Quite frankly, I don't have enough of a gamer's mind-set to even be a regular here, let alone a blog manager. What is LazarusWorld, after all, but a home for the collective of the Bad Boys of Computer Science, a comic which attracts teh l33t, teh pwned, and teh uber alike.

Yet, here I am, a writer and sometime graphic designer, afloat in a sea of tech fanatics -- a n00b, if you will. So sometimes I have to prove to myself that I actually belong here.

So I bought a Wii. And a couple of first-person RPGs. Unfortunately, I'm but three-quarters of the way through Super Paper Mario, and my interest is already starting to wane.

America is, historically, a country of white Protestant men. They founded its government, set its rules, and arranged its processes based on what would be most convenient and tenable for them. The result, of course, being that women and minorities got the shaft.

Invisible Man -- the only novel Ralph Ellison ever published in his lifetime -- is a commentary and condemnation on that violation, at least as it relates to the black population. But Ellison does not seem prepared to place the blame solely on those men whose rules began the cycle of segregated civilization. In order for a cycle to exist at all, in fact, the oppressed party has to buy into it, to a point where his protagonist is no longer a viable person. "I am invisible, understand," he writes, "simply because people refuse to see me."

Pretty unrealistic of me to start this project, wasn't it? After all, I was always the kid powering through the last fifty pages of the reading assignment on the bus on the way to school. Of course I waited until this week to finish the book.

Full disclosure: A big part of the reason I picked Their Eyes Were Watching God (besides the fact I already had it on my bookshelf) is that the story takes place where I live. Well, not in my house, but in Eatonville, Florida, a little town within the Orlando metroplex. This week is actually Zorafest in Eatonville, when prominent black writers and entertainers gather to elucidate the masses a little bit more about what Hurston was trying to say. I figured if I couldn't read this one before I left the area, I would have failed her memory. (I'd actually intended to attend Zorafest and report back here, but they want a hundred damn dollars. Forget that noise.)

Most "classic" novels are written by white European males, or white males who have just come from Europe to settle in New England. At least, that's the presentation we get in high school, reading Great Expectations or Les Miserables or Lord of the Flies or The Scarlet Letter or, God forbid, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.

The commonness of the prose, the setting, even the stories themselves tends to turn us off to literature, and so we abandon it in college, never reading anything more challenging or cerebral than the Cosmopolitan article promising eight new positions that will drive your man crazy. And therefore, a lot of us never encounter the modern classics -- books that tell a story; books that use recent, local language; books we can understand.

It's especially frustrating for those of us who, shall we say, have a less-than-bleached heritage. Where are our great books? Who is writing the trials and travails of our fellows? Is anyone stepping up to provide our voice?

Once you start looking, you'll probably find it. For black women at the turn of the century, that voice was Zora Neale Hurston.

I know, this place has been barren ever since Nick got out of that unbonded romantic transitional period. So I have a project which might help with that.

One of my reading goals for the year is a classic a month. There are lots of books that I've never read but as a wannabe literary potentate probably should have, and this is one way I can catch up. (I'm using Time Magazine's list as a jumping-off point.) To help me remember what I've read, I plan to write about it here. If you're familiar with Defective Yeti's NaNoReMo, this will be in a similar vein.

Care to read along? Join me if you dare as we wend our way through the swamps and forests of classical literature.

January's novel: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston