Black Boy (By Richard Wright)
Believe it or not, just last month was the first time that I had read Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy. It was one of the books that I read in Thailand. It has been sitting in my e-reader (a statement with some metaphysical implications; what/where is a book when it is in, no the general ether, but the ether of a particular device?)
It’s not the sort of thing that’s put on the high school curriculum, at least not in a state, like Florida, where the powers that be have very little interest in the history (nor the future) of African-Americans.
Good lord is it a wonderful, beautiful, brutal read. The first section, covering his life in the South in the early twentieth century. Yikes. Anyway who complains about cultures of violence or the use of the n-word within the black community needs to read this book (incidentally, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing some great stuff on this very topic lately; look it up). He writes about poor black kids and the bravado driven by this constant, crushing fear of white people. An uncle killed by whites for the crime of having been financially success and his aunt and mother afraid the leave the house or even ask for the body (much less assume ownership of the business or property). White employers trying to goad the author into literally killing another black adolescent. It’s just terrible to read and more terrible for knowing that it all happened – and that far worse happened, only without a future Pulitzer Prizer winner to chronicle them.
The second part covers his joining and departing the Communist Party. He leaves without disavowing the believe in class struggle and, really, without relinquishing his own, personal communism (small ‘c’), only relinquishing membership in a top down organization.
It reminded me of when I read the piece that Arthur Koestler (now there’s a fellow that no one reads anymore! and I stand by my prediction that, soon enough, Christopher Hitchens, for all his wonderful prose-fying, will find his work placed in the same basket) contributed to the collection The God That Failed. No one is praising Stalinism or suggesting that it was anything but a blight, but, despite the disavowals, not even a staunch anti-communist like Koestler can avoid capturing some of the romance of being a leftist and radical and a communist in the twenties and thirties. The idealism of it all. Wright doesn’t try to walk back the great thrills of that time in his life, like Koestler does, and the work is better for it. It reminds me of a review of a recent Family Guy episode where Peter takes up smoking. Yes, smoking is bad for you. Awful. The world would be a better place if no one smoked anymore. But it’s cool. It just is. Humphrey Bogart looked cooler smoking. Audry Hepburn looked sexier lighting her cigarette. And let’s not even talk about the way Catherine Deneuve could send shiver up the spines of any human (male or female, gay or straight) with the slightest fraction of sex drive just by blowing a puff of smoke from a gauloise. I feel that being a communist in the early thirties was like that.
Midweek Staff Meeting – Naptime
Happy National Poetry Month!
I was on vacation for a good chunk of March and got some good poetry reading in – finishing a collection by William Carlos Williams and dipping heavily into Wordsworth (who has become my standby in the last several years, replacing folks like Eliot).
So how will I celebrate?
I’ll buy some poetry, I think that’s a given. For a small investment, anyone can do a great deal to support poetry simply by buying a brand new book of poetry. There is an argument for buying directly from the publisher, so that the poet gets a larger share of the proceeds. I actually prefer to buy from a bookstore, so that I can support bookstores, but also, by buying at one, I am doing some small part to make stocking poets more profitable for them, thereby encouraging that store to invest in poetry.
I suppose that I’ll find some poetry readings to attend (check out the Library of Congress’ poetry schedule here)
And, I’m going to read some more Cantos. I started to make some progress again this year after a more than one year hiatus and I’m ready to dive in some more.
What do you say?
William Carlos Williams Disappointed Me
I’ve had this copy of Spring and All for some time. Well over a year. I bought it at the Strand Bookstore in NYC in January of 2013. I think. Whenever it was that I was NYC in the month of January. And I just got around to reading it on my recent trip to Thailand.
It’s a lovely edition, with a lovely tactile cover that you just love to touch, but the test of a book of poetry is not whether the book feels cool and relaxing on the cheek, but whether the poetry reads well.
Look, I know that WCW can write a poem. I’m not saying he can’t, but he’s just out of his depth here.
He’s trying to respond to continental style high modernism and he tries to use some of their tools in the prose poems that make up most of the book and which operate as a kind of manifesto, but he’s just not cut out of it. He tries to beat them at their own game and comes up short.
On the plus side, while trying to talk a young relative about poetry, I was able to open this book up to that ‘red wheelbarrow’ poem that you were probably forced to read in high school and use it as an example of how poetry doesn’t have to be hard and that it can be easy to read while still saying a great deal.
I’m Back
I suppose that I’ll have more to say about Thailand. Later. Right now, mostly, all I can say is that it is in a radically different time zone, being twelve hours different from Washington, DC, which is pretty much the best possible difference if your goal is to cause crippling jet lag.
There was some new family to meet. Beautiful scenery. Elephants. Street noodles. Drinking soda out of plastic bag.
As I said before I left, I got a lot of reading done (four books and half a dozen short stories, plus I re-read a lot of Wordsworth).
Now, I’m just not at all excited about going back to work.
Midweek Staff Meeting – Bigger Than Jerry Lewis
Monday Morning Staff Meeting – Dark Books
SCUM Manifesto
I picked this up for just six dollars at Red Emma’s in Baltimore. If you haven’t been and you live in the DMV… well, why the heck haven’t you been? Seriously? If you’re a fan of poetry, zines, punk rock, gender studies, African-American studies, anarchism, or just cool places, you should be checking this place out.
But on to SCUM Manifesto.
I should add that I would not have known about this book were it not for the awesome movie, I Shot Andy Warhol, starring the awesome indie queen, Lily Taylor, who played Valerie Solanas, the author of SCUM (and also the woman who shot Andy Warhol).
First of all, it’s a manifesto, not a proposal, not an analysis. It’s not Das Kapital, it’s the Communist Manifesto. One is a detailed analysis of a socio-economic system and the other a cri de couer. A manifesto does not necessarily prove, debate, or analyze; it’s function is to assert, to demand, and to polemicize.
I say this because it’s easy to criticize without realizing that you’ve missed the point. Her statement that the man, with his Y chromosome is incomplete X chromosome because it’s literally missing one of the lines that make up the letter X is not meant to be taken literally (did you see that? two ‘litterally’s in one sentence, but ending with the assertion, don’t take it literally; pretty cool, huh?).
SCUM is also surprisingly utopian. Or maybe not surprisingly. I was born in 1974, so I missed the sixties, but I wonder whether that utopian strain is not just something endemic to the decade in which it was written?
One thing that tripped me up is her dismissal of sex and sexuality. Solanas, by all accounts, was not interested in sex (though she was nominally lesbian). Her assertion that it would be easy for slightly over half the human race to give up sex kept tripping me up, mentally, and taking me out of the moment.
Finally, the introduction by Avital Ronell. She talks too much. Now, don’t get me wrong. She’s a very important philosopher, but the introduction is nearly half the length of entire book. Maybe the publisher wanted filler, I don’t know, but it felt like she was taking up psychic space that would have been better left to star of this show.
Ezra Pound: Canto LXXVI
This Canto bounces around a bit, linguistically. Splashes of Latin, Greek, French, and lots of Italian (and English, of course). Some Chinese characters whose inclusion doesn’t make sense to me. Obviously, I never understand what they mean, but it just seems that, stylistically, they don’t make sense. This is an otherwise pretty European Canto (we are in the Pisan Cantos, now, aren’t we, after all?).
Some great stuff. It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but the sounds are great. Pound’s been taking lessons from some of colleagues, I guess. Never really saw him as an aural poet before.
” both eyes, (the loss of) and to find someone
who talked his own dialect. We
talked of every boy and girl in the valley
but when he came back from leave
he was sad because he had been able to feel
all the ribs of his cow…”
this wind out of Carrara
is soft as un terzo cielo
Later:
no overstrokes
no dolphin faster in moving
nor the flying azure of the wing’d fish under Zoagli
when he comes out into the air, living arrow.
and the clouds over the Pisan meadows
the coffee philosopher 