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'Mules and Men' a Treasure Trove

5/29/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
I loathe heterosexual weddings. The wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce two years later. It's just a waste of time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find it personally beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster.
​Rupert Everett
Born May 29, 1959
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R. Everett

My Book World

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Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men with a preface by Franz Boas, a foreword by Arnold Rampersad, illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, and afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Part I consists of African-American folk tales that Hurston collects in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Florida. She begins in her hometown of Eatonville, primarily African-American. Amazing it is the number of times the word “mule” does appear in these tales, as if the beast is a metaphor for the “beasts” that white people take black men and women to be: though compliant, also stubborn, and intelligent. On the face of it, the tales might reflect a certain ignorance, but I think they simply reflect that slaves had to develop their own language because the whites refused to educate them in their own (if they themselves were versed well enough in English to do so).
 
Part II is about hoodoo (or voodoo), and Hurston heads for what she calls its capital, New Orleans, Louisiana. These passages are fascinating, as well. All throughout Hurston includes herself as a character. In order to retrieve the information she wants, she must become one of hoodoo’s adherents and spends much time and effort seeking to know its ways. She recreates for readers exact formulae for getting rid of one’s husband, for getting him back if she changes her mind, for many ways of dealing with one’s neighbors. Hurston never judges but fully participates, absorbing its, at times, headiness, as when she dizzies herself from dancing for forty straight minutes as part of a ceremony. 
 
In his afterword Henry Louis Gates (PBS’s Finding Your Roots) identifies Hurston’s proper historical place in American literature. After having achieved a higher education and published seven important books, she is virtually ignored or denounced by leading black male literary figures during the time she should be receiving accolades (among them Richard Wright). This happens, in part, because she identifies herself in a more "conservative," Clarence Thomas-like stance, in which she refuses to be defined by white people. It takes Alice Walker’s landmark 1975 article in Ms. to resurrect Hurston and bring her to the fore of American literary studies. As happens to many whose ideas are published ahead of their time, Hurston’s work languishes for decades amid a poverty of thought. If only she had not been shunned, she might not have died amid a more corporeal sort of poverty at age sixty-nine.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | The Letters of Cole Porter

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A Writer's Wit

5/28/2020

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I thought it [Diamonds Are Forever] was great fun myself and I only wish that people would write more books of exotic and fantastic adventure instead of whining away in contrived prose about their happy childhood and their ghastly lives in corrugated iron universities.
​Ian Fleming
Born May 28, 1908

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I. Fleming
TOMORROW: My Book World | Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men
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A Writer's Wit

5/27/2020

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I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings—and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.
​Mara Brock Akil
Born May 27, 1970
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M. Brock Akil
FRIDAY: My Book World | Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men
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A Writer's Wit

5/26/2020

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I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.
Alan Hollinghurst
Born May 26, 1954

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A. Hollinghurst
FRIDAY: My Book World | Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men
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'Cleanness' a Superb Novel

5/22/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Let the bullets that rip through my brain smash through every closet door in the nation.
​Harvey Milk
Born May 22,1930
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H. Milk

My Book World

APOLOGIES  to my readers: At the last minute I substituted my profile of Garth Greenwell's  book for Alison Smith's. I shall post one of Smith's Name All the Animals in the near future.
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Greenwell, Garth. Cleanness. New York: Farrar, 2020.
​
I didn’t make one annotation on first reading of this novel (and I shall read it again), in part because it held me spellbound and in part because I wanted to experience vicariously the joyride the unnamed narrator (except for Gospodar, the Bulgarian word for Mister) is taking through his young life.
 
Gospodar (Gospodine to his pupils) teaches accelerated English at a high school in Sofia, Bulgaria, sometime in the last decade, and unravels his story of love and loss. At the same time, our Gospodar employs the powers of travelogue to acquaint readers with a post-Soviet culture still burdened with its corrupt architecture (crumbling worse than the geopolitical realm itself). The novel is part language lesson: Gospodar translates (upon first mention) each Bulgarian word or phrase and in such a way that one is acquainted with the word’s fullness. At one point, a male sex partner Gospodar has met online calls him Bulgarian for bitch. But the narrator doesn’t leave it there, massaging the meaning within the context of the indigenous culture. The novel is part love story, in which the narrator meets a man he only calls R (every character is reduced to a single initial, in some way protecting the identities of his co-characters, almost creating the feel that one is absorbing a roman à clef). I’ve never read such sensual yet meaningful sex scenes (for want of a better term). At one point, the narrator makes love to his lover, R, taking perhaps twenty minutes to kiss every part of the man’s body. When he is finished, his partner is attempting to hide his tears, the fact that perhaps no one has ever loved him so completely. These scenes, though graphic, serve a larger purpose, never feeling pornographic (if there is such a thing) or gratuitous.
 
Ultimately, the narrator and R end their relationship, because R hails from Lisbon, and cannot see finding a way to earn a living in Bulgaria. In the last major scene of the novel, the narrator parties with a few young men who have graduated from his school the year before. The three of them get very drunk, and the teacher, Gospodar, makes a play for one of the young men. He is horrified by his own behavior yet is willing to give into it at the same time, if enticed or encouraged by the student. He withdraws from the party just before making a fool of himself or endangering his reputation as a responsible adult. Gospodar does this throughout the book, brings himself to some sort of brink, only to pull back after exploring the full impact that the act is about to make (sometimes within a few seconds), thus making the character more like all of us, ready to jump yet waiting to defer to a better angel. 

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men

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A Writer's Wit

5/21/2020

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The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.
Robert Creeley
Born May 21, 1926
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R. Creeley
TOMORROW: My Book World | Alison Smith's Memoir Name All the Animals
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A Writer's Wit

5/20/2020

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I went to work in an office and learned, among other lessons, to do things I did not care for, and to do them well. Before I left this office, two of my books had already been published.
​Sigrid Undset
Born May 20, 1882
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S. Undset
FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's Memoir Name All the Animals
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A Writer's Wit

5/19/2020

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I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
​Nora Ephron
Born May 19, 1941
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N. Ephron
FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's Memoir Name All the Animals
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Hyacinth Blue Is TimeLess

5/15/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
The mind and heart sometimes get another chance, but if anything happens to the poor old human frame, why, it’s just out of luck, that’s all.
​Katherine Anne Porter
Born May 15, 1890
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K. A. Porter

My Book World

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Vreeland, Susan. Girl in Hyacinth Blue. New York: Penguin, 1999.
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In contemporary times, a Philadelphia professor calls a colleague (who is an art scholar) into his locked study to reveal what he claims is an original work of the Dutch artist, Vermeer. The colleague argues against such a claim, but the man insists. He is in a bind because his father has confessed that he himself stole it from a Jewish home while he was working for the Nazis in WWII, but he cannot reveal such indicting provenance. Each succeeding chapter takes the reader farther back in history (à la the film The Red Violin) to reveal previous owners, right up to, the reader must assume, Vermeer himself. All owners are fascinated by the painting and yet must depend on its sale to save themselves or their family from financial disaster. The author explores the value of art. Is it entirely intrinsic, or is it monetary, or is it a bit of both? Vreeland manages to explore this unique idea in a poetic manner which is both compressed, yet expansive, a valuable topic for discussion. The novel is a timeless read, and I’m glad a friend recommended it to me long ago and that I finally took the time to read it.

​NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's  Name All the Animals

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A Writer's Wit

5/14/2020

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For everyone, there are those moments when you have great days with someone you wouldn't expect to. Then you have to go back to your real lives, but it makes an impression on you.
​Sofia Coppola
​Born May 14, 1971
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S. Coppola
TOMORROW: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's Novel, Cleanness
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A Writer's Wit

5/13/2020

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The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives.
​Armistead Maupin
Born May 18, 1944
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A. Maupin
FRIDAY: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's Novel, Cleanness
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A Writer's Wit

5/12/2020

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Whether you want to entertain or to provoke, to break hearts or reassure them, what you bring to your writing must consist of your longings and disappointments.
​Rafael Yglesias
Born May 12, 1954
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R. Yglesias
FRIDAY: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's Novel, Cleanness
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Mississippi In Depth

5/8/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Beneath words and logic are emotional connections that largely direct how we use our words and logic.
​Jane Roberts
Born May 8, 1929
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J. Roberts

My Book World

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Walton, Anthony. Mississippi: An American Journey. New York: Viking, 1996.
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This combination of “travel writing, history, and memoir,” as blurbed on the back cover is a profound work. Walton, noted poet and author, takes the reader on a multilayer journey. One of those journeys may be the physical. He tells of the move his Mississippian parents make from their home state to Chicago as young adults to establish a better life for their children. One is always aware of the physical: the hot Mississippi summer days, the fields of blindingly white cotton, the cool of air conditioning and iced drinks. Walton takes pains to give us a full history of the state, beginning with the Native Americans who occupy the land for centuries before others arrive and kill or move them off. He doesn’t stop there but gives us a history of the slave, the African-American: lynchings, beatings, the cold war that Whites take up against Blacks after the Civil War. But Walton’s journey of Mississippi, which begins mostly after he is an adult, includes memories of visiting family there, interviewing a broad range of white and black citizens. He describes the “polite” way that citizens treat each other, as long as one observes one’s role. He also describes the fight for the vote, which continues to this day. Included in his personal comments are original poems of note that help to illuminate his narrative. History. Travel. Poetry. He appeals to the broad spectrum of human perception and sensibility. I regret that it took me this long to read a book I bought in 2006, ten years after it was published. Yet Walton’s message is still a vibrant one of truth.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's novel, Cleanness
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A Writer's Wit

5/7/2020

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I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
​Rabindranath Tagore
Born May 7, 1861
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R. Tagore
TOMORROW: My Book World | Anthony Walton's Mississippi: An American Journey
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A Writer's Wit

5/6/2020

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We can live with lots of things, but we can't live without imagination, we can't live without hope.
Ariel Dorfman
Born May 6, 1942
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A. Dorfman
FRIDAY: My Book World | Anthony Walton's Mississippi: An American Journey
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A Writer's Wit

5/5/2020

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I work eight hours a day, but I'm not writing all that time. I'm thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of.
​Barbara Taylor Bradford
Born May 5, 1933
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B. Taylor Bradford
FRIDAY: My Book World | Anthony Walton's Mississippi: An American Journey
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This Book of Daniel Is Not in the Bible

5/1/2020

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 A WRITER'S WIT
One reason to fashion a story is to lift a grudge.
Bobbie Ann Mason
Born May 1, 1940
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B. Mason

My Book World

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​Smith, Aaron. The Book of Daniel: Poems. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh, 2019.

This poet's persona clearly has a crush on actor Daniel Craig and cleverly weaves together nearly fifty poems with pop culture in mind. A couple deal directly with our eponymous persona, Daniel, but many cover other icons. In “I Need My O’Hara Frank” he idolizes other poets:

I Need Sharons:
 
Tate and Olds,
but mostly Olds,
 
and never, ever
the Rose of.
​In “Celebrity,” he, stream-of-conscious style, connects the deaths of various celebs with himself:
Anne Sexton died in 1974, the year I was born.
Thomas James died in 1974 and was born
in Joliet, Illinois, where I was born. He wrote
Letters to a Stranger before he killed himself.
I’ve written three books few people read
and wanted to kill myself. He was 27 like
Joplin   Hendrix    Morrison   Cobain.
In the title poem, the persona levels with readers about Daniel Craig:
                                  I made a Daniel Craig scrapbook
called The Book of Daniel. For years I bought
every magazine with him on the cover. In Interview
he’s stripped to the waist, hopping around on the beach.
Jamie Dornan was in Interview, too: arms behind his
head in a bathtub. I fell in love with Daniel Craig
when he was stalked by a man in Enduring Love--
before he was Bond-hot and too famous.
​I rarely read a book of poetry in one sitting. To me, that’s like eating an entire box of chocolates in thirty minutes or less (which I’ve never done but know better than to try). Yet I found myself turning page after page, getting Smith's poetry when often I do not get what a poet wants me to. And when I was finished, it may also be the only book of poetry I turned around and read all the way through again. There.
NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anthony Walton's Mississippi: An American Journey
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