Four more. Thanks to some Facebookers for the links.
* Exact date of Odysseus's return from Troy pinpointed. With this crucial question settled, no one need read The Odyssey ever again.
* How to write about Africa.
In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.* Congratulations to Morgan Ross, winner of the Harper's Ferry "Worst Love Poem" contest.
Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it — because you care.
Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.
Your legs* A slave in Jefferson Davis's house was a Union spy. Great story. Dibs on the movie rights to this.
undulate like two jellyfish tentacles,
moving freely in the ocean
that is your upper lip.
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