Baldwin speaking on education at UC Berkeley in 1974
Celebrating Black History Month: James Baldwin
All February long, City Lights Bookstore is honoring national Black History Month by featuring authors and books that we feel are essential reading for anyone interested in African American and Black Studies — from the well-known to the less-known, the classics to the contemporary.
To find out if a book is in stock, email us at orders [at] citylights [dot] com.
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James Baldwin
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Baldwin grew up in poverty in Harlem. From 14 to 16 he was active as a preacher in a small revivalist church, a period he would write about in his semiautobiographical first and finest novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and in the play The Amen
After high school he began a restless period of ill-paid jobs, self-study, and literary apprenticeship in New York City. Disgusted with America’s racial injustice, he left in 1948 for Paris, where he lived in poverty for eight years, during which he wrote the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955) and his second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), which dealt explicitly with homosexuality. After 1969 he divided his time between the south of France, New York, and New England.
In 1957 Baldwin became an active participant in the civil-rights struggle. A book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), explores black-white relations, a theme also central to his novel Another Country (1962). In the impassioned The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps his most powerful civil-rights statement, he said that blacks and whites must come to terms with the past and make a future together or face destruction.
Baldwin’s later works include the bitter play about racist oppression Blues for Mister Charlie (produced 1964), the story collection Going to Meet the Man (1965), the novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), and the essay collection No Name in the Street (1972). Ranked with Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison as a spokesman for his generation of black writers, he has been acknowledged for his support and inspiration by such figures as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Amiri Baraka.
From CSPAN American Writers
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One of our staff favorites: Go Tell It On The Mountain
“Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
To find out if a book is in stock, email us at orders [at] citylights [dot] com.
***************************
James Baldwin
***************************
Baldwin grew up in poverty in Harlem. From 14 to 16 he was active as a preacher in a small revivalist church, a period he would write about in his semiautobiographical first and finest novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and in the play The AmenAfter high school he began a restless period of ill-paid jobs, self-study, and literary apprenticeship in New York City. Disgusted with America’s racial injustice, he left in 1948 for Paris, where he lived in poverty for eight years, during which he wrote the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955) and his second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), which dealt explicitly with homosexuality. After 1969 he divided his time between the south of France, New York, and New England.
In 1957 Baldwin became an active participant in the civil-rights struggle. A book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), explores black-white relations, a theme also central to his novel Another Country (1962). In the impassioned The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps his most powerful civil-rights statement, he said that blacks and whites must come to terms with the past and make a future together or face destruction.
Baldwin’s later works include the bitter play about racist oppression Blues for Mister Charlie (produced 1964), the story collection Going to Meet the Man (1965), the novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), and the essay collection No Name in the Street (1972). Ranked with Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison as a spokesman for his generation of black writers, he has been acknowledged for his support and inspiration by such figures as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Amiri Baraka.
From CSPAN American Writers
—————————————–
One of our staff favorites: Go Tell It On The Mountain
“Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.Ben Ehrenreich talks to Sesshu Foster
The second installment of prose acrobatics with City Lights authors Ben Ehrenreich and Sesshu Foster:
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Given that elephant seals are the marine descendants of bears, and manatees are descended from cows, and otters from foxes and sea lions from dogs, what are you doing to prepare for human evolution into analogous pinniped form?
* To prepare for eventual evolution of humans into pinniped sea mammalians, I continue to walk in the rain every chance I get. Even in memory, you can find me walking around downtown Seattle in the pouring rain on First St. down to Pioneer Square and back to Pike Market, where there used to be a good bookstore, and it’s the same rain I was walking in in East L.A. in 1973 in army jacket thinking about the CIA supported military coup in Chile that resulted in 3,000 desaparecidos and I was walking the hills of East L.A. thinking about that as the Vietnam War ground on and on, and it was raining… it was raining… Not to mention all those years of rain in the Bay Area, San Francisco in the pouring rain… rain pouring into the Grand Canyon… the ancient rain, Bob Kaufman called it—the dry rain of photochemical particulate on Los Angeles sunsets expelled from my lungs in little Aztec plumes of breath. I swim in the rain behind my eyeballs. In the jails and on stairs to nowhere it rains, sometimes dry rain, sometimes rain of darkness. Sometimes rivers of dreaming.
Will we need special clothes?
* Gortex made from salmon skin.
Or no clothes at all?
* Or clothes made of rice paper.
Will that be awkward at first? For whom?
* Everything is awkward, that is rule of Nature. Isaac Newton discovered Law of Gravity. De Carte discovered rules of Geometry. Socrates discovered Laws of Catehedrons. Nubis discovered the Rule of Pyramids. Marx delineated Laws of Surplus Value. Charles Darwin delineated Law of Nature is Awkward first, and forever.
Do you agree with leading pundits on CNN who regard the coming pinniped evolution as “the bright side of rising seas”?
…
6. Or did they say, “rising seethe”? Or “seeds”? Maybe they meant seeds.
Is it a) pragmatism, or b) treason, to participate in “outreach programs” to respected figures in the seal community?
* Female sea lion looked me directly in the face as if to lick me (or bite my nose) in Sea of Cortez a couple years ago. Caused me to get out of the water, scared her too because I jumped so fast.
Does this explain your search for Juan Fish?
* Studies triangulating coordinates of Juan Fish truck sightings reveals his intimate relationship to Mysteries of East L.A. and Terrain Ringing like a Bell.
Do you still have your Songs of the Humpback Whale LPs?
* Not sure. But I can reproduce these calls of whales on my old Smith Corona manual typewriter, in a way.
What about diet?
* Lentils.
Will Hunan Chile Fish Head still appeal?
* It appealed to me last week but we didn’t have enough eaters to eat one.
And literature? What about that? What about poetry? Won’t the sand cause chafing?
* We already have Melville, Conrad, Peter Mathiessen’s Far Tortuga, “Northern Tales,” edited by Howard Norman, the works of Knud Rasmussen, and if people can refrain from eating virtually every living thing on the planet, we might innovate interspecies communication enough to get a first person account of life under the sea equivalent to Walt Whitman’s poem, “the World Under the Brine,” much like Garcilaso de la Vega’s “Royal Commentaries of the Incas.” And his poetry, which I haven’t read.
As a pinniped-in-the-process-of-becoming, what position have you adapted with respect to porpoises and dying dolphins? What platforms, what distribution networks do you expect to employ? What will be the impacts? Will there be three, or some more even number?
It’s true that porpoises and even dying dolphins appear to be laughing at our attempts to shed vicious human traits of apocalyptic destruction of the world, our environment, their environment, other environments and other worlds. Destruction of everything, nuclear winter or collapse of civilizations, whichever comes first. But perhaps we might cast our visions and our quirks into digital figures or formats that the more generous among them might consider. After all, they like anchovies too.
And seas of ash?
* Seas of ash will continue to be a problem until oil company executives are imprisoned and executed with the same frequency as black people.
How will this affect the eightfold trajectory of cephalopod verse?
* I cannot really speak for the underwater poets, but I am working on translations of some of the longer cephalopod “songs,” and it is clear that they do tend to speak of historical eras when bipedal industrial capitalism has been entirely forgotten. Scholars used to believe that these and other animal “literatures” referred to an “alogocentric” and “anima-centric” world view which excluded direct reference to humanity and its sophisticated structures as a form of brute ignorance of our divinity, as well as a kind of extreme prejudice against such a clever species as ourselves, but it has recently become clear that these songs project into a future in which we are not located anywhere in it. They have forgotten us already, and we are still here. In our way.
Is it too late to switch to a duodecimal system? Might that not make some, small difference? At least as far as the old “No broker” apartment scam goes?
* In humans, the duodenum is a hollow jointed tube about 10–12 inch long connecting the HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stomach” stomach to the HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jejunum” jejunum. It begins with the HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodenal_bulb” duodenal bulb and ends at the HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligament_of_Treitz” ligament of Treitz. Once we are able to figure out how many Brooklyn apartment brokers it takes to change a duodenal bulb, we should arrive at Treitz, where we can get a cup of coffee and work on the transition.
Are individual acts of kindness sufficient, or do we need something more hardcore, like neutron bombs?
It turns out that neither has the intended effect, the effect for which it is intended, and neither kindness nor killers are of any use in contemporary politix and enviro-schizisms at all. Sadly, it turns out the only thing that works, that has any effect are Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, and academic and Center for Disease Control studies have proven that only suiting every man, woman and child, even toddlers, in these suits will have any affect on the planet and the trajectory of our global prognosis.
So here are today’s most widely used choices:
a.
b.
c. and d.
* Considering that we will have to wear these suits for the rest of our lives to effect global warming and ensure the survival of our children and pets, I tend toward the one with the great abacus faceplate, but my wife prefers that I sport the round furry red camellia with a two foot diameter. Which one would you like to wear and pass down to your descendants?
What’s that up in the sky?
* That’s Sergio, trying to learn how to drive one of our dirigibles. Keep an eye out because he might crash anywhere.
What’s stored up there in the top floor of L.A.’s City Hall? I mean other than the all-seeing eye, the mayor’s soul, and the thousands upon thousands of LAPD-confiscated paleta, tamale, and bacon-wrapped hot dog carts. What else they got up there?
* On the top floor of City Hall where a discreet employee of the departments can be found smoking on her break high above the city she serves, is where they keep the bronze bust of Tom Bradley, former LAPD officer, whom incumbent Sam Yorty tried to defeat in his second campaign by calling him a communist. There doesn’t seem to be any bust of Sam Yorty. Though the discarded remains of a partially eaten burger left near the waste receptacle is reminiscent of the man’s smile of hatred. And a scrap of styrofoam is brittle like his mentality.
When you slipped on a slippery rock and broke your ankle and lay there suffering among the other slippery rocks in the stream, did it occur to you that it might be interesting to build streaming video out of real, ice-cold, mountain snowmelt streams and that the American consumer might be willing to shell out Serious Cash for such a hand-crafted and authentic streaming experience? Rather that one made in China, for instance, by robots.
* The Chinese are at work at fashioning American consumerism by robots and when that change is effected the entire nation shall be replaced by a single machine shipped out of the Haijin docks at Hangzhou and assembled in Mexico. Americans who are so proud of their individualist ideologies have failed to notice these ideologies (“conservative,” “outlaw,” “liberal,” “left-wing,” “Christian,” “pro-life,” etc.) were manufactured by young Chinese women in sweatshop conditions in vast factories.
Is Serious Cash more or less serious than Serious Shit?
* I’m sure it was Johnny Cash who said, “Failure to address the milk to Wheaties or Rice Crispies ratio is a cereal killer.”
What about Serious Literature? Where does that fit in?
* You can find serious literature in the back, behind the celebrity sex manuals.
Is Nicanor Parra for real?
* He is. Or he was. Maybe Raul Zurita is real now.
What about “realism”? Is that real? If you pour it in an ice cube tray and stick a toothpick in it, is it refreshing on a hot, summer day?
* Realism is the drink that refreshes. In Moab, UT, on any day in August when it’s 100 degrees at 7 AM after a morning swim in the Apache Motel pool, pour a bit more realism in to your coolant tank to make the grade north of town by the 15 or 20 million tons of uranium tailings “90 feet high at its highest point” leaching into the Colorado river just to the north of town.
Which do you regard as more real, or more seriously real: socialist realism, Connecticut academic-adultery realism, or REAL ID?
* …
Does it worry you that the “real” is used as currency in Brazil, that you can walk around with it jingling in your pockets, that you can exchange it for fruit juices, flowers, mate, Murphy beds, shrimps on sticks? Does this give the Brazilians a leg-up in the “real economy”? Should there be sanctions?
* The Brasilians are ahead of us in every area, I’m not sure why. Probably because of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, he gave them the damned insights that spurred their advances of leaps and bounds over Americans who were building bridges of sighs in Topeka, Tallahassee and Philadelphia, San Diego, Tustin and Reno. If only Americans were not so habituated to endless construction of bridges of sighs, they might get off their collective ass. Luckily, the Brasilians have some cults that might distract them in this strange competition.
Does this relate in any way to “Amazon rankings”?
When Brasilian gangsters sing, “Stop your ranking, stop that skanking,” they are just trying to scuttle Americanism down by the liquor store. Drive away fast in your biggest American car you can find into the stars. (The music rises at this point.)
What about the ink? How will it ever dry when we’re all underwater? Where will we store our words?
(Music drowns out everything at this point.)
—————————————————-
Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 20 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. One of his last readings at St. Mark’s Poetry Project NYC is Mp3 archived at www.salon.com and local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, www.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook.
—————————————————-
Given that elephant seals are the marine descendants of bears, and manatees are descended from cows, and otters from foxes and sea lions from dogs, what are you doing to prepare for human evolution into analogous pinniped form?
* To prepare for eventual evolution of humans into pinniped sea mammalians, I continue to walk in the rain every chance I get. Even in memory, you can find me walking around downtown Seattle in the pouring rain on First St. down to Pioneer Square and back to Pike Market, where there used to be a good bookstore, and it’s the same rain I was walking in in East L.A. in 1973 in army jacket thinking about the CIA supported military coup in Chile that resulted in 3,000 desaparecidos and I was walking the hills of East L.A. thinking about that as the Vietnam War ground on and on, and it was raining… it was raining… Not to mention all those years of rain in the Bay Area, San Francisco in the pouring rain… rain pouring into the Grand Canyon… the ancient rain, Bob Kaufman called it—the dry rain of photochemical particulate on Los Angeles sunsets expelled from my lungs in little Aztec plumes of breath. I swim in the rain behind my eyeballs. In the jails and on stairs to nowhere it rains, sometimes dry rain, sometimes rain of darkness. Sometimes rivers of dreaming.
Will we need special clothes?
* Gortex made from salmon skin.
Or no clothes at all?
* Or clothes made of rice paper.
Will that be awkward at first? For whom?
* Everything is awkward, that is rule of Nature. Isaac Newton discovered Law of Gravity. De Carte discovered rules of Geometry. Socrates discovered Laws of Catehedrons. Nubis discovered the Rule of Pyramids. Marx delineated Laws of Surplus Value. Charles Darwin delineated Law of Nature is Awkward first, and forever.
Do you agree with leading pundits on CNN who regard the coming pinniped evolution as “the bright side of rising seas”?
…
6. Or did they say, “rising seethe”? Or “seeds”? Maybe they meant seeds.
Is it a) pragmatism, or b) treason, to participate in “outreach programs” to respected figures in the seal community?
* Female sea lion looked me directly in the face as if to lick me (or bite my nose) in Sea of Cortez a couple years ago. Caused me to get out of the water, scared her too because I jumped so fast.
Does this explain your search for Juan Fish?
* Studies triangulating coordinates of Juan Fish truck sightings reveals his intimate relationship to Mysteries of East L.A. and Terrain Ringing like a Bell.
Do you still have your Songs of the Humpback Whale LPs?
* Not sure. But I can reproduce these calls of whales on my old Smith Corona manual typewriter, in a way.
What about diet?
* Lentils.
Will Hunan Chile Fish Head still appeal?
* It appealed to me last week but we didn’t have enough eaters to eat one.
And literature? What about that? What about poetry? Won’t the sand cause chafing?
* We already have Melville, Conrad, Peter Mathiessen’s Far Tortuga, “Northern Tales,” edited by Howard Norman, the works of Knud Rasmussen, and if people can refrain from eating virtually every living thing on the planet, we might innovate interspecies communication enough to get a first person account of life under the sea equivalent to Walt Whitman’s poem, “the World Under the Brine,” much like Garcilaso de la Vega’s “Royal Commentaries of the Incas.” And his poetry, which I haven’t read.
As a pinniped-in-the-process-of-becoming, what position have you adapted with respect to porpoises and dying dolphins? What platforms, what distribution networks do you expect to employ? What will be the impacts? Will there be three, or some more even number?
It’s true that porpoises and even dying dolphins appear to be laughing at our attempts to shed vicious human traits of apocalyptic destruction of the world, our environment, their environment, other environments and other worlds. Destruction of everything, nuclear winter or collapse of civilizations, whichever comes first. But perhaps we might cast our visions and our quirks into digital figures or formats that the more generous among them might consider. After all, they like anchovies too.
And seas of ash?
* Seas of ash will continue to be a problem until oil company executives are imprisoned and executed with the same frequency as black people.
How will this affect the eightfold trajectory of cephalopod verse?
* I cannot really speak for the underwater poets, but I am working on translations of some of the longer cephalopod “songs,” and it is clear that they do tend to speak of historical eras when bipedal industrial capitalism has been entirely forgotten. Scholars used to believe that these and other animal “literatures” referred to an “alogocentric” and “anima-centric” world view which excluded direct reference to humanity and its sophisticated structures as a form of brute ignorance of our divinity, as well as a kind of extreme prejudice against such a clever species as ourselves, but it has recently become clear that these songs project into a future in which we are not located anywhere in it. They have forgotten us already, and we are still here. In our way.
Is it too late to switch to a duodecimal system? Might that not make some, small difference? At least as far as the old “No broker” apartment scam goes?
* In humans, the duodenum is a hollow jointed tube about 10–12 inch long connecting the HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stomach” stomach to the HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jejunum” jejunum. It begins with the HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodenal_bulb” duodenal bulb and ends at the HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligament_of_Treitz” ligament of Treitz. Once we are able to figure out how many Brooklyn apartment brokers it takes to change a duodenal bulb, we should arrive at Treitz, where we can get a cup of coffee and work on the transition.
Are individual acts of kindness sufficient, or do we need something more hardcore, like neutron bombs?
It turns out that neither has the intended effect, the effect for which it is intended, and neither kindness nor killers are of any use in contemporary politix and enviro-schizisms at all. Sadly, it turns out the only thing that works, that has any effect are Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, and academic and Center for Disease Control studies have proven that only suiting every man, woman and child, even toddlers, in these suits will have any affect on the planet and the trajectory of our global prognosis.
So here are today’s most widely used choices:
a.
b.
c. and d.
* Considering that we will have to wear these suits for the rest of our lives to effect global warming and ensure the survival of our children and pets, I tend toward the one with the great abacus faceplate, but my wife prefers that I sport the round furry red camellia with a two foot diameter. Which one would you like to wear and pass down to your descendants?
What’s that up in the sky?
* That’s Sergio, trying to learn how to drive one of our dirigibles. Keep an eye out because he might crash anywhere.
What’s stored up there in the top floor of L.A.’s City Hall? I mean other than the all-seeing eye, the mayor’s soul, and the thousands upon thousands of LAPD-confiscated paleta, tamale, and bacon-wrapped hot dog carts. What else they got up there?
* On the top floor of City Hall where a discreet employee of the departments can be found smoking on her break high above the city she serves, is where they keep the bronze bust of Tom Bradley, former LAPD officer, whom incumbent Sam Yorty tried to defeat in his second campaign by calling him a communist. There doesn’t seem to be any bust of Sam Yorty. Though the discarded remains of a partially eaten burger left near the waste receptacle is reminiscent of the man’s smile of hatred. And a scrap of styrofoam is brittle like his mentality.
When you slipped on a slippery rock and broke your ankle and lay there suffering among the other slippery rocks in the stream, did it occur to you that it might be interesting to build streaming video out of real, ice-cold, mountain snowmelt streams and that the American consumer might be willing to shell out Serious Cash for such a hand-crafted and authentic streaming experience? Rather that one made in China, for instance, by robots.
* The Chinese are at work at fashioning American consumerism by robots and when that change is effected the entire nation shall be replaced by a single machine shipped out of the Haijin docks at Hangzhou and assembled in Mexico. Americans who are so proud of their individualist ideologies have failed to notice these ideologies (“conservative,” “outlaw,” “liberal,” “left-wing,” “Christian,” “pro-life,” etc.) were manufactured by young Chinese women in sweatshop conditions in vast factories.
Is Serious Cash more or less serious than Serious Shit?
* I’m sure it was Johnny Cash who said, “Failure to address the milk to Wheaties or Rice Crispies ratio is a cereal killer.”
What about Serious Literature? Where does that fit in?
* You can find serious literature in the back, behind the celebrity sex manuals.
Is Nicanor Parra for real?
* He is. Or he was. Maybe Raul Zurita is real now.
What about “realism”? Is that real? If you pour it in an ice cube tray and stick a toothpick in it, is it refreshing on a hot, summer day?
* Realism is the drink that refreshes. In Moab, UT, on any day in August when it’s 100 degrees at 7 AM after a morning swim in the Apache Motel pool, pour a bit more realism in to your coolant tank to make the grade north of town by the 15 or 20 million tons of uranium tailings “90 feet high at its highest point” leaching into the Colorado river just to the north of town.
Which do you regard as more real, or more seriously real: socialist realism, Connecticut academic-adultery realism, or REAL ID?
* …
Does it worry you that the “real” is used as currency in Brazil, that you can walk around with it jingling in your pockets, that you can exchange it for fruit juices, flowers, mate, Murphy beds, shrimps on sticks? Does this give the Brazilians a leg-up in the “real economy”? Should there be sanctions?
* The Brasilians are ahead of us in every area, I’m not sure why. Probably because of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, he gave them the damned insights that spurred their advances of leaps and bounds over Americans who were building bridges of sighs in Topeka, Tallahassee and Philadelphia, San Diego, Tustin and Reno. If only Americans were not so habituated to endless construction of bridges of sighs, they might get off their collective ass. Luckily, the Brasilians have some cults that might distract them in this strange competition.
Does this relate in any way to “Amazon rankings”?
When Brasilian gangsters sing, “Stop your ranking, stop that skanking,” they are just trying to scuttle Americanism down by the liquor store. Drive away fast in your biggest American car you can find into the stars. (The music rises at this point.)
What about the ink? How will it ever dry when we’re all underwater? Where will we store our words?
(Music drowns out everything at this point.)
—————————————————-
Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 20 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. One of his last readings at St. Mark’s Poetry Project NYC is Mp3 archived at www.salon.com and local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, www.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook.
Visit his blog, East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines.
Ben Ehrenreich is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. HIs fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, Bomb, and Black Clock, among other publications. His novel, The Suitors, was published by Counterpoint in 2006 and received widespread critical attention. This is his second novel.
Ben Ehrenreich is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. HIs fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, Bomb, and Black Clock, among other publications. His novel, The Suitors, was published by Counterpoint in 2006 and received widespread critical attention. This is his second novel.
Sesshu Foster talks to Ben Ehrenreich
Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 20 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. One of his last readings at St. Mark’s Poetry Project NYC is Mp3 archived at www.salon.com and local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, www.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook. Visit his blog, East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines.
Ben Ehrenreich is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. HIs fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, Bomb, and Black Clock, among other publications. His novel, The Suitors, was published by Counterpoint in 2006 and received widespread critical attention. This is his second novel.Questions for Ben
What is the purpose of mystery
I am not permitted to reveal it.
What is the best goat in los angeles
The mayor.
What is the best dumpling in the world
The world is a dumpling: this planet—and us on it—the filling. The skin, what we call space, is out there somewhere. But I can only ask the question: what is beyond the skin? Is there a dipping sauce? Chile oil? Black vinegar? Who will eat it? When?
What is yoru secret
Night-blooming jasmine.
What is your secret
I hid it so well that I cannot remember where.
What is your posole recipe
Mine is mostly bones. Those close to me request that I not prepare it at Christmas time (or any other time) due to the disturbing clacking sounds made by the bare bones in the big stew pot, and to the horrors required for its preparation. (No one gets hurt but myself, so I don’t understand what the fuss is about, but family is often impenetrable.) It is, I will concede, a bit bland. You can add as much chile, lime, shredded cabbage, and oregano as you like, however, and you may wish to bring your own broth.
What kind of dumplings do they have in Palestine
They have dumplings made of razor wire stuffed inside the barrel of a Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle stuffed inside a teargas canister stuffed inside the shell from an M8A251 white phosphorus projectile stuffed inside a GPS-guided mortar made by Raytheon (right over there by the airport, just south of the 105 freeway; my old landlady’s daughter works there, leaves for work at 4:30 every morning, to avoid the traffic, she says) stuffed inside a Merkava tank stuffed inside a concrete watchtower and traditionally garnished with more razor wire, thirst and humiliation. Not being Palestinian, I was not permitted to taste these dumplings myself, but I smelled them everywhere. They were there in every pot, steaming away.
What are Palestinian toy tank war sculptures made out of plastic
That is a hard story to tell, but I met a young man named Eid Suleiman Hadhalin in a tiny Bedouin village in the south Hebron hills. A black goat followed me around the village like a puppy, nibbling at my shoe laces. Another goat, four days old and born with deformed legs bayed miserably, ceaselessly, dragging its crippled forelegs, its chin in the dirt. The village was half in ruins, destroyed by Israeli bulldozers. Ezra Nawi, the Israeli activist who took me there, had been arrested in one of the ruins when it was still someone’s home. He had refused to leave, refused to make way for the bulldozers. You can watch it on YouTube. The soldiers dragged him out, then bulldozed the house. Ezra went to prison for several months for that. The army has since issued demolition orders on every standing structure in the village, including the toilet and the communal oven. (The villagers, who are very poor, use goat dung for fuel; the Israeli settlers who live behind a fence just yards away claim the smoke is an environmental hazard.) Ezra told me I would like Eid. He was right. He told me that Eid was such a gentle and pure soul that he should not have been born in this world. I cannot judge that, but Eid had bright, glowing eyes and an open, joyful face. He lived with his wife and their two-year-old daughter. He was an artist. He gathered plastic scrap and trash from the landscape, cut it in strips and sewed them together to build small, scale sculptures of attack helicopters and bulldozers. They were perfect, beautiful things, precisely painted. He had put a small motor from a child’s toy in the helicopter so that its rotors actually spun. But he had stopped making helicopters, he told me. “We don’t make war here,” he said, and laughed. Now he just made bulldozers.
What are the secrets of Glendale Blvd
There are too many to list. I used to see coyotes running down the middle of the boulevard at two or three in the morning, over by the Jack in the Box. One of the neighbor’s goats used to escape and I’d see it munching the hedges by the Taco Bell parking lot while I waited for the bus and I would see junkies shooting up on the sidewalk behind La Espiga panadería and the guys at the transmission shop next door used to have a rooster, which in the mornings I often fantasized about bludgeoning, but those days are long gone. Now the owners of La Espiga have painted “Like us on Facebook” on the northern wall of the bakery where the Echo Park Locos and Los Crazys used to battle it out in black and red Krylon and I’d much rather talk about Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, who moved to the neighborhood in 1915 after their release from federal prison, having been convicted of violating U.S. neutrality laws for their involvement in an anarchist revolt in Baja California in 1911, when about 500 Magonistas and 100 American Wobblies defeated Mexican federal troops, taking and briefly holding Tecate, Mexicali, Tijuana, and San Quintín, in Mexicali establishing a small library into which any campesino could wander, sit down and read Kropotkin. I’ve never figured out exactly where they lived, if it was by the AutoZone and the post office or somewhere on the other side of the freeway, maybe by the new library which used to be an empty lot where they sold Christmas trees, across the street from the yuppie Vietnamese place, but it was definitely not where the Thriftee Storage is, because that was Mack Sennett’s studio in those days, and I’ve wondered sometimes what the Magón brothers thought of all that, if they ever walked down Glendale to the park or to catch a streetcar and if on the way they ever ran into a Sennett shoot, Keystone Kops bumbling down the boulevard, Fatty Arbuckle strutting for the cameras. Sennett’s crews filmed a new short every week and often spilled out into the street and I can’t help but think that if you looked at those old reels close enough for long enough you’d see the Magón brothers’ shadows flickering across the action, making it all seem not so funny really, those silly, silly kops, how inkompetent they are. The cops arrested the Magóns again in 1916, this time for distributing indecent material through the mails, which in their case meant newspaper articles critical of Venustiano Carranza, Woodrow Wilson’s ally of the moment. Ricardo died in Leavenworth six years later. Officially, of a heart attack. More likely he was hanged. I used to swim in the pool on Colton Street, just off Glendale a few blocks south of the park, went there almost every day for years. And I’ve heard that Ti George’s Chicken, which burned down shortly after the Haitian earthquake, is finally open again. Good news.
How would you describe Chuleta’s most adroit move
I’ve been working on this for a while, have finally trained her to dip herself in milk, then flour, then beaten egg, then seasoned bread crumbs. Then I say, “Fry!” and she leaps into the pan.
If you could grow certain items in your garden what would they be
I would grow a giant, velvety, dark, bluish purple flower so big that it would engulf the world in its folds. This may sound cataclysmic, but it would not be sad for us. It would be okay. There would be hints of melancholy perhaps for a little while, but the giant flower would be so soft and smell so sweet that we would not really mind. We would get used to the new way quickly, and forget about all this foolishness.
What kind of chiles are you growing and why not
This year: fatalli chiles, which are orange and extremely hot; chiles de arbol negros, which turn a wonderful glossy black when they are ripe and are also quite hot; Thai dragon chiles, old standbys that I like a great deal but that are relatively ho-hum in such exotic company; red Scotch bonnets, which are not, to my mind, as tasty as fatallis or habaneros; and these little round Chinese chiles that I don’t know the name of but of which I’ve grown quite fond. They’re like peas crossed with crocodiles. I also had a manzanillo chile plant but it only produced a single chile so I dug it up in spite. Last year I had a chocolate habanero that I still dream about. The chiles ripened a deep, dark brown and beneath all that heat they really did taste like chocolate. I wish I had saved the seeds.
What’s on the soundtrack to your last novel Ether
Everyone’s asking me this question lately. It’s mainly Humpback Whale Sounds, John Cale, Joy Division and Nina Simone. Plus the snapping sound a roadmap makes when you’re driving through the desert and you’re lost and your a/c is out so you have to keep the windows open and the map is flapping all over the front seat, damn the wind.
Don’t you have a responsibility as an author to provide dumplings to your characters and if so what type I tried, but the grease got all over the monitor and they keyboard got smushed with crab and pork and dough. I should clean that up, I know.
Which type of dumpling is most appropriate to which type of character
Plum dumplings with melted butter, confectioners sugar.
If you were to cast actors to play characters from your novels, who would you get to sew their costumes and how would you arrange that
Okay, if you were getting actors to play your characters,
All right, say you did finally round up numerous actors to play a bunch of your characters, list them actors and the characters here, each one with a Hunan dish that represents something about them
All characters will be played by Steve McQueen. He will wear a white, asbestos-lined driving suit with silver and gold piping, plus matching crash helmet and various wigs. (Señora Ruiz at the tailoring shop next to the transmission shop has refused to hem it, citing OSHA regulations.) Steve McQueen will eat one Hunan Chile Fish Head for every character he plays and I will reap the leftovers. You’re welcome to come over and help me dispose of them.
Which living authors currently in los angeles should we talk shit about
Chester Himes, Louis Adamic, Simone de Beauvoir, Oscar Acosta, Bertolt Brecht. None of those fuckers returns my calls.
Why is life and fate by vassily grossman which is about the battle for Stalingrad and the doldrums of Stalinism not more interesting than nausea by horacio castellanos moya where almost nothing happens but it’s still way more interesting and shorter
Because Castellanos Moya is funny. Grossman not so much.
What can we do with all these extra question marks ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
We are already doing it.
Can we insert short chapters about dumplings and Chinese restaurants in the san Gabriel valley and dolphins and porpoises in your next novel and at what point in the novel
Absolutely, so long as all the restaurants are called Hunan Chile King and decorated inside and out with colorful strands of non-chile-shaped Christmas lights. I am enough of an anarchist to believe that it should be up to the dolphins, porpoises, dumplings, and Hunan Chile Kings to decide where their chapters will go. Some of them may choose to locate their chapters outside of the space of the novel itself, maybe high up in Elysian Park, where the hills drop down over the 5 freeway and the rail yards and the river. Readers should understand that they are free to search for chapters there and elsewhere, even if I have not yet written them. In fact, several supplementary chapters of Ether are still hiding up there, not far from the Police Academy shooting range and the endless acres of Dodger Stadium parking lots, pristine in the off-season.
Why is time itself faintly whitish
All the bleach.
What is your opinion as a widelty traveled journalist of truckee, ca
I was there once many years ago, and remember it fondly. I ate barbecued oysters, though that memory now strikes me as unlikely, and perhaps invented. It was dark, so I can’t say much more.
How do you view the future of the orgamaic novel
It is bleak. Have you tried to fold a Kindle?
Is there another question and can it be worked on with a hand drill
Bzzzzzzz.
Celebrating Black History Month: ¡Venceremos?
City Lights Bookstore is honoring national Black History Month by featuring books that we feel are essential reading for anyone interested in African American and Black Studies — from classics to contemporary.
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¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba
Jafari S. Allen
Duke University Press Books (July 22, 2011)
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Promoting the revolutionary socialist project of equality and dignity for all, the slogan ¡Venceremos! (We shall overcome!) appears throughout Cuba, everywhere from newspapers to school murals to nightclubs. Yet the accomplishments of the Cuban state are belied by the marginalization of blacks, the prejudice against sexual minorities, and gender inequities. ¡Venceremos? is a groundbreaking ethnography on race, desire, and belonging among blacks in early-twenty-first-century Cuba, as the nation opens its economy to global capital. Expanding on Audre Lorde’s vision of embodied, even “useful,” desire, Jafari S. Allen shows how black Cubans engage in acts of “erotic self-making,” reinterpreting, transgressing, and potentially transforming racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities. He illuminates intimate spaces of autonomy created by people whose multiple subaltern identities have rendered them illegible to state functionaries, and to most scholars. In everyday practices in Havana and Santiago de Cuba—including Santeria rituals, gay men’s parties, hip hop concerts, the tourist-oriented sex trade, lesbian organizing, HIV education, and just hanging out—Allen highlights small but significant acts of struggle for autonomy and dignity.
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¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba
Jafari S. Allen
Duke University Press Books (July 22, 2011)
*************************************************************
Promoting the revolutionary socialist project of equality and dignity for all, the slogan ¡Venceremos! (We shall overcome!) appears throughout Cuba, everywhere from newspapers to school murals to nightclubs. Yet the accomplishments of the Cuban state are belied by the marginalization of blacks, the prejudice against sexual minorities, and gender inequities. ¡Venceremos? is a groundbreaking ethnography on race, desire, and belonging among blacks in early-twenty-first-century Cuba, as the nation opens its economy to global capital. Expanding on Audre Lorde’s vision of embodied, even “useful,” desire, Jafari S. Allen shows how black Cubans engage in acts of “erotic self-making,” reinterpreting, transgressing, and potentially transforming racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities. He illuminates intimate spaces of autonomy created by people whose multiple subaltern identities have rendered them illegible to state functionaries, and to most scholars. In everyday practices in Havana and Santiago de Cuba—including Santeria rituals, gay men’s parties, hip hop concerts, the tourist-oriented sex trade, lesbian organizing, HIV education, and just hanging out—Allen highlights small but significant acts of struggle for autonomy and dignity.
Looking Back on my Origins as a Science-Fiction Poet in the World of Tomorrow
Our planet is beginning to be surrounded by rings of orbiting debris consisting of dead satellites, fragments from satellite collisions, spent rocket boosters, items lost or jettisoned by spacraft crews, and the like. As human activity in Earth orbit continues, the density of the debris rings is increasing, and may well reach a tipping point where the rings become impassable to all spacecraft. This threat is known as the Kessler syndrome, a situation in which humanity’s access to space would be barred for decades, if not centuries.Of all the threats facing humanity, the Kessler syndrome must rank lower than pollution here on Earth, global warming, the exhaustion of natural resources, the collapse of biodiversity (and with it, the food chain), and the danger of nuclear war. Of course, everyday life would be seriously impacted by the elimination of satellites facilitating instantaneous worldwide communication. Yet the Kessler syndrome also provides yet another symbol of the way industrial civilization has barred its own path to the future––a future that was once identified, as I was coming of age in the sixties, with the expansion of human life beyond the confines of Earth.
As the Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky put it, “The Earth is the cradle of humanity––but you cannot remain in the cradle forever.” Spaceflight represented not only a technological achievement but the maturation of the human species: it was time to leave home and discover new worlds of possibility across the universe. An even larger claim was made: just as life emerged from the sea to inhabit the land, we would ascend to a higher evolutionary stage by emerging into the new environment of space. The imagination of this moment was archetypally expressed in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, showing in its finale the metamorphosis of an astronaut into an embryonic Star-child.
I was twelve years old when I attended the premiere of 2001 on a futuristically concave Cinerama screen in Boston, and the experience permanently altered my consciousness. Since I already knew I wanted to become a writer, viewing the movie convinced me to become a science-fiction writer. I took Arthur C. Clarke, who had coauthored the screenplay with Kubrick, as my guiding light, reading his books with an almost religious fervency. Indeed, throughout my teens, I cultivated a monastic aloofness to the social and political issues that convulsed the sixties and early seventies; my life was (and, in some sense, still is) dedicated to imagining the inhuman vastness of the cosmos. For me, the moon landing was a messianic event: I couldn’t believe that fate had granted me the privilege of witnessing the next––and arguably the most important––step in the evolution of life.
Despite my desire to transcend the mundane sphere, I was a product of my time: a hippie-appearing youth whose head was in the stars, but whose feet were planted in the counterculture. Inevitably, social forces were shaping both my personal development and the science-fiction genre. A cultural revolution was underway, one that was all too soon absorbed into the capitalist system, but that for a moment gave rise to a massive churn of utopian thought and practice throughout broad sections of the populace. The science-fiction genre too was caught up in this revolutionary wave, moving beyond its formulaic pulp-fiction origins into the self-reflexive spaces of literary modernism. A new generation of science-fiction writers––such as Samuel Delany, J. G. Ballard, Ursula LeGuin, and Joanna Russ––declared science fiction to be, not only a form of high literary art, but the main vehicle of modern imagination, the only medium capable of reflecting a reality that itself had become science-fictional.
I avidly followed the revolution within science fiction, attempting to achieve in my juvenile prose that fusion of technoscience and psychedelia I had first encountered in 2001. The boldest literary experiments in the genre were taking place in the British magazine New Worlds; moreover, its editors and writers hung out with progressive rock musicians (such as the band Hawkwind) who, in turn, adopted science-fiction stylings. This was a mix I desperately wanted to enter, and I submitted a stream of stories to the magazine, all of which were rejected (but often with encouraging comments by the editors).
As I tried to hone my craft, I found that I was having a problem constructing plot and character; I was far more interested in the weight and the weave of words themselves, obsessively reworking sentences into syntactically and semantically twisted skeins. This twisting of language was not at all in the service of storytelling; indeed, it soon became an end in itself. I discovered that introducing line breaks into my baroquely convoluted phrasings helped the page to breathe. I had to admit I was writing poetry.
This realization was at first a disappointment to me; things were not going according to plan. Against my will, my imagination wanted to make poems, not stories. But if I was unable to compose narrative fiction, then I resolved to become a writer of science-fiction poetry. I had no other option. Science fiction (SF), with its visionary take on reality, constituted my entire worldview––my natal religion, as it were. I was not about to leave this church; my turn toward poetry would not turn me away from the genre. To the contrary, I was convinced I’d enhanced the genre by inventing a new form: the modernist science-fiction poem.
Of course, given the degree of modernist literary innovation occurring within science fiction, it was only a matter of time before others would independently come up with the idea. Among the classified advertisements in of Locus, the “newspaper” of the genre, I spotted a call for submissions to The Speculative Poetry Review. Its editor, Robert Frazier, had also arrived at the notion of a modernist SF poetry––one that would, as he fiercely argued in an editorial, apply the lessons of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” to science fiction. I wasn’t sure who Charles Olson was, but I knew I had come to the right place. Frazier immediately accepted “Asleep in the Arms of Mother Night,” one of my earliest poems, for publication in his magazine (this was, in fact, my first acceptance; I was twenty-two years old).
Frazier’s mag was one node in a network of SF-poetry journals that sprung up in the late seventies; the network was eventually unified by the Science Fiction Poetry Association, founded by the SF writer Suzette Haden Elgin in 1978. I got to know Bruce Boston, one of SF poetry’s major practitioners, as well as Adam Cornford, a City Lights author who also has made notable contributions to SF poetry; like me, both of them resided in Berkeley at that time. The late seventies and early eighties were undoubtedly the golden era of SF poetry, a period in which the parameters and potentials of what many of us considered a new literary form were worked out for the first time. Beginning as a subculture within the science-fiction community, SF poetry soon gained a foothold in the genre’s mass-market magazines and anthologies. During this time, my own poems, along with those I wrote in collaboration with Frazier, appeared in Amazing Stories and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. And my long-standing desire to be published in New Worlds was fulfilled when my poem “The Sonic Flowerfall of Primes” appeared in the magazine’s final issue in 1980.
Several significant anthologies of SF poetry were issued around this time: The Umbral Anthology (Umbral Press, 1982), edited by Steve Rasnic Tem; Burning with a Vision (Owlswick Press, 1984), edited by Robert Frazier; and Poly (Ocean View Books, 1989), edited by Lee Ballentine (the editors are all important speculative poets in their own right). A new branch of science fiction had grown and was flowering into prominence.
Unfortunately, the efflorescence of SF poetry coincided with the end of the period of postwar prosperity in America; the economic contraction caused SF publishers to begin looking at their bottom line. As sales diminished, literary experimentation within the genre was discouraged, and SF prose––in contrast to SF poetry––entered a phase of aesthetic conservatism and commercialization. (Cyberpunk SF of the eighties, despite its literary pretensions, developed a style that inserted science fiction into an increasingly commodified lifeworld.) At the end of the eighties, the SF genre was no longer the visionary, utopian zone that it had been in my youth; instead, it was gradually becoming absorbed into the “culture industry” of late capitalism.
Meanwhile, as I learned more about non-SF forms of poetry, my work was breaking through the boundaries of classic SF into a kind of speculative lyricism with affinities to both surrealism and Language poetry. By the early nineties, after a series of rejections from Isaac Asimov’s, I decided that the only way I could continue to occupy deep space was to abandon science fiction. It felt like I was leaving home, but––in the words of the Marxist-Utopian Ernst Bloch, my guide to a future beyond the technical utopias of SF––home is a place we have never been. My poetry collection Science Fiction (Pantograph Press, 1992) was a transitional volume, containing both SF poems and work in the new mode. As the title indicated, my poetry now enclosed the genre, instead of being enclosed by it. And yet I will always consider myself to be a “speculative poet.”
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Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems, published by City Lights Books in 2010.
Celebrating Black History Month: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
All February long, City Lights Bookstore is honoring national Black History Month by featuring authors and books that we feel are essential reading for anyone interested in African American and Black Studies — from the well-known to the less-known, the classics to the contemporary.
To find out if a book is in stock, email us at orders [at] citylights [dot] com.
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Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Marable Manning
Viking
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Years in the making-the definitive biography of the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins’ bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds ofthousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world.
Manning Marable’s new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties. Reaching into Malcolm’s troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents’ activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination. Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of the most singular forces for social change, capturing with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
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Manning Marable (1950–2011) was the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African American Studies and a professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University. He was the founding director of African American Studies at Columbia from 1993 to 2003, and also served as director of Columbia’s Center for Contemporary Black History. The author of fifteen books, Marable also edited the quarterly journal Souls.
More about the late Manning Marable and Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention from NPR here.
To find out if a book is in stock, email us at orders [at] citylights [dot] com.
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Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Marable Manning
Viking
***********************************************************
Years in the making-the definitive biography of the legendary black activist.Of the great figure in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins’ bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds ofthousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world.
Manning Marable’s new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties. Reaching into Malcolm’s troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents’ activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination. Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of the most singular forces for social change, capturing with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
—–
Manning Marable (1950–2011) was the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African American Studies and a professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University. He was the founding director of African American Studies at Columbia from 1993 to 2003, and also served as director of Columbia’s Center for Contemporary Black History. The author of fifteen books, Marable also edited the quarterly journal Souls.More about the late Manning Marable and Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention from NPR here.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore interviews editor of Captive Genders Eric Stanley
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith (published by AK Press) is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex. The anthology offers intoxicating glimpses into a history of queer resistance to state tyranny, from 1960s sex worker organizing in San Francisco to mass protests over the Toronto bathhouse raids of 1981 to prisoner solidarity demanding HIV medication for transgender prisoner Victoria Arellano in 2007. By analyzing the root causes of anti-queer and anti-trans violence, Captive Genders exposes the brutality of state control over queer/trans bodies inside and outside prison walls, and proposes an analytical framework for undoing not just the prison system, but its mechanisms of surveillance, dehumanization and containment. By queering a prison abolition analysis, Captive Genders moves us to imagine the impossible dream of liberation. Here I ask coeditor Eric Stanley a few questions about the book, the process, and the politics.———————————————————————————————–
The pieces in this book vary from highly academic essays to extremely personal narratives – some feature broad historical analysis while others are very specific to the current moment. How did you decide to include such a wide range of material?
Eric Stanley: We began the project knowing that we wanted to include people writing from the inside and we wanted all the pieces to articulate an abolitionist politic. Beyond that, we did not want to assume what would or would not be “accessible” to our readers. I think we all approach a text with different histories and thus we connect with specific writing or not. To this end we wanted to offer multiple points of entry—personal narrative, analytic essays and conversations.
I like the way you include histories that may not at first glance appear to be trans-specific in content, like the piece on the Toronto bathhouse raids, which is most literally about gay men, or men who have sex in bathhouses, right? Or, Erica Meiners’ super-layered, intimate and analytical piece that investigates the history of sex offender registries, the shifting focus of who is targeted and who is made safe or unsafe when sex panics work their way into legislation. I feel like you’re pointing to the instability of gender and sexual categories – in short, featuring a trans analysis that isn’t limited to a certain type of body or identity. Was this part of your intention?
ES: Yes, I think that’s exactly what we are trying to do with the book, offer a trans analysis for events that do not necessarily, at least at first, seem to be only about “trans people.” The piece about the gay bathhouse raids was important to include because those raids, which were a part of larger project of gentrification and “beautification” for sure also affected trans people through increased policing of the area. Furthermore, the same logics that are and were used against gay men in the bathhouses, that they were both diseased and criminal, are the same logics, differently articulated, that suggest that trans people are pathological.
I think Erica’s piece also really beautifully illustrates the ways domination is made and remade and how an abolitionist politic is most powerful when applied to situations that are the most controversial. Many people will argue that “victimless crimes” should be decriminalized, but Erica’s piece pushes us to think about abolition in terms of sexual assault, a topic that many anti-prison activists shy away from.
Also, while it was important for us to show the ways in which dominant lesbian and gay politics oftentimes reproduce gender normativity and transphobia, we also wanted to show the complexities of our multiple identities. Many of our authors identify as both gay and transgender, or queer and trans, or other combinations of identities. The neatness that the mainstream politics of LGBT inclusion demands decomposes under the realities that many of us live.
You spent seven years working on this project – what was the hardest part?
ES: I’m not the most organized person, so one of the hardest parts was keeping track of all the various drafts of each piece. Editing through email, mail, over the phone, and in person with people created a bit of chaos. However, in the end I think it was good it took as long as it did. I think if the book had been released seven years ago there would not have been as large an audience as there seems to be now. Hopefully Captive Genders will continue to push us to work toward abolishing the prison industrial complex and building a fabulously safe world for us all.
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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of two novels, most recently So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights 2008), and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies, most recently Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (AK Press 2012). Mattilda will be touring the West Coast from late-January through mid-March 2012 – check in on upcoming dates via mattildabernsteinsycamore.com, and always feel free to send feedback or propositions on any subject at all. Mattilda just finished a memoir, The End of San Francisco, so watch out!Celebrating Black History Month: Now Dig This
All February long, City Lights Bookstore is honoring national Black History Month by featuring authors and books that we feel are essential reading for anyone interested in African American and Black Studies — from the well-known to the less-known, the classics to the contemporary.
To find out if a book is in stock, email us at orders [at] citylights [dot] com.
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Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980
Kellie Jones
Prestel USA
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The pioneering work of a group of black artists is documented in this companion volume to a groundbreaking exhibition. This comprehensive, lavishly illustrated catalogue offers the first in-depth survey of the incredibly vital but often overlooked legacy of Los Angeles’s African American artists, featuring many never-before-seen works, some of which were previously considered lost. Now Dig This! features artists including Melvin Edwards, Fred Eversley, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Alonzo Davis, Dale Brockman Davis, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and Charles White, connecting their work to larger movements, trends, and ideas that fueled the arts during this important era of creative, cultural, and political ferment. The publication also explores the significant network of friendships and collaborations made across racial lines, while underscoring the influence that African American artists had on the era’s larger movements and trends. Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 is part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty.
To find out if a book is in stock, email us at orders [at] citylights [dot] com.
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Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980
Kellie Jones
Prestel USA
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The pioneering work of a group of black artists is documented in this companion volume to a groundbreaking exhibition. This comprehensive, lavishly illustrated catalogue offers the first in-depth survey of the incredibly vital but often overlooked legacy of Los Angeles’s African American artists, featuring many never-before-seen works, some of which were previously considered lost. Now Dig This! features artists including Melvin Edwards, Fred Eversley, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Alonzo Davis, Dale Brockman Davis, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and Charles White, connecting their work to larger movements, trends, and ideas that fueled the arts during this important era of creative, cultural, and political ferment. The publication also explores the significant network of friendships and collaborations made across racial lines, while underscoring the influence that African American artists had on the era’s larger movements and trends. Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 is part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty.
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D. Scot Miller on The Liminal People
“You’re a king playing the role of vizier to sycophants and insignificants.”
These are the first words that Taggert, the protagonist of Ayize Jama-Everett’s The Liminal People (Small Beer Press, 2011), hears from Nordeen, leader of the death and drug-dealing African cartel known as the Razor Necks.
Taggert has a special power; he can heal people with his touch. Nordeen has even greater powers and is willing to take Taggert under his tutelage in exchange for his undying devotion. Soon after, Taggert is wearing their trademark razor on a chain around his neck and is in service to Nordeen as both muscle and healer from a pirate utopia on the coast of Morocco. When Yasmene, Taggart’s only love, reaches out to him from London to find her missing daughter Tamara, he begins a hectic quest – at break-neck speed – through the underground world of squats, raves, and curry-houses; falling into his past, stumbling into his future, and trying to gain his freedom from Nordeen; symbolized by the razor that digs into his flesh.
The Liminal People can be read in several ways. Told in a hardscrabble-gritty-noir style, Jama-Everett spins a surprisingly plausible tale of empaths, telepaths, telekinesis, and inter-dimensional travel through Tantric sex to scintillate and intrigue any skeptic to the genre.
As a straight-up espionage thriller, complete with diplomats, assassinations, safe-houses, and conspiracies, Jama-Everett could give Ian Fleming some fierce competition. It can also be read as an extension of the “mutant-strain’ of science-fiction, found first in comic books like Marvel’s X-men, where genetically mutated humans are endowed with many of the powers Jama-Everett utilizes in his main characters. Taggert’s self-healing ability, for instance, is reminiscent of the X-men’s tough-guy, Wolverine. Of course, there are twists. He can also crush your heart like a fig with his mind, make you allergic to your own skin. I suspect that most will enter and exit Everett’s world through this portal.
But as with the X-men comics of the early 80s, The Liminal People can also be interpreted as a grand allegory to contemporary issues around identity and personal power. This “close reading’ is often overlooked in literature coming from what Samuel Delany calls “The Golden Ghetto” of graphic novels, science and speculative fiction. This seems particularly true with marginalized authors within this marginalized genre.
Without telling too much, Jama-Everett intentionally begins the story in Africa with an encounter with the Dogon, a people who had knowledge of planets on the other side of the sun several centuries before they were discovered by modern science. Due to his healing abilities he is turned away. They tell him, “Healers are death of the warrior’s spirit.”
It is atmospheric asides like this that call the reader to dig deeper than traditional supernatural fantasy for wonder, and to reach further than science for the limits of human potential. Each manifestation of a power from a character is surprising, and a big part of the thrill is the jack-in-box reveal of a power triggered by cliff-hanging danger.
Unlike many books of this kind, the characters and settings are deeply rooted in the post-apocalyptic present of gun-running, famines, and child-prostitution, navigating a fully inclusive world of the darker peoples of the earth, and brimming with edicts for those coping with gifts in an ever-increasing world of mono-cultural mediocrity. Lines like, “Tamara is either a cool-girl or a freak. All of our kind are. We either lead the pseudo-outsiders or we truly live the outsider experience,” speaks to the weird, youngster in us all.
When Nordeen recruits Taggert with the opening line of this review, itself a metaphor, Taggert acquiesces saying, “If you don’t have powers, then you probably wouldn’t understand why I stayed. The best analogy is, imagine you’re a gorilla living amongst chimps. They’re kind of like you, but lighter, smaller, less substantial. They run around afraid all the time, screaming and barking at the slightest sound. You can throw your weight around and get whatever you want. So when you finally come across another gorilla, not only another gorilla, but an older, stronger gorilla that has a crew of chimps doing his bidding without doing much weight throwing, you want to figure out how it all goes down.”
Reading the story this way puts a compelling spin on what might have been an amusing, but easily forgettable yarn in the wrong hands. As exhilarating the story of Taggert’s quest to find Tamara is, much the exterior and interior dialogue that reveals the author as not only a disciple of Octavia Butler, but Nietzsche as well, is where the book truly shines.
“The norms don’t know, can’t perceive the world around the way I can,” Taggert laments while having a drink at a trendy single’s bar. “They don’t see the old powers of darkness, the one that make such grand machinations and movements seem predestined. I look around and I see the bloated ignorance of the lumpen proletariat; roly-poly, sausage-fingered, ginger-topped fathers of at least two illegitimate children trying to massage the asses of waif-like, peroxide-scarred students who are themselves trying to navigate adulthood with their new-found freedom from outdated parenting…In truth, all permutations of this life bore me.” Underneath all of the tricks of the tongue and mind that the book conjures, dwells a black radical, shape-shifting for change.
The Afrosurreal are border-crossers, edge-dwellers who work from within the margins with a serious intent, “Kings playing the role of viziers,” as they travel with a list of aliases, being paid in bundled envelopes, and actively resisting classification.
From within “The Golden Ghetto” Jama-Everett has created a book that resists classification, joining the Afrosurreal Pantheon of writers exploring this new-found freedom. He calls the gifted ones Liminal People, people “Always on the borderland, the threshold, the in-between.” He has Taggert explain. “I learned what I know by walking the liminal lands.” I trust that many people will relate, or will want to.
The Liminal People
Ayize Jama-Everett
Small Beer Press (2012)
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
D. Scot Miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist , teacher, curator. He sits on the board of directors of nocturnes review, and is a regular contributor to The East Bay Express, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Popmatters, and Mosaic Magazine. 2011 San Francisco Arts Commission recipient for AfroSurreal San Francisco Project. Miller is author of The AfroSurreal Manifesto and is completing a book of AfroSurreal poems, his Afro-surreal novel, Knot Frum Hear.
These are the first words that Taggert, the protagonist of Ayize Jama-Everett’s The Liminal People (Small Beer Press, 2011), hears from Nordeen, leader of the death and drug-dealing African cartel known as the Razor Necks.
Taggert has a special power; he can heal people with his touch. Nordeen has even greater powers and is willing to take Taggert under his tutelage in exchange for his undying devotion. Soon after, Taggert is wearing their trademark razor on a chain around his neck and is in service to Nordeen as both muscle and healer from a pirate utopia on the coast of Morocco. When Yasmene, Taggart’s only love, reaches out to him from London to find her missing daughter Tamara, he begins a hectic quest – at break-neck speed – through the underground world of squats, raves, and curry-houses; falling into his past, stumbling into his future, and trying to gain his freedom from Nordeen; symbolized by the razor that digs into his flesh.
The Liminal People can be read in several ways. Told in a hardscrabble-gritty-noir style, Jama-Everett spins a surprisingly plausible tale of empaths, telepaths, telekinesis, and inter-dimensional travel through Tantric sex to scintillate and intrigue any skeptic to the genre.
As a straight-up espionage thriller, complete with diplomats, assassinations, safe-houses, and conspiracies, Jama-Everett could give Ian Fleming some fierce competition. It can also be read as an extension of the “mutant-strain’ of science-fiction, found first in comic books like Marvel’s X-men, where genetically mutated humans are endowed with many of the powers Jama-Everett utilizes in his main characters. Taggert’s self-healing ability, for instance, is reminiscent of the X-men’s tough-guy, Wolverine. Of course, there are twists. He can also crush your heart like a fig with his mind, make you allergic to your own skin. I suspect that most will enter and exit Everett’s world through this portal.
But as with the X-men comics of the early 80s, The Liminal People can also be interpreted as a grand allegory to contemporary issues around identity and personal power. This “close reading’ is often overlooked in literature coming from what Samuel Delany calls “The Golden Ghetto” of graphic novels, science and speculative fiction. This seems particularly true with marginalized authors within this marginalized genre.
Without telling too much, Jama-Everett intentionally begins the story in Africa with an encounter with the Dogon, a people who had knowledge of planets on the other side of the sun several centuries before they were discovered by modern science. Due to his healing abilities he is turned away. They tell him, “Healers are death of the warrior’s spirit.”
It is atmospheric asides like this that call the reader to dig deeper than traditional supernatural fantasy for wonder, and to reach further than science for the limits of human potential. Each manifestation of a power from a character is surprising, and a big part of the thrill is the jack-in-box reveal of a power triggered by cliff-hanging danger.
Unlike many books of this kind, the characters and settings are deeply rooted in the post-apocalyptic present of gun-running, famines, and child-prostitution, navigating a fully inclusive world of the darker peoples of the earth, and brimming with edicts for those coping with gifts in an ever-increasing world of mono-cultural mediocrity. Lines like, “Tamara is either a cool-girl or a freak. All of our kind are. We either lead the pseudo-outsiders or we truly live the outsider experience,” speaks to the weird, youngster in us all.
When Nordeen recruits Taggert with the opening line of this review, itself a metaphor, Taggert acquiesces saying, “If you don’t have powers, then you probably wouldn’t understand why I stayed. The best analogy is, imagine you’re a gorilla living amongst chimps. They’re kind of like you, but lighter, smaller, less substantial. They run around afraid all the time, screaming and barking at the slightest sound. You can throw your weight around and get whatever you want. So when you finally come across another gorilla, not only another gorilla, but an older, stronger gorilla that has a crew of chimps doing his bidding without doing much weight throwing, you want to figure out how it all goes down.”
Reading the story this way puts a compelling spin on what might have been an amusing, but easily forgettable yarn in the wrong hands. As exhilarating the story of Taggert’s quest to find Tamara is, much the exterior and interior dialogue that reveals the author as not only a disciple of Octavia Butler, but Nietzsche as well, is where the book truly shines.
“The norms don’t know, can’t perceive the world around the way I can,” Taggert laments while having a drink at a trendy single’s bar. “They don’t see the old powers of darkness, the one that make such grand machinations and movements seem predestined. I look around and I see the bloated ignorance of the lumpen proletariat; roly-poly, sausage-fingered, ginger-topped fathers of at least two illegitimate children trying to massage the asses of waif-like, peroxide-scarred students who are themselves trying to navigate adulthood with their new-found freedom from outdated parenting…In truth, all permutations of this life bore me.” Underneath all of the tricks of the tongue and mind that the book conjures, dwells a black radical, shape-shifting for change.
The Afrosurreal are border-crossers, edge-dwellers who work from within the margins with a serious intent, “Kings playing the role of viziers,” as they travel with a list of aliases, being paid in bundled envelopes, and actively resisting classification.
From within “The Golden Ghetto” Jama-Everett has created a book that resists classification, joining the Afrosurreal Pantheon of writers exploring this new-found freedom. He calls the gifted ones Liminal People, people “Always on the borderland, the threshold, the in-between.” He has Taggert explain. “I learned what I know by walking the liminal lands.” I trust that many people will relate, or will want to.
The Liminal People
Ayize Jama-Everett
Small Beer Press (2012)
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
D. Scot Miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist , teacher, curator. He sits on the board of directors of nocturnes review, and is a regular contributor to The East Bay Express, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Popmatters, and Mosaic Magazine. 2011 San Francisco Arts Commission recipient for AfroSurreal San Francisco Project. Miller is author of The AfroSurreal Manifesto and is completing a book of AfroSurreal poems, his Afro-surreal novel, Knot Frum Hear.
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