She hated blank pages like she hated the blankness of her life.
So she began by making marks – large, loose, gestural sweeps on the page. She then shifted from elongated serpentines to dense clusters of hash marks on the peripheries of the page – this reminded her of where the people who once cared about her were now in her life. She came to the middle of the page and drew one thick hyphen – this was she.She went on this way year after year, filling thick notebooks with serpentines, hash mark clusters, and hyphens. Winters came and went with the usual snow and white brutality. Summers flourished in oppressive greens. Yet she went on. Fifty summers passed as she assiduously made her marks and filled notebooks.
Notebooks.
There was nothing else of use she could do.
It seemed as it was when she was a child and jumped from the bridge into that cold river. She watched people above her moving to and from their lives. The mornings filled with a flurry of black bowlers and slate fedoras – the afternoons a long procession of pursed lips and heavy eyes. Occasionally, a flash of brilliant blue or a fleeting smile, but it was mostly gray refracted above.
At the end she had stacked up thousands of notebooks from floor to ceiling. The notebooks filled her small apartment wall to wall. Then with this notebook she filled the last remaining slot of open space. As an opaque scrim spread itself across the sky she whispered,this is enough.
“One of the most important things the (Black Panther) Party did was to make it really clear who the enemy was: not the white people, but the capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors.”
Always the muzz of mosquitos and gnats about our heads.
Blurs of barbaric pantaloons held in sanguine suasion and selective editing of those who would never fit the guidelines established by the groaning masses of under effect.
Pleased to meet you Mr. Man. How do you do? I do jackknife filigree in fine fashion and fractures. I once had a backyard neighbor who fracked a pool into existence — it was really more of a lagoon, which eventually sinkholed and swallowed up half of the county south of our shared property line.
There were suits and counter suits, but one day my neighbor up and died and then I impaled the remaining family members with beetle pins and framed them — and the entire situation just disappeared.
But now as the owner of property bordering a canyon I get all sorts of perks from tourism and looky-loos so I’ve named the canyon for the family impaled.
That’s how I make my living. If you can call this a life.
What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)
Black History in its Own Words / Ronald Wimberly (2017)
A graphic novel with a twist — it’s not a novel, but a book of portraits. Pithy quotes —combined with strong a strong graphic style — featuring well-known (and some lesser-known) activists, artists, and various sports and cultural personalities. Some of the quotes feel too short and decontextualized, but Wimberly improves on this by providing a short introduction before each portrait. The effect, which might well be what he was going for, is to prompt the reader to do further research on the lesser-known individuals. Ebook, 02/06/21.
****
Lakewood / Megan Giddings (2020)
Taut literary fiction in a distinct horror-thriller vein. Giddings’s debut novel follows a young woman coming of age while participating in a shadowy medical study. The simultaneous pressures of providing for her family while attending college ratchet up the tension. The scenes of intense body horror, and Dali-esque paranoiac-critical surrealism, are memorable. The formal shift about two-thirds of the way through the book is perplexing, and the narrative flow flounders a bit during the last third of the book. A gripping read. Ebook, 02/07/21.
****
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You / Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi (2020)
A remix (and YA-oriented take) on Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 National Book Award winning Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.
I started reading this concurrently with Kendi’s original sourcebook, but this is shorter by 300 pages (at 294 pages) so I finished this first. A quicker read, but no less righteous and serious.
Reynolds is really effective at demystifying the sometimes ponderous history of racism/anti-racism, and especially the intricacies of the historical antecedents of segregation, assimilation, and anti-racist movements without dampening the importance of the subject. A great book based on an excellent, requisite-reading, history book. Ebook, 02/07/21.
“The god my grandma spoke about, the god I heard about in church, never spoke to me. I don’t mean that literally, like I was waiting to speak in tongues or to have him appear as a burning bush and order me around. There is no pleasure or comfort for me in the idea that an omnipotent being made a world like this one.”
When I tire I sleep on a patch of rocks where our library once stood. Early the next day I walk back to the complex — to my cell smelling of urine and fear. I love my little hole.
In this parallel world which I inhabit only the objects that become the subject of my consciousness truly exist, everything else is a ghostly simulacrum that plays on unseen film screens in theaters I don’t attend. And that I wouldn’t attend had I the capacity…
And I am a capacious man, even in these lean times.
“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
… like the grandfather who lost his leg to photochemical exposures —cursing at a faded revolution.
… like the grandmother who lost her fight with (de) mentia and her superego — cursing at her nurse about blackness.
… like the father who lost his fight with reason in a drug-addled fug — his (de) mentia a vanishing wisp cursing at the ghosts beyond his reach…
All victims of a faded revolution.
What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)
Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems / Etheridge Knight (1980)
In 1980 this collection included new poems by Knight and selections form two previous works including his Pulitzer Prize and National Book award nominated collection: Belly Song and Other Poems (1973). It was in the preface of this book that Knight elucidated his concept that “Poets are naturally meddlers…” creating art in the form of a dialectic or “TRINITY: The Poet, The Poem, and The People.
His haiku forms are sharp in “Indiana Haiku — 2,” “Missouri Haiku,” and “Indiana Haiku.” In the “Missouri Haiku” compilation he writes about the existential menace he feels in “Boone County: The blue pick/up truck / Roars past: Sun shines on shotgun / Leering in window.”
And no matter where he is in America Knight reminds you that’s all the same existential dread, as in the free verse poem “Boston 5:00 A.M. — 10/74:”
AWAKE! For mornings Are the same as nights The troops Goosestep Down the streets
Other standouts in a book replete with standouts are “For Langston Hughes,” “Welcome Back, Mr. Knight: Love Of My Life,” “A Poem For 3RD World Brothers,” “It was a Funky Deal,” among many others. Ebook, 02/05/21.
“manicured fingers shuffling the same stacked deck with the ante raised”
— Etheridge Knight / “On Watching Politician’s Perform at Martin Luther King’s Funeral”
… I once had my foreskin tossed in the food processor by a moyle who didn’t know how to spell mohel. Unfortunately I was still attached to said foreskin and that’s why I’m called “French Tickler Shorty” nowadays.
We need to explode all canons: classics, literary, political, social… and I went in on a long pontification — extolling the virtues of true equality and intersectional access — for hours I went on.
And at the end of those countless hours a single hand was raised, only one question asked:
do you agree with the Kardashians that…
I was certain that it was all uphill toil from there. Pass me the maple syrup, please.
“I was always a bit contemptuous of the first person. I was stupid about it. I thought it wouldn’t allow me to write about other people. But, in fact, it allows you to do it in a really interesting way because it’s all inflected by the subjectivity of the character. Once I stopped feeling self-conscious about it, then it moved quickly.”
What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)
Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2017)
A slim book length essay in epistle form where Adichie offers, at a friend’s request, advice on raising a child in the feminist tradition. Stark, intelligent advice on raising an empathic human being. It is feminist advice, first and foremost, but also good humane advice that the world sorely needs in greater doses.
In her third suggestion, on gender roles, Adichie serves up this incisive bon mot: “The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina. Cooking is learned. Cooking—domestic work in general—is a life skill that both men and women should ideally have. It is also a skill that can elude both men and women.”
This book is full of excellent practical advice for dismantling patriarchal hegemony, and excellent advice for any human being who aspires to the heights in the art of being human. Ebook, 02/03/21.
“So teach Chizalum that biology is an interesting and fascinating subject, but she should never accept it as justification for any social norm. Because social norms are created by human beings, and there is no social norm that cannot be changed.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Now you see me now you don’t. I’m lost to myself. Even I can’t see me. Where do I come from?
We came from Cuba. We came from Spain.
And I can’t track my family back any further than my two grandmothers: one came from Vigo (maybe, somewhere in Galicia seems certain) in Spain; and the other one was abandoned at a convent doorstep by a parent she hardly knew somewhere in (or near) Havana.
My two grandmothers had 6 husbands — and one child by each — 6 kids sired by 6 different fathers. So the invisibility took root.
Those roots were uprooted during the revolution and they all became invisible again in exile — a familial diaspora ranging from Chicago to Jersey City to Puerto Rico and Miami.
We all became invisible in a land that really didn’t want us.
The land that “bumper-stickered” me with: “Will the last American leaving Miami please bring the flag.”
(Blind-ass cracker mother fucker! I wrote somewhere some years later)
Now you see me… and now I’ll disappear in plain sight.
We came from Cuba. We came from Spain.
I also have an Arabic-rooted patronymic. Although I’ve been told that the man my father took his patronymic from wasn’t actually his father. It was my Spanish grandmother’s matronymic…
“Son of Álvaro;” I find… “alternatively, from Arabic al-faris, a knight or cavalryman, from which was derived the Medieval Iberian rank Alférez”
So just how far back do I travel to find the Arab in me? Was my father’s line the Moor, or the assassin of the Moor?
Neither… maybe. I just found it may be a Visigothic name. From the Visigoths “who ruled Spain between the mid-5th and early 8th centuries had a profound impact on the development of surnames.”
Whatever it was/is: we were killers once, and we always will be killers.
We came from Cuba. We came from Spain.
Now I’ll disappear in plain sight.
“The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina. Cooking is learned. Cooking—domestic work in general—is a life skill that both men and women should ideally have. It is also a skill that can elude both men and women.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
He took off his shoes and the right pinkie was exposed — nude, malformed, and smelling like gruyere cheese from six feet away. A couple of wiry hairs arcing over the sock. She, on the other hand, was at the bookshelf pulling out a book about genital piercings, entitled American Primitives, out of a shelf filled with the best selling titles about effective extortion techniques, labiaplasty, and breast augmentation plastic surgery mishaps. At the rear of the study lay the son on a lazy boy recliner snoring like an opossum with a severed tail — the disembodied limb still involuntarily twitching under the light of the bold wolf super moon — the Saab ownwer long gone and oblivious. He lay there, mouth agape, drool pooling in the cleft of his chin. The whites of his eyes revealed beneath the slits of his fluttering eyes.
The dark circles around his eyes, not yet diminished, accentuating the ‘possum affect. His half erect penis beginning to show because he drank a liter of water two hours ago and forgot to drape a sofa cushion on his groin.
II.
Your skin looks like shagbark. You look like a shameless twat hung by the toes. Who hangs by their toes? Did someone hang you there, or did you do that yourself? I don’t remember that movie, you say. And I say this isn’t a movie, dear. Someone is writing us into existence and I’m kinda bored by it. Hey, you’re kinda cute. Well this kinda cute ain’t around. And something about happy loving couples not being friends of mine… oh, he must be listening to Joe Jackson. You follow it? Nah, I really don’t care; I just don’t want to be a character here anymore. I’d rather go back into that inchoate place ‘o blackness and stasis. I’d like snail tacos and drag races. Oh, what are you watching some feature length cartoon, from a secondary angle, full of rice and stew and red wine? Yes. Oh well it’ll stop soon enough after 100 words. Look at the length of this. He’ll check to see if it’s north of 100 words and stop. You’ll see. Pari passu delivering Centurias he arrived.
III.
English is my second language, but my Spanish, although mostly atrophied, remains stubbornly attached like the original skin that hangs on to the anole’s back after molting. Everything seems processed in Spanish first before the protean firing into English. My neurons work overtime, and therefore all the wiring in my head never ceases working. The machinery overtaxed and always at the edge of a breakdown.
IV.
The fug in this house sticks to you. The persimmons on the table spin when you look at them, and when I look at them they levitate and circle into a gyre that moves from room to room looking for the energy that’ll stop it from moving. From movement to stasis is the natural order, and it seeks the natural order. You look at them again and the fruits drive themselves into the living room wall, creating a starburst pattern unseen in this millennium.
What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)
Fire Next Time / James Baldwin (1963)
This is an incisive dissection of America’s original sin, and how it was still with us on the eve of major civil rights legislation being codified. Possibly more powerful than it was when it was published because there is so much we’ve fallen short on — there are new ways to disenfranchise, the same old ways to abuse and kill. It’s a righteous book, and we continually fail at overcoming the pernicious socialization of racism in America. / Ebook, 01/30/21.
****
The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play / Joan Didion (2007)
I’ve been on hold for ages on the source book. I came across this version written by Didion as a theater piece — performed by Vanessa Redgrave. It’s a powerful, and painful, recounting of how Didion dealt with the sudden death of her husband and the lingering illnesses (and eventual death) of her daughter in the span of a couple of years. I’m still on hold for the 2005 memoir that won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. / Audiobook, 01/30/21.
****
How to Write One Song / Jeff Tweedy (2020)
Tweedy, again, proves that he has a knack for writing more than songs. A pretty nifty, direct, and intimate approach to demystifying the craft of songwriting, which he has elevated to an art with Wilco, solo, and other related projects. It’s really a quite useful approach to any type of writing or creative endeavor. / Hardcover, 01/31/21.
****
That Old Country Music / Kevin Barry (2021)
A very good new collection of short stories, set mostly on the mid-western mountains and coast of Ireland, from Barry. He has such a knack for black humor, the turn of an unusual phrase, and the juxtaposition of images that are original and transcendent.
Among the best stories here are “The Coast of Leitrim,” “Deer Season,” and a couple of distinct humanizing points of view in “Roma Kid,” and “Extremadura (Until Night Falls).”
The collection sags a wee bit in the middle but finishes strong with “That Old Country Music” and “Roethke in the Bughouse.” / Ebook, 01/31/21.
****
American Sublime / Elizabeth Alexander (2005)
Alexander’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize nominated poetry collection, four years before she famously recited the inaugural poem at President Obama’s first inauguration.
The volume is sectioned into four parts: “American Blue,” “Ars Poetica,” “Amistad,” and “American Sublime.” The “Amistad” section is a recounting of the travails on the eponymously named Spanish slave ship and its aftermath.
Alexander’s poems are at once evocative, imagistic, personal, universal, and steeped in American history. Flash cuts from slavers, Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk, to Etheridge Knight and beyond. / Ebook, 02/01/21.
****
The Colossus of New York / Colson Whitehead (2003)
Somewhat reminiscent of the classic film paeans to cities Manhatta (1921) and Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927). Cubist and kaleidoscopic flashes of portions of the 8 million stories in the naked city, seen through the organizing concepts of “Port Authority,” “Rain,” “Brooklyn Bridge,” “Subway,” “Times Square,” etc. something like a long form-prose poem-essay-ode. Interesting. / Ebook, 02/02/21.
“It is what it is: wretched work, that we who the dead leave behind must do.”
— Elizabeth Alexander / “Black Poets Talk about the Dead”
“It is what it is: wretched work,
thee istsfor manity reader 