How did Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston become friends? For Longreads, Yuval Taylor tells the story of a fortuitous road trip, on which Hurston drove Hughes from Mobile to Tuskegee in her Nash coupe. “The road trip provided the perfect opportunity for Zora and Langston to compare notes from their Southern travels, exchange ideas, and explore, along the back roads, the characteristics of African American culture that informed their greatest work,” writes Taylor. “They had both kept meticulous records of songs, sayings, turns of phrase; they related their impressions of conjure wisdom, including the names of potions and powders; they delighted in the cultural riches of their Southern black brethren.” And thus, one of the great literary friendships was born.
On the Road with Hurston and Hughes
Curiosities
Sam Sacks offers up a review of Booker winner The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga for Open Letters“Obama spotted carrying poetry book” – It was Collected Poems 1948-1984 by Derek WalcottThe amazing, exhaustive, 7-part, behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 campaign from NewsweekRahm, Ari, Zeke: Which Emmanuel brother are you?In case you weren’t already tired of this… the n+1 vs. the lit-blogs row of early 2007 lands in an academic journal. Our own contribution to the saga is duly noted.Wyatt Mason offers more thoughts on John Leonard (via Conversational Reading)Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, The Outliers, hits stores a week from today. Gladwell introduces the book in a video at Amazon (scroll down a bit).Oxford researchers figure out the ten most annoying phrases.And the New Oxford American Dictionary has named its Word of the Year: hypermiling.As we remember Michael Crichton, “The Top 5 ‘Crazy’ Michael Crichton Ideas That Actually Came True“Nam Le wins the Dylan Thomas Prize. We interviewed him in August.
B Is for Bigotry
“I mostly find it sad. I understand that super religious people would not be there supporting it, but to go the extra mile to fight it when you could just not come kinda shocked me!” The Huffington Post reports on Brandon James, a drag performer whose plans to read to kids about acceptance at a North Carolina public library were scuttled after some of its patrons complained. We suppose the march of progress is never neat (via Book Riot).
Writin’ State o’ Mind
“I try to edit my work in different states of mind. So I’ll go running on a really hot day and then read the 2,000 words I just wrote. Or if I’m upset, or really sleepy, or if I’m drunk, I’ll read this stuff. If you’re sleepy and you find yourself skipping over a paragraph because you’re bored by it and just want to get to the interesting part, it comes out. Those different states of mind are a really interesting filter.” Writing advice from Sebastian Junger.
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Take a Look
“I remember LeVar shooting at a zoo and an elephant had a cold and kept blowing snot all over him. He never lost his cool. ‘OK, let’s try it again.’” OMG guys, Mental Floss has an oral history of Reading Rainbow! And let us also never forget the reminiscences of our founder C. Max Magee‘s mom upon learning the show would be cancelled.
Curios
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Free Shipping from Powell’s
Portland’s famous independent bookseller Powell’s is offering free shipping for online orders this weekend.
No Fanfiction, Please
For those of you who were not on Twitter yesterday, the novelist Elizabeth McCracken tweeted a series of tips for applying to MFA fiction programs. Among other bits of good advice, she says it’s generally best to apply with a solid short story rather than a novel chapter.
Both Hughes and Hurston traded shamelessly in the popular Negro-denigrating stereotypes of the era, a cynical practise that resulted in the fact that they were promoted by the condescending white literary establishment then… and still are now.
As I commented on a story by Hughes first published by Esquire, in 1936, and re-published, uncritically (with relish, even) in 2019:
“The main characters in this story are low-grade morons. Does that make them ‘authentic’? Reminding me of the famous set piece in Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in which two very Black gentleman have an argument about whether the Esso (brand name filling station) dinosaur logo is an actual living thing (kept out behind the filling station) and from ‘Egypt’. Ho ho, ha ha (those quaint Negroes)… but who cares? Hurston is an icon. Hughes is an icon. Did either produce hilarious literary vignettes of moronic Whites? I somehow doubt it, as each knew which side of the day-old toast the dirty butter (or pomade) was on. Who was in charge of the Literary Filter that this, and so many other Jim Crow Fantasias, pumped through at such volume that it all filled the trough of the ‘canon’ of Black Lit? Imagine ‘Beloved Classics of Jewish Lit’ commissioned, edited, published in Germany and taught in German Universities the same year this story was published (1936). Such a canon couldn’t be any more grotesque.
“Sure, I know, Hughes and Hurston and every other member of the Black Kapo Class very famously advertised their ‘love of the Negro Race’ and worked to ‘uplift’ same. But those public sentiments merely satisfied the conditions of their Kapo contracts with the Dominant Culture; they were terribly divided people (I think I just heard Michael Jackson grab his crotch).”
Well, again, there were always very few routes, to mainstream acceptance, open to Artists of (too much) Color, which didn’t involve wearing a conceptual banana-skirt… I get that. But where did all the self-aware push-back, from Black critics of the ’60s and ’70s, go? Kicked back out to the edge of the plantation during the ’80s?