Based on the labels on typewriter ribbon donated by Octavia Butler, she got her ribbon from Office Machines Incorporated which had locations at 543 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA and 433 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, CA.
via https://anacostia.si.edu/collection/object/acm_2004.0007.0002
Reply to @Denny @richnewman @patrickrhone at https://beardystarstuff.net/2024/01/16/i-finished-reading.html
I started reading Parable of the Sower exactly one year to the date mentioned at the start of the book at the public library in Pasadena where she grew up. As a 49 year old father of a 12 year old daughter, it was a much more visceral and eerie experience than I could ever have expected. She has forever changed the perspective I have driving down the streets of our shared neighborhood.
I'm not sure if they'll have open remote registrations for it or if it will only be broadcast locally, but the local Octavia Butler Book Club has an upcoming zoom session on Feb 24 which can be found in the Pasadena Public Library's newsletter (.pdf). It will feature Dr. Kendra Parker via Zoom from Georgia to present her lecture: "Walking a Mile in Her Shoes: Exploring Octavia Butler's Archives."
The nearby Huntington Library houses her papers and some of her materials there may be accessible online.
https://huntington.org/exhibition/octavia-e-butler-telling-my-stories
After Butler’s death, The Huntington became the recipient of her papers, which arrived in 2008 in two file cabinets and 35 large cartons, comprising more than 8,000 items.
“The greater your ignorance the more verifiably accurate must beyour facts,” she once remarked.
unsourced
Thus began a lifelong relationship with her commonplace books.Butler would scrape together twenty-five cents to buy small Meadmemo pads, and in those pages she took notes on every aspect ofher life: grocery and clothes shopping lists, last-minute to-dos,wishes and intentions, and calculations of her remaining funds forrent, food, and utilities. She meticulously tracked her daily writinggoals and page counts, lists of her failings and desired personalqualities, her wishes and dreams for the future, and contracts she
would sign with herself each day for how many words she committed to write.
Not really enough evidence for a solid quote here. What was his source?
He cites the following shallowly: <br /> - Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories: Positive Obsession (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 123–36.<br /> - 2 Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2020).<br /> - 3 Dan Sheehan, “Octavia Butler has finally made the New York Times Best Seller list,” LitHub.com, September 3, 2020, https://lithub.com/octavia- butler-has-finally-made-the-new-york-times-best-seller-list/.<br /> - 4 Butler’s archive has been available to researchers and scholars at the Huntington Library since 2010.
I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.'
Lilith’s Brood, a trilogy first published as Xenogenesis, details the long and seedy seduction of humanity by the Oankali, sluglike aliens that delight in genetic trade with other species. The story is set hundreds of years after the Cold War turns hot and obliterates the superpowers and most of humanity. The Oankali arrive after the war, abduct and resuscitate war-ravaged humans and plan to send us back to Earth — at the cost of merging our biochemistry with theirs.
Spanning continents and centuries, WILD SEED details a tense courtship between two African immortals, one a psychic parasite who can switch bodies, and the other a shapeshifter.
another TBR
The stories collected in BLOODCHILD move quickly, often laying out their premises and conflicts in a single exchange or sequence.
, Octavia Butler
I discovered Octavia Butler when I was living in New Zealand doing my dissertation research (first stop at research locations was always the public library) and found Kindred on the shelf. I then read the Xenogenesis trilogy, which I just discovered was published as Lillith's Brood.. As a foreign visitor in a mysterious land, both the time travel and the alien visitation appealed to me.