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Crystal
Regular Poster
Username: Crystal
Post Number: 334
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - 01:39 pm: | 
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I’m reading Acolytes by Nikki Giovanni. I know I’ve said that I don’t “get” poetry – but I’m getting this! She has some prose in there too but I’m pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying the poetry. I’m about half way through and I’ve seen myself in several pieces. I guess I’m relating to us being in the same age group [yes, I’m an old wave jumper]. She’s giving loving props to some of our cultural figures [holla Nina Simone!] and other folks who we may not know but we know somebody like them. I get a real family feeling from this book.
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Schakspir
Veteran Poster
Username: Schakspir
Post Number: 1135
Registered: 12-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - 07:34 pm: |
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Return to Manure, by Raymond Federman
The Hero and the Blues, by Albert Murray |
Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 281
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - 09:43 pm: |
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Hi Crystal 
I'm past the halfway point in:
"Richard Wright: The Life and Times" by Hazel Rowley
"Lost in the City" by Edward P. Jones
Finished these for author chats:
"Angelica" by Arthur Phillips
"The Shadow Catcher" by Marianne Wiggins
PS Arthur Phillips, Colson Whitehead, and Joshua Redman were all born in 1969 and graduated from Harvard, although Arthur a year earlier. My favorite is his lost generation novel "Prague." This one is a Victorian ghost story, while Marianne's is a fictional biography of Edward S. Curtis, the turn of the century ethnographer / photographer of Native Americans.
PPS I've also been reading from two recent books about Ralph Ellison:
"Shadowing Ralph Ellison" by John S. Wright (University Press of Mississippi, 2006)
"A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison" edited by Steven C. Tracy (Oxford University Press, 2004)
The latter features a 34-page essay by Ellison biographer Lawrence Patrick Jackson which explores some possibilities for why Ellison achieved iconic status while many of his contemporaries who published regularly barely receive "academic scrutiny."
Lawrence Jackson is working a biography of Chester Himes.
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Emanuel
Regular Poster
Username: Emanuel
Post Number: 332
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - 11:59 pm: |
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Hi Crystal,
I'm one of those who doesn't really get poetry either but I bought Jessica Care Moore's poetry book "The Alphabet Versus The Ghetto" when I met her at conference in Detroit last year. I liked it. The only Nikki Giovanni book I read (and still own) is Racism 101, which was pretty good too.
I'm currently halfway through "Jump at the Sun" by Kim McLarin. The book is very interesting and makes me excited about getting into fiction again. I was on a nonfiction kick for a while. Next on my list is:
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrall
Nowhere is a Place by Bernice McFadden
Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle
Devil in the Midst by Diane Dorce
Business Unusual by Linda Beed
That'll probably be it for me for 2007 unless some interesting independent book review assignments come my way. |
Troy
Veteran Poster
Username: Troy
Post Number: 732
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, July 25, 2007 - 10:03 am: |
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I just finished the galley of Grace After Midnight: A Memoir by Felicia "Snoop" Pearson (Grand Central Publishing pub: Nov. '07) http://aalbc.com/reviews/felicia_snoop_pearson.htm
I will probably review this one. It is a quick interesting read. While it is not strong on depth, it will defintely appeal to fans of the the "character" she plays on HBO's The Wire.
Another interesting side note. Felicia actually thanked me for creating the page above. Believe it or not expression of gratitude happens less often that you would think.
I started a few other books but I'll probably finish Allah Is Not Obliged, by Ahmadou Kourouma, next. http://aalbc.com/reviews/allah_is_not_obliged.htm
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Crystal
Regular Poster
Username: Crystal
Post Number: 335
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, July 26, 2007 - 03:18 pm: |
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Wow, looks like I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. My extended winter wonderland vacation has put me way behind.
Emanuel - I had forgotten about Bernice McFadden’s book – time to go shopping after I finish Harry Potter hahaha. I enjoyed Devil in the Mist and am awaiting its sequel HINT-HINT Sisgal!
Steve – looks like you’ll be our resident Ellison expert. For some reason I couldn’t get into Lost in the City. I think at the time I had several other books on tap so I just didn’t finish it.
Thanks for your lists everyone.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 9459
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, July 26, 2007 - 03:59 pm: |
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I finally finished Arnold Rampersad's biography of Ralph Ellison and Ralph didn't come across as such an admirable character in this book. After the success of "Invisible Man", he spent the rest of his life, living off his reputation, in denial about the fact that he did not have another book in him. I was also disappointed in how he "outgrew" Langston Hughes and snubbed Toni Morrison and scorned James Baldwin. Ellison's long-suffering wife, whom he was also very insensitive toward, attributed the "snobbish elitism" many accused her husband of, to his being a tempermental genius. |
Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 282
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, July 26, 2007 - 05:47 pm: |
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Crystal,
The stories in Lost in the City, although they share some common characters with the stories in Aunt Hagar's Children, seem more hard-edged; for instance, there have already been four killings and I'm only halfway through. Aunt Hagar's, by comparison, has two stories about doctors, a science fiction story, and a historical piece about D.C. at the turn of the century. But still, these stories are very good; there's variety in the characters' voices, there's humor, and some tear-jerkers too.
No, I'm not trying to pass myself off as an expert on Ralph Ellison; sorry for giving that impression. My interpretations of his work is almost completely personal (unlike Dr. Rampersad, who seems to recycle every opinion about Ellison that's ever crossed his desk).
There's even an old gent in Trinidad who thinks that Arnold Rampersad beat out Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea for an American Book Award! LOL! The ABA is Ishmael Reed's book award.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161152541
Having read Ishmael for a couple of years, here's what he does. He says that Tom Wolfe compares black people to rats in Bonfire of the Vanities, a pretty shocking allegation of racism, I would say. Then when you read the book you discover that what he means is that one of the characters calls drug dealers "vermin."
Then he has one of his crew of token ethinic surrogates, Dr. Sam Hamod, put a hit on "some" Jewish writers (Bellow and Roth) by claiming that in The Human Stain, Phillip Roth compares black people to gorillas. Actually, one of the characters uses the phrase "ape-sh**."
I think Frank Chinn is there to put a hurtin' on Chinese-American women novelists like Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, whom I love. After all, who ever heard of Frank Chinn? You see, Ishmael doesn't like "feminists" and he's afraid to go after Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. So he writes a piece about Zora Neale Hurston in which he says he likes her because she's NOT a feminist, claiming she has more in common with Phyllis Schlafly than Michelle Wallace or bell hooks. Well Carla Kaplan would disagree with that opinion.
John S. Wright makes the comparison between Bonfire and Invisible Man:
None of the reviewers, however, noted what would have been unmistakable in any parallel reading of Invisible Man, that Wolfe had premised his whole enterprise on the selfsame narrative omen of modern urban turmoil with which Ellison had opened his own first novel back in 1952; an unseeing and potentially murderous nighttime racial encounter on the streets of the great metropolis sets a prototypic white man, who imagines himself to be the victim of a prospective mugging, against a young black man of blossoming intellect and great expectations whose common humanity remains unperceivable in the face of the white man's unreasoning fear.
And of course, Phillip Roth's novel of passing, The Human Stain, is inspired in some respects by the life of the late NY Times book critic, Anatole Broyard, a New Orleans creole, who followed Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin in being published in the Partisan Review.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Clement Greenberg, the former book critic at the Partisan Review turned modern art critic, was almost singlehandedly responsible for shifting the attention of the art world from European abstract expressionism toward American abstract expressionism, particularly the work of Jackson Pollock. It's really not much different than the influence wielded by Marxist jazz critic LeRoi Jones in the early 1960s when he was writing his Apple Cores column in Downbeat, which promoted the New Jazz, avant garde, or the "New Thing," as it was called. Greenberg's belief that the visual arts had moved beyond figurative representation is very similar to Jones's that jazz had moved beyond melodic and harmonically-based improvisation to free atonality. And "free jazz" was conflated with the Freedom Movement in civil rights. Martha Bayles explains:
It's the mentality in the visual arts that can be traced right back to a guy named Clement Greenberg, and that school of criticism. These folks came out of a Marxist tradition. They were not Stalinists, they were Trotskyites who believed in cutting-edge arts that would push the world toward a socialist future. Don't ask me why they believed this, but they believed it. Greenberg's most famous book of essays is Art and Culture, in which he praises all of the modernist artists of the hour, including Pollock and the abstract impressionists -- anybody he can get his mitts on. They are always praised in the same terms. They are the avant-garde in the political sense, they are the leading cutting-edge not only of artistic change, but by implication of social and political change. This is the mentality that many of the critics work from. I don't think half of these people can tell you where they get their ideas from, but that is where they get them from. There is a vacuum at the heart of it, because they don't really think that the latest avant-garde jazz artist is going to cause a political revolution, but it is still this idea that there is a single cutting-edge, that history is moving forward, that we are marching into the future. It is all that way of thinking.... the idea of art always making progress. We need to question that idea. Is Mozart a mere precursor to Anton Webern? It doesn't pay to look at art that way. That is not how it works. |
Nom_de_plume
Regular Poster
Username: Nom_de_plume
Post Number: 54
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 28, 2007 - 12:24 pm: |
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I'm reading New England White of course, but last night I also picked up What Is the What by Dave Eggers and I'm trying not to start it until I finish the other since it requires my full attention (which is rare)!
Has anyone else read this? It is INCREDIBLE. It's a fictionalized biography of Valentino Deng, one of the "Lost Boys" who made the trek from the Sudan to Ethiopia to Kenya to America. The first few pages alone are riveting...and so, so sad. I can't wait to read it! |
Emanuel
Regular Poster
Username: Emanuel
Post Number: 336
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 28, 2007 - 04:18 pm: |
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Nom_de_plume
I hope I can get to Eggers's latest. I loved "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." |
Nom_de_plume
Regular Poster
Username: Nom_de_plume
Post Number: 55
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 28, 2007 - 11:42 pm: |
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Emanuel, did you?! I picked it up three times but put it back down because I wanted to read this one first because I was hooked from the first page. I'm glad you said that - I will get that next time I'm out. |
Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 285
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, August 07, 2007 - 08:09 am: |
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Emanuel and Nom_de_plume, I started What is the What about two months ago and read 84 pages but then put it aside. I'd like to finish it though.
I'm halfway through New England White. I've also read 64 pages of Allah is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma. On the surface it's a story of a boy soldier but it has a whole other level of meaning. It tells history of the commandant of the small boy's unit, who's named Colonel Papa le Bon (or the good father):
For a start, he never had a father, never knew who his father was. His mother was wandering from bar to bar in Monrovia when just like that she gave birth to a baby she called Robert's. When the kid was five, a sailor wanted to marry the woman, but he didn't want anything to do with the kid, so Robert's was given to his aunt who also worked in the bars. The aunt used to leave him on his own in the house playing with French letters ('French letters' are condoms).
Etc. So naming the commandant "Robert's" is a joke about his mother's promiscuity but it's also a pun on the Petit Robert, one of four dictionaries that the boy soldier, Birahima, uses to tell his own story, or maybe more to the point, to explain his life or existence in French, which, according to him, considers him (or his language or his literature) illegitimate. I can't say much more until I've finished it. Another book like this is Solibo Magnificent by Patrick Chamoiseau of Martinique, which is a brilliant short novel, an allegory about oral culture, written in French and Creole (which, unfortunately, I can only read in translation).
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Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 287
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - 10:57 pm: |
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Finished:
Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazel Rowley
Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
New England White by Stephen L. Carter
Allah is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
A Death in the Family by James Agee
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Reading:
The Restless Journey of James Agee by Genevieve Moreau
White Noise by Don DeLillo -- Another campus novel - the main character is chairman of the department of Hitler Studies at College-on-the-Hill - and the juxtaposition with New England White is blowing me away. I recommend it as a chaser to NEW.
In my opinion Stephen L. Carter is really coming into his own as a novelist. NEW is not genre fiction but a literary novel with thriller-like tendencies. I look forward to reading his next one too.
Allah is Not Obliged is a scathing satire of everything -- religion, magic, African politics, tribalism, etc. The second half tells the history of the various dictators and warlords that have ruled Sierra Leone and Liberia in recent years, in all its brutal reality. I have no doubt that these events are not far from the truth. Thumper, thanks for the recommendation and the review; I hadn't heard of this one but I'm glad I read it.
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