Thinking on Zora Neale Hurston

 I did not read Zora Neale Thurston until prison. I have written here before about Hurston. She is a writer who has impressed upon me more than one idea. The first one was writing in dialect was possible for a writer of her talents - and I would avoid any other writer who tried doing as she did. 

But the most recent insight she gave me came this past weekend, when half listening to Velshi on MSNBC discuss Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as a banned book. It came to me that Hurston turns upside down the idea that one cannot go home again, and also that one must leave home to be a success. No, I would say she wrote that one can go home again if one loves that home and is loved by that home.

More on Hurston from the L.A. Times: How a new film captured Zora Neale Hurston’s radical authenticity:

Zora Neale Hurston may have been buried in an unmarked grave when she died in 1960, but her star has been rising, posthumously, ever since Alice Walker brought her back to public’s attention in the late 1970s. Hurston’s masterful 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is a staple of college reading lists. Her name has been dropped on TV series ranging from “The Sopranos” to “Godfather of Harlem.” She is widely seen as a trailblazer of Black feminism. And now she’s the subject of a new PBS “American Experience” documentary, “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space,” which premieres Tuesday on PBS and will be available thereafter on PBS.org.

She’s viewed largely through the lens of her fiction, particularly “Eyes,” the story of a young woman striving for authenticity and independence along with romantic love. But as the new film makes clear, Hurston’s work as an anthropologist was at least as important as her literary output. Traveling alone through the South in a Nash coupe in the ’20s, a gun on her hip, Hurston collected songs, folktales and life stories from Black communities seldom seen or heard. At a time when anthropology was generally viewed as a study of the other, Hurston immersed herself in the lives of her own people.

“I thought I kind of knew everything I needed to know about her,” says Cameo George, the film’s executive producer. “But she had a marked impact on anthropology, and how we study other cultures, and certainly African American culture. Once you understand that, and you think back to the books that you’ve read of hers, you really see that anthropology is an integral part of her literary voice.”

This will be on PBS by the time anyone reads this.

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Writer: Zora Neale Hurston

Google keeps showing me these different articles, and today it had been Zora Neale Hurston. I read her autobiography before Their Eyes Were Watching God. I am hooked on her.

Book Riot's ZORA NEALE HURSTON: WRITER, FOLKLORIST, ANTHROPOLOGIST, ACTIVIST by Caitlin Hobbs provides a succinct biography.

The Tampa Bay Times review of Hurston's short collection, 'Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick,' must be from 2020.

The book’s introduction, by editor Genevieve West, notes that Hurston explained its title phrase, “hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick,” in several ways, including “making a way out of no way” — a nod to her fondness for subversion. One of her subversions of norms for fiction a century ago is her almost complete focus on black characters. White people are all but absent in this world, and when they do show up momentarily, they’re generally clueless. Hurston subverts white attitudes toward black people by simply ignoring them.

The Guardian reviews this collection here. 

How amazing that she has a new collection of stories can only be understood if you read the biographical materials.

Lastly, Literariness.org has Analysis of Zora Neale Hurston’s Stories:

...One criticism often leveled at Hurston was that she frequently masqueraded folklore as fiction, or, in other cases, imposed folklore on the fictive narrative. Whatever the merits of such criticism may be, Hurston’s short stories abound with an energy and zest for life that Hurston considered instructive for her readers.

***

By far the most important aspect of “John Redding Goes to Sea” is its theme that people must be free to develop and pursue their own dreams, which is a recurring theme in the Hurston canon. John Redding is deprived of self-expression and self-determination because the wishes and interpretations of others are imposed upon him. Hurston clearly has no sympathy with those who would deprive another of freedom and independence; indeed, she would adamantly oppose all such restrictive efforts throughout her career as a writer and folklorist.

What is not to like about duch a writer?

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1/7/21

Last Black History Post: Ethel Waters & Zora Neale Hurston

Harvard University Press Blog has On Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston, which includes this paragraph:

Both Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston believed that the Black body, that their own kinesthetic bodies, could serve as prodigious and vital instruments in their musical endeavors. While Waters’s massive breakthrough hit “Shake That Thing” (first performed in 1925 at the Plantation Club) would take the sexual energy of the jook (a realm Hurston refers to as the pinnacle of Black theatricality in her 1934 “Characteristics of Negro Expression” essay) to its ludic extreme, Hurston would also put her body to work not only as a narrative device, an instrument to convey big ideas about the dynamism of Black life, but as a form of performative epistemology called on to reference and revivify the cultural and historical memory of the work song archive. And crucial to this epistemology was an emphasis on the beautifully unpredictable idiosyncrasies manifest in her own voice both caught on tape and loudly leaving its imprint on her own indelible, discursive style. Like Hopkins before her, Hurston pursued the preservation and cultivation of voice—but in this case, it was her own rather than a literary character’s that once again revolutionized Black sound writing as well as the relevance, meaning, and value of recording Black women’s vocality.

I found Zora Neale Hurston in prison and she knocked me over. I know of Ethel Waters. 

You may find the excerpt interesting as it describes the relationship of these two women and how sound affected their work.

Finally, the color line constricts only so long as we whites let it. A better America will intermingle its parts.

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2/24/22

Book Forum Reviews Zora Neale Hurston

I admire Zora Neale Hurston. She shows what we should all aspire to being: an intelligience, an imagination, a spirit undaunted by the world.

The review covers Hurston's non-fiction, is worth reading for itself, but I like this for what it says about the writer:

ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S LITERARY STATURE is no longer in dispute, yet people are still trying to put her into a box. “Do you think she was a libertarian?” someone once asked me. For whatever reason, I was too polite to say something like “How the hell should I know?” Far more polite than Hurston would be if she could now answer for herself. Yes, she made conservative, even reactionary noises in her lifetime against the NAACP, leftist politics, Richard Wright, and other socially progressive influences. But tagging Hurston as a libertarian or reactionary is far too reductive for such a formidable polymath whose groundbreaking work as an anthropologist, oral historian, journalist, and gadfly is nearly as monumental as her sui generis fiction, notably her 1937 masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She was allergic to anybody’s political program and was too grand and outsize a personality to fit into anybody’s box. None of that “to-be-or-not-to-be” mess for Hurston. She simply, proudly, and unapologetically was. And her own mercurial audacity was all the ideology she ever needed.

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 3/8/22

Zora Neale Hurston: Playwright

I make much of Hurston as a novelist  (follow this link to Hurston related articles), but I am curious about her plays. Like Mae West, for different reasons, Hurston as playwright feels like providing a different perspective on the writer.

Looks like Roundabout Theater Company produced a Hurston play, Spunk, in 2021. The site provides a page on the play's history and a page on the play's original context, and from there I found Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.

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Hodgepodge of The Literary - Videos. A True Grit Essay, Zora Neale Hurston, and More!

 I really like pulp fiction - Hammett, Robert E. Howard - even the pulpiest heroes - Doc Savage, The Shadow - can be fun.

J.M. Coetzee is one writer who I have read less of (two novels, a couple of short stories) than who I found videos on YouTube:

Daphne du Maurier interested me because I have never understood Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". She wrote the story on which it is based.

I managed to read two Iain M. Banks's Culture novels while in prison. If you think you like science fiction, that you have read great science fiction, without reading Banks, then you are missing out. Seriously missing out.

Speaking of Iain Banks:

Michael Connelly is one who I found in prison, and I am still wondering  where to place him. He is not a prose stylist, but it is hard not to get attached to his characters.

I have not read much of J.G. Ballard - did I get a novel of his read in prison? I have read much about him. Here is a documentary on him, hopeflly it will inspire you find his books:

Alasdair Gray on writing and painting:

Ross MacDonald:

Groucho, Capote, Ring Lardner:

Indiana represented:

Philip Roth at 70: Interview with David Remnick is not what what I heard on The New Yorker Radio Hour. It is more than that. Roth was one of my great discoveries while in prison. Yes, I knew about him when I was a teenager, but did not read him. I wish I had read him instead of Saul Bellow; Roth's world is far mre accessible to me than Bellows'.

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While in prison, I read an anthology of Russian fantasy and science fiction. I used the interlibrary loan program to get more current Russian writers; one was Victor Pelevin's A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia.  What I picked up was the idea of using fantasy where social realism is insufficient to tell us about life. Why I am adding to this already too long post is that The Guardian published a long read on Pelevin: The mysterious novelist who foresaw Putin’s Russia – and then came to symbolise its moral decay.

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In He Got Away With Everything: Reading True Grit After the Reelection of Donald Trump (LitHub) Piers Gelly offers a reading of True Grit which is beyond anything I have read about Charles Portis' novel. 

On its face, this decision to write fiction rather than journalism might seem like a turn away from reality—a reality in which, by the time he started writing True Grit, Kennedy and X and King had all been murdered. But in Portis’s writing, and in True Grit especially, I see an Oklahoma of the mind in which these convulsions are powerfully resonant. True Grit is a story about how, in times of upheaval, the mind clings to systems for safety. And in staging this psychological fact, Portis’s novel echoes a contemporary novel not typically mentioned in the same breath: The Crying of Lot 49, which was published three years earlier. What’s implicit in Portis is explicit in Pynchon: both novels, I think, are attempts to represent a mind metabolizing the upheavals and anxieties of the era.

***

Similarly, the quest at the heart of True Grit isn’t just about revenge; it’s also a quest for meaning in a world grown increasingly slippery and strange. As Mattie travels further and further into the Choctaw Nation in search of Tom Chaney, her father’s killer, the reality of True Grit begins to warp. Psychological and moral ambiguity come with the territory: beyond the borders of the United States lies a lawless land of rumor, deception, and plain old oddity. Out here, names drift. Tom Chaney’s name, we learn, might actually be Chelmsford. The villainous Permalee brothers are named Darryl, Carroll, Farrell, and Harold, which has a rather Pynchonian mouthfeel. In this context, Mattie’s theological gloss seems more and more like a desperate insistence—not an attempt to describe order but to create it.

 ***

The quietly anarchic possibility of this gesture, in the context of the whole, made me feel certain that Portis’s subject matter wasn’t predestination itself, but rather the tendency of the human mind to seek refuge in rigid systems, in doctrines, but to do so imperfectly, incompletely, for the mind contains doubts and contradictions that doctrines simply do not. Mattie’s hopefulness is, for me, a final act of courage—grit, even—and although we can never know that LaBoeuf did, in fact, read those pages, we can hope. 

Mr. Gelly may be onto something here that applies to Portis' other novels. This conflict between systems and the contradictions that reality imposes on those systems. That I agree with him on how Trump mangles reality with his lies does not affect my opinion on this reading of True Grit.

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Where to start with: Zora Neale Hurston - it doe not mention any of her plays, but it does place her memoir high on the list. That is where I started with Hurston. Start, you will not mind going on.

How Zora Neale Hurston's posthumous novel was rescued from a fire and published. It may be that her biographers may need to change their views on the last decade or so of her life. This makes it sound like she never quit writing (unlike myself).

Until today, outside of a handful of scholars, the world had not seen Zora Neale Hurston's final novel, The Life of Herod The Great.

Hurston, the accomplished Black writer, folklorist and anthropologist in the Harlem Renaissance era, worked for many years on the pages to The Life of Herod the Great until she died in Fort Pierce, Fla., in 1960 at the age of 69.

In this novel, Hurston looked to redefine the legacy of Herod, who reigned as king of Judaea from 37 BCE to 4 BCE. In a 1953 letter to her editor Hurston wrote, "You have no idea the great amount of research that I have done on this man. No matter who talks about him, friend or foe, Herod is a magnificent character."

And today's reading of the Gospel touched on Herod's slaughter of the innocents. I keep saying this, Hurston is very much worth reading. That she was forgotten for so long is a blot on America's literary conscience.

Gallardo: I wanted to talk about Jan. 7 when the novel debuts, which would have been Hurston's 134th birthday. What should the world remember about Hurston?

Plant: She loved life. And she loved humanity. And everything she did, her anthropological work, her work as a novelist, dramatist, her political activism, everything was about having us see one another as different variations of divine expression … We want to remember her as a humanitarian who was courageous in her effort to have us see ourselves, whole and complete. Undiminished.

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5 Reasons Writing Is Important to the World

Here are five reasons writing a story is possibly the most powerful act for good you will ever accomplish in your life.

And they are good reasons. They buoyed my feelings this morning of excruciating pain and disgust.

I came to Leonard Cohen late in life. Of Federico Garcia Lorca, I read his plays in prison. I offer “In love for life”: The poet who changed Leonard Cohen’s life by Callum MacHattie to point out the strange ways inspiration pollinates creativity.

However, decades before, Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was forging the path upon which Cohen’s lyrics would follow. Lorca was a member of the ‘Generation of ‘27’, a collection of Spanish poets in the 1920s who spearheaded a movement that showcased romance and tragedy through surrealist imagery. While Cohen’s work has carved him an individual lane in contemporary music, he has often cited Lorca’s work as deeply formative in terms of his influence: “I was fifteen when I began to read Federico Garcia Lorca. His poems perhaps have had the greatest influence on my texts. He summoned up a world where I felt at home. His images were sensual and mysterious: ‘throw a fist full of ants to the sun.’ I wanted to be able to write something like that as well”.

Until today, I never heard of Kate Braverman. That I is due to The Paris Review posting her short story Histories of the Undead. I am thinking hard about my prose for "Chasing Ashes". I like Braverman's style - it has an energy that I think mine lacks.

She remembers now, in the long mornings when Flora and Bob are gone, that she always detested fragments. Or more accurately, the need to order them, to invent a spine, a progression, a curve that resolves.

The Paris Review also posted a link to Kate Braverman Is Dead by Leah Mensch. I like Ms. Mensch's prose, too.

In the photo, she stands in front of a shop window, naturally disinterested. “Beverly Hills,” the sign reads. It’s one of the only shots I’ve ever seen where she looks relaxed, her hands in her pockets. She wears a skirt long over her knees, pulled up to her waist, fastened with a belt. She’s thin, but her cheeks are full. She’s just published her first book of poetry, Milk Run, and her debut was a success: her friends at Momentum Press had underestimated the print demand. Open, all open the places. Never mind that she’s going to walk home through a dark and filthy LA alleyway. Never mind that afterward, she’ll heat speed over an open flame, because the world, for the first time, has made space for her. Los Angeles’s streets overflow with art and literature, and her mind, full of sex and rage and sprawling sentences, is not only tolerated, but, at last, celebrated. “She has,” a critic wrote, “come to a place on the narrow landscape of American poetry where her art and talents cannot be denied.”

For the next forty years, she’ll struggle to fit more than an arm and the backside of her torso into this space. She’ll try everything: Prozac, Lithium, hiding her breasts, pulling her shirt over her head on the Venice boardwalk. Her future efforts will be deemed too desperate, too ambitious, her fiction’s protagonists — double-fisting a syringe and a pen, leaving men behind, gasping for air — too intense and severe. Her rage and her obstinacy, which will drive her work, will trap her, too. “Girl child of the already decomposing streets of Los Angeles,” she’ll later call this 1977 self, with all her bursting naiveté.

From what I read about Braverman, another American writer ignored by America.

So much of her work was born from this: her desire to make a man sit down. Across four decades, she would publish twelve books — poems and short stories, novels and a memoir — all of which are populated with unorthodox women. A revulsion toward conventional womanhood drives the rage in her writing. Womanhood should, she believed, confer outlaw status; it should encompass everything from single motherhood to murder, creation to destruction, the full alphabet of human possibility. Central to her narratives are characters with addictions or criminal records, or who court instability — people who, like herself, have a penchant for danger, a penchant for pain. Sex, pain intermingling with pleasure, were regular subjects. Intimacy and sentimentality were not: “you never understood this man / or why you need him,” she wrote. “Surely another could have tied your wrists / and made your hidden parts open, glistening.” Elsewhere, she wrote about rejecting men’s company altogether: “by choice I sleep alone.” 

And people wonder why women got angry at us men:

Like Palm Latitudes, Squandering the Blue failed to satisfy the publishing world. Though some of Braverman’s female contemporaries, like Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill, were gaining momentum, the ‘80s were still largely dedicated to literary men. “If I were male,” Braverman said, “[the writing] would be normal. But good girls don’t write about drugs, single motherhood, and rage.” That she had deliberately rejected fluency in the publishing industry’s language, choosing instead to stand on her own power and intellect, was a point of pride. She’d expected some reward for it, but instead — perhaps because of some convergence of her subject matter, her womanhood, and her temperament — Braverman struggled to regain a foothold. And it made her angry. Angry that she’d been left behind by the Ackers and Gaitskills, that she’d been rejected by their publishers. Angrier still that men like Bukowski, who was then publishing about a book a year, were celebrated and revered for their writing about addiction. Bukowski also, around this time, gave an on-camera interview during which he kicked his soon-to-be wife and called her a whore.

I sit here amazed by her story. 

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 Back in the archive, I posted about Lincoln Michel inveighing against novels slavishly imitating film. He posted a link to an earlier entry in this discussion, Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick. When I was filling the holes in my literary education during my prison stay, I began noticing the differences between Nineteenth Century novels and those of the Twentieth Century. I put this down to film coming into its own after 1915. Check out the difference between Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and James Jones's From Here to Eternity - in terms of themes, but as to the visuals contained in the stories. Jones's novel was filmed much more easily than ever has been the case of War and Peace. Hemingway and Hammett are much easier adapted to film.

The obsession with plot movement rendered through televisual scenes at the expense of other pleasures seems a very modern and very American attitude. I have to imagine much of it comes from the domination of Hollywood in American culture, which has passed down many “rules” of storytelling to other mediums. While I don’t necessarily agree with those rules for filmmaking anyway, they’re bizarre to apply to novels. Many of the film and TV rules for storytelling have to do with the basic constraints of filmmaking. Primarily, it costs a lot of money. And film is a visual medium where story is conveyed by actors moving and talking. But novels are not bound by production costs, fitting in commercial breaks, or the need to convey story only through actors’ actions and dialogue.

A novel should lean into the pleasures and possibilities of a novel, I say. The novel is an explosive, expansive, and exuberant form. It can encompass anything. Certainly early novels like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy knew this, as did modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Such writers leaned into the varied possibilities of fiction and were always willing, even eager, to shift form and style.

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Cold Mountain and Ending August of 2014 - 8/29/2014 (Part Two)

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. 

Continued from Cold Mountain and Ending August of 2014–8/29/2014 (Part One) sch 6/8/2025] 

I really want to discuss Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road (Harper Perennial, 1991). What an odd autobiography! What great writing! A monument to the fickleness of public taste and how talent can survive. I am glad to have found her. I think I am better for the experience.

Hurst mixes the folkish with something more formal. It pleases and impresses my Midwestern ears. We do try sounding not as uppity as Easterners, but do like it known we have had an education.

I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon's nest. It was hard on my family and surroundings, and they in turn were hard on me. I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, "What if there is no me like my statue?" The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. 

Chapter 4: "The Inside Search"

I wish I had such wisdom, or wrote so well.

 Nothing in Cold Mountain moved me enough to copy it down, as with these paragraphs from Dust Tracks on a Road:

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry seasons and rolling around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. people can be slave-ships in shoes.

Chapter 8: "Backstage and the Railroad"

***

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they at dwell therein.

Chapter 10: "Research"

Hurston spends more time on her anthropology career than her writing, or her marriages.

 What Hurston wrote in the following paragraph I found applicable to me. It also applies to others I know. I never pursued writing, decades back when everyone thought I ought to be a writer and I thought everything was crap.

I wrote "Their Eyes Were Watching God" in Haiti. It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I wish I could write it again. In fact, I regret all my books. It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning. Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolsih for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no book would be written at all. It might be better to ask yourself "Why?" afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhre in space whicdh commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen  when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. You have all heard of the Spartan youth with the fox under his cloak.

Chapter 11: "Books and Things"

I think that paragraph certainly applies to me, and it also applies to more things in life than writing. 

Being white, I'm not so sure Hurston's comments on race issues circa 1941 are really within my ken for remarks. I do think her observations continue to have validity - especially since my imprisonment - but surely some things have changed since then. If nothing else, we have had James Brown, Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammed Ali, Prince, and Barack Obama. I would say there were/are millions of less public displays of change. It also seemed to me that she makes a point only recently recognized by whites: blacks are not a monolith. Read Dust Tracks on a Road. See what you think.

I finished typing the last major draft for "Cruising Down a Blind Alley." I did a read through of the first 21 pages with Joel. I want to rework the first sentence. Joel thinks it is much improved. This one really wears me out. I worry still over the last paragraph - that I mix too many metaphors. I think Joel finds the narrator/protagonist unpleasant. He is - depression has him in its grip. I think back on my own depression and the memory scares me. I am satisfied I have got him so far. But the whole remains as it was yesterday. Reading the Robin Williams obituaries made me remember a lot of what I had forgotten. Being told in the first person brings everything into the story as it is perceived by the narrator's diseased mind. Not so easy. I can say this is not creative writing workshop writing - or so I think. It may be I hurt myself by wanting these stories to be both part of a series and self-sustaining. I know where this one fits into my wider goal. That may hurt it on its own. For with the wider story is about the town and the town, the Bridges legacy, are characters in the broader story. The backdrop has a life of its own. And this story has about driven me crazy. I really have no idea what will become of these stories without Joel! Enough for now.

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Reviews of Their Eyes Were Watching God

My own review remains buried in my papers awaiting my PO's approval of my laptop.

So let me offer Their Eyes Were Watching God: Book Review. I agree completely it.

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Updated 4/3/22:

Another brilliant review of Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God: The Case for Zora Neale Hurston’s Forgotten Classic by Sofia Hegstrom. I think she makes a point about the protagonist coming to love herself I have not seen before and seems very Hurston.

Updated 4/4/22

Give 5 Ways Zora Neale Hurston's Work Influenced Black Literature And Black Womanhood to get a broader view of the writer.

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Appreciating Zora Neale Hurston'; Margaret Atwood Takes On AI; French Women Making Trouble

I began reading Zora Neale Hurston with her Dust Tracks on a Road. I think Understanding Zora Neale Hurston’s Loneliness: Richard Deming on Hurston's 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road does a very good job of why her memoir should be read. Hard to believe such an interesting woman was allowed to fade into obscurity.

Trouble makers: When French women write about sexual freedom by Nelly Kaprièlian-Self:

The editor and writer Vanessa Springora believes that for a woman to write about sex is a political act. Since #MeToo, French publishers have been creating new lists of feminist books. Many have been bloodless essays, but Springora’s own list at Julliard, “Fauteuse de trouble” (“Troublemaker”), which began publishing this spring, is dedicated to literary writing by women about their bodies and sexuality. “Troublemaker” carries the double sense of troubling sexual feelings and political dissent: for Springora “sexuality is also a revolutionary force”. Her argument is that writers and publishers should stop examining sexuality through the filter of the “male gaze” and adopt a female perspective. A woman who wants to write explicitly about her sexual experience needs to strike against that gaze and collapse the distinction between the act and its depiction, reclaiming the language of sex.

I never got around to reading Erica Jong - who in America has done anything like these Frenchwomen?

From The Walrus: Margaret Atwood Reviews a “Margaret Atwood” Story by AI Plus a poem that a chatbot took ten seconds to write

 Yes, I know. You’ll say that these are minor quibbles, and your Uncle Roger writes doggerel verse like this by the yard and sends it out to you every Christmas. I point out that a chatbot replacing Uncle Roger might very well happen, but, dear published author, it is not yet very likely to replace you.

My second demonstration piece was instigated by The Walrus. Here is the ask, followed by the response:

Prompt: Can you write a dark and dystopian short story in the voice of Margaret Atwood that takes place in Canada?

***

When you return from the bathroom, having recovered from your bout of faux norovirus, give yourself a pat on the back. You, dear author, would never write anything so gawd-awful, and neither—unless my brain leaves for another planet—would I. Of course, some of you will make waggish jokes, such as “Sounds like Margaret Atwood to me,” and yes, maybe the bot is onto something with the weary-faced Winnipeggers and their secret stories of terror, no doubt concerning Pierre Poilievre.

 I have no idea who is Pierre Poilievre, but I get the feeling it is a Canadian joke.

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Another Zora Neale Hurston Post

 From Another Chicago Magazine published Review of Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall’s “Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon” by Reighan Gillam. I have not had the chance to read Hurston's anthropology work. I assume it is as interesting as her fiction. Nothing that I have read suggests she did not do good work and it was well-written. Please read the review.

It seems to me that anthropology is what a writer does when writing about people and their society.

As a Hoosier, I would also like to point out Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was trained as an anthropologist.

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Once More, Zora Neale Hurston

I remain fascinated by Zora Neale Hurston. Pretty strange for an old white guy, huh? Reading A Society of One from The New Yorker, this passage caught my attention:

...It is important not to blink at what she had to face and how it made her feel. Envy, fury, confusion, desire to escape: there is no wonder in it. We know too well the world she came from. It is the world she rebuilt out of words and the extraordinary song of the words themselves—about love and picking beans and fighting through hurricanes—that have given us something entirely new. And who is to say that this is not a political achievement?....

 I guess I had to get old, to finally facing the responsibilities of writing fiction beyond just telling stories to make a buck, to having the time to fill in the holes of education, before I came to see that with words we can make a better world, to honor the people we write for and about. Hurston was one of several who taught me this lesson.

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Zora Neale Hurston News

 Another author found in prison was Zora Neale Hurston. From Atlas Obscura, I found a small Florida city is keeping her memory alive.

The trail, on its own, isn’t much. It highlights eight locations, with informational markers, that were relevant to Hurston’s life and final years in Fort Pierce. But the history it encodes into the city, of Black life thriving on its own during segregation in the American South, is monumental.

Good.

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12/9/21

Black History Month: More Books

 I posted another selection of Black writers here. Today's post comes from The Rumpus. WHAT TO READ WHEN CELEBRATING BLACK HISTORY. I do not know what it says about me except I am an old ignorant white man that I knew only two of the writers (bell hooks and Zora Neale Hurston) and have read only one (Hurston's memoir - of which I agree with the article's estimation and would say it needs reading if all one has read of Hurston is There Eyes Were Watching God.) 

My only defense is there is only so much time and so many books 

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2/15/22

Black Speculative Fiction Month

 I had no knowing there was a Black Speculative Fiction Month until I got my newsletter from BookRiot.

Let’s start by giving credit to where credit is rightfully due: to Black speculative fiction writer Milton Davis along with writer Balogun Ojetade. Davis has written several books that center on speculative fiction and is revered as a leading voice in the Black speculative writing world. The purpose of the celebration is to highlight Black voices who are creating worlds that center their identity, culture, and imagination.

There is a discussion of hoodoo and a spotlight on several novels here. I would like to point out one since one of the co-authors is Zora Neal Hurston.

HOODOO BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON AND MARY FLEENER

Zora Neale Hurston is praised by many hoodoos and conjure workers for her anthropology and documented studies on hoodoo culture. In the late 1980s, a comic book was illustrated by Mary Fleener that turned her experiences into high contrast, black and white graphic novel. On the first pages, you see a shelf full of hard with things like chicken bones and mixtures of different recipes that all have unique purposes.

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Zora Neale Hurston's The Conscience of the Court

 I was checking out the stories published by The Saturday Evening Press when I noticed Zora Neale Hurston's "The Conscience of the Court." I found it another Hurston's blending of high language and low. Am I wrong in thinking there is a slyness in it, when the simple woman manipulates the system?

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Another Book List

 I so not know Susan Minot but I do like what she likes in books - Susan Minot on Zora Neale Hurston, Bob Dylan, and Tender Is the Night. 

I agree with these William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, Raymond Chandler, Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Milan Kundera, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One and Ross MacDonald’s The Drowning Pool.

I want to read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditleson, and George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain.

Now to find the money to get them and the time to read them!

Zora Neale Hurston 8-12

I found Zora Neale Hurston in prison.  Someone had abandoned her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road in the quiet room of my unit building at Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution. I had recognized her face from a photo I had seen of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. I liked the woman who came through on the page. This lead me to reading her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. I got notes on my reading. Then I had to read it again for one of the prison's college classes. It is brilliant.

Now I find out she has a webpage. You will find excerpts from her works and teaching materials. Check her out.

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Black Friday Onto Sunday Morning

 Well, it is Sunday, and it is cold and I overslept. My ride to church will be coming soon. I need to catch up with my reports.

Friday: I ran spell check over my ten-minute play while waiting for KH, did some more downloading of music,I got the documents ready for court,  and some reading. 

When KH arrived, we went to Payless and lunch. Ninja of Japan is where we ate - every other place was closed. He was kind enough to accommodate my fasting and need to eat vegetarian, but the food was not all that impressive. We came back here and talked some more. We did a run through of the play. It is a little long. He laughed, so it works. When he left, the low level headache I had all day persisted, so I did no more writing. More reading online and a little of Carlos Fuentes.

14 English Words from Yiddish - some I knew, some I did not, but I have got to say it is proof the Jews have done more for us than ever has anti-Semitism.

I read one of Alain de Botton's books while in prison, and thought him a hoot, so I checked out The Brisbane Times' Eight books: A Booker winner’s slavery novel and more Alain de Botton. They were not so hot on the new one.

Also, from The Brisbane Times Book Review: Julia Baird’s rousing call to let grace drive our actions. I like this idea:

While this grace might be termed secular, Wright says that it seems to “require another element or dimension” in order to make sense of it. Julia Baird, too, is mostly concerned with a non-religious understanding of grace, but rather than Wright’s cosmic bolt from the blue, it’s of a more ordinary, more quotidian variety.

This is grace as an expression of the best in humanity: forgiveness, kindness, openness to the sheer wonder of the natural world and to the gift of life. And there is still mystery to this version of grace because it cannot be measured in purely transactional terms.

I did manage to get a story submitted, "Running Away From the Dying and the Dead" to Belmont Story Review

 Saturday: I was up early. The cleaning crew was expected, the cat needed to go out. I went back to Payless for tomatoes and manila envelopes. I prepared the documents I intended to file needed bigger envelopes. Then, I ran into a fellow from work who gave me a ride to the downtown post office, only it was closed. I walked over to the bus station, got my ride home. I had left around 9 and was back around 11. The rest of t of the day felt like an exercise in procrastination - especially if the goal was meant to be staring on again on "Love Stinks".

I did finally get to "Love Stinks" late in the day. Also, I wrote a long post on why America does not need a dictatorship that will see the light of day tomorrow. I downloaded more music, incurred more crashes, and got a few more things read.

 I spent some time catching up with the Times Literary Supplement:

Up the Ulua: Zora Neale Hurston’s quest for a Mayan ruin by Douglas Field (which left me wondering if, after all the neglect Hurston was subjected to, if the world is not going to the other extreme)

Mary Beard: A don’s life: What the papers say by Mary Beard (I got to agree with her that reading newspapers online is a convenience that also limits us)

She’s got a lovely bunch of coconuts: Lydia Davis shows us how it’s done by Heather Cass White made me wonder why I never heard of Lydia Davis, and the review hit me on a sore sport - my being able to put experience into words.

What has happened in this story? Two people’s emotional lives have been affected by a misplaced modifier. Though all three characters speak the same language, and want to transact the same business, a single word choice leaves two of them confused and self-doubting. Something has been lost in the translation of life into language, a danger that Davis, a translator of Proust and Flaubert, knows well. It is hard enough to move effectively from one language to another – even harder to move from experience to words.

Davis has made that difficulty, and the graceful, funny, awkward, surprising, unlikely, persuasive and moving ways in which it may be surmounted, her life’s work. Seen from a distance, each of her collections of stories – there have been nine so far, plus her novel, The End of the Story (1995), two collections of essays and innumerable translations – looks much like any of the others. Seen up close, however, they reflect different parts of her life. Her first books feature more drinking and divorce than her later ones. Our Strangers comes back more than once to ageing and loss. Davis’s process, meanwhile, remains consistent: she publishes constantly, in an array of outlets, large and small. Her acknowledgements sections are useful guides in themselves to the variety of publications active in any given decade since the 1970s. When she has between fifty and a hundred pieces of work, either newly written or newly revised, she publishes them as a book.

 What Sade did next: Novels and short stories written from confinement by Will McMorran does not improve my opinion of Sade (he wrote to shock and I do not see why he is even regarded for more than that), but I keep trying to understand.

Since Sade’s works became more widely available in France in the 1960s, readers and critics have unsurprisingly shown more interest in the books that previous generations were told they could not, or should not, read. What, after all, is the point of Sade if not to be shocking? The kind of shock literary texts deliver, however, tends to be short-lived. And Sade’s most extreme novels are anything but: hundreds of pages long, they demand considerable stamina of their readers, and of their readers’ capacity or desire to respond to the endless horrors they describe. While some may become desensitized as they progress, others may find that the violence becomes harder, rather than easier, to bear, and may consequently grind to a halt. Either way, Sade at his most shocking is not necessarily Sade at his most interesting. A novel such as Justine (1791), which maintains a (porously thin) veneer of respectability is, for example, a much more compelling text than the no-holds-barred version of the same story that Sade later offered in his much longer – and much more explicit – Nouvelle Justine (1799?).

For the novels in this new edition the veneer was a necessity rather than a choice. All three were written in the Charenton asylum to which Sade had been condemned by Napoleon. While he had been granted permission to write, his rooms were raided in 1807 by police who seized a manuscript entitled Les Journées de Florbelle ou la nature dévoilée (The Days of Florbelle or Nature Revealed), a work of libertinage that apparently rivalled his most notorious works in its ambition. After this second great loss – the first being the scroll of Les 120 journées de Sodome, taken from his cell during the fall of the Bastille – Sade made no further attempts to write the kind of fiction that had cemented his scandalous reputation. If a “late style” can be discerned in works such as La Marquise de Gange, Adélaïde de Brunswick and Isabelle de Bavière, it was thus to a great extent imposed on him: to reach his readers he first had to get past the censor. For many of his twentieth-century devotees, he sacrificed too much in order to do so. Francine du Plessix Gray describes the trio as “terribly proper little historical novels”, while Jean-Jacques Pauvert, a pioneering editor and biographer of Sade, evinces a sense not just of disappointment but almost of betrayal when he pronounces: “The Marquise de Gange is of no interest other than for indubitably being by Sade, and for the success with which he almost entirely erased himself from it”.

Sade, it appears, fooled more than just the censors. It seems baffling now that Pauvert could find no trace of the author in La Marquise de Gange when it is arguably Sade’s most playful and self-conscious novel....

About Cervantes, I have no doubts, and The quixotic inkblot: A bold reassessment of the European novel by Ian Ellison was of more interest, if not of anything I can use for myself.

A richly detailed reconstruction of the author’s life and Spain’s fertile cultural landscape, Cervantes the Poet offers a bold reassessment of the origin of the European novel. This is usually theorized as an admixture of classical epic poetry and chivalric romance, with Don Quijote standing as both the original and the best example. Where Ponce-Hegenauer offers truly exciting new perspectives is in her argument that lyric subjectivity and madness exert a greater influence on the novel than epic or romance. “What is evident”, she argues, is that Don Quijote, “by virtue of its continued relevance for so many formulations of modernity, contains a consistently recognizable figuration of the modern subject, a subject which remains mysterious”. It is Alonso Quijano’s descent into insanity and his self-reinvention as Don Quijote de la Mancha, in other words, rather than his wild adventures and the multilayered textual complexities of Cervantes’s narrative, that provides us with the blueprint for the modern novel and keep us gazing into the quixotic inkblot.

I learned of Pascal from Nietzsche, and I read The Pensees in prison, and I felt I needed to read Winning the wager: Pascal talks to our own spiritual ennui by Michael Moriarty. Pointed out something I have felt without really examining or naming.

This year France celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of Blaise Pascal. He died aged 39, having invented a calculating machine, produced pioneering work in mathematics and physics, and even designed a bus service for Paris. For those who know him chiefly as a mathematician and scientist, it might be surprising to learn that Pope Francis marked the birthday in June with an Apostolic Letter. This contained a biographical sketch of Pascal and an outline of his religious thought. Even for those aware of Pascal as a religious writer, this letter may have elicited a surprise. He was an adherent of the movement within Catholicism called Jansenism, which to its critics came dangerously close to Calvinism, and which was condemned in its time by the papacy. Besides, Pope Francis is a Jesuit, and Pascal devoted a fierce and sometimes very funny polemic, the Lettres provinciales (1657), to the Society of Jesus, accusing it of watering down and even distorting Christian morality.

***

It is in the philosophical, not the spiritual or theological domain, that Pascal’s originality lies. The key philosophical concept here is inquiétude, disquiet or restlessness, more generally associated with Malebranche and Locke. By “restlessness” Devillairs means the absence of an available and determinate relationship to truth and the good, a condition in which the desire for truth and happiness cannot be satisfied, but cannot be altogether discarded.

 Mermaids and unicorns: Why the welfare state may be preferable to tech utopia by Eric Rauchway left me wondering if we worry too much about AI taking jobs when it may outright kill us; that our tech billionaire class are a bunch of idiotic sociopaths.

In September the Associated Press reported on how supercomputers powering AI research use an extraordinary quantity of water as coolant: a series of questions posed to the large language model ChatGPT, run by the firm OpenAI, uses up about half a litre. A reasonable person might wonder whether that water would be better allocated to people and crops than to language-generating machines. Engineers at the waterworks in West Des Moines, Iowa – 6 per cent of whose reserves, in July 2022, went to Microsoft supercomputers powering ChatGPT and programs like it – wondered exactly that, arguing that future projects within its borders would have to be less thirsty so the district’s human residents could be assured of water.

A few weeks later the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen issued a “techno-optimist manifesto” in which he defended artificial intelligence against its detractors, arguing that reasoning like that of the West Des Moines water engineers was tantamount to manslaughter, or worse: “We believe Artificial Intelligence can save lives … We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives”. Andreessen averred that “deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder [sic]”. (If that sentence went through an AI grammar checker, you can see that the technology requires substantial further investment before we can trust it with our lives.)

Scoffing at governments and universities in favour of free markets, Andreessen staked a claim to the future, which he apparently believes has a greater right to resources than the present. He is not alone in this thinking, versions of which emanate from his fellow Silicon Valley billionaires. They are not the first very rich men to believe that disproportionate quantities of scarce resources should, by right and reason, belong to them rather than to their fellows. And they are not the first to declare that the least interference with their investment schemes would be immoral or criminal. They are perhaps unusual in the oddly apocalyptic tone of their optimism, and in their success at getting themselves taken seriously by universities and governments – perhaps because many of us feel we are losing ground to machinery, in ways we cannot quite define.

In The Handover David Runciman argues that we have long since given over our world to artificial agents that are far more powerful than us, and often indifferent to our welfare. For centuries they have roamed the earth and divvied up its resources. They are called states and corporations. People designed these machines to do what we ourselves cannot: indefinitely remember, organize and endure.....

There was more read in other venues, that will need to wait to post. I need to get read y for church.

I leave with one more rejection of a story:

Thank you for sending us "Theresa Pressley Attends Michael Devlin’s Viewing". We sincerely appreciated the chance to read your work; however, we have decided it is not the right fit for us at this time.

We wish you the best of luck in finding a home for "Theresa Pressley Attends Michael Devlin’s Viewing" elsewhere.

With kind regards,
American Literary Review Staff

Well, I have raked that one over the coals.

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Books: Black History - Harlem Renaissance

A list coming from The Rumpus'd WHAT TO READ WHEN YOU WANT TO CELEBRATE THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE:

The Harlem Renaissance ushered in the rise of Black authors such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Nella Larsen. They each gave voice to what it means to have hopes and dreams while living with the pressures of racism. They became my ancestral mentors as I ventured to write a hopeful story about a Black woman in the 1920s who dreamed of being a writer.

Each book that I have chosen for this list helped me to celebrate Black creativity and to write with power about what it means to be Black woman with a dream.

At least I knew most of these writers even though I have read only Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

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2/15/22

Reading About Writers I Like

 Three writers I found in prison have pieces published about them this weekend.

I admit to not reading much by Deborah Levy, a now 13-year-old short story, and reading much about her. The more I read about her, the more I think there is to learn from her. The Guardian did a podcast How Deborah Levy can change your life, which I listened to this morning. Women readers, women writers might be profit the most, but men should not ignore her. She seems to be working out what I stumbled upon – that realism that does not include our mental life of dreams and the like is not reality.

Whoever finally reads my posts on writing and books, will notice I am a Zadie Smith fan. Anyone questioning why this should be so, will do well to read The Guardian's profile, Zadie Smith: ‘I get in trouble when I talk about the state of the nation’, of which this is not even the best part

Smith was subjected to the media glare when she was barely out of university. “Most of the terrible stuff that went on when I was young was not really to do with me, it was an insane projection,” she says now. “You are dealing with what people themselves want.” Nobody could believe that a young woman wouldn’t want to be endlessly profiled, with her photo in the papers on the flimsiest excuse. “But I really didn’t want it. I don’t want to be a photograph in the newspaper because it fills some space.”

Neither did she want to present a TV show, write a column or any of the other things that were relentlessly pushed her way in her 20s. “As I made very clear, I want to write novels. Could you let me write them, please?”

Which is exactly what she did. White Teeth was followed by the often overlooked The Autograph Man, about the corrosive effects of fame. Its protagonist, the British-Jewish-Chinese Alex-Li Tandem, is “a weird, nerdy, obsessive, melancholy type of guy … he’s probably more like me than any character I ever created”, Smith admitted in a recent essay. Her next novel, On Beauty, a classy reworking of EM Forster’s Howards End transferred to a New England college town, won the Women’s prize in 2006. She was just 30.

There was a seven year gap until NW, a formally experimental but deeply personal novel about friendship and success, in 2012. Then came Swing Time in 2016, which also took in celebrity and shaming and was set partly in west Africa.

While all of Smith’s novels deal with race and class and gender – from Black girls growing up on a council estate in Swing Time to a forward-thinking 19th-century housekeeper in The Fraud – she doesn’t feel any sense of responsibility. “I take pleasure in it. That’s something I think I take from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. It is not some tedious moral weight. It is a delight,” she says. “I’m not here to represent anybody,” she adds. “I barely represent myself. My job is to think about things and to express them in language.” She pauses. “I want people to read me because I can write. That matters to me more than anything else.”

Finally, another Guardian review (yes, its book review newsletter was full of much goodness this morning), In the forest of the soul is more a biography and overview of Kenzaburo Oë's life and work. Oë won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I found far more amazing than even Murakami. There is life and love in Oë.

Oë's commitment to Hikari (nicknamed "Pooh" after AA Milne's bear) inspired, over 30 years, a unique cycle of fiction whose protagonists are fathers of brain-damaged sons. That experience pervades his complex vision, in fiction and essays, of militarism and nuclear disarmament, innocence and authenticity, faith and redemption. His translator John Nathan, professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and author of Japan Unbound (2004), says that, like Natsume Soseki, the early 20th-century modernist, Oë "created a language of his own, in the manner of Faulkner and few Japanese writers before him. He's excruciatingly self-conscious and aware, painfully looking beneath the surface of things." Although Nathan feels Oë (pronounced oh-way) has been "undertranslated - he's terribly hard to do", his work has reached more foreign readers since his Nobel prize for literature in 1994.

Henry Miller likened him to Dostoevsky in his "range of hope and despair", while the late Edward Said, a friend for 20 years, noted his "extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding", particularly across cultures. Who else, Said wrote in a public exchange of letters in 2002, would repeatedly warn of the "danger to Japan of too much imperial swagger and economic delusion?", a peril rooted, for Oë, in a failure to learn from the past. According to the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, he has "always been fascinated by what's not been said about the Japanese role in the second world war".

Please give all three writers a chance, and also the original articles. There is much to be learned in them.

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