tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-234718012024-03-07T21:38:08.945-05:00The Existence MachineRichardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.comBlogger732125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-86924633348866896332016-12-31T13:15:00.000-05:002016-12-31T13:30:45.739-05:00Books Read - 2016As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2016, in chronological order of completion. And as is the typical practice, I've provided links to posts I've written about those books. Annoyingly, continuing the recent downward trend, there were only four new posts this year. My plan-slash-hope had been to write something short about each book I read - inspired, so I thought, by our friend <a href="http://www.hada.ly/">Clare</a>, I was going to write 100 words about each book. Well, this didn't happen. There are many reasons, excuses, etc, but the fact is I just didn't write much. Some of them didn't inspire any ideas in me at all, but others did, and I simply did not take the time to explore them in writing. Other books I discussed with friends via email, and I didn't take the time to re-organize those thoughts into coherent essays. <br />
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In any case, following the list are comments and observations.<br />
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1. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2016/01/notes-on-maggie-nelsons-argonauts.html"><i>The Argonauts</i></a>, Maggie Nelson<br />
2. <i>My Brilliant Friend</i>, Elena Ferrante (Ann Goldstein, trans.)<br />
3. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2016/03/notes-on-white-girls-by-hilton-als.html"><i>White Girls</i></a>, Hilton Als<br />
4. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2016/03/notes-on-otros-valles-by-jamie-berrout.html"><i>Otros Valles</i></a>, Jamie Berrout<br />
5. <i>The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy</i>, David Graeber<br />
6. <i>Counternarratives</i>, John Keene<br />
7. <i>The Autobiography of Red</i>, Anne Carson <br />
8. <i>Don't Let Me Be Lonely</i>, Claudia Rankine (re-read)<br />
9. <i>Citizen</i>, Claudia Rankine (re-read) <br />
10. <i>My Struggle, Book Four</i>, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)<br />
11. <i>Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales)</i>, Rasheedah Phillips<br />
12. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2016/10/notes-on-self-portrait-in-green-by.html"><i>Self-Portrait in Green</i></a>, Marie NDiaye (Jordan Stump, trans.)<br />
13. <i>Faces in the Crowd</i>, Valeria Luiselli (Christina MacSweeney, trans.)<br />
14. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2016/10/notes-on-world-is-round-by-gertrude.html"><i>The World Is Round</i></a>, Gertrude Stein (Clement Hurd, illus.)<br />
15. <i>Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo</i>, Ntozake Shange<br />
16. <i>Spurious</i>, Lars Iyer (re-read)<br />
17. <i>Dogma</i>, Lars Iyer (re-read)<br />
18. <i>Exodus</i>, Lars Iyer (re-read)<br />
19. <i>Bluets</i>, Maggie Nelson<br />
20. <i>Unto the Last and Other Writings</i>, John Ruskin<br />
21. <i>The Last Samurai</i>, Helen DeWitt (re-read)<br />
22. <i>Dhalgren</i>, Samuel R. Delany<br />
23. <i>My Struggle, Book Five</i>, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)<br />
24. <i>Malone Dies</i>, Samuel Beckett (re-read)<br />
25. <i>Signs Preceding the End of the World</i>, Yuri Herrera (Lisa Dillman, trans.)<br />
26. <i>A Sorrow Beyond Dreams</i>, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.) (re-read)<br />
27. <i>Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press</i>, Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair<br />
28. <i>Ladivine</i>, Marie NDiaye (Jordan Stump, trans.)<br />
29. <i>What Is History?</i>, E.H. Carr<br />
30. <i>No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame</i>, Janet Lansbury <br />
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In the first eight years of this blog, I'd included in this space an increasingly detailed statistical breakdown of my year in books. I abandoned the practice last year and don't see any good reason to pick it up again this year. In the event, there's not much to breakdown. This year I read only 30 books, many fewer than in any year I can remember in my adult reading life (well, except for last year: it turns out <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2016/01/books-read-2015.html">the facts show</a> I read only 33 last year). Again - a lot of reasons: declining commuting time and attention deficits produced by reduced sleep, children, television, and social media, chief among them.<br />
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Of the 30, eight were re-reads of very short books (one exception: <i>The Last Samurai</i>). Of the remaining 22, most were also very short, four were books of essays (one of which - David Graeber's - was half read last year, if memory serves), one was non-fiction proper, and one was a short book about parenting (which was pretty useful, actually). The rest was literature, in one form or another - a few were ostensibly poetry, or poetry/essays, such as Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, I suppose. A few were novels, or short stories, or literary memoir of sorts. Two were volumes of Knausgaard's <i>My Struggle</i>. One was Samuel R. Delany's <i>Dhalgren</i>.<br />
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A quick re-cap of the re-reads: Helen DeWitt's <i>The Last Samurai</i> remains a fantastic novel, just as good now as it was when I read it upon release 15 years ago. Still, I'd forgotten much about it. I'd recommended it happily to several people, some of whom read it and liked it, but when I re-read, I was struck by how little of the <i>experience </i>of it I had remembered, even while pushing it on people. Claudia Rankine's pair of books - <i>Don't Let Me Be Lonely</i> and the widely discussed <i>Citizen</i> - are very much worth reading and re-reading and writing about. I read them both just last year, and I would not be surprised to find myself re-reading them next year - if only because I want to write about them - which I do. Right now all I can think of to say, some months on, is that they are special books. You should read them.<br />
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I re-read Lars Iyer's <i>Spurious </i>trilogy because I was in the mood for something smart and funny and easy to read (no offense lol), and they do not disappoint. When I read them the first time, I remember thinking <i>Exodus</i> was a drop-off from the first two, but upon re-read I felt quite the opposite. (Devoted readers will of course recall that I previously <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2012/02/mid-neolithic-perhaps-thats-when-it-all.html">wrote</a> about the second book in the trilogy, <i>Dogma</i>.) Beckett's <i>Malone Dies</i> is an obvious classic. I'd re-read <i>Molloy</i> last year, and plan to re-read <i>The Unnamable </i>before too long, maybe this year, maybe not, plus I still have plenty of other Beckett to read for the first time. Anyway, god, <i>Malone Dies </i>is great. Just some amazing, marvelous pages, dammit. My decision to re-read Handke's memoir about his mother who had committed suicide, <i>A Sorrow Beyond Dreams</i>, was prompted by noticing a passing reference by someone on Twitter. I think about half of this book is a fascinating meditation on what it means to write about a life, especially someone else's life.<br />
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So much for the re-reads. And as a digression, often I include a list of books I read substantial portions of without being able to finish, for whatever reason. I won't do a full accounting this time, just some notes: this year I attempted a few different Henry Green novels - his style would take me for a few pages, but then I'd hit a wall and lose interest in the moment. I read fully 200 pages in Clarice Lispector's massive complete stories collection that New Directions published last year. The stories are easier going than her novels - speaking of which, I read and re-read several times over the first 10-15 pages in her <i>The Passion According to G.H. </i>- I enjoyed reading these pages, but they are difficult and I just could not get moving on the book. I picked up on a whim (at the World Bank bookshop, god help me) a Dalkey-published book called <i>I, The Supreme</i>, by <span class="st">Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos, which purports to be the writings of, and documents about, a 19th century Paraguayan despot. I read about 100 pages of it and got bogged down and frankly annoyed by the despot's referential and hyper-playful language.</span><br />
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Of the books that were new-to-me that I <i>did</i> finish reading... I loved loved loved Maggie Nelson's <i>The Argonauts</i>, and managed to write about it. Her <i>Bluets</i> was nice, but did not have quite the same impact. A re-read is in order - and I plan to read other Nelson books too. Carson's famous <i>The Autobiography of Red</i> had pages I loved and pages that baffled me. I'd need to re-visit it, as well, for its own sake, but especially if I wanted to say anything about it. David Graeber's <i>The Utopia of Rules </i>is by turns brilliant and, honestly, stupid, sometimes on the same page. Somehow the stupidity seems to make the brilliance possible. It's hard to figure. Rasheedah Phillips is part of the <a href="http://metropolarity.tumblr.com/">Metropolarity</a> collective, and her <i>Recurrence Plot</i> collection was frequently invigorating, just the kind of science fiction I'm looking for and I think we need more of. Anything I might say about Ntozake Shange's <i>Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo</i> would likely be irrelevant or impertinent, but it's an interesting and unique novel, which is something. <i>Signs Preceding the End of the World</i> was getting a lot of hype, relatively speaking; I thought it was undeserving of it. With <i>Faces in the Crowd</i>, I've now read all three Valeria Luiselli books translated into English so far, and with all three there are pages I love, but I'm not sure they add up to much (again: re-reading may be in order). John Keene's <i>Counternarratives</i>, I felt, <i>did </i>deserve hype it has received, and I had some fleeting ideas for a post about it, yet nothing stuck. (Briefly: its stories each concern, in various different modes, slavery and its aftermath. They are never less than intriguing.)<br />
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I may still manage real posts about <i>Dhalgren</i> (nothing like what I expected, whatever that might have been; I'm
very glad to finally have read it. I enjoyed the experience - it warrants a stellar reputation, but it seems to me that the content of its actual reputation is a mismatch for the real book), NDiaye's strange new novel <i>Ladivine</i>, and the John Ruskin <i>Unto the Last</i> collection, as well as a possible re-evaluation of Knausgaard's <i>My Struggle </i>project in light of reading the fourth and fifth books in the series (the fifth book has revived my flagging interest in the project; I liked it <i>a lot</i> more than the third and fourth installments).<br />
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If I had to name favorite books of the year - not counting re-reads, which are all great; I'd recommend each of them without reservation - I think it'd have to include:<br />
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<i>The Argonauts</i> by Maggie Nelson<br />
<i>Dhalgren</i> by Samuel R. Delany<br />
<i>Recurrence Plot</i> by Rasheedah Phillips<br />
<i>Ladivine</i> by Marie NDiaye <br />
<i>Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press</i>, Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair<br />
<br />
And putting <i>Whiteout</i> at the bottom allows me the opportunity to specifically recommend that book, uncharacteristically the only proper non-fiction book I read this year. It was published in 1998, begins by showing that Gary Webb's reporting about the CIA and drugs was accurate and unfairly attacked and maligned by the big mainstream media outlets - the Washington Post in particular. It's not great prose, but it's packed with a lot of information. And it remains relevant to us today, both by, a, outlining the history of the CIA and US military working with not only drug dealers (honestly, the idea that massive amounts of drugs enter the United States without the US Government specifically allowing it strikes me as silly now), but with literal Nazis after World War II, and, b, the often direct complicity in covering up such activity, or not reporting on it, by newspapers such as The Washington Post, L.A. Times, New York Times, etc. One <i>does</i> wonder how we got in our current mess, doesn't one?Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-80267547779246745372016-10-04T21:14:00.000-04:002016-10-04T22:36:42.329-04:00Notes on The World Is Round by Gertrude Stein<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjklStLO8Jj7nO8pCau0Vfo0nqSyDZ68uNl9rm0oksYb5EcCPDL_Gd35r3HN_qxgAsuvjF4lh011zjfmMSpW5TQD9iVyyqhsT3oGgsr_9jJhSM83dUODxoUoRcxiIJMwkbd_76U/s1600/world+is+round+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjklStLO8Jj7nO8pCau0Vfo0nqSyDZ68uNl9rm0oksYb5EcCPDL_Gd35r3HN_qxgAsuvjF4lh011zjfmMSpW5TQD9iVyyqhsT3oGgsr_9jJhSM83dUODxoUoRcxiIJMwkbd_76U/s320/world+is+round+cover.jpg" width="267" /></a></div>
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<i>The World Is Round</i> is a children's book written by Gertrude Stein, published in 1938. The book was illustrated by Clement Hurd, who is best known as the illustrator for Margaret Wise Brown's children's classics <i>The Runaway Bunny </i>(1942) and, especially, <i>Goodnight Moon </i>(1947).<br />
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I've lately decided I am firmly pro-Gertrude Stein, but to date this is still just the third book I've read by her. I only recently learned of its existence, via Ethan's <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/tagged/Gertrude-Stein">posts about it</a>, and even then, I wasn't expecting to read it any time soon, except I came across the attractive 75th anniversary edition on display at the Children's Book Store here in Baltimore. This edition includes the original book - with its pink pages and blue text, as mandated by Stein - an afterword by Clement Hurd's wife, Edith Thacher Hurd (from 1986), and a new foreword by Thacher Hurd, their son (and incidentally a writer of children's books himself, including one of our old favorites, <i>Art Dog</i>). These two pieces, especially the afterword, tell the interesting story about the genesis of Stein's book and its production, in the context of the burgeoning and 'experimental' world of children's books in the 1920s and 1930s, including some letters between Stein and Hurd. Briefly, Margaret Wise Brown, a big admirer of Stein's, suggested to Young Scott Books that they invite literary authors to write children's books. Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Stein were asked; only Stein responded.<br />
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But never mind all that! How is the book? In many ways it makes perfect sense that Gertrude Stein wrote a children's book. Her vocabulary and her syntax tend to be simple. There's rhythm and repetition, like you'd find in many children's books. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj6ZyH54XuhhwYnYtjtXMM_kGXScx-c6FJFMvmrNDDR1AKivpgz8VKK3fgK1l63haNYUk5hRsBDGbHS7BGp26EdZiQj3QeEffVz45tznsIJSii8YogqmI5GzdDdW03OLbb8Z8K/s1600/WorldIsRound-page1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj6ZyH54XuhhwYnYtjtXMM_kGXScx-c6FJFMvmrNDDR1AKivpgz8VKK3fgK1l63haNYUk5hRsBDGbHS7BGp26EdZiQj3QeEffVz45tznsIJSii8YogqmI5GzdDdW03OLbb8Z8K/s320/WorldIsRound-page1.jpg" width="250" /></a>[In my effort to include pictures from the book in this post - an <i>Existence Machine </i>first!! - I struggled mightily with formatting. I had wanted, e.g., pages 1 and 25 to be side-by-side, but it wasn't happening. So then I thought, well, ideally, I'd <i>write something</i> alongside each image, preferably something relevant and insightful or at least useful. Alas, no. At one point, I came back to this post, as it remained in draft status - where it remained for many months before being published, if we're honest, and we're nothing if not that - I stared at the blank space next to the page, and nothing was coming... I typed "what am I doing" - because honestly my god what am I doing.] [Incidental side note while we still have white space to fill: this book is one of the many places, but not the first, where the line "A Rose is a Rose is a Rose" appears.] [But anyway look at page 1! Isn't it lovely?]<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeGS8eIURVs5FjXXAH6wqhyphenhyphenpV9kk4Vgs2Xu4cvxmVcSKhEbq8pe-J0J0R6aZ5hPAk-kpywjOmzE8h7QTeFZ5qs5cubAmJAmYeYXCD01xVS6awQJnDHnO8zPFio9qyF3l_tUEby/s1600/WorldIsRound-page25.jpg" imageanchor="2" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeGS8eIURVs5FjXXAH6wqhyphenhyphenpV9kk4Vgs2Xu4cvxmVcSKhEbq8pe-J0J0R6aZ5hPAk-kpywjOmzE8h7QTeFZ5qs5cubAmJAmYeYXCD01xVS6awQJnDHnO8zPFio9qyF3l_tUEby/s320/WorldIsRound-page25.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>
It is in many ways delightful - in both classic children's book ways and Gertrude Stein ways. But I have to say: it's difficult to imagine many actual <i>children</i> reading the book or sitting still while it's read to them. The book concerns the adventures of Rose, and what she thinks and feels, her doubts and struggles, and among other things, her climb up a mountain with a chair, because why not. The language is simple, as one might expect from either Stein or a children's book. And it's repetitive in the way children's books often are, but especially the way Stein often is. [I know, I already more or less said that above. Pretend this is me being artfully repetitive like Gertrude Stein. Only pretend I'm using far fewer syllables.] Yet there is a <i>lot</i> of text, quite a lot for a children's picture book. Many pages are only text, and a lot of it, and one page in particular is essentially one paragraph, a wall of text. So you'd have to imagine either an especially precocious child, and/or an especially patient one. Still, it is frequently lovely, often funny, interesting, philosophical, occasionally bizarre, occasionally boring, and, again, it has a page that is a wall of text, much like you'd find in, like, <i>The Making of Americans</i>, or Kafka or Bernhard or something, not so much <i>Goodnight, Moon</i>. I love that page so much. Unfortunately, while many images from the book exist online, I could not find that one, so I took a photo of it myself. And here it is:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy7An4uQGXDaGT03Bifhn0iDzgj0IxfM_7ecZI4Fy9irP9Y0sWsvxaO_4yVxVJZ7aQZgrv96CUcwPCDaLlrKOg9x7o0OvyTN38DOviZlOJqkeLMyNbQwFLAXP2q0zLrHbzduHf/s1600/IMG_1096.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy7An4uQGXDaGT03Bifhn0iDzgj0IxfM_7ecZI4Fy9irP9Y0sWsvxaO_4yVxVJZ7aQZgrv96CUcwPCDaLlrKOg9x7o0OvyTN38DOviZlOJqkeLMyNbQwFLAXP2q0zLrHbzduHf/s320/IMG_1096.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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"Water yes and birds yes and rats yes and snakes yes and lizards yes and cats yes and cows yes, and trees yes and scratches yes, and sticks yes, and flies yes, and bees yes but not a Rose with a chair, all a Rose with a chair can dare is just not stare but keeping on going up there."<br />
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Yes.<br />
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<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-3091686216564986082016-10-04T20:45:00.000-04:002017-10-09T12:07:03.872-04:00Notes on Self-Portrait In Green by Marie Ndiaye<i>Self-Portrait In Green</i> came to my attention this Spring via a tweet from Aaron Bady, in which he linked to publisher Two Lines Press's special "<a href="http://twolinespress.com/try-out-marie-ndiaye/">Try Out Marie Ndiaye!</a>" page. They described the book as "an utterly unclassifiable memoir that belongs on the shelf somewhere near Maggie Nelson’s <i>The Argonauts</i>, Claudia Rankine’s <i>Citizen</i>, and Anne Carson’s <i>Autobiography of Red</i>." As I had <i>just</i> gotten finished reading all three of those books, this seemed especially designed to attract me in particular. I had never heard of Ndiaye (who is apparently a <i>big deal</i> in France), but I loved those three books, to varying degrees, and it was cheap, so I ordered it.<br />
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In the event, having read the book twice, I'm not sure what to say about it. Granted, what do I ever know to say about a book anymore, right? When was the last time a blog post appeared here? Nearly seven months ago? Right. In that span, I've thought about writing about a number of things, planned several posts, opened drafts, written terrible sentences, but not found the time, or taken the time, or whatever, to do what it takes. But one common thread that has bugged me is the problem of expectations. I'm sort of obsessed with blurbs (can you be "sort of" obsessed with something?) - the work they do to manage and contain our reading experiences. Publishing copy, too: book flaps, webpages, ad copy, etc.<br />
<br />
So, I began reading this book with incredibly high expectations - and it just doesn't measure up to them. In fact, it <i>can't</i>. "Measure up" is wrong - it just doesn't compare. It doesn't <i>seem</i> to be anything like those books, in any meaningful way. The comparisons are simply unfair, and in the end a bit annoying. And yet, they hooked me in, didn't they? - it was successful marketing! god help me - and I'm not at all sorry I read the book. But the whole enterprise rankles. And notice, too, that they call it an "unclassifiable <i>memoir</i>" - yet by the end of the page, have referred to it as a novel. Apparently, in this brave new post-James Frey (heh) literary (heh) world of the (relatively) massive successes of your Knausgaards and Ferrantes, there is simply no difference whatsoever between a memoir and a novel, a memoir and a <i>fiction</i>. For the record, Knausgaard's <i>My Struggle </i>books have always scanned to me as memoir, so naturally everyone calls them novels. Ferrante's Neapolitan series, meanwhile, scans as fiction, so naturally those books get taken as essentially memoir, to the point that it's apparently totally important that we know who she really is. In this case, I have gathered, from where I can no longer remember, that Ndiaye began writing <i>Self-Portrait in Green </i>as a memoir, and it became a fiction. A common enough occurrence, no doubt. So why <i>not</i> just call it both? Isn't that irritating? I think it's irritating.<br />
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(And yet, perhaps somewhat contradictorily, I do not have a problem with writing that is in fact unclassifiable. I call that, simply, <i>writing</i> - and it is in this sense that the commonality with Nelson, Rankine, and Carson, all three the real deal, as far as I'm concerned, is borne out.)<br />
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The book you say? How is the book? Hah, what an <i>odd</i> question. The book is pretty good, I think. I enjoyed it, rather a lot, on a sentence by sentence level. I enjoyed the <i>texture</i> of it, of those sentences (the term is borrowed from a friend). I'm not sure I understood the significance of all the green. There were women in green, throughout, and presumably the green meant something, but I couldn't tell you what it was. I'm not sure I care. Re-reading, I enjoyed the sentences even more—Ndiaye is a talented writer—but I remain more or less in the dark about the green. I'm ok with that.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-61908182454081630752016-03-13T10:55:00.000-04:002016-03-13T10:55:13.093-04:00Notes on Otros Valles by Jamie BerroutI learned of <i>Otros Valles</i> from Ethan, who has posted some <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com/tagged/Jamie+Berrout">excerpts</a> on his tumblr and in general praised it. The author describes herself as "a queer Mexican trans woman writer . . . from the South Texas border", which description fits the narrator as well, and as such, I feel it's not really <i>for me,</i> possibly not to read, but certainly not to discuss with any authority or attempt to explain, to write about at any length. But I wanted to mention it, and point interested readers in its direction. Here, I'll just say that, on the strength of the passages Ethan posted, I bought and read the <a href="https://gumroad.com/jamieberrout#">self-published</a> e-book, and I liked the experience of reading it. I appreciate that it is quiet and meditative. The narrator is concerned with being trans and Mexican and queer, and what that means, about family conflict and comfort, and friendship and loneliness, about intersectional oppressions and politics and history, and about writing. There isn't much in the way of plot or event, nor resolution. She might be interested in explaining things to herself, but she is not interested in explaining things to me.<br />
<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-47196018975649220242016-03-12T09:28:00.000-05:002016-03-12T09:29:19.835-05:00Notes on White Girls by Hilton AlsReaders will remember <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/06/notes-on-malcolm-x-in-our-own-image.html">my post</a> on the 1992 essay collection <i>Malcolm X: In Our Own Image</i>, edited by the late Joe Wood, in which I reserved special praise for the entry by Hilton Als:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
His essay is called "Philosopher or Dog?" and it begins in a manner that
I initially found off-putting. But it finds a groove (or I found its
groove) and by the
end, I felt it was brilliant. It's a poetic meditation, if you will, on
Malcolm X's mother,
and the unfair uses he puts her to in his <i>Autobiography</i>. For example, he describes his mother, who was from Granada, as looking
like a white woman, being more educated than his father, and even
inviting occasional abuse for that reason. <span class="il">Als</span>
a) calls bullshit on all of that, but b) also tries to imagine her
life, her politics. . . Among other things, it's a
fascinating riff on the uses and distortions of autobiography and memoir.</blockquote>
Hilton Als was to that point unknown to me, though this may say more about my general tendency to ignore the <i>New Yorker</i> than anything else. In any case, I thought the essay was fascinating and knotty, and I was intrigued to learn that it was collected in Als' recent book of essays titled <i>White Girls</i>. What would it mean to collect an essay about Malcolm X, and his mother, in a book by that title? In the event, having now read the book, which includes essays ostensibly concerning Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, Michael Jackson, Eminem (and <i>his</i> mother), Louise Brooks, and Richard Pryor, among others, I don't really have a definitive answer, except that Louise Little was the white girl of Malcolm X's imagination. It remains a provocative question.<br />
<br />
It could be said that the book's general over-arching subjects are race and gender and the construction of
identity and self. And of micro-collectives - as in the long, sprawling, frequently beautiful
first essay, which largely concerns a friendship evidently of central
importance to the author (or narrator? later essays, in which Als writes
first-person essays from the standpoint of identities not his own,
retrospectively raise the question), a "we" to which he belongs, or
belonged, the ways in which we each are part of numerous such entities known
as a "we" - understood to those belonging to it, often obscure to those
outside it. The Flannery O'Connor essay was personally gratifying - given <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2009/12/on-flannery-oconnor-and-politics-and.html">my own blog post</a>
on her and on politics and racism some years ago (a piece long by blog
standards, short for an essay in a book) - not that that's necessarily a
good reason to appreciate writing, but in any case, I read it thinking <i>yes, this is what O'Connor is doing in her fiction, and this is how to read her doing it. </i><br />
<br />
Those two essays notwithstanding, about halfway through I was feeling somewhat adrift and
disappointed in the book, despite liking much of what I had read to that point
- but none of it, except perhaps that opening essay, or most of it anyway, seemed to be <i>as</i> effective or urgent as the Malcolm X piece - which incidentally holds up very well on re-reading. But the second half picks up considerably. In particular, two pieces dealing with Richard Pryor (one of which is in the voice of an imaginary sister of Pryor's) are very good and among my favorites in the book.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-25134876885628210742016-01-31T11:00:00.000-05:002016-02-24T20:18:24.244-05:00Notes on The Argonauts by Maggie NelsonI thought I might try a new thing here: blogging. Possibly even about the books I read!<br />
<br />
As of this moment, I've finished reading two books so far this year, both of which had figured to be the final book(s) of 2015, but were not, and only one of which will I write about here. (I saw a year-end post which said that any book worth reading is worth devoting 100 words to. Fair point. One hundred words isn't many; maybe I'll give it a try. Not that I expect to keep to it.) (Is this one hundred words yet?)<br />
<br />
Maggie Nelson's <i>The Argonauts</i>. In short, I <i>loved</i> reading this book. But what is it? A very slim volume (which helps, no doubt). Inside flap says it's "Memoir/Criticism". Sales categories bug me, but Nelson does do those things here. She writes about her own life - her attempts to get pregnant, her pregnancy, her relationship with her partner Harry Dodge, to whom the book is frequently addressed and who is "fluidly gendered" (that phrasing is taken from the intro to <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/05/08/author_maggie_nelson_on_fielding_nosy_questions_about_queer_families_you_have_to_be_tough_and_foxy%E2%80%9D/">this interview</a> with Nelson; I use it rather than "trans" if only because she writes about that term some in the book) - she writes about her roles as mother and step-mother - the messiness and physicality of all of these things. She writes about feminism and queer theory and poetry and writing: and about the former being just as worthy of critical attention as the latter.<br />
<br />
I'll just offer one example from the book. Nelson tells the story of a seminar she attended as a grad student, in 1998, in which Jane Gallop was to present new material, and Rosalind Krauss was to respond to it. (Neither name was familiar to me. Nelson describes Gallop's work as having "evidenced a deep investment in Lacanian thought without seeming to have drunk the Kool-Aid", as seeming "to be learning everything there was to know about the [philosophical] boiler room so that she could blow it up". Krauss's work she knew less well but "gathered that everyone was invested in her theories about the modernist grid".) Gallop's presentation was a slideshow of resolutely personal photographs, about her husband and son and their lives, and commentary about the subjective experience of being photographed, combined with her experience as a mother. Nelson: "I liked that Gallop was onto something and letting us in on it before she fully understood it. She was hanging her shit out to dry: a start." But Krauss goes on the attack, accusing Gallop of a disturbing "soft-mindedness", in sharp contrast to her important previous work. Nelson: "The room thickened with the sound of one keenly intelligent woman taking another down. ... the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop's maternity had rotted her mind—besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think than an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting."<br />
<br />
Nelson was at that time neither a mother nor had any expectations of becoming one, but her sympathies were with Gallop: "I was enough of a feminist to refuse any knee-jerk quarantining of the feminine or the maternal from the realm of intellectual profundity." In saying so, of course, Nelson is reminding us that such refusals have been a basic component of feminism, i.e., nothing new. However, the need to refuse such quarantining (and of not just "the feminine or the maternal", but also "the physical", "the medical", and any number of other "personal" categories people are encouraged to keep hidden, or told is outside the realm of thinking), and to assert its opposite, is perpetual. Maggie Nelson not only <i>calls</i> bullshit on such mindsets, but beautifully <i>demonstrates</i> throughout that it is bullshit.<br />
<br />
I think <i>The Argonauts </i>is both important and beautiful. It is that elusive species, <i>writing</i>.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-76931051497617931532016-01-05T21:50:00.000-05:002016-01-07T20:07:52.167-05:00Books Read - 2015As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2015, in chronological order of completion. As usual, links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts. This year merely continued the recent trend of fewer and fewer new posts—there were only 9 new entries this year, down from 13 last year (and 25 the year before). Granted, there was an excellent reason for that: our son Malcolm was born smack in the middle of the year. Only two posts date since his birth, and the first of those was already in the works beforehand. <br />
<br />
In any case, following the list are comments and observations.<br />
<br />
1. <i>The Magic Mountain</i>, Thomas Mann (John E. Woods, trans.)<br />
2. <i>Capitalism & Slavery</i>, Eric Williams <br />
3. <i>Sidewalks</i>, Valeria Luiselli (Christina MacSweeney, trans.) <br />
4. <i>Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson</i> <br />
5. <i>Wittgenstein Jr</i>, Lars Iyer <br />
6. <i>A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History</i>, Manuel De Landa <br />
7. <i>24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep</i>, Jonathan Crary <br />
8. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/03/notes-on-portable-malcolm-x-reader.html"><i>The Portable Malcolm X Reader</i></a>, Manning Marable & Garrett Felber, eds. (<a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/03/sub-zero-weather-in-very-distant-august.html">also</a>, <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/05/black-lives-matter.html">also</a>)<br />
9. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/06/notes-on-malcolm-x-in-our-own-image.html"><i>Malcolm X: In Our Own Image</i></a>, Joe Wood, ed.<br />
10. <i>Lila</i>, Marilynne Robinson<br />
11. <i>Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South</i>, Stephanie M. H. Camp<br />
12. <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>, Claudia Rankine<br />
13. <i>Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan</i>, Ian Bell<br />
14. <i>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i>, James Joyce (re-read)<br />
15. <i>Don't Let Me Be Lonely</i>, Claudia Rankine<br />
16. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/07/paradox-lost.html"><i>Liberalism: A Counter-History</i></a>, Domenico Losurdo (Gregory Elliott, trans.)<br />
17. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/06/short-remarks-on-extinction.html"><i>Extinction</i></a>, <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/05/noted-thomas-bernhard.html">Thomas Bernhard</a> (David McLintock, trans.)<br />
18. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/07/paradox-lost.html"><i>The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America</i></a>, Gerald Horne<br />
19. <i>Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All</i>, David Roediger<br />
20. <i>The Death of the Novel and Other Stories</i>, Ronald Sukenick<br />
21. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/07/paradox-lost.html"><i>The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism</i></a>, Edward E. Baptist<br />
22. <i>Molloy</i>, Samuel Beckett (re-read)<br />
23. <i>The Greatest Threat: The Black Panther Party and COINTELPRO</i>, Eddie Conway<br />
24. <i>Benito Cereno</i>, Herman Melville<br />
25. <i>The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965, </i>, Samuel R. Delaney<br />
26. <i>Patternmaster</i>, Octavia Butler<br />
27. <i>Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self</i>, Marilynne Robinson (re-read)<br />
28. <i>Between the World and Me</i>, Ta-Nehisi Coates<br />
29. <i>Bog-Trotter</i>, Dory Previn<br />
30. <i>Mumbo Jumbo</i>, Ishmael Reed<br />
31. <i>Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, volume one</i>, Marguerite Young<br />
32. <i>The Story of My Teeth</i>, Valeria Luiselli (Christina MacSweeney, trans.) <br />
33. <i>Hotel Andromeda</i>, Gabriel Josipovici (re-read)<br />
<br />
In the past, I've included in this space an increasingly detailed statistical breakdown of my year in books. This year, I find I just can't be bothered. I found those breakdowns alternately amusing, useful, and tedious—and this year, the prospect of assembling the data just filled me with dread, so fuck it.<br />
<br />
That said, it remains important for me to keep in mind who writes the books I'm reading, and why. So the lack of stats this year should in no way be interpreted as my no longer caring about (some of) such statistical matters. Besides, not only were there fewer posts than ever, I <i>read</i> fewer books than at any time since I began reading in earnest (just over twenty years ago). This was also in part because the arrival of our son, an ankle injury I sustained three weeks after his birth, and an extended period of atypically extreme busy-ness at work all combined to mean I worked from home more often than not in the second half of 2015. That is to say, I no longer had my regular commute, also known as regular dedicated reading-time.<br />
<br />
But still! I read some excellent books!<br />
<br />
As the year began, I was wrapping up <i>The Magic Mountain</i>, and honestly it doesn't really fit here, the reading experience belongs more with 2014, but rules are rules. From there I moved right into Eric Williams classic study, the excellent <i>Capitalism & Slavery</i>, continuing my recent focus on American slavery and its aftermath. (Interestingly, it was only a little before reading his book that I learned that Williams had been a person of color. Which only goes to show you how difficult it can be to keep track of such matters.) Three more books explicitly about slavery were to come, ranging from a focus on day-to-day resistance (Stephanie Camp's <i>Closer to Freedom</i>), to a detailed history of what slavery was <i>like</i> and how it helped build American power and capital (Edward Baptist's deservedly widely read <i>The Half Has Never Been Told</i>), to a fascinating if knotty study about what the founders of the United States had <i>really</i> been concerned with in doing so (namely, preserving slavery) (Gerald Horne's <i>The Counter-revolution of 1776</i>; I'd begun reading this in 2014). I also read <i>Seizing Freedom</i>, David Roediger's provocative account, following on from Du Bois's insistence in <i>Black Reconstruction </i>that the enslaved freed themselves, of former slaves' ideas of <i>jubilee</i> in the wake of emancipation, what it meant for them, its influence on other movements (e.g., feminism) (which movements tended to abandon its wider implications), and how it was ultimately betrayed. In addition, Domenico Losurdo's <i>Liberalism: A Counter-History</i>, while not explicitly <i>about </i>slavery, by tracing what liberal ideas <i>actually entailed</i> ends up being very much about slavery indeed.<br />
<br />
I also continued my reading in more modern and/or recent African American history and black political writing - which, of course, is <i>also</i> part of 'slavery's aftermath', broadly speaking. This included George Jackson's prison letters, which, while frequently fascinating, were in total disappointing. I wish I owned copies of <i>Assata</i> and Angela Davis' autobiography and read the library copy of Jackson's, rather than the other way around, but so it goes. (Though I certainly <i>will</i> be buying those two, to have more readily to hand<i>.</i>) Manning Marable's <i>Malcolm X Reader</i> and an essay collection about Malcolm X, edited by the late Joe Wood, from 20 years ago, were read in the wake of remembrances of his assassination. They are both worthy volumes. I'd half-expected to soon read Marable's biography, but it didn't come to pass, not yet. Eddie Conway's short volume about COINTELPRO and the Black Panther Party - published while he was still in prison - is a pretty good intro to the topics (we'd had the book for a while, but I only got to it this year, somehow; Conway is now out of prison, and semi-regularly attends our Quaker Meeting here in Baltimore). And then later in the year, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' much-discussed, <i>Between the World and Me</i>. I realize lots of liberal white guy reviewers said it was really good and really important. So forgive me for thinking it excellent.<br />
<br />
I read just three 'new' novels this year: Lars Iyer's <i>Wittgenstein Jr</i> (which maybe I didn't like as much as the <i>Spurious</i> threesome, but it's still plenty good enough), Marilynne Robinson's <i>Lila</i> (third book in the sort of trilogy that began with <i>Gilead</i>; I liked it very much, probably more than I did <i>Home</i>, the second book), and Valeria Luiselli's odd and entertaining, <i>The Story of My Teeth</i>.<br />
<br />
The rest of the year's fiction reading, not counting three re-reads (<i>Molloy</i> - still great; <i>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i> - still, uh, <i>meh</i>; and <i>Hotel Andromeda</i> - even better this time round!), and the library copy of Butler's <i>Patternmaster</i> (which I liked well enough, but was not overly thrilled by; this was the only science fiction of the year), was confined to the exciting category of Books I've Had On My Shelves For Years. This was partly because of available finances, and partly because - I mean, I've had these books for years, right? presumably some of them are worth reading? Actually, scanning the list, this didn't amount to too many different books. But, in this vein, I did finally read Bernhard's marvelous<i> </i>final novel, <i>Extinction</i> (leaving me with just one major prose work left, I think - <i>The Lime Works</i>? I'll have to check his bibliography), Ishmael Reed's fascinating and bizarre and confounding <i>Mumbo Jumbo</i>, and Melville's strange <i>Benito Cereno</i> (which dovetailed with the slavery theme). What started this practice off was finding Ronald Sukenik's overtly experimental story collection, <i>The Death of the Novel</i>, in a box in my basement. Totally meant to blog about it too. In any case, as often happens with such collections, it's interesting, entertaining, at times boring. Some of its incidental political content stuck out for me, as, if nothing else, just as suggestive of the creeping literary conservatism of the last 40+ years as the experimental nature of the stories themselves might.<br />
<br />
In this last category, but really of necessity standing by itself, is volume one of Marguerite Young's huge novel, <i>Miss MacIntosh, My Darling</i>, the reading of which fairly dominated the second half of my year. It really is an amazing surfeit of words - a strange, frequently beautiful, often exasperating 600+ (so far) pages. I hope to have <i>something</i> more substantive to say about it in a separate post later on, but suffice it to say... haha, as if Young herself would <i>ever</i> have used the expression "suffice it to say".... never mind, then, for now.<br />
<br />
That leaves miscellaneous not-fiction - essays (Luiselli's nice little <i>Sidewalks</i> - I mean no condescension at all, and a re-read of Robinson's <i>Absence of Mind</i> - I'd meant a post or two dealing with it and her and possibly some Josipovici compare/contrast, but though something like that may still come, I have to admit her much-shared NYRB conversation with Obama kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, so we'll see) and theory/philosophy (Crary's <i>24/7</i> and De Landa's <i>Thousand Years of Nonlinear History </i>- both fantastic books, honestly; the former author of no relation to myself, which makes the fact that he wrote a book I could absolutely see myself writing, were I the kind of person who wrote theory, or books, or ever, rather interesting indeed) (and it's been way too many months since I read the De Landa, but I frankly loved reading that book - it's such a wide-ranging, almost freewheeling, recontexualization of just tons of all kinds of familiar and unfamiliar historical material) and memoir (Delany's and Dory Previn's - both intriguing and excellent reading experiences, in entirely different ways) and biography (the late Ian Bell's completion of his two-volume bio of Dylan, not as good as the first but not bad), and Claudia Rankine's two superb books of... what? essay-poems? prose-poems? I don't know. <i>Citizen</i> is the big one from this year, and it's deserves to be read, but if anything, I think I liked the earlier <i>Don't Let Me Be Lonely</i> even more.<br />
<br />
And there it is. Thank you for reading.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-53635764482487464802015-11-02T22:00:00.000-05:002016-02-21T11:13:32.712-05:00The silence that alone can rend them...In his book <i>Faux Pas</i> (1943), Maurice Blanchot has an essay called "On Hindu Thought", in which he discusses studies of Hinduism intended for the Western reader. He writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
…once this feeling of interest has been awakened, the same commentators
risk distancing the minds, that bearing a more intense yearning, will
see themselves threatened with being gratified too easily. For what have
they shown? That Hindu spirituality has marvelously succeeded, that it
succeeds at once by its extraordinary blossoming in all the people, and
even more in the heart of each being, by the beatitude that it
necessarily brings him at the end of long ordeals. After the
commentators' explanations, we are forced to think that Hindu
spirituality is a spirituality that succeeds too well, that is too
satisfied with itself, that it promises and gives, reliably, by
patience, knowledge, and technique, a definitive salvation. And the
paradox that results from this is that the doctrine for which the soul
has searched through thoroughly pessimistic questioning seems to end up
in a strangely optimistic conception of spiritual life. The thought that
constantly strove to place itself heroically before the Absolute now
has for its ideal only a comfortable laying out of spirituality.
Further, and this does appear in modern Hinduism, the clearest, purest
religious devotion is finally destined to serve national and social
claims, those that can best serve as an obstacle to that unity of life
founded on a common awareness of profound existence. We repeat that
those are the effects of an unfortunate exegesis and that it would be
absurd to make the responsibility for it fall on the Vedanta or the
Upanishads. But these judgments at least show that spiritual problems
can only be approached with the greatest rigor and the most severe
precautions. Westerners, who, like other people, are especially familiar
with chatter and palaver, have the particular characteristic of talking
nonsense and yet of believing in language. What words bring to them has
a definite meaning that they recognize and that they then try to
organize logically. Faced with any mystical teaching, they would do best
to give up language and force themselves to the silence that alone can
rend them. (translation from the French by Charlotte Mandell, 2001)</blockquote>
A few things come to mind reading this passage and the essay it comes from. Earlier this year, I took a meditation class; more specifically, a <i>mindfulness</i> meditation class. I am not what you'd call a spiritual person; god knows I'm not religious (ha! sorry), though I've certainly tried to distance myself from the stridency of my own youthful atheism, as well as the racist stupidity masquerading as intellect that is the wider, uh, <i>movement</i> of superior-than-thou atheist "writers" or "thinkers". The closest I've come to religious is semi-regularly attending a local Quaker meeting. Nor, for that matter, have I really investigated any of the Eastern religions.<br />
<br />
[Incidentally, thinking I'd provide a link or two above to other semi-related posts here, I spent some time poring over some of my early blogging. It's interesting how concerned I was with explicating my thinking on matters concerning religion. A very early (2007!) post on how these new atheist types <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2007/02/effacing-politics.html">efface politics</a>. And more: "<a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2007/10/some-thoughts-on-reason.html">some thoughts on reason</a>", in which I riff off an interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein (2007); one <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2007/04/sam-harris-v-andrew-sullivan.html">taking aim</a> at both tiresome participants in a debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan (again 2007); on "<a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2009/09/on-atheism-and-indifference.html">atheism and indifference</a>" (2009); another one on <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2009/02/notes-on-faith-and-atheism.html">faith and reason</a> (2009); and then finally my <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2008/02/god-is-not-great-christopher-hitchens.html">lengthy review</a> of Christopher Hitchens' extremely terrible "book", <i>God is Not Great</i> (2008). I'm linking to these posts here, in part because why not?, but also because I can't imagine devoting the time or space to such matters again. I'm not sorry to have done so - some of those pieces are pretty good, I think, for what they are - but the urgency has long since subsided. It's curious. But I digress.]<br />
<br />
So I'm not really a religious or spiritual person. Yet I have relatively recently learned and accepted that there are benefits to a meditation practice, and that there are good scientific bases for believing so. Mindfulness in particular appealed to me as a way to, among other things, better manage my responses to parenting challenges. But, while I liked the idea of regular practice <i>potentially</i> opening onto a more spiritual existence, I wasn't primarily in it for that. I was essentially seeking to <i>instrumentalize</i> a traditional practice for my own ends. Some would call this appropriation. Perhaps. I'm not convinced that's always such a bad thing. In any case, I have zero patience for the kind of corporate mindfulness training that's become something of a cliche - business types helped to sleep better, as they ransack the earth. No.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I took the class. I enjoyed it. It went well! The book we read was <i>Mindfulness in Plain English</i> by <span class="st">Bhante Henepola Gunaratana.</span> Which brings me back to Blanchot and to my point. You might think that a book with such a title would be doing exactly what Blanchot seems to almost warn against: that it would seem to gratify the seeker too easily, that spiritual life is made comfortable, comforting, all too optimistic. In fact, however, despite, yes, the book being written in plain English - that is, it is seemingly easy to understand - its subject remains in some sense elusive. It lays out clearly enough various practical aspects for embarking on a practice. But it's almost too easy! For someone like myself - lacking, as we have established, a connection to spiritual life, and despite relatively recent personal philosophical moves against this tendency, still very much a person of the Anglo-American culture of scientistic practicality (say that five times fast) - for someone like myself, at times it was hard to settle on what exactly I was expected to take from it. Sit how? Breathe how? What does it mean to focus your attention? To not? What does it mean to acknowledge a distraction? To let it go? As might be expected, these things take, well, practice. You can't just read a book (or take a course) and have it. Interestingly, too, the instructor and the author both cautioned against even attempting certain more spiritual aspects of the practice in the beginning. The author seems to even suggest it might be dangerous.<br />
<br />
The essay, then, also brings to mind two other Blanchot essays from the same book, "Kierkegaard's <i>Journals</i>" and "The Experience of Proust". This is perhaps not surprising, since they also appear in the same section of the book: "From Anguish to Language". For Kierkegaard, despite his voluminous writing, despite his extensive oeuvre, based substantially on his life, despite this journal, communication remains elusive, if not impossible, the fugitive self hidden from view. Proust, meanwhile, over the course of 3,000 or so pages, unfolds an interpretation of the experiences which necessitated his writing. Yet despite his attempts to explain, to interpret, to convert his experiences into knowledge, the experiences remain ultimately beyond reach, keeping "the quality of the secret by continuing . . . to seem always more mysterious than the work itself". Language fails us, can't but fail us, life, spirituality, experience, remain finally beyond the reach of words, words, so so many words.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-58143655085085202152015-07-15T22:00:00.000-04:002015-07-15T22:09:09.409-04:00Paradox LostOn July 4th, I happened to read <a href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-White-United-States-Real-Founding-Father-Lord-Dunmore-20140731-0040.html">this article-review</a>, by Paul Street, an excellent summary/overview of Gerald Horne's <i>The Counter-Revolution of 1776</i>:<i> Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America</i>. I'm going to cherry-pick this passage from the piece:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The “American paradox” (US historian Edmund Morgan’s term), whereby “the Age of Liberty” was also “the Age of Slavery,” was not limited to colonial North America and the United States. As the historian Greg Grandin reminds us, “the paradox can be applied to all of the Americas, North and South…What was true for Richmond [Virginia] was no less true for Buenos Aires and Lima – that <i>what many meant by freedom was the freedom to buy and sell black people as property</i>” (Greg Grandin, <i>Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World</i>, New York, 2014, emphasis added). But consider this: of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the brutal Middle Passage to the New World, two-thirds ended up in Brazil or the West Indies. But by 1860, approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the US South. In the US alone among the new Western Hemisphere Republics of the 19th century, slavery flourished rather than faded – until its destruction in the Civil War. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Part of the explanation for that disjuncture is the natural reproduction of slaves under the “paternalist” regime of the US South. Another aspect is the remarkable expansion of cotton slavery across the US South in the first half of the 19th century, intimately related to the early industrial revolution in England and Europe. A final piece is the white settlers’/slaveholders’ Counter-Revolution of 1776. The break-off slayed the specter of British Abolition and opened up vast new swaths of land for genocidal theft from the continent’s original inhabitants and the deployment of new slave cash-crop production armies. [Paul Street, "The White United States’ Real Founding Father: Lord Dunmore", July 3, 2014, <a href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-White-United-States-Real-Founding-Father-Lord-Dunmore-20140731-0040.html">teleSUR</a>]</blockquote>
I read Horne's <i>Counter-Revolution of 1776</i> earlier this year, and while I found it occasionally rough-sledding as a reading experience (Horne's prose sometimes gets in the way of his presentation of what is after all either unfamiliar or re-contextualized information), at minimum it contains a wealth of material on what the colonists-slaveholders-proto-founders were concerned with - essentially, preserving the slave system and protecting their property rights and themselves from both insurrection from slaves and attack from Africans armed by either the Spanish or British, depending. Horne's book sketches, as Street concisely puts it, "a central, fundamentally counter-revolutionary motivation behind the fateful decision to break off from England: a sense that the slave system on which North American fortunes depended could not survive except through secession from the British Empire."<br />
<br />
I read two other books this year, which can be read fruitfully alongside Horne's: Domenico Losurdo's <i>Liberalism: A Counter-History</i> (translated from the Italian by Gregory Elliott) and Edward E. Baptist's much-discussed <i>The Half Has Never Been Told: </i><i>Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism</i>. Among much else, in <i>Liberalism</i> Losurdo reveals anew that the "American paradox" is no paradox. That "the Age of Liberty" was also "the Age of Slavery" was no accident. Losurdo is fond of phrases like "the pathos of liberty" or, my favorite, "the self-congratulation of the community of the free", but ultimately, the point is that the articulated values of liberty and freedom, and the political rights developed to protect them, were based on the un-freedom of others, explicitly. Their liberty depended on the dispossession of the indigenous and the enslavement of Africans. There was no contradiction, no paradox, except insofar as we continue to read them in isolation, when they were meant in concert (the book is not only about American liberals, but that's what's relevant here). And then <i>The Half Has Never Been Told</i> narrates, in horrifying detail, the slave system as it changed and expanded after 1776, and especially after 1800. One considerable virtue of the book is that it recontextualizes information droned into us as school-children (along with, of course, tons of information we never encountered in school) such as the Louisiana Purchase, the various slavery "Compromises", the Mexican War, the cotton gin, and so on...Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-59659280507676241652015-06-26T08:00:00.000-04:002016-02-21T11:15:29.077-05:00Knausgaard, Heidegger, and Literary SocietyAnother <a href="http://this-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-blog-comes-to-one-in-dark_21.html">recent-ish</a> Stephen Mitchelmore blog post lamented (albeit in very strong terms) the state of online literature writing, its diminishment in the face of concentration and generally dudely commentary. In the post, he reminds us of a passage from the second volume of Knausgaard's much bruited <i>My Struggle</i> books. Knausgaard reports having been unable to make poetry open up to him, how he felt like a fraud, judged. He goes on to present a litany of ways in which we could write about poetry in objective terms, for example about Hölderlin and his poetry. But, "It was possible to do all of this without Hölderlin’s poems ever opening themselves up. The same could be done with all poets, and of course it has been. (Translated by Don Bartlett)".<br />
<br />
Re-reading Knausgaard's words brought to mind for me Heidegger's essay (or series of lectures) called "The Nature of Language" (located in <i>On the Way to Language</i>), which somewhat randomly I had been reading at about the same time. There are numerous passages I could quote by way of illustration, but I'll go with this one:<br />
<blockquote>
But as for us, it must remain open whether we are capable of entering properly into this poetic experience. There is the danger that we will overstrain a poem such as this by thinking too much into it, and thereby debar ourselves from being moved by its poetry. Much greater of course--but who today would admit it?--is the danger that we will think too little, and reject the thought that the true experience with language can only be a thinking experience, all the more so because the lofty poetry of all great poetic work always vibrates within a realm of thinking. But if what matters first of all is a thinking experience with language, then why this stress on a poetic experience? Because thinking in turn goes its way in the neighborhood of poetry. It is well, therefore, to give thought to the neighbor, to him who dwells in the same neighborhood. Poetry and thought, each needs the other in its neighborhood, each in its fashion, when it comes to ultimates. In what region the neighborhood itself has its domain, each of them, thought and poetry, will define differently, but always so that they will find themselves within the same domain. But because we are caught in the prejudice nurtured through centuries that thinking is a matter of ratiocination, that is, of calculation in the widest sense, the mere talk of a neighborhood of thinking to poetry is suspect. (Translated by Peter D. Hertz)</blockquote>
I don't have a lot to add, beyond highlighting this convergence, in part because I'm still trying to get the Heidegger essay to open up to me. The previous sentence was written back in February when Stephen's post was still new, and in fact, I failed to finish the Heidegger essay (I'm not certain I've ever finished a Heidegger essay or chapter, come to think of it)... (and god what a portentous post-title! you should have seen what it was in the first place...)<br />
<br />
. . . but I had wanted to say something seemingly unrelated, but which was originally prompted by this convergence. Knausgaard is interested in whether poems open themselves up to us, he is interested in ultimates, as it were, as Heidegger puts it, he is interested in the contrast between what is often said, in "objective" terms about a poem, or a poet, and what the writing actually does, or could do, to us were we awake to it. And yet Knausgaard has become a kind of literary celebrity, called on to write travelogues for the <em>New York Times Magazine</em>, to be a native informer in the pages of the <em>New Yorker</em>, to sit comfortably alongside Jonathan Franzen, happily domesticated for our consumption. I mention Franzen, because he is the quintessential literary celebrity, it seems to me, and I have frequently seen him and Knausgaard mentioned in the same breath, the same tweet, as though they were very much the same thing (highly praised white male authors who are perhaps not all that, being the general vibe). I find the yoking baffling and unpleasant and obfuscating, not least because as writers, I think they have little in common - and though I certainly much prefer Knausgaard, surely even whatever merit Franzen's writing has is utterly obscured by his weird celebrity? It pushes us away from the writing, does it not? Prevents us from allowing a work to open up to us? There is backlash: Knausgaard is dismissed, the praise is surely excessive, isn't it?, the celebrity off-putting, and what the fuck is up with that <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxCairnduff/status/570510206834253824">title</a> anyway? (Though why Hitler should get to own forever two such useful words as "my struggle" is honestly beyond me. If we <em>don't</em> name our 3000-page pseudo-memoir-y novel series <em>My Struggle</em>, surely the terrorists win? Hello?) Even extra-literary criticism that I find potentially interesting and valid - would a woman writing something like <i>My Struggle</i> be taken so seriously? (So <i>so</i> seriously.) Indeed not; probably not. But even this question, just as it is (literary society is unquestionably sexist, as in fact Steve's post touches on), pushes away the writing, prevents it from opening up - we are suspicious. We are suspicious! But in such questions it is also assumed that if a woman wrote a long autobiographical novel-ish thing, that it would thereby be much like Knasugaard's, because in such terms our only mode of inquiry appears to be at the level of chatter and celebrity and ratios of recognition. The experience is placed at a distance, foreclosed. We are not open.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-62682705745022816632015-06-25T21:25:00.001-04:002016-02-21T11:15:52.876-05:00Short Remarks on ExtinctionHaving recently read Thomas Bernhard's final novel, <i>Extinction</i>, I was interested to read <a href="http://this-space.blogspot.com/2015/05/panthers-and-museum-of-fire-by-jen-craig.html">this account</a> by Stephen Mitchelmore of the narrative in Jen Craig's novel, <i>Panthers and the Museum of Fire</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Perhaps priority should be placed on the narrative itself, which would
be convenient because writing is exactly what the dreamer regards as the
breakthrough she had been seeking, now given so unexpectedly by <i>Panthers and the Museum of Fire</i>,
a manuscript written by Sarah, an old school acquaintance, into whom
the narrator had bumped on the street one day, leading to a series of
events, including Sarah's death, possibly as an indirect result of her
excessive weight, culminating in the supposed non-reading of the
manuscript. Each event and the narrator's commentary is reported with
reference to where she is on the walk between Glebe and the café on
Crown Street, with the events that occur on that walk included too, and
also with recollections of how she had related the events before the
walk to her friend Raf at some point in the recent past, either at a
gastropub in Potts Point, or over the preparation of prawns before a
dinner back in Glebe, or over the phone to report the remarkable
breakthrough she had experienced the night before. </blockquote>
This made me think of how I'd try to explain what a Bernhard narrator is <i>doing</i> as he's narrating. Bernhard's books are frequently characterized as extended rants, which is strange if only because it's rare for his narrators to not reverse position and undermine, or at least mitigate, what seem to initially be very firmly held opinions. But such a blanket characterization also ignores that the narrator is typically expressing his opinions, or remembering having expressed them, <i>to someone</i>. <br />
<br />
In any case, more so perhaps than with other Bernhard novels, I was very much taken with noticing such things as I was reading <i>Extinction</i>. This is the first sentence of the novel:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
On the twenty-ninth, having returned from Wolfsegg, I met my pupil Gambetti on the Pincio to discuss arrangements for the lessons he was to receive in May, writes Franz-Josef Murau, and impressed once again by his high intelligence, I was so refreshed and exhilarated, so glad to be living in Rome and not in Austria, that instead of walking home along the Via Condotti, as I usually do, I crossed the Flaminia and the Piazza del Popolo and walked the whole length of the Corso before returning to my apartment in the Piazza Minerva, where at about two o'clock I received the telegram informing me that my parents and my brother, Johannes, had died.</blockquote>
This sentence has so much. For one thing, we see "writes Franz-Josef Murau", three words that are easy to forget over the next 300-plus pages (fairly long for a Bernhard novel!), as they're virtually never referred to again. So narrator is writing; the book in front of us is a document of some kind. He lives in Rome, and walks its streets, as indeed at various points in the narrative he recollects doing, recounting events, expressing opinions, recounting opinions expressed, remembering people he expressed them to. There's Wolfsegg, his childhood home. There's his pupil Gambetti - to whom he remembers having recounted so many of his opinions and ideas and memories. And finally, of course, there is the fateful telegram, the narrator's response to and meditations on the contents of which occupy the rest of the novel. Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-57677532434125052582015-06-09T22:00:00.000-04:002016-02-21T11:14:29.998-05:00Notes on Malcolm X: In Our Own Image<a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/03/notes-on-portable-malcolm-x-reader.html">Recall</a> that, in <i>The Portable Malcolm X Reader</i>, Manning Marable wrote that the 900-plus books written about Malcolm X, "with remarkably few exceptions, accepted <i>as fact</i> most if not all of the chronology of events and personal experiences depicted in the <i>Autobiography</i>'s narrative." One book Marable mentioned positively is a short collection of essays titled <i>Malcolm X: In Our Own Image</i>, edited by Joe Wood, who had been a columnist for the <i>Village Voice</i>. (I'd not heard of Wood prior to reading the book, and only just looked him up as I began writing this post. He <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/1325/what_happened_to_joe_wood">disappeared</a> in 1999 hiking on Mt. Rainier and was never seen again. He was 34.)<br />
<br />
It's on balance a good collection, certainly worth reading if you're especially interested either in Malcolm X or the black intellectual tradition, or, you know, what the fuck's the matter with this country. It was published in 1992, and appears to be out of print, though used and library copies are probably not hard to come by (if you're local, Enoch Pratt has several). The "our own image" of the title, it perhaps should be made clear, is that of black American writers. Several well known black writers have essays in the book, including Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Patricia Hill Collins, John Edgar Wideman, Greg Tate, Adolph Reed. <br />
<br />
The various writers here are much concerned with the nature of Malcolm X's legacy and influence, and by no means is his <i>Autobiography</i> taken as anything like the last word. This, too, was the time of the proliferation of the X imagery and merchandise, and rappers, such as Public Enemy, explicitly invoking him as an icon, as well as the Spike Lee biopic, about which few who mention it have much nice to say. Published the same year was Bruce Perry's biography, <i>Malcolm</i>, which is frequently criticized in these pages for its psychoanalytical approach, in isolation of politics and historical events and forces. There's interesting stuff on Alex Haley and the <i>Autobiography</i> (Wideman), gender (Hill Collins), the effect of Malcolm's "zoot suit" years in shaping his later political outlook and style (Robin D. G. Kelley), and so on.<br />
<br />
I'd like to briefly highlight two essays in particular. The first is by the poet Hilton Als, previously completely unknown to me. His essay is called "Philosopher or Dog?" and it begins in a manner that I initially found off-putting. But it finds a groove (or I found its groove) and by the
end, I felt it was brilliant. It's a poetic meditation, if you will, on Malcolm X's mother,
and the unfair uses he puts her to in his <i>Autobiography</i>. For example, he describes his mother, who was from Granada, as looking
like a white woman, being more educated than his father, and even
inviting occasional abuse for that reason. <span class="il">Als</span>
a) calls bullshit on all of that, but b) also tries to imagine her
life, her politics. . . Among other things, it's a
fascinating riff on the uses and distortions of autobiography and memoir. (Interestingly enough, the piece also appeared later in Als' book <i>White Girls</i>.)<br />
<br />
The other essay I want to highlight is Adolph Reed's excellent and depressing "The Allure of Malcolm X and the Changing Character of Black Politics". Reed is critical of the continuing usefulness of <span class="il">Malcolm</span> <span class="il">X</span>
as a political symbol, given the changed political circumstances. Then he describes what those changed circumstances are, by tracing the
course of insider-oriented accommodationist politics that took hold
after <span class="il">Malcolm</span>'s death, and especially after Black Power. This move, as Reed describes it, is less cynical than that short-hand makes it sounds, but just as defeatist. He's talking about a)
people who are less radical anyway but who b) use the threat of 'deal with
us or you'll have those scary radicals to deal with' - who are insider-oriented in that they believe incremental changes within the system are a better
approach. But of course this threat only works if the possibility of mass
revolt exists. Whereas this process ended up helping to demobilize the mass of
black people, thus neutralizing the effectiveness of the threat.
Though it worked well enough for their purposes through the 1970s, in the 1980s, Reagan called their bluff, and they were revealed as meaningless. Surprisingly left
out of Reed's essay altogether are the drug war and mass incarceration, which at first glance appear to be a glaring oversights. Perhaps in 1992 those particular long-term trends
there were not as obvious to everyone as they have since become, though they seem from this vantage point to be crucial <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2012/02/notes-on-black-power-mixtape.html">neutralizing factors</a>. Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-90705759986517270122015-05-04T23:10:00.000-04:002015-05-04T23:10:02.614-04:00Noted: Thomas BernhardOof:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What's preventing me from starting right away? I asked Gambetti, though immediately I added, We think we can embark on such an undertaking, yet we can't. Everything's always against us, against such an undertaking, and so we put it off and never get around to it. In this way many works of the mind that ought to be written never see the light of day, but remain just so many drafts that we constantly carry around in our heads for years, for decades — in our heads. We adduce every possible excuse, we invoke all kinds of spirits — malign spirits, of course — in order not to have to start when we should. The tragedy of the would-be writer is that he continually resorts to anything that will prevent him from writing. A tragedy, no doubt, but at the same time a comedy — a perfect, perfidious comedy. (<i>Extinction</i>, p.102; David McLintock, trans.)</blockquote>
I'm sure I have no idea what he's talking about.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-76677188783781590932015-05-01T12:30:00.000-04:002015-05-01T19:31:54.944-04:00Black Lives MatterIn March I posted <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/03/sub-zero-weather-in-very-distant-august.html">an excerpt</a> from James Baldwin's 1972 essay "Malcolm and Martin". At the time, I'd meant to add a little more from it, with some remarks of my own, but they didn't come together. And for a variety of reasons I hadn't been able to do it since. But events in the interim have done their damnedest to remind us of the total up-to-the minute relevance of essays and books written decades ago. At any given time, by "events" I could be talking about public outrage at one of dozens of cases from all over the United States. Michael Brown. Miriam Carey. Eric Garner. Rekia Boyd. Trayvon Martin. Renisha McBride. Walter Scott. Tamir Rice. John Crawford. That's just off the top of my head: black men and women and children murdered by police and by gun-happy police surrogates, and our uneven collective responses to it.<br />
<br />
In fact, I'm talking about the police killing of Freddie Gray here in my hometown of Baltimore, the total lack of accountability, the subsequent protests, the horrifying police response, and parts of Baltimore erupting in outrage and chaos, more protests, more marches, more police and the National Guard, horrible media coverage, and so on. Nothing the police have done, are doing, will do, is new. (For that matter, I could be talking about Tyrone West, or Anthony Anderson, or ... any number of other black people killed or injured by <a href="http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/">Baltimore City Police</a>.) <br />
<br />
I've never been able to use this blog to effectively respond to news as it was happening, and by now it just seems pointless to even try, with Twitter providing a much more useful outlet for that anyway (follow me <a href="https://twitter.com/yolacrary">here</a>, where I've been particularly busy, mainly re-tweeting). But I do want to say that I am proud of the people of Baltimore city, especially so of young black people. And, it should go without saying, absolutely disgusted by the police and politicians and the national media. We attended the protests this past Saturday, which were noisy and peaceful and fairly diverse and, in their way, a joy to be involved in, despite the horrible occasion. But I had to watch from my office in DC, and my train commute, via Twitter reports, the situation on Monday, when police, pretending to respond to some spurious threats, rolled into Mondawmin in riot gear, effectively kettling school children, now unable to get home, but told to disperse. . .<br />
<br />
As justifiably pessimistic about white Americans as Baldwin is in that essay, linked above, there still seems a kind of muted optimism, as in this later passage from it:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Since the American people cannot, even if they wished to, bring about black liberation, and since black people want their children to live, it is very clear that we must take our children out of the hands of this so-called majority and find some way to expose this majority as the minority which it actually is in the world. <i>For this we will need, and we will get</i>, the help of the suffering world which is prevented only by the labyrinthine stratagems of power from adding its testimony to ours. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>No one pretends that this will be easy, and I myself do not expect to live to see this day accomplished. What both Martin and Malcolm began to see was that the nature of the American hoax had to be revealed—not only to save black people but in order to change the world in which everyone, after all, has a right to live. One may say that the articulation of this necessity was the Word's first necessary step on its journey toward being made flesh. (pp.507-8; italics mine) </span></div>
</blockquote>
This was written after the assassinations and general turmoil of the 1960s, but before the onset of the drug war and mass incarceration, which I can't help but view as <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2012/02/notes-on-black-power-mixtape.html">strategies for containing</a> the black population, and before the neoliberal counter-revolution and austerity imposed on much of the post-colonial world, which have only strengthened those "<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;">labyrinthine stratagems of power</span>". So it was still possible to hold onto some kind of optimism, again however muted (after all, in this passage Baldwin, as in the rest of the essay and elsewhere, remains not remotely optimistic about white Americans, nor about how long it would take to reveal "the American hoax"). It's enormously dispiriting to know what came next. I said something similar in connection to <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2012/03/notes-on-two-political-books-from-1974.html">my readings</a> of Angela Davis' autobiography, and James and Grace Lee Boggs' <i>Revoluton and Evolution in America</i>, both published in 1974, right on the cusp, as it were.<br />
<br />
It's easy to be depressed by this, and I frequently am. Indeed, the situation described by Baldwin above has gotten much worse over the intervening decades. As I said, easy to be depressed about it - especially easy for a 45 year-old white guy to sit here and be depressed by it, to be nostalgic for an earlier period of social conflict. But people are out there fighting every day, young black people in particular, those whom this society beats down the most (and sometimes, there are small victories, as in the announcement, <a href="http://www.citypaper.com/news/freddiegray/bcpnews-police-officers-charged-in-death-of-freddie-gray-20150501,0,2106525.story">just today</a>, of charges being filed against the six cops responsible for Freddie Gray's death). The situation for black Americans is in many ways objectively worse than it was 40 years ago, but that's no reason to give up. The struggle continues.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-28609148637310058432015-03-06T13:45:00.000-05:002016-02-21T11:14:53.869-05:00"Sub-zero weather in a very distant August"; or, "Our children need them, which is, indeed, the reason that they are not here"The following is from James Baldwin's essay, "Malcolm and Martin", which originally appeared in <i>Esquire</i> in 1972, and can be found in <i>The Portable Malcolm X Reader</i>, which I wrote about <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2015/03/notes-on-portable-malcolm-x-reader.html">yesterday</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I don't think any black person can speak of Malcolm and Martin without wishing that they were here. It is not possible for me to speak of them without a sense of grief and rage; and with the sense, furthermore, of having been forced to undergo an unforgivable indignity, both personal and vast. Our children need them, which is, indeed, the reason that they are not here: and now we, the blacks, must make certain that our children never forget them. For the American republic has always done everything in its power to destroy our children's heroes, with the clear (and sometimes clearly stated) intention of destroying our children's hope. This endeavor has doomed the American nation: mark my words.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Malcolm and Martin, beginning at what seemed to be very different points—for brevity's sake, we can say North and South, though, for Malcolm, South was south of the Canadian border—and espousing, or representing, very different philosophies, found that their common situation (south of the border!) so thoroughly devastated what had seemed to be mutually exclusive points of view that, by the time each met his death there was practically no difference between them. Before either had had time to think their new positions through, or, indeed, to do more than articulate them, they were murdered. Of the two, Malcolm moved swiftest (and was dead soonest), but the fates of both men were radically altered (I would say, frankly, sealed) the moment they attempted to release the black American struggle from the domestic context and relate it to the struggle of the poor and the nonwhite all over the world. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>To hold this view, it is not necessary to see C.I.A. infiltrators in, or under, every black or dissenting bed: one need merely consider what the successful promulgation of this point of view would mean for American authority in the world. Slaveholders do not allow their slaves to compare notes: American slavery, until this hour, prevents any meaningful dialogue between the poor white and the black, in order to prevent the poor white from recognizing that he, too, is a slave. The contempt with which American leaders treat American blacks is very obvious; what is not so obvious is that they treat the bulk of the American people with the very same contempt. But it will be sub-zero weather in a very distant August when the American people find the guts to recognize this fact. They will recognize it only when they have exhausted every conceivable means of avoiding it. (<i>Reader </i>pp. 505-6)</span> </div>
</blockquote>
Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-3010336984909988442015-03-05T11:00:00.000-05:002016-02-21T11:14:29.994-05:00Notes on The Portable Malcolm X ReaderLast month was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. As I noticed people remarking on this, discussing the man and his words and legacy, I remembered that I own a copy of <i>The Portable Malcolm X Reader</i>, edited by Manning Marable and Garrett Felber; I pulled it down to examine its contents, and in relatively short order, ended up reading the whole thing. The following is little more than a report.<br />
<br />
The <i>Reader</i> is intended as a companion to Marable's recent biography, <i>Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention</i>. It's divided into three sections: Documents, Oral Histories, and Articles. Documents takes up the bulk of the book (around 400 pages worth), consists of newspaper articles, semi-redacted FBI and police reports, and speeches, and as such is at times repetitive, since Marable's brief introductions to each section often cover the main points any general reader would need or want to know from the subsequent documents, including key quotations. My feeling is less that the reader should just read these introductions, but rather that some of them unnecessarily 'spoil', as it were, the documents that follow, particularly since many events are covered by multiple newspaper accounts <i>and</i> an FBI report. As a resource it works fine, but one does skim. Interestingly, I found Malcolm X came off surprisingly poorly in the transcripts of some of his debates with more liberal Civil Rights leaders, during his Nation of Islam (NOI) period. Some of his rhetorical gambits read as weak on the page, which of course knows nothing of charisma and presence and inflection, and I could well imagine the exasperation of some of his interlocutors. As we get closer to his break with NOI, and especially in the period after the break, the speeches are more interesting as texts. This is not surprising. <br />
<br />
Oral Histories is the shortest section, at just over 80 pages, containing portions of just four interviews, but they are intriguing choices, including the cop - Gerry Fulcher - who'd been in charge of the illegal wire-tap of Malcolm X's room at the Hotel Theresa in the months leading up to the assassination, and who has a lot of interesting things to say about unorthodox police work surrounding the assassination. Another is with Abdullah Abdur-Razzaq (James 67X Shabazz), a close associate who'd pledged one year of his life to Malcolm X as they both left the NOI. He (in Marable's introductory words) "locates the source of tension between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad in the 1962 shooting of Ronald Stokes by Los Angeles police. The lack of an aggressive response to the brutality of the LAPD chafed Malcolm, who had to bite his tongue and support Muhammad's stance of nonaggression." Perhaps the most interesting interview is with a man named Herman Ferguson, who had worked with Malcolm in the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU). Among other things, Ferguson talks about some resentment from former NOI guys who'd followed Malcolm X to Muslim Mosque Inc, regarding the lack of discipline (from their point of view) of OAAU folks, and most intriguingly to me, the fact that women held certain important leadership positions within the OAAU. <br />
<br />
The Articles section contains six pieces, including a simply great James Baldwin essay, "Malcolm and Martin", which originally appeared in <i>Esquire</i> in 1972, and very interesting essays by Robin D. G. Kelley (about Malcolm X's relationship with, and criticisms of, the Black bourgeoisie) and the previously unknown to me Farah Jasmine Griffin (whose essay critiques his views of women, and discusses the understandable reluctance with which many black women have criticized those views).<br />
<br />
The final essay is by Marable himself and recounts some of his considerable challenges in researching and writing his biography. Of course, I'd read <i>The Autobiography of Malcolm X</i> many years
ago, and though I'd occasionally wondered about the nature of Alex
Haley's role in putting it together, and usually keep in mind the
problems with autobiography and memoir when it comes to reliability, I realized
recently that I'd more or less taken the book as accurate. I'd been inspired by the famous double-conversion narrative, but had never really considered the implications of things left out in Malcolm's self-presentation, or in that presentation having been framed by Haley, who I'd not realized was a much more conservative figure trying to produce Malcolm for a mainstream audience. As noted above, this <i>Reader</i>, then, is intended as a companion to Marable's biography, which was itself intended to be the first scholarly biography of
Malcolm X, and to address many "basic questions about this
dynamic yet ultimately elusive man that neither the<i> Autobiography</i>,
nor the nine hundred-plus [! - ed.] books written about him had
answered satisfactorily." For it turns out I was far from alone: "Nearly
everyone writing about Malcolm X largely, with remarkably few
exceptions, accepted <i>as fact</i> most if not all of the chronology of events and personal experiences depicted in the <i>Autobiography</i>'s narrative." Taken as a whole, the <i>Reader</i> by itself renders such easy acceptance foolish, as might be expected, complicating our sense of Malcolm X considerably, and has made the prospect of reading Marable's biography enticing. Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-90788697735283003362014-12-31T14:30:00.000-05:002015-05-01T12:38:32.553-04:00Books Read - 2014As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2014, in chronological order of completion. As usual, links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts—though this year there were <i>very</i> few of either. The whole year featured just 13 posts overall prior to this one (down from only 25 from last year), several of which are only excerpts, or don't reference current reading at all. So it was an exceedingly slow year blogging-wise.<br />
<br />
Following the list are comments and observations, plus the always all-important statistical breakdown.<br />
<br />
1. <i>The Meaning of Freedom</i>, Angelia Y. Davis<br />
2. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/02/notes-on-want-to-start-revolution.html"><i>Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle</i></a>, Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, & Komozi Woodard, eds.<br />
3. <i>Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited</i>, Clinton Heylin<br />
4. <i>Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom</i>, Catherine Clinton<br />
5. <i>Either/Or, Part I</i>, Søren Kierkegaard (Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong, trans.)<br />
6. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/02/anne-carsons-gender-of-sound-etc.html"><i>Glass, Irony & God</i></a>, Anne Carson<br />
7. <i>The Black Woman: An Anthology</i>, Toni Cade Bambara, ed.<br />
8. <i>Men In The Off Hours</i>, Anne Carson<br />
9. <i>Plainwater</i>, Anne Carson<br />
10. <i>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</i>, Harriet Jacobs<br />
11. <i>The Beauty of the Husband</i>, Anne Carson<br />
12. <i>The Silent Crossing</i>, Pascal Quignard (Chris Turner, trans.)<br />
13. <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i>, Mark Polizzotti<br />
14. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/03/noted-web-du-bois.html"><i>Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880</i></a>, W.E.B. Du Bois<br />
15. <i>The Hamlet</i>, William Faulkner<br />
16. <i>The Wave</i>, Evelyn Scott<br />
17. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/05/not-all-men.html"><i>On Strike Against God</i></a>, Joanna Russ<br />
18. <i>Once Upon A Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan</i>, Ian Bell<br />
19. <i>Gargantua & Pantagruel</i>, Rabelais (J.M. Cohen, trans.)<br />
20. <i>The Childhood of Jesus</i>, J.M. Coetzee<br />
21. <i>Odd Number</i>, Gilbert Sorrentino <br />
22. <i>Blues People</i>, LeRoi Jones<br />
23. <i>The Angela Y. Davis Reader</i>, Joy James, ed. <br />
24. <i>The Einstein Intersection</i>, Samuel R. Delany<br />
25. <i>My Struggle, Book Three</i>, Karl Ove Knausgaard (Don Bartlett, trans.)<br />
26. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/07/noted-jean-genet.html"><i>Prisoner of Love</i></a>, Jean Genet (Barbara Bray, trans.)<br />
27. <i>"Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice</i>, David M. Oshinsky<br />
28. <i>Generosity</i>, Richard Powers<br />
29. <i>Black Feminist Thought</i> (Updated 2nd Edition), Patricia Hill Collins<br />
30. <i>Strangers in the Universe</i>, Clifford D. Simak<br />
31. <i>Annihilation</i>, Jeff VanderMeer<br />
32. <i>Authority</i>, Jeff VanderMeer<br />
33. <i>Hotel Andromeda</i>, Gabriel Josipovici<br />
34. <i>Understanding Waldorf Education</i>, Jack Petrash<br />
35. <i>Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads</i>, Greil Marcus<br />
36. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/08/noted-gertrude-stein.html"><i>Wars I Have Seen</i></a>, Gertrude Stein<br />
37. <i>Report From Part One</i>, Gwendolyn Brooks<br />
38. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/09/noted-june-jordan.html"><i>Civil Wars</i></a>, June Jordan<br />
39. <i>Their Eyes Were Watching God</i>, Zora Neale Hurston<br />
40. <i>Percival Everett by Virgil Russell</i>, Percival Everett<br />
41. <i>American Desert</i>, Percival Everett<br />
42. <i>Acceptance</i>, Jeff VanderMeer<br />
43. <i>Trouble on Triton</i>, Samuel R. Delany<br />
44. <i>Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union</i>, June Jordan<br />
45. <i>Notes of a Native Son</i>, James Baldwin<br />
46. <i>Maud Martha</i>, Gwendolyn Brooks (re-read)<br />
47. <i>Soldier: A Poet's Childhood</i>, June Jordan<br />
48. <i>Dust Tracks on a Road</i>, Zora Neale Hurston<br />
49. <i>Erasure</i>, Percival Everett<br />
50. <i>The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956</i> <br />
(George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, eds.)<br />
51. <i>The Fire Next Time</i>, James Baldwin<br />
52. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/11/short-note-on-re-reading-gilead.html"><i>Gilead</i></a>, Marilynne Robinson (re-read) <br />
53. <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/11/notes-on-re-reading-home.html"><i>Home</i></a>, Marilynne Robinson (re-read)<br />
54. <i>What Ever Happened To Modernism?</i>, Gabriel Josipovici (re-read)<br />
55. <i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i>, Ursula K. LeGuin<br />
56. <i>The Drama of the Gifted Child</i>, Alice Miller (Ruth Ward, trans.) <br />
<br />
<b>Some statistics</b><br />
Number of which substantial portions were read last year: 3 <br />
Number that are re-reads: 4<br />
Number of books that were borrowed from the library: 22<br />
Number of books that were borrowed from friends: 7<br />
Number of books read on the Kindle: 1 (<i>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</i>)<br />
Number of books written by men: 31<br />
Number of different men represented: 24 <br />
Number of books written by women: 25<br />
Number of different women represented: 16 (Note: two books, <i>Want to Start a Revolution?</i> & <i>The Black Woman</i>, are multi-author collections; the former is primarily woman writers, the latter entirely woman writers)<br />
Number of books by American authors: 40<br />
Number of American authors: 25<br />
Number of books by black American authors: 22<br />
Number of black American authors: 13<br />
Number of black American women: 8 (13 books)<br />
Number of black American men: 5 (9 books)<br />
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 9<br />
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 4<br />
Number of non-American, English-language authors of color: 0<br />
Number of books in translation: 7 (including Beckett's <i>Letters</i>)<br />
Number of authors of books in translation: 7<br />
Number of translated books by woman authors: 1 (Miller)<br />
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 4 (German, French, Norwegian, Danish)<br />
Most represented foreign language: French (4: Rabelais, Quignard, Genet, Beckett)<br />
Number of Nobel Prize-winners:3 (Beckett, Coetzee, Faulkner)<br />
Number of books which were acquired via the <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2006/04/big-dalkey-get.html">Big Dalkey Get</a>: 1 (Sorrentino's <i>Odd Number</i> is contained in <i>Pack of Lies</i>)<br />
Number of other Dalkey books: 0<br />
<br />
Number of novels: 22 <br />
Number of collections of short stories: 1 (Simak)<br />
Number of books of poetry: 4 (to the extent that Carson's books can so easily be thus categorized)<br />
Number that are plays or written for stage: 0<br />
Number that could be categorized as science fiction: 7<br />
Number of science fiction books written by women: 1<br />
<br />
Number that are biographies or letters or memoirs: 10<br />
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 1<br />
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 6<br />
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 18<br />
Number about pop music: 4<br />
Number about Bob Dylan: 4<br />
Number about science: 0<br />
Number explicitly feminist or about feminism: 3<br />
Number about parenting or education: 2<br />
Number that are anthropology: 0<br />
<br />
Number of books from before 1800: 1 (Rabelais!)<br />
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 2 (Jacobs, Kierkegaard)<br />
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0<br />
Number of books from 1915 to 1940: 4 (Scott, DuBois, Hurston's <i>Their Eyes</i>, Faulkner)<br />
Number of books from 1941 to 1950: 2 (Hurston's <i>Dirt Tracks</i>, Stein)<br />
Number of books from 1951 to 1960: 3 <br />
Number of books from 1961 to 1970: 5 <br />
Number of books from 1971 to 1980: 4 <br />
Number of books from 1981 to 1990: 4 <br />
Number of books from 1991 to 1999: 5 <br />
Number of books from 2000 to 2010: 16 <br />
Number of books from 2011 to 2014: 10<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Comments & Observations:</span><br />
I began this year <i>in media res</i> with two books, Angela Davis' <i>The Meaning of Freedom</i> and the multi-author essay collection, <i>Want to Start a Revolution?</i> The latter I managed to write about, at least a little bit, but I was remiss in not writing about the former, as I was in not writing about so much of my reading this year. Davis' book, which as a collection of speeches and other talks might seem minor when compared to her <i>Autobiography</i> or <i>Women, Race, and Class</i>, is in fact very much worth reading. Some of the questions she raises in her talks, some of the links made, as for example between prisons and slavery, led to my decision to make (American) slavery and its aftermath and legacy (some admittedly very broad ideas that I mean very broadly) a special focus in my reading going forward. In this, history, memoir, slave narrative, biography, and so on, served (and will serve) as my intentional reading choices.<br />
<br />
I'd long felt I wanted to, but several of Davis' remarks led me to actually take the time to read DuBois' long but simply essential history, <i>Black Reconstruction</i>. I had so much I thought I'd wanted to say about that book, but never could bring myself to begin a real essay. Suffice it to say here that the current American political situation makes a <i>lot</i> more depressing sense after reading <i>Black Reconstruction</i> than it did before. Alongside this, I was also reading the Davis <i>Reader</i>, which has many excellent essays. Fascinated by what she said in one of them about the convict lease system (and the failure of Frederick Douglass and, to a lesser extent DuBois, to say anything about this post-Reconstruction atrocity), I read David Oshinsky's <i>"Worse Than Slavery"</i>. This is a pretty good book, but the title is misleading and I have to think intentionally provocative. The title references what someone <i>said</i> about the <i>convict lease system</i>, but the book itself is not primarily <i>about</i> the convict lease system, rather the convict lease system is one element on the way to what is really the main topic, the Parchman Farm prison labor system (still important and very bad, but no one seemed to confuse it with slavery). Also, the book focuses a little too much on 'colorful characters', and as such gives off a whiff of 'narrative non-fiction', a book written by someone who flits from topic to topic, writing well-written books. Whereas something like the convict lease system, and prison labor in general, I think, would benefit greatly from both the urgency and theoretical base someone like Davis would bring to it.<br />
<br />
Beyond Du Bois' history, I read Catherine Clinton's useful biography of Harriet Tubman and, finally, <i>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</i> by Harriet Jacobs. The death of Amiri Baraka, embarrassingly, led me to finally read the excellent <i>Blues People</i> (published when he was known as LeRoi Jones, and which I've owned a copy of for probably 20 years without reading), which also dovetailed nicely with one of the Davis <i>Reader </i>essays. This made me want to read more Jones/Baraka, which led me to look for the Reader I thought I had, but I fear that this was one of the books I discarded in my big purge. One of the few regrets on that front, but a regret it is. A reference by Davis to Jean Genet's comments about the Black Panthers in his <i>Prisoner of Love</i> had me digging that book out, not least because I had no memory of the Black Panthers having been in it when I'd read the first half of <i>Prisoner of Love</i> about ten years ago. I'd thought the memoir excellent at that time, yet still never returned to its second half. What I did this time was look up all references to the Black Panthers, read those, then read the rest of the book from where I'd left off. [<b>Relevant update</b>: I should definitely say here that the book is a primarily a memoir of Genet's time spent with Palestinian rebels in the early 1970s.]<br />
<br />
Patricia Hill Collins'<i> Black Feminist Thought</i> was unfortunately a bit of a slog for me, which is too bad because I think it's an important book. After that, I read multiple books each by Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, and Zora Neale Hurston. Highlights in this group were Brooks' intriguing sort of memoir <i>Report From Part One, </i>Jordan's fantastic essay collection <i>Civil Wars</i>, and Hurston's classic novel <i>Their Eyes Were Watching God</i> (it deserves its reputation) and fascinating autobiography<i> Dust Tracks on a Road</i>. And I finally had some success with James Baldwin's essays, reading both <i>Notes of a Native Son</i> and <i>The Fire Next Time</i>. About half of <i>Notes</i>, especially, is composed of utterly crucial essays that really every American should read.<br />
<br />
<i>Their Eyes Were Watching God</i> is the first fiction I've mentioned in these notes, perhaps surprisingly. In fact, it took four months before I read any fiction at all this year, so it's fitting. While in the midst of <i>Black Reconstruction</i>, I was packing books for a move, and came across Faulkner's <i>The Hamlet</i>, the only Faulkner book I own that I had not yet read. I set it aside to read once I'd finished the Du Bois. Same was true of Evelyn Scott's <i>The Wave.</i> Interestingly, <i>The Hamlet</i> concerns poor whites in Reconstruction Mississippi (or probably just post-Reconstruction), and <i>The Wave</i> is Scott's big 'modernist' (so the back copy says) Civil War novel - and it's in many ways quite brilliant. Reading at that time two novels by Southern white writers about the Civil War period and its aftermath is not how I would have designed it, honestly; this was one of those accidents of history, as it were: I had them on hand, so they moved to the top of the pile.<br />
<br />
Prior to said move in April, I'd noticed our then-housemate's copy of Anne Carson's <i>Glass, Irony & God</i> and quickly read it. I <i>loved</i> it. This led to a brief Carson focus, in which I read four of her poetry-cum-essay collections. I'd've read more, probably, but ran through my friend's copies, moved, then got re-focused on other things. I expect to return to Carson at some point, perhaps soon. That was about the only 'poetry' I read in 2014, though as usual, I did sample stray pages from the likes of Wallace Stevens, Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, etc. This doesn't really belong here, but here it goes: I read another Gertrude Stein book, her strange and wonderful World War II memoir, <i>Wars I Have Seen</i>. Ditto Pascal Quignard's again more or less uncategorizable book <i>The Silent Crossing </i>- uncategorizable except that it's much like his other book, <i>The Roving Shadows</i>, which readers will recall that I read last year. After fully embracing the latter when I read it, I had <i>many</i> reservations<i> </i>about <i>The Silent Crossing</i>. I'd hoped to pull them together for a blog post, and may still. But in brief, I had several problems with the general theme this time round.<br />
<br />
Brief interlude to include a list of books I read substantial portions of - or at least began in earnest - without yet completing by the year's end:<br />
<br />
<i>The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America</i>, Gerald Horne<br />
<i>Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America</i>, Saidiya Hartman<br />
<i>Not In My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City</i>, Antero Pietila <br />
<i>The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</i>, Max Weber<br />
<i>The Magic Mountain</i>, Thomas Mann (this one <i>just</i> missed the cutoff, alas, and will in short-order be the first book completed for 2015)<br />
<i></i><br />
Books I'd read substantial portions of in 2013 and had fully expected to return to in 2014 but in fact never did:<i> </i><br />
<br />
<i>Feminisms</i>, Warhol and Price Herndl, editors<br />
<i>Direct Action: An Ethnography</i>, David Graeber<br />
<span class="st"><i>Praeterita</i>, John Ruskin</span> <br />
<i>Selected Prose, 1909-1965</i>, Ezra Pound<br />
<br />
Back to fiction, I again read a clutch of science fiction novels, including Le Guin's <i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i>, which I liked, two more knotty books from Samuel R. Delany, and Jeff VanderMeer's much ballyhooed 2014 Southern Reach trilogy (Ethan more or less <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2014/11/agota-kristof-and-southern-reach.html">captured</a> how I felt about the latter, despite being generally entertained). Off science fiction, I returned to old friend Gilbert Sorrentino, for his novel <i>Odd Number</i>, the first of what is now the <i>Pack of Lies</i> pseudo-trilogy. I tried to dive right into the second novel, <i>Rose Theatre</i>, but found it more or less unreadable at the time. Coetzee's <i>The Childhood of Jesus</i> was a strange experience, seeming weirdly inconsequential when placed aside his recent books. A trip to the library for another purpose had me picking up Richard Powers' <i>Generosity</i>. Powers was once my favorite novelist, which seems odd saying now. I used to snap his novels up immediately upon publication, but I'd passed on this one (as well as his new one, <i>Orfeo</i>, as yet). It was an enjoyable read. I'd had some interesting thoughts about it at the time, which have all more or less dissipated. At a separate library visit, my eye caught a recent novel by Percival Everett, a writer I'd long been curious about, but for some reason been somewhat skeptical of. I ended up reading three of his novels, beginning with the one that caught my eye. This one, <i>Percival Everett by Virgil Russell</i>, I thought was excellent, so I immediately and eagerly dove into <i>American Desert</i> from 2004, which was quite the opposite. Though it's not without its entertaining moments, I frankly disliked it; it seemed utterly pointless, and the prose perfunctory. It was then with less enthusiasm that I later tried the novel he's best known for, <i>Erasure</i>, but thankfully this one is <i>much</i> better. Moving along, readers will remember my re-reads of Marilynne Robinson's excellent novels <i>Gilead</i> and <i>Home</i>, both of which I managed to blog about. <br />
<br />
I shouldn't forget that I finished <i>Gargantua & Pantagruel</i> and read Part I of <i>Either/Or</i>. Thoughts perhaps worthy of sharing on each remain as yet languishing in sketchy draft form. And since Rabelais and Kierkegaard are both at least in part associated in my mind with this blog's patron saint, Gabriel Josipovici, now seems a good place to mention that I read his latest novel <i>Hotel Andromeda</i>, which was up to his usual high standards, and re-read his wonderful <i>What Ever Happened to Modernism</i>? And there was volume III of Knausgaard's <i>My Struggle</i>, known
elsewhere as "Boyhood Island". As with the first two volumes, I fairly
consumed it, reading it very quickly, and found much to appreciate, but the urgency of the first
volume seems to be gone.<br />
<br />
Finally, I read four books about the music and/or life of Bob Dylan. First came Clinton Heylin's very informative, and for that useful and interesting, but often obnoxious and overall ploddingly written biography, <i>Behind the Shades Revisited</i>. Mark Polizzotti's enjoyable entry in the 33 1/3 series, about the great album <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i>, is much better. As was the first part of Ian Bell's two-part biography, <i>Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan</i>. Bell can be repetitive, but his approach is much more exploratory and curious than Heylin's, and his ideas more interesting, which makes for a more enjoyable reading experience no less than does his superior prose. All of this, and my ongoing full-blown Dylan obsession, led me to read a book I'd honestly mocked the existence of when it was first published, Greil Marcus' <i>Like a Rolling Stone</i>, which in the event I found to be very much a typical good Greil Marcus book, which is to say generally enjoyable, and by turns fascinating and ridiculous.<br />
<br />
[<b>Update:</b> I realized, after posting this earlier, that I didn't really characterize my reading year, nor name specific favorites. I don't <i>need</i> to do either, of course, but I felt I wanted to. If I had to name, say, five favorite books of the year (not including re-reads), I think I'd go with <i>Black Reconstruction</i>; <i>Glass, Irony & God</i>; <i>Civil Wars</i>; <i>The Meaning of Freedom</i>; and about half of <i>Notes of a Native Son</i> (that is, the good stuff in it is so good as to completely outweigh the not as good stuff). Overall it was a bit of a strange year. Looking back, it feels very choppy. I felt primarily focused on black writers and black history and experience, yet the stats don't bear that out. Or at least not in any straightforward way. Throughout the year, there were many marvelous pages in books that were frequently slogs. Not to mention that I was often wading through books in tired circumstances. This is not new either. Or books I found fascinating, or wholly engaging, but that I would have a hard time claiming as personal favorites. I don't know. This paragraph is pointless.]<br />
<br />
And with that, I'll close here. Thanks for sticking with me, and thanks for reading. See you next year.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-32988361858747129612014-11-19T08:30:00.000-05:002016-02-21T11:17:11.189-05:00Notes on re-reading HomeAfter <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/11/short-note-on-re-reading-gilead.html">re-reading</a> Marilynne Robinson's novel <i>Gilead</i>, I have meanwhile also re-read her <i>Home</i>, the second <span class="il">novel</span> of what has, with the publication this year of <i>Lila</i>, turned out to be a trilogy of sorts. And I'm reminded of a few other points. First, before even beginning to re-read <i>Home</i>, I remembered the sinking feeling I'd had when I began reading it the first time. <i>Gilead</i>, as noted, takes the form of an elderly preacher's notebook, intended to be read by his now seven year-old son when he is an adult; thus it is a document that as such seems to justify its own existence. <i>Home</i>, on the other hand, is a third person narrative primarily from the point of view of one of the barely mentioned characters in <i>Gilead</i>. <i>Gilead</i> is open, whereas <i>Home</i> appeared at first glance to be . . . just another novel. Having now finished my re-read of it as well, the novel definitely overcomes my initial apprehension, though I can see how it would be taken, still, for just another novel, albeit a very good one. But I think it's more than that. <br />
<br />
Though I don't plan a major treatment here, I find it useful to think of these books in the terms used by Josipovici in his essay "The Bible Open and Closed", which can be found in his collection, <i>The Singer on the Shore</i> (and which I previously wrote about <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2009/03/notes-on-josipovicis-bible-open-and.html">here</a>). He says in that essay that<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
we in our culture have a problem with narrative. What does it <span style="font-style: italic;">mean</span>? we ask. What is the guy trying to <span style="font-style: italic;">say</span>? And if the book in question is a sacred text the problems grow even more acute. For then it is even more important to understand clearly what it is saying, since our very lives may depend upon it. We need to feel we are dealing with a text that is closed, in the sense that its meaning can be clearly understood and translated into other terms; yet the Bible, like all narratives, but, as I hope to show, even more than most, is open, that is, it resists translation into other terms and asks not so much to be <span style="font-style: italic;">understood</span> as <span style="font-style: italic;">lived with</span>, however puzzling and ambiguous it may seem.</blockquote>
It is perhaps fortuitous for my purposes here that Robinson's novels are deeply concerned with religious life and even the Bible (which facts seem to put too many people off of reading, or appreciating, them), so we might well ask, <i>what is she trying to say, what does it all mean?</i> While <i>Home</i> might come across as a conventional "realist" novel, it seems to me that the narrative remains very much open. It occurs to me that this is a milder version of the argument advanced by Ethan in his <a href="http://maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com/2014/11/agota-kristof-and-southern-reach.html">recent post</a>, discussing Agota Kristof's great sequence of novels alongside Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy. The first books in each of those trilogies (<i>The Notebook</i> and <i>Annihilation</i>, respectively) are<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
both <i>open wounds</i>. But though both trilogies depart from their notebooks for a kind of "broader view" once the first volume is done with, they do so in dramatically different ways; and where in the remainder of her trilogy Kristof insists on keeping the wound open (not least by bringing out the implications of the verb "present" in my previous sentence), VanderMeer seems almost frantic in his rush to patch the wound up — without regard for what "the condition for a cure" might be.</blockquote>
I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to use the word <i>wound</i> to describe <i>Gilead</i>, but certainly it is open. And with <i>Home</i>, at any rate, Robinson does not seem to be "frantically rushing to patch the wound up" (not least because her books have appeared over the course of ten years, rather than all in the same year, as with VanderMeer's), or to especially be filling in the blanks of that openness. <i>Home</i> intersects with <i>Gilead</i> at an angle, and remains off-kilter from it, as far as our childish desire to have more information about certain events goes. Or maybe I'm just trying to rationalize liking a novel that is really more conservative than I want to admit.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-88410610773919191542014-11-12T22:06:00.000-05:002016-02-21T11:17:11.195-05:00Short Note on Re-reading GileadThis week I have re-read Marilynne Robinson's novel, <i>Gilead</i>, in part in anticipation of reading her recently published new novel, and also just because. It's a great book. Of course, I'm hardly alone in saying this. It did, after all, win the Pulitzer Prize, and was, I gather, fairly widely read, for a literary novel. And yet it strikes me that the book is under-appreciated. I suspect that the religious content throws many readers. (The book takes the form of an elderly preacher writing to his now seven
year-old son, words he expects the boy to read when he is an adult.) Certainly I have encountered numerous bewildered responses to the novel, readers simply unable or unwilling to process the religious material, who somehow seem to read it as some kind of tract. This is unfortunate, and baffling. Readers of this blog know that I am not a religious person, yet I have had no trouble with the religious nature of this novel. Indeed, I name it among the more important novels I have read, and I am actually saddened by the capacity people have to misread the book. It is, in many ways, what used to be called "wisdom literature", yet it is also a marvelous, and subtle, literary performance. And, it seems to me, a wholly appropriate literary response to our current situation, in the sense in which I have here attempted to channel or expand on Josipovici and others.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-13845657076256484672014-09-07T21:06:00.001-04:002015-05-01T12:39:59.877-04:00Noted: June JordanIn <i>Civil Wars</i>, her incredible book of essays published in 1981, June Jordan wrote this in the preface contextualizing her 1978 essay, "In the Valley of the Shadow of Death", otherwise offered without comment, in light of the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and countless other recent and ongoing police/white atrocities: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It seems to me that my whole life has been regularized by the apparently normal events of white/police violence against the Black community. Over and over and over again a child is killed by police because he is a Black boy. Sometimes it gets to the point that, when my son is around the house and I leave on an errand by myself, when I come back the first thing I do is to call, “Christopher?” I have to know: Is he all right?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One year after the police murder of Arthur Miller [“a highly respected, Black civic leader of Bedford-Stuyvesant”] and the Hassidic assault upon Victor Rhodes [in Crown Heights, 30 to 50 Hassidic “patrols” attacked Rhodes, who was walking his girlfriend home from a party], I got the chance, through a fellowship to Yaddo, to write a full-length drama, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Issue</i>, about freedom, police violence, and Black life. Early on, the hero of this play, Lloyd Wilson, makes this statement:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
They want to keep score! (Furious and slow and clear). Look at this garbage. All the way back to 1964. Then it was that pig, in Manhattan, Lieutenant Gilligan. Shot the kid who was fooling around with a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">water</i> gun. And there was Newark: Did you ever see the cover of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life </i>magazine: Black boy bleeding to death on the street. Cops shot him through the back of the head. The kid was running with a six-pack. Of beer. Every mothafucking year they do this, three/four times, at a minimum. All you got to do is let it be Christmas or Thanksgiving or spring or summer or Monday or Sunday and they act like killers on the loose, complete with license. But we! We getting good at funerals/funeral oratory. Good at rallies. Good at speeches and quotes for the press. It’s a ritual: They murder our children. And what do we do about it? We cry real hard real loud. Then it’s over: That’s that. If I was a pig, behind all of that crying for all of that dying, I would blow away a nigga a day. Why the hell not.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I wrote this play in June and July, 1979. In August, Brooklyn police murdered Luis Baez, shooting him sixteen times. My friends, Alexis DeVeaux and Gwendolyn<br />
Hardwick, and I went to a Brooklyn rally held to protest the killings. After the rally, approximately one thousand demonstrators followed Reverend Herbert Daughtry on a peaceful march through the streets, chanting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a people united can never be defeated</i>. The police rioted, driving police cars into the crowds and chasing unarmed demonstrators with drawn guns. We literally crawled across the concrete sidewalks to safety</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One year later, 1980, the courts ruled that no indictment of the Hassidic suspects was possible due to “insufficient identification.” No police were indicted in the murder of Arthur Miller.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Two months later, Miami police beat Arthur MacDuffie to death, for a traffic violation. The media seem surprised by the violence of the response of the Black community in Miami.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Do not be surprised.</div>
</blockquote>
Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-85683769718499120832014-08-14T14:53:00.002-04:002014-08-14T14:54:03.319-04:00Noted: Gertrude SteinFrom <i>Wars I Have Seen</i> (1945):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
The thing that is most interesting about government
servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do
believe what they are supposed to believe, which has a great deal to do with
wars and wars being what they are. It really has. </div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
I once asked some one who should know why public
servants in the army in every branch of government service did not seem to have
the kind of judgment that the man in the street any man or any woman has about
what is happening. Oh he answered the reason is simple, they are specialists,
and to a specialist his specialty is the whole of everything and if his
specialty is in good order and it generally is then everything must be
succeeding.
(pp. 52-53)</div>
</blockquote>
Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-9397448095438789622014-08-06T09:39:00.002-04:002016-02-21T11:17:33.699-05:00Fragment of a thought on the trouble with writing about BlanchotWhenever I have attempted to write about Maurice Blanchot, I've felt the need to
admit to a struggle, to confess that I'm not sure I quite understood the
essay in question. I've been annoyed by this - perhaps you have too, you who have read - though maybe I should not. Part of the problem is that the very nature of
Blanchot's inquiry does not allow for summary. The tendency when reading
is to summarize - is it not? - to try to reduce the points to a manageable size? But
Blanchot writes against reduction. He refuses reduction. He examines a
text, or a figure, or a tradition, exploring it from many possible
angles, rarely, it seems, settling on a particular interpretation. And
his essays speak to each other, and to and with the philosophical and
literary traditions, with great erudition, so that by beginning one
essay, one enters into the flow of a tributary of thought, though one
that doesn't necessarily lead one to any specific conclusion. But how to
write about what I find there? Excerpts can be misleading, and anyway
difficult to isolate.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-63470712139257418042014-07-19T21:16:00.001-04:002014-07-19T21:16:26.167-04:00Noted: Jean Genet<div class="MsoNormal">
From <i>Prisoner of Love</i> (1986), Genet's memoir of his time spent with the Palestinians in the early 1970s (translation by Barbara Bray): </div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I'm not at all sure that when the
Congress at Basle, after considering Argentina and Uganda, finally decided that
the Jews should settle in Palestine, the choice was divinely inspired. After
all, what the Jews call the Promised Land was promised first of all to one vagabond
who'd walked all the way from Chaldea and another who'd come from Egypt. But
the country known as the Holy Land is famous because of the events recorded in
the New Testament. The Jews ought to hate it rather than love it. It gave birth
to those who became their worst enemies, starting with St. Paul. Without him
and Jesus, who would remember Jerusalem, Nazareth and the carpenter, Bethlehem
or the Sea of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Galilee? The Gospels are
full of them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
"The English Protestants knew
the place from the Old Testament too."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
"Have you ever had a good look
at stuffed animals? The geography of the Old Testament is stuffed. Nature plays
hardly any part in Jewish history. Except for the bits about the exiles. They
mention Ninevah and Ur, Egypt and Sinai. But they never come alive like the Sea
of Galilee, or even Golgotha." (p.282)</div>
</blockquote>
<br />Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-65041935534384373752014-06-20T23:00:00.000-04:002014-06-20T23:54:44.449-04:00But you must writeIs it possible to be a writer and yet not write? Not writing, continually not writing, wouldn't you eventually have to accept that you are not a writer? Does it matter? The fact of it? Or the label? Surely not the label.<br />
<br />
I've been quiet, for long stretches, and longer. I've had good reasons; I've had bad reasons. <i>It bothers me.</i> Why does it bother me, the silence? Presumably I feel some need? Some need not being met? Some need I am not meeting?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>But then why do you write? </i>-- A: I am not one of those who <i>think</i>
with a wet quill in hand; much less one of those who abandon themselves
to their passions before the open inkwell, sitting on their chair and
staring at the paper. I am annoyed and ashamed of all writing; to me,
writing is nature's call -- to speak of it even in simile is repugnant
to me. B: But why, then, do you write? -- A: Well, my friend, I say this
in confidence: until now, I have found no other means of getting <i>rid</i>
of my thoughts. -- B: And why do you want to get rid of them? -- A: Why
do I want to? Do I want to? I have to. -- B: Enough! Enough! (<i>The Gay Science, </i>Book II, section 93) (Taken from <a href="http://beinginlieu.blogspot.com/2014/05/we-have-art-in-order-not-to-die-from.html">Being In Lieu</a>.)</blockquote>
I do feel this weird need to get rid of the thoughts I have, weird, I think, <i>because I all too often don't do it anyway</i>... and also obscurely feel that the project I've supposedly and half-assedly taken on here is somehow <i>socially important</i>....
why do I feel that? What do I mean by it? It bothers me even more that I'm not getting the
thoughts out there, as if I'm letting them down, or time is
running out on them, the ideas... why? it's not as though I feel like what I'd write could change anything of any size, expand any wider conversation, so what is it? just the need for the subjects to be taken
up <i>generally</i> with any seriousness? As if I could impact that? Or is it not just that? It's not: they are personally important to me. The subjects matter, the writing matters. Yet the silence persists.<br />
<br />
Last year I read volume two of Karl Ove Knausgaard's <i>My Struggle</i>. Among other things, this volume covers his move to Sweden, falling in love and having children with his partner Linda, and the writing of his astonishing <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2013/04/notes-on-time-for-everything.html">second novel</a>, <i>A Time for Everything</i>. He writes about taking care of the children so Linda could attend classes. He admits to some bitterness - and it is in some of these passages that the first real whiff of misogyny creeps in. Yet he is devoted to his children, or so it seems. He writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
. . . He looked at me and said with the natural authority that was typical of him: "But you must <i>write</i>, Karl Ove!"<br />
And when push came to shove, when a knife was at my throat, this was what mattered most.<br />
But why?<br />
Children were life, and who would turn their back on life?<br />
And writing, what else was it but death? Letters, what else were they but bones in a cemetery?</blockquote>
<i>Who would turn their back on life?</i> The history of writing has, in many ways, been a part of the history of men off doing things while women maintain life, and children in particular. Writing is a solitary activity. It suffers from distraction. Children are distracting! Women who have tried to write have grappled with this problem, given that they are still expected to attend to life. My attention, here at the blog, has been trained not only on certain literary matters, but on socio-political matters. I am overtly feminist in my outlook and have written about that too. I have sought to connect these matters, but have rarely been capable of much more than gestures in that direction. My sense is that they are connected anyway.<br />
<br />
<i>Who would turn their back on life?</i> This question nags at me, suggests things. Not writing is not a new problem for me, nor, <a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2007/01/on-writing-and-not-writing.html">to be sure</a>, is it a new subject for a post - the linked post is from 2007, folks, so I'm not trying to blame my not writing on the responsibilities of life. Far from it, in fact; it runs deeper. Yet the question still presents itself. So consider it presented.<br />
<br />
Given that, a possible thread for future posts: consider questions of <i>trust</i> and <i>play</i>, as found in Josipovici's fiction and literary criticism, and discuss with, or alongside, storytelling and play as producing meaning for children.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23471801.post-84713670997458595622014-06-03T22:30:00.001-04:002023-10-21T15:00:39.436-04:00"What do we want? That our children may dwell in peace."[<i>I read Assata Shakur's excellent autobiography, </i>Assata<i>, in the Spring of last year (2013). This post was begun soon thereafter, but I never got around to finishing it.</i>] <br />
<br />
Until very recently, I knew next to nothing about Assata Shakur. She was only brought to my attention when the FBI recently increased its bounty (from $1 million to $2 million) for her capture, and placed her on its "most wanted" list. This prompted lots of discussion online; among other things, in response to this move, an <a href="http://assatateachin.com/">Assata Teach-In</a> was organized (see also <a href="http://assatateachin.com/comic/">this one page comic</a>, which summarizes things nicely, and this two-part - <a href="http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2013/06/15/assata-shakur-prisoner-in-the-united-states-an-interview-part-1/">one</a>, <a href="http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2013/06/17/assata-shakur-prisoner-in-the-united-states-an-interview-part-2/">two</a> - interview with her regarding her treatment upon her original capture). This was how I ended up reading her autobiography, <i>Assata</i>. <br />
<br />
The book begins with her account of the events leading to her arrest, and from there alternates between chapters about her childhood and youth, and chapters about her prison experience and legal defense. In that way it is structurally not unlike Angela Davis' own autobiography. There is indeed much that could be said about <i>Assata</i>, but I want to talk about one aspect in particular. <br />
<br />
This passage appears toward the end of the book:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My mother brings my daughter to see me at the clinton correctional facility for women in new jersey, where i had been sent from alderson. I am delirious. She looks so tall. I run up to kiss her. She barely responds. She is distant and stand-offish. Pangs of guilt and sorrow fill my chest. I can see that my child is suffering. It is stupid to ask what is wrong. She is four years old, and except for these pitiful little visits—although my mother has brought her to see me every week, wherever I am, with the exception of the time I was in alderson—she has never been with her mother. I can feel something welling up in my baby. I look at my mother, my face a question mark. My mother is suffering too. I try to play. I make my arms into an elephant's trunk stalking around the visiting room jungle. It does not work. My daughter refuses to play baby elephant, or tiger, or anything. She looks at me like i am the buffoon I must look like. I try the choo-choo train routine and la, la, la song, but she is not amused. I try talking to her, but she is puffed up and sullen.<br />
<br />
I go over and try to hug her. In a hot second she is all over me. All i can feel are these little four-year-old fists banging away at me. Every bit of her force is in those punches, they really hurt. I let her hit me until she is tired. "It's all right, " i tell her. "Let it all out." She is standing in front of me, her face contorted with anger, looking spent. She backs away and leans against the wall. "It's okay," i tell her. "Mommy understands." "You're not my mother," she screams, the tears rolling down her face. "You're not my mother and I hate you." I feel like crying too. I know she is confused about who i am. She calls me Mommy Assata and she calls my mother Mommy.<br />
<br />
I try to pick her up. She knocks my hand away. "You can get out of here, if you want to," she screams. "You just don't want to." "No, i can't," I say weakly. "Yes you can," she accuses. "You just don't want to."<br />
<br />
I look helplessly at my mother. Her face is choked with pain. "Tell her to try to open the bars," she says in a whisper.<br />
<br />
"I can't open the door," i tell my daughter. "I can't get through the bars. You try and open the bars."<br />
<br />
My daughter goes over to the barred door that leads to the visiting room. She pulls and she pushes. She yanks and she hits and she kicks the bars until she falls on the floor, a heap of exhaustion. I go over and pick her up. I hold and rock and kiss her. There is a look of resignation on her face that i can't stand. We spend the rest of the visit talking and playing quietly on the floor. When the guard says the visit is over, i cling to her for dear life. She holds her head high, and her back straight as she walks out of the prison. She waves good-bye to me, her face clouded and worried, looking like a little adult. I go back to my cage and cry until i vomit. I decide that it is time to leave.</blockquote>
My reaction to this passage was visceral—anger, deep sadness, despair, all of it. And having written most of the above last year, I couldn't decide what to do with it. I didn't just want to post the excerpt by itself, but I wasn't - and am still not - prepared to write at length about my reaction and the kinds of connections the passage brings to mind.<br />
<br />
But the anger... it should be simple, but the ongoing history of white supremacy in this country makes nothing simple. That Assata Shakur's daughter should ever have been separated from her mother, that she should have believed that her mother did not want to be out of prison: these are great crimes, inexcusable crimes, all too common crimes. There has been much talk in recent weeks of reparations for slavery. It's not clear to me how a debt like that could ever be repaid. How even individual crimes, like those against Assata Shakur and her daughter, could ever be adequately atoned for.<br />
<br />
Unsure how else to proceed, allow me to close with a quotation from Shirley Graham Du Bois, which I came across in an essay about her, by Gerald Horne and Margaret Stevens, featured in the <i><a href="http://yolacrary.blogspot.com/2014/02/notes-on-want-to-start-revolution.html">Want to Start a Revolution?</a></i> collection:<br />
<br />
"I am only one Negro mother who has seen the doors of a great hospital closed against her dying son. . . . What do we want? That our children may dwell in peace."Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08014014605639738887noreply@blogger.com0