{"id":1495,"date":"2011-03-04T09:11:34","date_gmt":"2011-03-04T16:11:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/?p=1495"},"modified":"2011-03-04T09:13:45","modified_gmt":"2011-03-04T16:13:45","slug":"gifts-from-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/?p=1495","title":{"rendered":"Gifts from the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Internet, I do not want to talk about Charlie Sheen. Yes, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aolnews.com\/2011\/03\/02\/charlie-sheen-craziness-inspires-tons-of-strange-and-funny-web-m\/\">the memes are funny<\/a>, but the man has two small children and a history of domestic violence, which rather spoils the yuks.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, here&#8217;s why I&#8217;m grateful for the Internet today. Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose blog <a href=\"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/?p=963\">I have mentioned admiring<\/a> before, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/culture\/archive\/2011\/02\/jane-austen-just-dissed-you\/71437\/\">has<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/culture\/archive\/2011\/02\/how-do-you-teach-beauty\/71472\/\">discovered<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/culture\/archive\/2011\/03\/snobbery\/71862\/\">Jane Austen<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>I love this about blogs&#8212;the way they allow you to observe the authors&#8217; thoughts and reactions evolving over the short term. There is such a pleasure in watching a writer who I admire falling into books that I love&#8212;and given that I was initially attracted to TNC because he writes so incisively about race in America, a <em>particular<\/em> pleasure in hearing him <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/culture\/archive\/2011\/03\/i-was-in-the-middle-before-i-knew-that-i-had-begun\/71968\/\">declare<\/a>: &#8220;I feel like she&#8217;s talking to me, and strangely enough, only to me. It really is kind of sick to say this, but I think I&#8217;m in love.&#8221;  Austen is so often pigeonholed as a genre writer and dismissed on those grounds, and contemporary black writers can be pigeonholed in the same way, stuck off on the African-American shelves in one shadowy corner of the bookstore. It&#8217;s delightful to watch two minds reaching across time, geography, and culture to create that ageless alchemy that happens when a receptive reader takes up a great book.<\/p>\n<p>Ta-Nehisi + Jane Austen 4ever. They make such a lovely couple.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Internet, I do not want to talk about Charlie Sheen. Yes, the memes are funny, but the man has two small children and a history of domestic violence, which rather spoils the yuks. Instead, here&#8217;s why I&#8217;m grateful for the Internet today. Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose blog I have mentioned admiring before, has discovered Jane Austen. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1495"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1500,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions\/1500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shannon.users.sonic.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}