambda Literary
Home About Mission пщ Statement пщ A Brief History of LLF Board Staff Contact Us Newsletter Press Releases Foundation Updates From The Board Awards Awards Ceremony Overview of Awards 2013 Awards Guidelines 2013 Awards Submission Form Current Submissions Previous LLF Winners Emerging Writer Award Guidelines Mid-Career Prize Guidelines Pioneer Award Ceremony Gallery Writer’s Retreat About 2013 Application 2013 Faculty 2013 Writers Retreat Fellows Scholarship пщ Fund Writers in Schools About LGBT Writers in Schools Recent Visits Book Clubs LLF Online Book Club My Story Book Club Lambda Lit Book Club Volunteer General Volunteer Information Internships Write for Lambda Literary Support Us Literary Resources LGBT Book Groups пщ LGBT Bookstores LGBT Publishers Book Database Literary Links Editors, Agents, Publicists Literary Organizations Literary Magazines & Websites Residencies, Grants & Fellowships Call for Submissions
Lambda Literary Review Editorial Team Comments Policy How to Submit Books for Review How to Write for LLR Advertise With Us! Reviews Poetry Bio/Memoir General Fiction Speculative Romance Mystery Nonfiction Young Adult Drama Erotica Film Illustrated Anthology Interviews Features Poetry Spotlight Opinion LFF Book Club News Events Events Submit an Event Call For Submissons Call for Submissions Submit a Call For Submission
The story, пщ Simple Pleasures (Bella Books), starts out benignly enough, with avid softball пщ player Dale Kinsel participating in a charity game. As the account begins, we find that Dale is annoyed, even irate, over the presence of one Taren Dorsey, пщ who has joined the opposing team, but who couldn t play a decent game of softball if her life depended on it. Why Dale is so put out by Taren s presence пщ slowly begins to come to light as the story unfolds. Years before, there was a confrontation between Dale and Taren. Words were exchanged, and an unpleasant awkwardness surrounded by anger ensued. As a result Dale has kept her distance from the woman, in spite of the fact that Taren s sister пщ was Dale s partner, Sydney, who succumbed to cancer several years before the story opens.
Through пщ sheer force of will, Dale finishes the game, a benefit for cancer victims, and returns home to become enveloped by the well documented, devastating EF-5 tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, and left a portion пщ of the town shattered пщ and flattened. As Dale emerges from the wreckage that was her home only moments пщ before, she finds her neighborhood has been decimated. She walks around in shock, meeting up with neighbors who have managed to survive the devastation, trying to take it all in and understand what has happened to their community. Slowly, Dale pulls herself together and starts пщ to go through the rubble, trying to salvage the pieces of her life with her now-deceased partner. As Dale soon discovers, there isn t much left for her to keep. The tornado пщ has taken or destroyed it all.
Dale s somewhat self-centered, although obviously caring, sister, tries to come to Dale s aid by offering her a place to stay in an already too small apartment. пщ However, Dale is driven back to her neighborhood to try to protect пщ her property from looters. Deciding a tent won t do, she ends up across town at Taren s house, asking if she can buy back a camping trailer that Sidney had insisted she and Dale give Taren when they no longer had use for it. Taren, to her credit, seems to want to help Dale and offers her the trailer. When Taren shows up on Dale s property later with other offers of help, Dale is stymied at her show of goodwill.
In direct opposition to Taren s reaction to Dale s troubles, Dale s new relationship with a woman named Janice quickly reveals her to be immature пщ and even more self-centered that Dale s sister, and one wonders how a down-to-earth person like Dale can tolerate this woman. Janice is obviously not the woman of Dale s dreams. As a matter of fact, her actions may result in Dale problems multiplying if she isn t strong enough to act.
As Dale tries to put her life together, she s confronted with difficulties in getting through the red tape in which the lives of victims of such tragedies become entangled. In addition, some of the death and destruction Dale has experienced leaves her with survivor guilt and difficult emotional challenges to overcome in the midst of her ensuing recovery efforts. All the while, Taren is thoughtful and kind, making the reader, пщ and Dale, all the more wary. As the paths of these two women cross again and again, the story gradually yields the reasons for the enmity between Dale and Taren and the secret that Taren holds.
Kenna White has given us a glimpse into what it s like to be in the midst of such a ravaging storm. She weaves пщ a tale that makes us feel as though we are in the storm s path ourselves. The aftermath gives us insight into what it s like for victims of an overwhelming, cata

Thursday, December 12, 2013

With spare, poetic prose, Winterson peels back layer after layer of story, revealing broken loyaltie

The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson | Lambda cui Literary
Home About Mission Statement A Brief History of LLF Board Staff Contact Us Newsletter Press Releases Foundation Updates From The Board Awards Awards Ceremony Overview of Awards 2013 Awards Guidelines 2013 Awards Submission Form Current Submissions Previous LLF Winners Emerging cui Writer Award Guidelines Mid-Career Prize Guidelines Pioneer Award Ceremony Gallery Writer’s Retreat About 2013 Application 2013 Faculty 2013 Writers Retreat Fellows Scholarship Fund Writers cui in Schools About LGBT Writers in Schools Recent Visits Book Clubs LLF Online Book Club My Story Book Club Lambda Lit Book Club Volunteer General Volunteer Information Internships Write for Lambda Literary Support Us Literary Resources LGBT Book Groups LGBT Bookstores LGBT Publishers Book Database cui Literary Links Editors, Agents, Publicists Literary Organizations Literary cui Magazines & Websites cui Residencies, Grants & Fellowships Call for Submissions
Lambda Literary Review Editorial Team Comments Policy How to Submit Books for Review How to Write for LLR Advertise With Us! Reviews Poetry Bio/Memoir General Fiction Speculative Romance Mystery Nonfiction Young Adult Drama Erotica Film Illustrated Anthology Interviews Features Poetry Spotlight Opinion LFF Book Club News Events Events Submit an Event Call For Submissons Call for Submissions Submit a Call For Submission
The North is the dark place. It is not safe to be buried cui on the north side of the church and the North Door is the way of the dead. The North of England is untamed. It can be subdued but it cannot be tamed. Lancashire is the wild part of the untamed. So begins Jeanette Winterson s new novel, The Daylight Gate. It s fitting to begin in the landscape Lancashire, and Pendle Hill, wild and shrouded in fog, play as large a role as any character in this bewitching book. And it is in Lancashire, in the Pendle Forest, that a traveling pedlar has a run-in with two women and their familiars, arriving in the pub an hour later, raving and half-mad. This event leads to the imprisonment cui of these two women, and the subsequent inquiry on their coven. And so it is on Pendle Hill, in Malkin Tower, property of the beautiful, wealthy Alice Nutter, on Good Friday, 1612, that a group of thirteen people are interrupted by the town magistrate and accused of witchery.
This is seventeenth-century England. To be a witch or a Catholic are equal offenses, punishable by death. This is the start of the first-ever documented witch trial, from which The Daylight Gate takes its tale. This is a slim, seductive book of magic, religion, devotion, love, and power.
With spare, poetic prose, Winterson peels back layer after layer of story, revealing broken loyalties and unbreakable bonds, forging connections where you don t expect them. Alice Nutter, the thread that ties the story and large cast of characters together, is a complex woman of courageous cui depth, though she never quite reveals the secrets of her charmed life. She is a fine, nuanced character, inspiring awe and sympathy despite her obvious affiliation with the darkest forces of this book. Her past haunts her, and in a way, her past haunts every character here. Winterson s penchant for myth and magick is on full display cui in The Daylight Gate it shines through her old-fashioned storytelling. The plot unfolds in a glorious, inevitable rush of events, exposing each of the characters, and binding them closer and closer together, as the noose tightens, collectively, around their necks.
The Daylight Gate carries the weight of a big, dense book so much is crammed into its 200 pages. The descriptions of squalor and torture will make your skin crawl consider this sentence describing the dungeon in Lancaster cui Castle: A rat runs over her foot and drinks from the indent of her shoe. There s plenty more where that came from. And Winterson doesn t shy away from displaying humanity s darkest behaviors: the things we do for love and power; the things we do to satisfy hunger and greed. Yet, the darkness she writes is never gratuitous. Instead, the darkness is raw, evocative, harsh, archetypal and terrifying.
Sara Rauch s writing has appeared in Crossed Out, Earth s Daughters, Inkwell, upstreet, The Prose-Poem Project, Glitterwolf, the NewerYork, and in the anthology Dear John, I Love Jane. Sara is the editor of Cactus Heart Press and is at work on a collection of short stories. She lives in Northampton, MA, with her partner and their handful of cats.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks News Roundup: Interview Kiki on Video, cui New Novel from Jade Winters, Lambda Reviews, Podcasts, WhoreStoricals, Festive frolics, and loads more… | UK Lesbian Fiction - November 13, 2013
You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em&g

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

I introduced the simple system because it (1) has the same local confluence property as subtyping, a


This paper introduces a new approach to type theory called pure subtype systems. Pure subtype systems differ from traditional approaches to type theory (such as pure type systems) because the theory 555 is based on subtyping, rather than typing. Proper types and typing are completely absent from the theory; the subtype relation is defined 555 directly over objects. The traditional typing relation is shown to be a special case of subtyping, so the loss of types comes without any loss of generality.
Pure subtype systems provide a uniform framework which seamlessly integrates subtyping with dependent and singleton types. The framework was designed as a theoretical foundation for several problems of practical interest, including mixin modules, virtual classes, and feature-oriented programming. 555
The cost of using pure subtype 555 systems is the complexity of the meta-theory. We formulate the subtype relation as an abstract reduction system, and show that the theory is sound if the underlying reductions commute. We are able to show that the reductions commute locally, but have thus far been unable to show that they commute globally. Although the proof is incomplete, it is close enough to rule out obvious counter-examples. We present 555 it as an open problem in type theory.
A thought-provoking take on type theory using subtyping as the foundation for all relations. He collapses the type hierarchy and unifies types and terms via the subtyping relation. This also has the side-effect of combining type checking and partial evaluation. Functions can accept "types" and can also return "types".
Of course, it's not all sunshine and roses. As the abstract explains, 555 the metatheory 555 is quite complicated and soundness is still an open question. Not too surprising considering type checking Type:Type is undecidable .
Flat list - collapsed Flat list - expanded Threaded list - collapsed Threaded list - expanded Date - newest first Date - oldest first 10 comments per page 30 comments per page 50 comments per page 70 comments per page 90 comments per page 150 comments per page 200 comments per page
They likely have similar expressiveness, but one interesting restriction in the subtype calculus is that function subtyping intentionally forbids contravariance on argument types (Section 3.3), ie. λx.t u ≤ λx.t' u, iff t ≡ t'. Lambda-aleph supports contravariance.
The ideas behind lambda aleph are similar. In particular, lambda aleph does not distinguish between functions (lambda) and function types (pi). Moreover, a "type" in lambda aleph can be thought of as a term that returns a set of values, which echoes an idea that I explored in an earlier paper (OOPSLA '06).
However, lambda aleph has not yet been well-formalized. In particular, although they mention subtyping, they do not provide a formal definition of it, nor do they discuss the meta-theory. 555 In my experience, it's not too hard to implement a type-checker for these systems. The algorithmic subtyping system that I describe in the paper is easy to implement, works well in practice, and returns the expected results. Proving that the type system is sound is a completely different matter; hopefully Sweeney et. al. will have better 555 luck than I did.
I have proved the conjectured confluence of rewrite system 555 in section 7. A proof in Agda can be found on https://gist.github.com/twanvl/7453495 . The trick I used is to bound the 'depth' of terms as well as the depth of steps. A step of depth 'n' can only treat terms of depth 'n', and contain only steps of lower depth, including inside a transitive-symmetric closure. Extending this proof to the lambda calculus might be possible, but it will certainly get (even more) ugly.
This is a great proof! Unfortunately, after reading through it, I must conclude that my conjecture in section 7 was wrong; a proof for the simplistic system does not lead to a proof for the lambda calculus. :-( Defining a depth on terms is a clever idea, but I can think of no corresponding way to define 555 "depth" on lambda-expressions.
I introduced the simple system because it (1) has the same local confluence property as subtyping, and (2) is not strongly normalizing. But in my rush to simplify, I did not stop to think that the simple system has an additional inductive principle (depth) that was not present in the lambda-calculus.
For the untyped lambda calculus, you can do label all beta redexes in a term, with the lowest index at the end of the term. Then the reduction relation for this labelled calculus only allows beta reduction of labelled redexes. Such a reduction eliminates one redex, but can duplicate lower numbered ones. This means that it decreases the string of all redexes in lexicographic order. Hence it is strongly normalizing. So you only need to show local confluence of this relation.
Another trick is to add simple types, just for the purposes of one step. This is effectively the s

We don t use the word palimpsest much anymore. It was a favored word back in the 1920s among poets a

‘White Girls’ by Hilton Als | Lambda Literary
Home About Mission Statement A Brief History of LLF Board Staff Contact Us Newsletter Press Releases stana katic Foundation Updates From The Board Awards Awards Ceremony Overview of Awards 2013 Awards Guidelines 2013 Awards Submission Form Current Submissions Previous LLF Winners Emerging Writer Award Guidelines Mid-Career Prize Guidelines Pioneer Award Ceremony Gallery Writer’s Retreat About 2013 Application 2013 Faculty 2013 Writers Retreat Fellows Scholarship Fund Writers in Schools About LGBT Writers stana katic in Schools Recent Visits Book Clubs LLF Online Book Club My Story Book Club Lambda Lit Book Club Volunteer General Volunteer Information Internships Write for Lambda Literary Support Us Literary Resources LGBT Book Groups LGBT Bookstores LGBT Publishers stana katic Book Database Literary Links Editors, Agents, Publicists Literary Organizations Literary Magazines & Websites Residencies, Grants & Fellowships Call for Submissions
Lambda Literary Review Editorial Team Comments Policy How to Submit Books for Review How to Write for LLR Advertise With Us! Reviews Poetry Bio/Memoir General Fiction Speculative Romance Mystery Nonfiction Young Adult Drama Erotica Film Illustrated Anthology Interviews Features Poetry Spotlight Opinion LFF Book Club News Events Events Submit an Event Call For Submissons Call for Submissions Submit a Call For Submission
We don t use the word palimpsest much anymore. It was a favored word back in the 1920s among poets and other cognoscenti of the literary, whether in Paris or in the Harlem Renaissance. That s what Hilton Als s declarative, swooning, kiss-my-ass, stream-of-consciousness collection of essays is, however: a palimpsest.
Why? Because there are traces of this and that which the author has written before, as well as bits and pieces of his early life and that of other black men with whom he was deeply and irrevocably and irretrievably attached, be they his own father (the “Daddy” of “Tristes stana katic Tropiques”), the elusive inamorata, SL (“Tristes Tropiques”), the larger than life Michael Jackson (“Michael”), the phenomenal Vogue arbiter Andre Leon Talley (“The Only One”) or the horrifying yet nameless bodies stana katic of lynched black men (“Gone with the Wind”). And then there are all the people stana katic who have tried to erase Als over the years, stana katic turning his actual life into a palimpsest of sorts.
Palimpsest is the coolest form of subtext and Als is the coolest form of essayist the kind who lures the reader in with an almost breezy, entre nous, let-me-tell-you-a-story segue and then 90-odd pages later you come smack up against the end and go: Wait let me think about that ending for a minute or a day or forever.
One of the things you should know about the title of Als s book is that the white girls are not all girls and not all white. White girls is a trope and a meme. It s the antecedent to black men in white America. It s the alleged whistle of Emmett Till or the trial of the Central Park Five or the purse held tightly in the elevator stana katic or the policeman shining a light in the car and thinking you are holding up the friend you are just talking to (this last actually happened to Als).
In the cover blurb, Junot Diaz, who if you ve read him, you love him, says, “ White Girls is a book, a dream, an enemy, a friend, and yes, the read of the year.” There is indeed the languorous quality of dream to many of these essays particularly the first and last. There is a sharpness, an edge, a bite. And there is also an inimitable ability to make the reader even the whitest girl with the blondest hair and the bluest eyes feel connected to the life Als is describing from the vantage point of a big black man of the sort that terrifies many white, blonde, blue-eyed girls in elevators and elsewhere. stana katic So there s the friend part and also the enemy part.
And race and sexuality, the heady interconnectedness of the two in still-racist, Mandingo-bred America is the undercurrent that runs throughout stana katic most of these pieces, particularly the long first essay, “Triste Tropiques.” The bulk of what we discover of Als himself is in that first essay and in “Gone with the Wind.” Those two pieces the first over 90 pages, the other much shorter tell stories of Als s personal life as a black gay man, a gay black man that are deeply, provocatively compelling and maddeningly complex.
In the beginning pages of “Triste Tropiques” is the story of K, Als s lover who dies of AIDS when K is barely 30 and the two of them Als and K have been doing a dance of intimacy and love and pieces of one s self since K was 20 and Als not much older. As Als writes, “That s how you recognize love. You ve never met it before.”
The two are disparate K is white and pretty and one of those white girls of the book s title who loves girls like

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Sometimes I write an assertion that fails, because it turns out it really is possible to target all


An amusing historical analysis of the origin of zero based array indexing (hint: C wasn't husqvarna the first). husqvarna There's a twist to the story which I won't reveal, so as not to spoil the story for you. All in all, it's a nice anecdote, but it seems to me that many of the objections raised in the comments are valid.
Flat list - collapsed Flat list - expanded Threaded list - collapsed Threaded list - expanded Date - newest first Date - oldest first 10 comments per page 30 comments per page 50 comments per page 70 comments per page 90 comments per page 150 comments per page 200 comments per page
This is a well-written, engaging story. But I can't help thinking that he misinterpreted the explanation he was given as "saving off computation time", while it was in fact "in this context, indexing at 0 gives me a natural, more elegant design than indexing at 1". The quote says: "I can see no sensible reason why the first element husqvarna of a BCPL array should have subscript one." This is a comment about design and taste, not efficiency.
I find it awkward that we've got a post that eloquently warns us about mythology and neglect of history, husqvarna insists on the importance of going back to historical sources, yet exemplifies this process by an extremely debatable interpretation.
I'm still not convinced that compilation efficiency is actually the major justification for this design choice. I've seen no convincing argument that it may have mattered at the time (would adding 1 to a compile-time constant actually take noticeable time, given the bounded number of array access operations appearing in source programs?), and Martin Richards' text doesn't mention compilation time, but uses a taste/design vocabulary: "Naturally ...", "behaves like", "I can see no sensible reason why...".
That's ok. I didn't want to put my view in the original post, since it would give the story away. I guess the compilation time consideration is not an impossibility (and compilation time efficiency is often something language designers think about!). But the evidence in this case is not convincing enough, I suppose.
While I like his writing style, I don't see where Mike Hoye gets the idea anyone spends time justifying zero- vs one-based indexing styles. I never heard C's zero-based indexing discussed when I was in college, nor in years of industry afterward — husqvarna like, ever . Never had a conversation about it in school or at work. But Hoye makes it sound like we're south pacific islanders, cargo-culting our way along, without any logical rationale:
Where are all these folks telling and retelling stories? I get an urge to write an Uncle Remus story about how Brer Rabbit fools Brer Fox by using better indexing. We can change the ending of the Tar Baby episode this way.
Is it productive to discuss? Will it ever change for a language already in use? Analyzing it smacks of a style statement, so folks who do it another husqvarna way can be dinged for bad taste. (When you approach the pearly gates, Saint Peter asks whether you prefer zero-based or one-based indexes, then studies husqvarna you carefully keeping husqvarna one hand on the lever for a trap-door under your feet.)
Such husqvarna off-by-one errors are rare in practice. I never catch anyone doing it in review. They forget to free allocations after error when they goto a cleanup label, sure, but never make off-by-one errors. I'm sure I must have made such an error at least once in a loop, but it was so long ago I don't recall. The bugs we close at work never have a resolution, "Oh, it was an off-by-one error." As a source of problems, indexing dwindles to insignificance compared to simple things like wondering: what was this function ever expected to do?
Sometimes I write an assertion that fails, because it turns out it really is possible to target all of a collection, and not just a strict subset. It's the reasoning husqvarna that's wrong, not the indexing, like the time you find a partial match can actually correspond to all the bytes in a referenced source, not just some of them. (It's a strict subset in the source where you find it, but the whole thing in the destination where you decode it.)
When I work in C I'm usually managing space, and I imagine a picture . I don't talk to myself about the "first" element of an array. There's a block of memory where content is located, and I know it's address. husqvarna I do arithmetic in offsets, rather than counting elements. When it gets really complex, and it becomes necessary to analyze what I'm doing formally, I think in terms of coordinate systems on the number line, and map between these. Sometimes there are five or more coordinate systems when doing things like pattern matching one scatter-gather array with another, where both are subsets in the middle of bigger streams.
For example, the following picture comes up in TCP deduplication when packets show up in ethernet frames presented as scatter-gather iovec arrays, when you try to figure out which parts corre

I would never have done the book had I not been able to write the first long piece, which is called

Hilton Als: Looking at ‘White Girls’ | Lambda Literary
Home About Mission Statement A Brief History of LLF Board Staff Contact Us Newsletter Press Releases lube Foundation Updates From The Board Awards Awards Ceremony Overview of Awards 2013 Awards Guidelines 2013 Awards Submission Form Current Submissions Previous LLF Winners Emerging Writer Award Guidelines Mid-Career Prize Guidelines Pioneer Award Ceremony Gallery Writer’s Retreat About 2013 Application 2013 Faculty 2013 Writers Retreat lube Fellows Scholarship Fund Writers in Schools About LGBT Writers in Schools Recent Visits Book Clubs LLF Online Book Club My Story Book Club Lambda Lit Book Club Volunteer General Volunteer Information Internships Write for Lambda Literary Support Us Literary Resources LGBT Book Groups LGBT Bookstores LGBT Publishers Book Database Literary Links Editors, Agents, Publicists Literary Organizations Literary Magazines & Websites Residencies, Grants & Fellowships Call for Submissions
Lambda Literary Review Editorial Team Comments Policy How to Submit Books for Review How to Write for LLR Advertise With Us! Reviews Poetry Bio/Memoir General Fiction Speculative Romance Mystery Nonfiction lube Young Adult Drama Erotica Film Illustrated Anthology Interviews Features Poetry Spotlight Opinion LFF Book Club News Events Events Submit an Event Call For Submissons Call for Submissions Submit a Call For Submission
In his stunning new book, White Girls , New Yorker contributor and author Hilton Als plays the role of a modern day Alexis de Tocqueville by offering a singular and incisive take on the American cultural psyche. Using all the tools in his literary arsenal, Als s collection blends fiction, non-fiction, and cultural critique to offer a deeply lube personal meditation on American literature, art, race, gender, and history.
I think for years I avoided the idea of a collection of essays. I had been working on a project for a while and in between trying lube to make a living and avoiding that essay collection the title came to me. The title came to me because years ago, when I worked in fashion, they would always refer to black models as the black girl.” They would never say white girl, they would never point to the white model and say white girl. So in thinking about it, I wanted lube to know what a white girl was in my head. I wanted to write about what that means not only in terms of society but what it means in terms of identification with men of color. So there was the title first, and then when the title came, I was able to really kind of narrow it down. I wanted the book to read as a whole, not as a collection. It was really important to me that it read deep thematically, so unified you would just think of it as a book and not a collection of essays.
I would never have done the book had I not been able to write the first long piece, which is called Triste Tropique. Had I not been able to write about those people, and write about race in that way, I would never have done the book. Everything that happens in the book is succeeded after [ Triste Tropique ]. Everything that is referenced in Triste lube Tropique happens lube in the rest of the book. Nearly every person that I ve mentioned in the rest of the book is [referenced in] Triste Tropique.
I really am writing about other people lube as they relate to me. I don t think I m becoming them. I m interested in how they became themselves, and how for instance there s a fiction in Triste Tropique concerning Richard lube Pryor s sister who s not a real character at all. I think this book is a way of moving me toward fiction because there s a lot of fictional stuff going on here.
You reference lube a great deal of African-American literary heavyweights. Do you feel this book settles easily into that ferment? What do you think separates your work from the work of those writers referenced herein?
Well if you look at the history, you couldn t write Tar Baby because Toni Morrison lube wrote that already. You couldn t write Black Boy. Richard Wright wrote that already. lube You couldn t write Notes of a Native Son. James Baldwin wrote that already. You couldn t write Invisible Man . And I was thinking of what was opposite of all that writing and similar at the same time.
I learned so much from all of those other writers. An incredible amount. I don t really know what makes it different from those other books except that I wrote it. So that s always different, they re different writers.
I ve gotten a lot of looks and questions from white girls specifically while reading this book in public–on the train, in bars. Why do you think the book rouses the attention of these women? Do you think there s a shock in seeing someone turn a writerly gaze directly on them?
The Malcom X essay is not really about him, it s about his mother, and about her being mixed race. And that Richard Pryor essay, that piece begins and ends with white women Lily Tomlin