Another Colson Whitehead Post

 I admire Colson Whitehead. Another writer I caught up with in prison. Other posts about him are here.

One novel read and one that left me a little confused was Apex Hides the Hurt. Bailey Sincox's B-Sides: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides the Hurt” from Public Books ended my confusion and reinforces my reasons for reading Whitehead.

The word renaming in 2023 likely brings to mind what happened to many buildings, monuments, and institutions in the wake of Black Lives Matter. That makes this a perfect time to revisit Colson Whitehead’s 2006 Apex Hides the Hurt, in which the Black protagonist is tasked with renaming a town with a complicated and contested history. But Whitehead’s is no sober allegory of American racial politics. Instead, it is a symbolic send-up, a long-form pun.

Apex does not look much like Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, The Nickel Boys (2019) and The Underground Railroad (2016). Both are closer to his debut The Intuitionist (1999), which literalizes W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of “racial uplift” in the character of a Black elevator inspector. In a style we might call allegorical realism, Railroad links stages of American history (slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow) via a subterranean steam engine.

Apex has allegorical elements, but it is also a satire. It is the closest Whitehead comes to channeling Ishmael Reed, whose Flight to Canada is an irreverent rewrite of the antebellum slave narrative.

The novel’s nameless protagonist is a nomenclature consultant. His claim to fame is having come up with “Apex,” the name of a Band-Aid competitor that comes in more than one flesh color. Unsurprisingly, sticking a bandage on the “hurt” of racist history precipitates a new crisis.

***

Equal parts mock-heroic and absurd, the toe injury awakens Apex’s protagonist to the fact that he “deals in lies and promises, distills them into syllables.” In his toeless enlightenment, he reviles Winthrop’s white-picket-fence suburbia and Lucky’s corporate vision as much as his own prestigious education and corner office with a view. Being down a digit lends him a critical distance.

However, towns and bandages are not the only things getting new names. This is where Apex surprises, perhaps more so in 2023 than in 2006. Via renaming, Whitehead’s satire takes aim more generally at a capitalist system that senses the profits to be made from proclaiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past.

The protagonist’s neurosis only intensifies when a white colleague tells him, “Wise up: you are the product.” It is not just that his Blackness is selling clients a self-congratulatory notion of their own progressive politics. Worse, he has been buying into it himself, taking his success as evidence of a postracial world.

***

Ending on a note of cynical irresolution, Apex suggests that the best name is probably not the “balming” one. Yet it also suggests that names are beside the point. True change will take longer than a rebrand

Follow the link above and get yourself a copy.

sch 7/5 

Updated 7/16/2023 with material from The Guardian.

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead review – a dazzling sequel to Harlem Shuffle

Two-time Pulitzer-winning author Whitehead shows no sign of resting on his laurels. Crook Manifesto continues the brilliantly realised sequence that began with Harlem Shuffle, intricately depicting cultural history and family drama with the compelling energy of a crime thriller and the sharp wit of social satire. Harlem itself is one of the lead characters, and there are echoes of other chroniclers of this burg such as James Baldwin and Chester Himes. In ambition and scope, in the way the intimate is so deftly weaved with the epic, one is also reminded of Balzac. Whitehead has embarked on a great comédie humaine of his own.

Colson Whitehead: ‘A city summons you into its weird drama’ (Interview)

Name a book that inspired you to write.

Until I got to college, I wanted to write horror fiction. My mom would buy the new Stephen King every year and when I was 12 I read Carrie. Obviously, it’s a story about a teenager with psychokinetic powers, but the structure is really interesting. The story jumps forward in time and is interspersed with congressional reports about the incident in the town two years later, and newspaper reports detailing the disaster that happens 100 years in the future of the book. I thought, oh, this is cool – I’d love to write, like, a vampire or werewolf story that’s kind of messed up and has a weird chronology and plays with perspective

sch

Writers: Colson Whitehead

I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

Colson Whitehead, Again and for the First Time

 [This was written after I had read several of Colson Whitehead's other novels and so it will be the first published of my notes but not the first written.]

Yesterday, I finished Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt (2006; Anchor Books, 2007). Not as realistic as The Nickel Boys - Apex being more of a parody or allegory rather an historical indictment of racism-  nor as surreal as The Underground Railroad - there could be nomenclature experts -  nor is it as openly fantastical as The Intuitionist or Zone One - no zombies, no alternate histories - and it does feel a bit tamer compared what else I have read of Whitehead's. 

Whitehead opens with:

He came up with the names. They were good times. He came up with names and like any good parent he knocked them around to teach them life lessons.  He bent them to se if they'd break, he dragged them behind cars by heavy metal chains, he exposed them to high temperatures for extended periods of time. Sometimes consonants broke off and left angry vowels on the laboratory tables. How else was he to know of they were ready for what the world had in store for them.

Could be he is talking about writing. This paragraph does what I think all opening paragraphs should: make you want to read further.

We get what I read as a critique of consumer culture:

Riverboat Charlie's had neglected so many branding opportunities that he wasn't sure whether to blame a lack of imagination or to applaud that quality, so rare these days, of understatement. As he waited for the mayor, he rhapsodized over what might have been menus and signage employing colorful argot of wharf rats and gambles, a décor artificially wizened to simulate exposure to dark and churning water, a mascot-spokesman in the form of a cartoon character or elderly gentleman of stylized appearance. Under his attention, the humble establishment became a vacuum, and all the outside marketing world rushed into fill every inch and corner, wherever a jubilant little branding molecule might find some elbow room. He was the outside world come to bully about.

p. 110

To be continued... 

sch

2/16/20

Odds & Sods, Disheveled Wednesday - Politics, Writers

Four hours after leaving work, I got home.

I was a bit bugged at work today. Too much on my mind, a bit tired from staying up too late to watch the start of The Justified miniseries on FX. No writing done in the past two days, except in my head. A new chunk of "Chasing Ashes" fell into my head.

We got done a little early, I was heading to the bus before 1:30. Needing to go to the sheriff's, it being hotter than Hades, I decided to take the #12 bus around to where I could walk down from Memorial to the courthouse and the catch the #7 from there at 2:30. All that I accomplished.

On the way to the courthouse, I saw another hawk on a pole.  I cannot make up my mind if it was an immature redtail hawk

or a Cooper's hawk:

I lean toward the latter.

I went off the rails a little when I got back downtown. On the way downtown, I decided to skip the Midwestern Writers conference over at Ball State. I had thought of looking up Larry Sweazy, and then I thought better of it. I decided to get a pulled pork sandwich. Which meant not taking the first Ball State bus. Then instead of getting the books I searched for this morning, I got four others and only one from the morning's list. Christopher Marlowe, here I come (even though I have not yet finished with Roberto Bolano.)

I got in at 5:30 and did little for over an hour. I worked on getting a pulled muscle in my right calf to relax. It is better now, not as much a limp as earlier.

KH and I discussed my grant proposal. I have some ideas now. He also reported that of the two Canadians who read "Love Stink", one gave up after 10 pages and the other thought it was a tough start but interesting. MW has a copy, my niece is still reading, and I will await further word from them. I am not dismayed, just quizzical.

Last night, I spent a long time talking to MW. These calls are good on one level, and they also keep me getting anything typed. Better to be human, I guess.

Maybe I will stay up and watch the finale of Mayans. That is a show that I think improved. It was also popular in prison.

What follows is stuff from yesterday and today, minus The Beatles.

Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop’ looks more and more like a politically motivated criminal scheme 

 Marcy Wheeler has a new post that breaks down some of the many, many known oddities of the supposed "laptop." When you consider that the whole premise of the story to begin with is that a "Hunter Biden" allegedly wandered into a random Delaware computer repair shop, handed over a damaged laptop, completely forgot about it afterward, and then somehow the computer dude and/or allies decided that Donald Trump ratf--ker Rudy freaking Giuliani was the person he needed to deliver the laptop's data to, dozens of other oddities piled on top of that begin to turn what started out as farce into a full three-ring circus of weird.

Marcy's post is, as usual, worth reading in full, but here’s the shortest version of it: Quite a lot of evidence suggests that in 2018 or 2019, Hunter Biden was the target of a successful phish or other hack that gave an outside party access to his iCloud account, his email accounts, and other data.

Of special note is a window of time during which Hunter was receiving addiction treatment (from the disgraced ex-Fox News talking head Dr. Keith Ablow, no less, just to put a nearly cartoonish spin on all this yet again) and appears to have had "limited" online communications. Despite those limited communications, somebody was using this period of time to make a hell of a lot of technical changes to Hunter's iCloud and email accounts...

Is a good novel smarter than its author? Kundera thought so… - a collection of comments and links on Kundera.

I read one Irvine Welsh novel in prison -The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins (a bit of censoring for my monitoring software) - and have seen the film version of Trainspotting. I saw a copy of a Welsh novel at the Ball State Barnes and Nobel. Irvine Welsh and Miranda Sawyer in conversation at Spiritland - be warned, he's Scots.

Big Caesars and Little Caesars by Ferdinand Mount review – rogue’s gallery

For if the five acts he identifies as Johnsonian assaults on democracy – including attacks on the civil service, curbs on the right to protest and bringing in compulsory voter ID for elections, which Mount sees as outright voter suppression – haven’t exactly turned Britain into a police state yet, laws like this remain on the statute book long after their author is gone. Even if the last Caesar refrained from exploiting them fully to his advantage, the next one might not, and history suggests that there is always a next one.

Mount is right; the point isn’t whether Johnson, or Trump for that matter, can successfully come back themselves. It’s that what they represent will always be back, sooner or later, and democracies must be ready for it.

The Dutiful Wife

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates Crashes School Board Meeting Over Removing His Book From Class 

 

Colson Whitehead appears here again: Colson Whitehead on Blaxploitation Cinema, Sidney Lumet’s New York, and His Own Harlem Trilogy The Author of Crook Manifesto Discusses the Latest Installment of his Sweeping Crime History of New York City by Dwyer Murphy; and Colson Whitehead Answers the Proust Questionnaire. (My other stuff on Whitehead.)

Cristina Garcia on Chronicling Cuba’s Complex History Through Fiction 

Q&A with Reed Farrel Coleman, author of Sleepless City 

Americans are still better off, with more in the bank than before the pandemic

However, households are rapidly spending down that extra cash they’d socked away during the pandemic. Median account balances are at their lowest levels in roughly three years and have dropped as much as 41 percent from their peak in April 2021, when Americans were flush with government stimulus money and tax returns, according to a JPMorgan Chase Institute analysis of the bank accounts of 9 million Chase customers.

Taken together, the data helps explain the big mystery behind how the U.S. economy has managed to avoid a recession that many economists had forecast: Consumers, supported by a strong labor market, have been able to keep spending despite inflation and a sharp rise in borrowing costs.

But it also highlights why Americans remain tentative about their economic prospects, particularly as they face higher prices on food, housing and travel. Many have been working through their savings and say their bank account balances are on a downhill trajectory, with little prospect of building them back up to where they were a year or two ago.

The rise of the anti-capitalist Right in Germany

 

Dispatches from the Heartland: Don’t Bet Against America:

The harshest critics of industrial policy and clean energy investments—including the House “Freedom Caucus” and other GOP members who voted against the bi-partisan infrastructure bill but are now taking credit for its investments—seem to lack faith in American workers and businesses. They don’t believe we can organize ourselves, pass policy initiatives, and spend public money in a way that will grow the pie for everyone—not just the biggest businesses in the world. The naysayers argue that America can’t resuscitate its own steel and auto manufacturing sectors in more dynamic and sustainable ways, and don’t believe we can bring supply chains back home even as company after company is sending out announcements about once-offshored jobs returning to the heartland.

Apparently, according to the logic of these critics, the laws of globalization shall not be challenged. But if we listen closely to what the naysayers are really arguing, it’s essentially this: America’s best days are behind us, and we should just relent. We should just fold up shop and let China run the world’s economy as multi-national corporations get richer and more powerful while working families end up in a more precarious situation.

What the essay does not say, maybe cannot explain, is why the MAGA Republicans think this way? How can they fulfill the promise of making us great again if they do not believe in our greatness? I will think it must have something to do with the addiction with playing the victim, which seems to me the one consistent tent of American conservatism these pas t40 years. Then, it may be, they lack faith in us because they seek the strongman who will revenge their self-inflected victimhood, and we the people must pass away for the strongman to gain power.

 

sch 9:32 PM

 

 

Colson Whitehead, Again and for the First Time. Part 2

More of my notes on Colson Whitehead's  Apex Hides the Hurt (2006; Anchor Books, 2007).  Along with the marketing issues, Whitehead addresses race.  Nothing new there but this how he does so, in part, in Apex:

There was always that kindling problem of being black in America - namely, how to avoid becoming it.

p. 145

***

The sliver of himself still in tune with marketing shivered each time Gertrude used the word colored. He kept stubbing on it. As it were. Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. She was a few iterations behind the times. Not that you could keep up, anyway. Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

…But there was a flipside of calling something by the name you gave it - and that was wanting to be called by the name that you gave yourself. What is the name that will give me the dignity and respect that is my right? The key that will unlock the world.

p. 192

And how we cannot all agree there is systemic racism?  

sch

2/16/20

Book: The Intuitionist

I read Colson Whitehead in prison. I had heard of him before. I found The Underground Railroad and then I kept reading. And reading. The notes of my readings remain in their handwritten form. I have begun to doubt my PO will approve my laptop. 

So, when I saw Ploughshares published Revisiting The Intuitionist, I had to read it and see what there is to share.

First off, Neil Serven, the essay's author, found Whitehead's first novel as strange, as inventive, as wonderful, as I found it. He does a very good job in summarizing and analyzing the novel. My only quibble is the writer does really touch on the one point that attracted me to Colson Whitehead: his bending and mixing and warping of genre.

Secondly, I agree with Mr. Serven's conclusion:

Over twenty years after its initial publication, The Intuitionist’s message remains relevant: it’s a wise critique of ambition and “progress” and the dark spaces that exist in the in-between.

sch 3/23/22

Colson Whitehead and Ralph Ellison

 Read anything you can find by Colson Whitehead. He is as good as the hype. I read a zombie novel by him, and I liked it.

As for Ralph Ellison, he wrote only one novel, and he managed to write a great one, Invisible Man.

Both have much to teach a would-be writer, and keep the attention of a reader.

So had to pay attention when I saw The Guardian's headline: Colson Whitehead: ‘When I read Invisible Man I thought maybe there’s room for a Black weirdo like me’:

The book that changed me as a teenager
I was 19 when I underwent my big Pynchon summer and dived into Gravity’s Rainbow. Systems, rebel forces, counter-histories, a little bit of hope – that you could cram so much of the world from page to page was exhilarating to discover.

The writer who changed my mind
In seventh grade English class we read the first chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and I thought: here’s a Black weirdo who writes; maybe there’s room for a Black weirdo like me. I was 12.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Also in seventh grade, I read Stephen King’s Carrie and thought novels might be where it’s at. (I previously wanted to write Spider-Man.) I liked the chronological jumps, the inserts of news reports, interviews and scholarly texts. Novels could be oddball, form-wise, and also have a big body count.

The author I came back to
I dug Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, but couldn’t hack The Lathe of Heaven at 11 years of age. I went back when I was researching short novels for The Nickel Boys, and was finally able to understand her flawed utopias. Plus I’m finding her Tao stuff pretty cool these days.

The book I reread
I rarely reread books. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is such a bounty I can’t resist, though. I read a couple of chapters a year: spreading it out!

The book I could never read again
I liked Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high. Does it hold up to my current taste? Probably not. I’m curious … but not that curious. Rereading a book just to see if it holds up seems dumb, and I don’t care enough about it to read it for any other reason. I guess I’ll never know!

The book I discovered later in life
I read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry 10 years ago and it was scrumptious. Sagebrush, water snakes ... Age 42 is later in life, right, if you’re 53?

And then, about the same time, The Paris Review released its interview of Ellison:

INTERVIEWERS

Then you consider your novel a purely literary work as opposed to one in the tradition of social protest.

ELLISON

Now, mind, I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain? One hears a lot of complaints about the so-called protest novel, especially when written by Negroes, but it seems to me that the critics could more accurately complain about the lack of craftsmanship and the provincialism which is typical of such works.

INTERVIEWERS

But isn’t it going to be difficult for the Negro writer to escape provincialism when his literature is concerned with a minority?

ELLISON

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel—and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?—is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

INTERVIEWER

But still, how is the Negro writer, in terms of what is expected of him by critics and readers, going to escape his particular need for social protest and reach the “universal” you speak of?

ELLISON

If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he’s lost the battle before he takes the field. I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms. Perhaps, though, this thing cuts both ways: the Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to write—that’s what the antiprotest critics believe—but perhaps the white reader draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read. He doesn’t want to identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and social situation, though on the deeper human level identification can become compelling when the situation is revealed artistically. The white reader doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary recreation of society. Negro writers have felt this, and it has led to much of our failure.

Too many books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience. By doing this the authors run the risk of limiting themselves to the audience’s presumptions of what a Negro is or should be; the tendency is to become involved in polemics, to plead the Negro’s humanity. You know, many white people question that humanity, but I don’t think that Negroes can afford to indulge in such a false issue. For us, the question should be, what are the specific forms of that humanity, and what in our background is worth preserving or abandoning. The clue to this can be found in folklore, which offers the first drawings of any group’s character. It preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the history of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and so forth, which insure the good life, or destroy it; and it describes those boundaries of feeling, thought, and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group’s will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and dies. These drawings may be crude, but they are nonetheless profound in that they represent the group’s attempt to humanize the world. It’s no accident that great literature, the product of individual artists, is erected upon this humble base. The hero of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and the hero of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” appear in their rudimentary forms far back in Russian folklore. French literature has never ceased exploring the nature of the Frenchman. Or take Picasso—

###

ELLISON

I think that’s a case of misreading. And I didn’t identify the Brotherhood as the C.P., but since you do, I’ll remind you that they too are white. The hero’s invisibility is not a matter of being seen, but a refusal to run the risk of his own humanity, which involves guilt. This is not an attack upon white society! It is what the hero refuses to do in each section which leads to further action. He must assert and achieve his own humanity; he cannot run with the pack and do this—this is the reason for all the reversals. The epilogue is the most final reversal of all; therefore it is a necessary statement.

sch 4/22

Speculative Fiction, Underground Railroad, and the Emotional Truths

From Gene Seymour's Alt That’s Fit to Print The dangers and rewards of speculative fiction pointing out the good points.

Such tendencies worry me somewhat when it comes to—and I realize how ridiculous this sounds—the reception of alternative histories. I am thinking principally of Colson Whitehead’s award-winning The Underground Railroad (2016), which has recently been adapted into a miniseries streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Whitehead blends the grim realities of the antebellum slave trade into an audacious fantasia that transforms what was, historically, a metaphorical “railroad” transporting escaped Black slaves to freedom into an actual subterranean network of tracks and trains. The author tells the story with such deadpan authority that I found myself worrying that some readers with no knowledge of the actual facts would come away believing that Whitehead’s fiction and historical records were one and the same. I thought such worries were idle until I came across a reviewer who described Whitehead’s novel as “a mostly straightforward and realistic account of a slave’s escape.” That “mostly” modifier may be enough to buy him the benefit of the doubt, but . . . really, man? “Straightforward”? “Realistic”? You really think there were tracks and trains hauling runaways northward, and that there were actually skyscrapers in South Carolina in the early to mid nineteenth century, along with quacks conducting quasi-eugenics experiments?

Still, like so much speculative fiction, Whitehead’s story, for all its reality-tweaking, offers up emotional truths—truths that might not come across as powerfully in a less-imaginative narrative. He also captures the physical reality of the slave system, and cogently lays out the white-supremacist mythology that propped it up. These elements are as unavoidable in his Underground Railroad as the details in the recollections of those who escaped north through the network of safe houses and hideouts that marked the actual Railroad’s trail. There are many ways to pull a fast one on the gullible. But one of the dividends of alternate history, when it’s rendered well, is how it can illuminate actual things and events that happened in the past and quite often linger on in the present. To be drawn into such stories doesn’t mean you’re being taken. Sometimes, they wise you up.

I would apply this to Philp Roth's The Plot Against America and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The thing is the capturing of emotional truths. 

Best Books of The 21st Century

 Since I am cheap, I have been avoiding The New York Times. The NYT recently published a list of the best books, so far, of this century. This I have not read, but the email has sent me two people who have read the list. 

Ted Gioia wrote The Best Books of the 21st Century. Mr. Gioia is someone who I have come to respect. He gives the top ten. 

(10) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
(9) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
(8) Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
(7) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
(6) 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
(5) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
(4) The Known World by Edward P. Jones
(3) Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
(2) The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
(1) My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrant

I have not read the Bolano. Jones, or the Wilkerson novel. While I admit to an anti-Franzen bias, that is a pretty good top ten. I like seeing Colson Whitehead there. 

More importantly, he goes on to write about My Brilliant Friend. I cannot recall when I read Ferrante - it was while I was in prison, let us say within the 10 years. Gioia points out what struck me most about the Neapolitan novels, a view into a different world than I see in American novels:

The image of success is almost more important than any financial measures of its magnitude. We have now left the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story far behind. Instead we merely exchange today’s rags for tomorrow’s more expensive looking rags.

This sense of a constraining destiny is especially evident in the novel’s secondary characters—and these play a prominent role in the book. Ferrante even provides a guide to the nine different families involved in her tale, as well as other parties who help propel the narrative forward. The conflicts and rivalries will dominate the book, and though many of these friends and neighbors have dreams and ambitions, their freedom to act is limited at every hand.

Most people I know have given up on sticking-to-itness. I know I did, that was part of my depression - finding out that no matter how hard I worked during my fifties, I was not going to get where I wanted to go. Most people I know feel they are stuck. No, some did not attempt to further their education. Substance abuse got in the way of others. Some found success did not matter as much as attending the right schools. Many believed that corporate America would return with the jobs our parents had. Ferrante's world had none of our American examples; her go-getters resemble the people I have known.

Lincoln Michel plunged into a more detailed criticism of the list with his Three Thoughts on the NYT Top 100: Missing Millennials, Fading Autofiction, the Genre-Bending Era. Here are the issues he raises.

The biases toward American novels (and political and historical nonfiction) and against translated literature, poetry, story collections, graphic novels, and essay collections is notable but also expected. Americans simply don’t read much poetry or translated literature. Similarly, the bias toward big press books instead of indie press books. One thing I spent yesterday discussing with another writer that was surprising—at least to me—is the lack of younger writers. The list is heavily weighted toward writers over 65. There is not a single author under 40. Unless I missed someone, there are only two millennials on the entire list: Fernanda Melchor and Torrey Peters. If you move the cutoff to 1980 births, Justin Torres would also count. Still, only 2-3 titles out of 100 for the generation most of this century? There are no zoomers and even Gen X is underrepresented. This is a list of boomer authors, largely. (Generations are fake of course, but an easy shorthand.)

Being 64, I suppose that I should not mind this, but I do. KH and I were talking recently about bands/singers that should give up performing. They are not giving room for new talent, for new styles. I feel the same way about writing.

I think one can make an easy argument that the biggest trend in the literary fiction world has been, in fact, genre fiction. Or rather “genre-bending” work that bridges literary fiction style and themes with genre fiction tropes and concepts. Like autofiction, this is a fraught term. Both are labels people can claim are hardly new at all. There have always been books that blurred literary style and genre tropes, and however you define autofiction there are precedents stretching back centuries. But labels can be useful for thinking about larger trends in culture. And anyway, what’s the point of a literary newsletter but to dissect such hobbyhorses?

This trend I figured out in prison when I decided to start writing again and began reading as widely as I could. I find it silly not to look back at the 19th Century and see that many great novels did not fit into any genre. I have come up with answers to my question of why literature disdained genre: 1) the apprenticeship of American writers in journalism (although Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is a crime novel); and 2) publishers paid attention to marketing experts.

Check out the original essays, please. 

sch 7/13

Starting A New Week - Writing, Literary Stuff, Rejections, Bookers, Colson Whitehead, Otters.

Lollygagging around the apartment this morning. I have gotten caught up with Orphan Black. Now, that is an excellent thriller. I went down to the convenience store. Not sure if I want to go out again.

Yesterday's trip to Walmart was partially successful. I had to leave some items there because I ran out of time to catch the bus. 

Working on the blog last night and today are the closest I came to any writing.

Bad insomnia last night. Discomfort continues from the surgery. I really want to take it easy, to do this recovery right.

Items related to writing follow.

 How To Write the Perfect Cover Letter Even Tho Nobody Cares (+ formatting and submission methods)

 (3) The Do’s and Don’ts of Cover Letters

 Writing Queernormative Worlds: World Building Workshop - C. M. Rosens

‘It Was A Matter Of Lust’ and other poems - Literary Yard

The Booker Prize 2026 not likely to read them any more than I get any other books read.

Should the Booker Prize Be Quirkier? (Thornfield Hall)

Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man should be a laugh for Musk and the racist trolls who were so worried about a feminist Odyssey because Nolan used Wilson's translation. 

ROFLMAO: Nolan's 'The Odyssey' ruined a poem I never bothered to read

 What I Learned from a Close Read of All of Colson Whitehead’s Work (Literary Hub) an overview of one of America's best writers.

Oops, I thought I had withdrawn this one:

Thank you for submitting "Going For The Kid" to Tome and Space. Unfortunately, we have decided not to accept it for our publication.

We appreciate the time and effort taken to share it with us.

Sincerely,

The Tome and Space Editors

And a rejection for “After Making Landfall”, but for an older version:

Thank you for sending a submission for the upcoming issue of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. Although we feel your work has many positives, after much deliberation, we decided it was not a good fit for us at this time. 

We receive many incredible stories, poems, non-fiction, and images, and we are forced to select only a handful of pieces. Know that though your work will not be in this next issue, our staff welcomes your submissions and truly hopes to continue receiving material from you. Should you wish to send us another submission, please wait until the next submission period opens.

We do accept—and encourage—simultaneous submissions. You can find listings for where to send submissions at the following:

http://newpages.com/

https://www.chillsubs.com/lists

http://www.everywritersresource.com/literarymagazines/.

Http://www.duotrope.com is perhaps the best source but charges a fee. There is a free trial, however.

If you have any questions regarding your submission or any other publishing matter, please feel free to contact the editor via our website.

Thank you for your support of literary and art publications in general and especially of SBLAAM.

And completely off topic: Bay Area wildlife mystery leaves researchers 'somewhat horrified'.

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Recuperating, Not Spry

 Healing but not doing much more.

I made it to group on Friday. My legs got wobbly. I took the bus there and back, as little walking as possible. I stayed put for the rest of the day. Did some reading, watched shows on Netflix. Right now I cannot recall what it was! Thusday Murder Club. 

Got a rejection. 

Thank you for sharing "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984" with A Public Space. We regret that we are unable to use this piece for the magazine, but appreciate the opportunity to consider it.


All our best,

A Public Space 

I keep having these intense moments of insomnia. Those I have used to work on my research project. 

CC called again on Friday. I spoke with KH, too. Joel C called with compliments for “Ahab in the Moonlight”. That is now published. I need to get a link here to it. 

Saturday, I went to Payless and the convenience store twice. A little more walking, a little more of my research project.

I started watching Orphan Black on Netflix. I like it. Oh, I started Bugonia and just could not take its deepness or weirdness. Looks good, though.

I decided against church. Not enough energy, pain is more a low-level discomfort. 

 One thing decided: a different working schedule. I need to get some books read.

Things read over the past few days that I want to share:

The Eyes of Athena and the Disenchanted World of The Odyssey (Reactor) 

The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding  (Reactor) 

Zardoz: …What the F*ck Did I Just Watch?  (Reactor) 

You Must Remember This’s Karina Longworth on ‘The Bisexuals’ 

Exclusive: In a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer has some regrets (AP News)

How America’s newspapers lost their voice 

Pennsylvania roads are being coated in radioactive wastewater − here’s why 

From author to anime hero: the unlikely revival of a Japanese literary star | Fiction in translation (The Guardian)

No Longer Human comprises a series of notebooks by a formerly “handsome young man”, who declares his incompatibility with the human race. For him, the world is “a place of bottomless horror”; he concludes that “living itself is the source of sin”. The narrator of the title story of Schoolgirl takes a similar view: “the problem is that I’m corrupt. I’m a bad girl.”

The relentless pessimism in Dazai’s work risks seeming overwhelming or indulgent but, as Barton puts it, Dazai “leans into [the self-loathing] with a kind of exuberance”. Indeed, his appeal in part lies in this “unashamed emotional quality, but also tempered with enormous intelligence”.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead review – final part of the Harlem Trilogy is freewheeling fun | Fiction | (The Guardian) 

Whitehead initially envisioned the Harlem Trilogy as a jaunty entertainment, a break from the serious Pulitzer-winning business of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Cool Machine specifically covers the New York of his youth, a scene he experienced first-hand, which only adds to the air of vivid, freewheeling fun. Whitehead maps the streets, labels the landmarks and dips in at intervals with handy background information. He takes a dark and dangerous corner of history and makes it feel illuminated, magnified, even borderline family-friendly.

A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson review – a brilliantly eccentric history of the movies | Film books (The Guardian)

 Revisionist? Well, it certainly takes us to wintry and sombre ponderings on the movies’ (perennial) tendency to coarsen and to cheapen, to enforce cultural mob-rule. He cites King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd, starring James Murray, a former extra plucked from the ranks and groomed for glory but whose awful destiny was to descend into alcoholism and homelessness – back into the crowd. He emphasises movies’ amazing populist-democratic power and reach, their power embodied by the fact that, unlike in the theatre or concert hall, a film’s action could not be stopped or affected by the crowd in front of it. Like a theologian dragged by doubts to the foot of the cross, Thomson wonders if the movies will always lack literature’s way of allowing us to enlarge our imaginations, as opposed to forcing a submission to the screen.

The Rest Is History (Lapham’s Quarterly )

Who Cares? (Sheila Kennedy)

The American Prospect, among others, has reported on the crisis in what we call “Care work.”

As the report notes, immigrants from countries like Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Jamaica, the Philippines, and dozens of others make up the majority of people who serve the aging, frail, sick, disabled and dying. These immigrants “bathe their clients, change adult diapers, supervise medications, and provide companionship in relationships that are intimate as well as professional.” And they are the targets of Donald Trump’s hatred.

How civilisations fall, according to Gibbon (Engelsberg ideas)

5th Circuit ‘answers the call’ from Clarence Thomas on gun law

4 little-known Google Calendar tricks I use to plan my workweek - and save time (ZDNET)

The Problem With Middle-Class Socialism (The New Republic)

Secret Service Agent Put on Leave for Alleged Leaks About JD Vance (The New Republic)

Trump Prepares to Attack Eighth Country of His Second Term (The New Republic)

Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon (The New Republic)

What Do You Have to Hide? - by Jared Henderson

WNAP-FM | Listen Online - myTuner Radio

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton

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