Over at the LBC
A Brief Interruption
Probably won't be able to post for the next day or two since I'll be in New York at the Kingsland Tavern celebrating the Realistic Records release of the Recoys album. Have I mentioned this? Should be a blast. But don't worry, I'll be back with many more books to talk about, and hopefully some added features for this little blog of mine. Bye for now.
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We Are 1: A Poem for Black Lives
To paraphrase the critic Georges Poulet: a poet of written poems does not necessarily aim only to write a poem; he or she aims to become, and for those who read his or her poems to become. Becoming is an activity that many young African Americans are engaged in today -- whether it be formal, revolutionary, or informal -- and it is an activity that requires undivided dynamism. If Kendrick Lamar’s chant “we gon’ be alright” -- four words that when repeated meld a fight song to a primordial moment in the foundation and the defense of a collective and its culture -- is now considered the foremost musical expression of this era’s black activism, Nate Marshall’s poem “repetition & repetition &”, the very first poem from his book Wild Hundreds, should be considered the foremost articulation of contemporary blackness’s dynamism in literature. It’s an engine of becoming.
Our is a long love song,
A push into open air,
A stare into the barrel
With those three lines, Marshall begins an epic comparable to Robert Hayden’s renowned “The Middle Passage” and other black epics; but this is an epic of guidance and instruction. It’s built on the thesis that black “works,” as painful as it may be to be black. The poem begins by posing the question What do I feel as a black person, its title “repetition & repetition &” having given us the context. The opening of the poem removes any ambiguity we might attribute to the poem’s message, plunging us into the poet’s project.
We are a pattern,
A percussive imperative,
A break beat
“repetition & repetition &” quickly comes to feature the collective “we” as fundamental to the poem. Marshall uses the word "we" as the black community loves for it to be used. If “I” is modernism, and postmodernism, Marshall pushes it aside for the beloved “we” -- the “we” of the hard road to salvation and joy. Sorry, he seems to be saying: despite claims that our sentiment is tribalism or that we are just Americans, the black community remains a place where a black “we” is a beautiful way of saying “me.” With “we” he expresses the blackness that has us all feeling, one that cannot be found in oh-so-many poems that center the lonely “I” or “me.”
“We” is brilliantly defined in the line “we are love.” We = love, in convivial crowds and effective political rallies.
Baby we are hundreds:
Wild until we are free.
Wild like Amnesia
This is an epic of identity. It proposes black identity (love, being wild) to its reader, as a written articulation of “black is beautiful”; it functions as a model of identity to adhere to and trust.
Identity is an old and persistent question in black life, to the point where passing, pretending that one is not black or not claiming one’s blackness, has been a theme of many black novels (see Nella Larsen’s Passing). Faith in blackness and in one’s own blackness is a feature in our age of contradictions: of a black president, of interracial marriages, of a growing middle class, of foreclosures of homes owned by blacks, of predatory and racist practices, of the killings of young black men and women, of Black Lives Matter. It’s an age of youthful comic modernities, where tragedy is not the sort of thing that co-workers of other races want to talk about. Should I be happy in public? Who am I in all of this? Marshall answers these questions and others with an epic that can guide, in terms of how to think about blackness or being black.
The black identity being proposed is not a simple one. As John Edgar Wideman wrote as a blurb for Mitchell Jackson’s novel The Residue Years, it embraces the English language as a means of expression, saying loud and clear, Despite my difference, I am culturally a descendent of the English language and of poetry in English. It is perhaps the most complex aspect of the poem -- the poet does not want to settle for blackness as some sort of noble savagery. His language tells us that a black person can read French theory and find solace in Modernist English poetry all the while feeling the pain and rage that comes from seeing a dead black child on a television; all of it combined being who “we” are or “I” am as a black person.
In the end, Marshall offers an engine for the pursuit of self that can only be the undercurrent of black production -- ranging from Beyoncé's Lemonade, or Greg Osby’s many great yet unknown albums of genius Jazz blackness, or a teacher’s persistence with children -- but also a vehicle for any non-black person to think about the blackness of co-citizens and friends. His poem is an epic of strength in love and in numbers, where in despite "a stare into the barrel," and "repetition," as he ends the poem, ‘we are 1’ and will remain it.
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Cottagers Week
My nominee for this season at the LBC, The Cottagers by Marshall N. Klimasewiski, is being discussed this week. I hope you'll join the discussion over there. My first post is on suspense and the contemporary novel.
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What We’re Reading
Welcome to what we hope will be a new (semi-regular!) feature, in which the Millions fam opens up about the books on our nightstands (and desks, and floors – seriously these things are like kudzu). As you might expect, it's an eclectic mix about which we have ~strong feelings~.
From haikus to a macroeconomic treatise on American industrialism – with lots of novels and story collections in between, of course – here's what we're reading:
Jacob Lambert: I just finished Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush, and hated it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. What a pretentious disaster. Up next is Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson, which hopefully won't make me want to stick my head in the oven.
Tess Malone: I haven't read one book by a straight white man this year, but I'm breaking the streak for Rob Delaney's memoir, Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.
Edan Lepucki: I recently finished The Barbarous Coast by pulp L.A. Noir writer Ross MacDonald and I am #blessed to be an early reader of Susan Straight's new novel (!!!)...editors can email me if they want deets on that masterpiece.
Sonya Chung: A little past halfway through Jung Yun's Shelter [Ed. note: which was selected by our own Edan Lepucki as one of her most anticipated books of this year], I had to put to down. It's an important book, and I'm sad that it had to be written, and Yun writes skillfully and unflinchingly. All that. But, it's a hard story, and I needed a break. Will return to it surely.
I am on to Mat Johnson's Pym and Sue Miller's The Senator's Wife for the long weekend. Yes, I started two novels simultaneously. Both take place in academic communities but could not be more different from each other; so somehow, it works to alternate between them.
I also always have a book of essays going on the side. Currently, John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket. (Film Forum has a documentary about Berger playing now; don't miss it, New Yorkers! The final scene is priceless.)
On deck: Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan and Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.
Bill Morris: At the moment I’m reading two books that could not be more unalike, but which are fabulous in their own ways: James McBride’s exploration of James Brown’s life and its meaning, Kill 'Em and Leave; and Robert J. Gordon’s work of macroeconomics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which examines the astonishing burst of changes in everyday life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.
Janet Potter: I'm about to start To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey, having recently given up on Here I Am after 200 pages.
Anne Yoder: Unbeknownst to me 'til now, my to-read pile is afflicted by planetary influence. I’m currently reading Kyle Coma-Thompson’s Night in the Sun – its story "27-B" contains an appallingly beautiful description of death at 30,000 feet, the stewardess holding the body back upon landing and yet: “The head moving in the most grotesque way, a sodden sunflower crown wagging on its rigid tough stem.”
Next in orbit: Julie Reverb’s No Moon and Black Sun Lit’s latest issue of its journal Vestiges, "Ennui."
Nick Moran: I was in Florida this weekend, so I've been revisiting Jai Alai Books's essential poetry collections, Eight Miami Poets and Suicide by Jaguar. Amidst Miami's Zika outbreak, I've developed a fresh appreciation for Dave Landsberger's South Beach Haiku #3: "My legs fit perfectly in my pants. / My leg bones fit perfectly in my legs— / shorts are for tourists."
Claire Cameron: I recently burned through Dear Mr. M, the new book by Herman Koch, who also wrote the international bestselling The Dinner.
Dear Mr. M has an elegant structure that weaves together many strands, but one is about man named Herman who moves into the apartment below and stalks a famous writer, Mr. M. After spying, opening his mail, talking to his wife and kid, Herman finally approaches Mr. M under the guise of being a journalist wanting an interview.
I just interviewed Koch. In my emails, I addressed Koch as "Dear Mr. K" and signed off as "Herman." I don't know if he finds it funny or creepy, but no cease and desist order yet.
Hannah Gersen: the book on my nightstand that I have slowly been working through is Consolations by David Whyte, which is a beautiful book that gives definitions for everyday words, elaborating on their spiritual and philosophical meanings. It starts with the word "alone" and ends with "work." It's a quiet, thoughtful book, a really good way to start or end the day.
Kirstin Butler: I've been on both an essay- and thriller-reading tear lately, probably because those are the two things i'm working on myself ! In the former category I've gone for contemporary classics – John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead and Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land – with one old standby mixed in, John McPhee's Annals of the Former World. I will read anything McPhee you put in front of me. As for the latter genre, I've discovered I'm a pretty tough customer; I was excited to read The Hand That Feeds You by A.J. Rich (nom de plume for the writing team of Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment), but after one too many times of yelling 'oh my god don't fall for it' at the heroine, had to give it up. If any readers have good thriller recs please get @ me on Twitter!
Nicholas Ripatrazone: I'm currently reading Ghostland by Colin Dickey, due out 10/4. It's a creepy, smart trek through America's haunted sites. He investigates how "ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can't talk about in any other way."
Oh and by the way: What you're reading right now looks pretty awesome too.
(Image via Alie Edwards)
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Pynchon by Way of ‘Sally Forth’
Readers of the Sunday funnies may have spotted an odd juxtaposition somewhere between "Garfield" and "Beetle Bailey" this morning. "Sally Forth" writer Ces Marciuliano has reimagined the opening lines of Pynchon's postmodern classic Gravity's Rainbow as a baseball-themed essay by grade-schooler Hilary. We will be running an essay here on literary mashups tomorrow, but this has to be one of the stranger intersections - the banality of the comics page, crossed with one of the more famously challenging novels in history. What a goofy, subversive thing to do.See Also: Pynchon fans, Inherent Vice drops in just a week.[Image and link via Ces Marciuliano]
Welcome to the Working Week 4: Andrew
[Editor's note: This week we've invited Megan Hustad, author of How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work, to dissect our contributors' first-job follies.]Andrew writes:It began, as brilliant decisions generally do, in a bar. A Saturday evening, over drinks with two friends, a few months into my first real job (for the benevolent media magnates that still pay my salary). Why not, one of us spat out, drive to New York City? Uh, right now? Yeah, right now! One of us had a car. We'd need music for the 10-hour (each way), international journey. And, oh yeah, passports. Off we went.Sunday early morning we arrived in Manhattan, walked around in a daze until very late Sunday night, then drove back to Toronto, arriving minutes before my Monday shift.That I hadn't slept since Friday night could easily be offset with a quick shower and several swigs of Jolt Cola which my colleague poured into me. And, oh, I would wear a suit, something neither I nor anyone else would conceive of wearing in the newsroom, unless heading out for an interview. But the improbable vision of young Andrew in a suit at work would distract my senior editors, I hoped, from the snoring.As it turned out, the caffeine jolt and the adrenalin rush of the whole experience kept me awake, and in retrospect, I doubt that I would have done anything differently.But I'm guessing it wouldn't win me any awards for professionalism.Megan Hustad responds:The suit was a good call. I got promoted once because I was between apartments, living out of a duffel bag, and the suit I wore twice a week for a month because it hid stains and didn't wrinkle prompted my boss to imagine I was going on a lot of interviews. This has historically been the best argument for wearing a suit, after all - it communicates you're going places, and little else. Suits obscure all appetites other than ambition. Horatio Alger and other early American capitalists were nuts about suits.In any event: Children, if you took a long, hot shower and still smell of beer, consider a suit. Don't do as I once did and show up in an orange (orange that highlighted my bloodshot eyes!), moth-eaten wool turtleneck. Uselessness rating: 1For more information, please see these related posts:Welcome to the Working Week: Megan Hustad Analyzes Our On-the-Job FoiblesWelcome to the Working Week 1: MaxWelcome to the Working Week 2: EmreWelcome to the Working Week 3: Garth