Sherman Alexie

oh yeah it's him, funny that it's disappeared already, I thought it was his one moment of celebrity.

Some old guy couldn't get his shitty poem published so he sent it under a chinese name to Sherman, who gave it the pass before getting informed that oh btw I'm not azn lol :^)
Now nobody likes being trapped, but you'd think he'd play it safe and pretend that he published the poem on its own non-existent merits... well no, the absolute madman went and raised such a well-orchestrated stink that the usual suspects all took front stage dogpiling on the first fucker. Everybody involved came out looking like little shits and then the world kept on not caring, but I'm cursed with a good memory for names and ridiculous drama

still wouldn't read the guy based on that, I guess

>tfw got kicked out of a teaching practicum because of being made to teach this book
FUCK YOU SHERMAN ALEXIE

fukkin cam janson over here

Holy shit what? I want to here this story so I can tell it when I see him next. Go on, tell me little man.

*hear
Jesus Christ

>no one reads Alexie based on injun factors
>watch the movies
>now everybody cares
Why does this happen so often?
Why are you comparing this to Ralph Ellison?

I recently read Absolutely True Diary and thought it was great. I read Reservation Blues a really long time ago and remember liking it but not loving it. I definitely want to read more of his stuff but I need to go back and finish Almanac of the Dead first.

The Business of fancy dancing and Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fist Fight in Heaven are superb. I recommend those next.

ment to reply

Finally lit talking about some good books.

True Diary of an Absolute Madman is more like it, Sherman Alexie is crazy lol!

>tfw had to teach roll of thunder and gawain and the green knight for practicum

Are you the same people bitching about Heart of Darkness?

I read that book in middle school and loved it - it's YA so don't expect anything life changing. I enjoy some of his short stories to this day though. He has a nice, personal voice.

That's good to know. I usually don't read YA so this will be refreshing.

Why would I do that?

Well you seem to hold a grudge against books focusing around minority's issues

you're an awful writer

most resentful redskin I've ever had the displeasure of reading. mostly bitches about the whiteman in a style about the level of john green. one of those authors who makes you think "we should have finished them off"

>redskin
>bitches about whitemen
>john green
All I'm hearing is triggered white boy not being able to handle the truth of Indian led lives

He's a bastard race baiter. He gave a talk at my college where he basically said "boohoo when I left the Rez for college, some people asked me about bows n arrows instead of kicking my ass and it was stereotypical and it was racist and white people won't sit with black people in your cafeteria so your all racist"

A white girl literally stood up and asked "so what can white people do?" To which he just he replied "don't be so tribal"

Fuck that guy.

>"don't be so tribal"
That's some top quality banter right there.

>being this mad America has race issues
>being this mad red guy says so

wow I didn't realize Veeky Forums was literally just /pol/ with more Steinbeck

Oh no! Indian guy is being mean to me and saying we genocided his people, what am I gonna do mom?

>It's a Veeky Forums hates non-white male authors chapter

>"don't be so tribal"
BASED
U mad bro?

added, thanks.

Have you seen any movie adaptions of his films?

i've seen Smoke Signals twice

>i don't really like how he keeps his works off epublishing to stop (people like me) pirates from distributing his works without him getting paid.

true pirates used to scan paper copies back then

did anybody have some balls to ask him where his bow and arrows were

That's a good one. I think there's a movie for The Business of Fancy dancing too with the same actor they got to play Thomas as the MC. I haven't gotten around fm to watching that one yet though.

I saw him speak at my University this year, seemed like a real asshole who misunderstood the interplay between humor and criticism.

Oh really? What's he like?

Who's we? My ancestors all died in the potato famine and worked in sweatshops. Can I get oppression points against my English-German American oppressors?

He is such low quality bait. I get asked if Americans wear shoes indoors every third conversation here. Should I write books about growing up as an oppressed Irish-American and give talks about how unfair everything is?

Chill out dude. Indian people get the shit side of the stick in American society, why are you so butt hurt that some guy's writing about it? Are you upset that he's making bank off progresive writing or what?

>If something bad happened to me then that invalidates what happened to you.

The Irish went through a lot of shit, but they didn't go through systematic extermination and forced assimiliation, which resulted in being placed on a unworkable peice of land. You still got to be a person and not a "oh one of those" persons.

Nobody gives a fuck if you are Irish in America anymore. Natives still get asked for peace pipes and teepee bullshit. It's not the same thing. At least if you are Irish you can go "hey at least there are more than 10000 of us."

If I were Irish, and I might be, I would be disgusted in myself if I were trying to use the "Irish are bad ass that's why they never complained about the bad things that happened to them" little speech, but it's ironic because you do it all the time now and it defeats the purpose.

Lastly, Sherman doesn't just say "wah wah racism" that's you, in reverse. Sherman addresses some racism he's dealt with, as well as his cultures own flaws, and hes never sjw about it at all.

I saw him do readings out of an anthology he just edited. Whenever he spoke it was simultaneously off-putting and amusing. He just made fun of the audience for being struggling poets the whole time. Most of his talk was really sarcastic remarks about his editing position, saying stuff like, "It's alright to be jealous. Come on guys, you know you want this shit." And some b'aww stories about his personal efforts to make it to the top, and then some social shit about this troupe of minority female poets that follows him around to readings. I guess it was supposed to be inspirational but it was awfully strange.

i just have read that story, it seems he claimed that he liked that poem albeit was somehow more indulgent since it was supposedly written by a chinese, eventually he had to let it stay in the collection; the most row was from some chinese person professor victoria chang. she said that

>it diminishes categorically all of our accomplishments. He sort of implies that minorities are published because we’re minorities, not because of our work. That’s just insulting because it strips everything we’ve worked so hard for.

sounds as a sound reasoning, but if so, to demand removing that poem from the collection of the best american poems of 2015 (which she did) was completely illogical then since it would only admit that he was published due to the minority nepotism, so her overall complaints sounded as something like this - how he dared to use the nepotism which is only for us, oh and also it suggests that we are published only due to nepotism

it seems it was not that easy to sweep into the corner and forget (which sherman likely wanted)

the poem a shit indeed

>Can I get oppression points against my English-German American oppressors?

>>The court opened. Pretty soon I was compelled to notice that a culprit's nationality made for or against him in this court. Overwhelming proofs were necessary to convict an Irishman of crime, and even then his punishment amounted to little; Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians had strict and unprejudiced justice meted out to them, in exact accordance with the evidence; negroes were promptly punished, when there was the slightest preponderance of testimony against them; but Chinamen were punished always, apparently. Now this gave me some uneasiness, I confess. I knew that this state of things must of necessity be accidental, because in this country all men were free and equal, and one person could not take to himself an advantage not accorded to all other individuals. I knew that, and yet in spite of it I was uneasy.

mark twain, 'goldsmith's friend abroad again'

>The Irish went through a lot of shit, but they didn't go through systematic extermination
didn't they claim that the potato famine was an arranged genocide or some crap like that

He's very aggressive, very confident in his ability and reputation. He spent most of the time telling a story based around the past year, he had a brain tumor, got it removed. So a lot about grief, the possibility of death, wondering whether he is the same person post operation. He tried to alternate between seriousness and humor, but after a while (it was two hours total), the alternating got predictable and annoying. He spent his share of time doing the whole "white-people" thing, trying to take the edge of by making a joke of it. He didn't read any of his work, there was a second event the next night where he did but I didn't go. He talked about that poetry contest controversy he was involved in, was very arrogant, spent a while laughing about how he was a millionaire, belittling his opponents by saying how much influence he has and that he isn't the one trying to get tenure to teach white kids at a college. At the end he did mention stuff about genetic testing, and how much of race and ethnic identity is made up compared to how fluid the mixing and genetics are (He got sequenced and was pretty white). His awareness of that made his focus on "identity politics"less grating, but the university definitely wanted him there for the identity politics so he wasn't holding back. He seems like he'd be a cool guy in person, when he isn't being a media personality and if the conversation isn't about a polarizing political topic.

>The Irish went through a lot of shit, but they didn't go through systematic extermination and forced assimiliation

You sure about that?

Alexie is based and deserves more recognition

The whole "couldn't get published" quip is just absolute horseshit, friendo. That incident shows exactly how vapid, hypocritical, and nepotistic the publishing game is. The same poem that'd be called self-indulgent drivel if the author was a middle aged straight white man would be celebrated and furiously wanked over if the author was a woman, minority, some sort of faggot, or all three at once.

I've enjoyed what I've read of his. The book in the OP pic has the bonus of gaining enough attention to be banned by schools. He's an author I think I wouldn't be disappointed by if I met him in person; cool that he's a friend of your family OP.

>The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
That's a really enjoyable, interconnected collection of short stories; the movie Smoke Signals, something of a remix of that collection, is nice too.

Well what I heard of it is that he full well knew and just wanted to help the guy out
>I think I wouldn't be disappointed by if I met him in person
He's awfully smug and sarcastic, a real playful guy in nature really but some take that the wrong way.

>smug and sarcastic, a real playful guy
I wouldn't take those people the wrong way if they didn't all heel-turn the second you start playing back

I'll check that one out because it'll be awhile before I wrap up some of my reading backlog and move on to some of his other books.

If you haven't read Leslie Marmon Silko, I highly recommend Ceremony and I liked what I read of Almanac of the Dead but once the weather turned to fall and winter, it was hard for me to stay in the mindset of Almanac's desert/South American settings.

>Well what I heard of it is that he full well knew and just wanted to help the guy out

he wasn't the first one to publish it though, it was already published by some magazine (after 40 magazines refused to publish it when it was written by a white man) and he just picked it for the anthology which he 'guest edited' in 2015

>>“The Bees” was rejected by 40 different journals when submitted under his real name

>>The literary journal Prairie Schooner, one of nine places to receive a submission from “Yi-Fen Chou,” accepted “The Bees” and three other poems for its Fall 2014 issue. The poem was referred to Best American Poetry, where Alexie came across it, and wound up in the collection

he didn't know the author

>>Alexie explained that he read submissions blind, to the extent that he could. He didn’t look up authors to learn more about them or their past work.

and he admitted that he picked it partially because the author was supposedly a chinese

>>And he acknowledged that he was “more amenable” to the poem because he thought its author was Chinese American.

washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/08/a-white-guy-named-michael-couldnt-get-his-poem-published-then-he-became-yi-fen-chou/

Well, glad he was honest about it and didn't pull the poems which is what I feel like most people would have done. Based Alexie.

pulling the poem would only admit that it was included only because the author was supposedly a chink

he had to keep it there in an attempt to save his face

I taught Ceremony in an AP Lit class, really enjoyed it and my students did too. Seemed to be a pretty decent introduction to racial/cultural lenses.

I read Indian Killer in college and liked it quite a bit. I don't know much about Alexie's other work but I've been interested in pursuing his work further if it'd be recommended.

I highly recommend continuing with these suggestions

He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and I'm from Spokane so I think his books are interesting.

>Indian Reservation
3rd world shit wholes desu

No, he came out and admitted that the supposed race influenced his decision, that's why he kept it. He did the right thing at that point.

>the Lone Ranger Fist Fight in Heaven

that's the one I read. I thought it was good writing.