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
Influential Books
The Library of Congress has published an updated list of the most influential books in America after hearing responses from the public.
No Recourse to Steel
It’s safe to say that Jorge Louis Borges could have lectured on anything from watching paint dry to waiting in line at the DMV and the end result would still have been magnificent. Here he is teaching a little Buddhism 101, with an accompanying lecture by his close friend and UC-Berkeley professor Amelia Barili.
Summer Poems from Charles Simic
Recommended Listening: Charles Simic reads five new poems for The Southern Review’s summer podcast.
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Dead Sea SEOS
Google is pairing up with the Israel Antiquities Authority to put ancient manuscripts, such as the book of Genesis, online.
Tuesday New Release Day: Baxter, McElroy, McSweeney’s, Carey
New out this week is Gryphon, Charles Baxter’s new collection of stories. Joseph McElroy also has a new collection of stories out, Night Soul. The latest McSweeney’s (featuring that fragment from an abandoned novel by Michael Chabon) is now available, and new in paperback is Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America. Many more new books to look forward to, of course, in our massive preview published last week.
Now Turn to Page Thirty
Rebecca Schuman argues in an essay for Slate that extraordinarily long course syllabi are killing the college classroom. If it’s academic homicide you’re after, you might also want to check out Cathy Day’s piece for The Millions in which she suggests that academia might just be killing the novel, too.
Curiosities: No Glamour in Publishing
Want to catch up on John Updike in a single summer?Dick Cavett reminisces about the time Updike and John Cheever appeared on his talk show… together.Clancy Martin on his failed attempt to become the world’s largest maker of Fauxbergé eggs and how he evaded the Russian police.Ward Sutton literalizes the idea of the cartoonish critique at the Barnes & Noble Review. First up: T.C. Boyle’s The Women.Street artists smell a conspiracy around the recent arrest of “Hope”-monger Shepard Fairey, the artist formerly known as Giant.On the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution in Iran, our friend Porochista Khakpour looks back.WNYC presents streaming audio (mp3 link) of Zadie Smith’s NYPL talk on then-President-elect Obama.Fresh Air’s Maureen Corrigan raves about Yu Hua’s Brothers.More heads roll in the publishing industry.How close did we come to economic apocalypse?Glamorous publishing people: “No, there is no glamour left in publishing.”Food for your ears: “The Dinner Party Download is a fast and funny ‘booster shot’ of unconventional news, cuisine and culture to help you win this weekend’s dinner party.” Sarah Shun-lien Bynum was a recent guest.Amid stimulus package largess, arts getting left out in the cold.Epilogue, a new mag that marries short writings, art, and music.File under: links you probably don’t need to click on
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?