firecat

2 Mar 2009

Go to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random article you get is the name of your band.
# Go to www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
# Go to www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
(Note: Instead, I used Flickr's advanced search to find images that use a Creative Commons license allowing derivative works.)
# Use an image editor to put it all together.

image by Alexandre Duret-Lutz (gadl on flickr)

By indirect request of

coffeeandink

audible.com has a collection of six short stories by Zora Neale Hurston that I recently read. I had never read any Hurston before.

The stories are narrated by Renee Joshua-Porter and the work won the AudioFile Earphones Award for Exceptional Audio Performance. Hurston was a folklorist who wrote her characters' dialogue in African American dialect, that can be difficult to read for people not used to the sound of the dialect. So I think it's especially helpful to have a really well performed audio version of these stories.

The stories were awesome. She was writing about black people in the rural South and also in New York City. What she wrote about was so specific and so universal at the same time. She has a keen ear for dialogue that makes the stories come alive, and the stories are rich in details about how the characters lived. They are also observant and compassionate (in a detached way) about the ways people interact and how they affect each other emotionally.

It was interesting how the stories in the collection were arranged, sort of from "happy endings that make you go hmm" to "neutral endings that make you go hmm" to "sad endings where someone is happy anyway" to "ding dong the witch is dead" endings.

I'm looking forward to reading more Hurston.