Antilles: the weblog of the CRB

Links, links, links

- Who invented rock and roll, asks Marlon James--why couldn't it have been Jackie Brenston?

- Geoffrey Philp reviews Crystal Rain, the new speculative fiction novel by Tobias Buckell, set in a futuristic world borrowing many details from the Caribbean.

- Imani wonders why better-made editions of classic Jamaican writers like Roger Mais aren't in print:

The Jonathan Cape omnibus of the novels was a hardcover and probably did not have any typos (though I suspect I’ve just forgotten them) but the pros stop there. It’s clear that that the publisher simply got three separate copies of the three novels, each with completely different fonts (not even the same size!) and stuck them together. *lifts hands into the air*

- Andre Bagoo is offering weekly "bedside books" updates:

Derek Walcott’s The Prodigal climbs to the top of my ‘active zone’, taking pride of place alongside his Collected Poems. The wonderfully produced American hard-cover edition of Zadie Smith’s bulky White Teeth caused some difficulty with the delicate balance that I have going....

- Kwame Dawes on reading Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "The Windhover" as a young man:

For a poet living in a world in which language was constantly subjected to mutation, stretching, punning, and weighted with political and ideological meaning--and here I am speaking of the world being influenced and shaped by Rastafarians who forced us to take every word seriously, to test it for its possible implications and to see language as hardly locked in by tradition, but open to transformation, Hopkins’ poetry resonated for me--gave me permission, then to think of language, the Jamaican language I was learning, in different ways.