I've thoroughly enjoyed writing this blog, which began fourteen years ago this month. It has allowed me the freedom to write about whatever I wanted, in any way that I wanted. And, fortunately, I never had to concern myself about any gatekeepers.
I look forward to writing the blog for a few more years.
I have a bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce in my kitchen cupboard. So when I saw an item in Harper's magazine (January 2023 issue) quoting a class-action lawsuit against the product's manufacturer, the T.W. Garner Food Company, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I became very interested in what the lawsuit was about.
The lawsuit, filed in September, stated that "A hot sauce is labeled 'Texas' if it is made in Texas, using Texas ingredients and flavor profiles. .... Texas hot sauces...must be made in Texas from ingredients sourced from Texas. ....Texas takes great pride in its hot sauce. ....The defendant trades on the reputation of Texas. There is nothing Texas about them."
Nowhere on the label does it say "Texas-style" (whatever that is). There's only a cartoon-drawing of a cowboy wearing a 10-gallon hat, with a whip in his hand, and three red peppers near the logo. The label says the company has been making Texas Pete hot sauce "Since 1929." Which leads one to ask this question, why has it taken 93 years to complain about the product's authenticity?
Frankly, I don't know what makes Texas hot sauce different from any other hot sauce. If there is such a thing as Texas-style hot sauce and the recipe is generic and in the public domain, how is its replication by others injurious to the reputation of Texas? I'm not a lawyer but based on the above quote, this lawsuit sounds frivolous. That could mean it will get thrown out of court.
I enjoy a good road-trip movie like The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Thelma & Louise (1991). And for a long time I've seen the movie potential of a road trip by car that Langston Hughes and his traveling companion, Zell Ingram, a young artist, took in 1931. (Ingram is described by the biographer Arnold Rampersad in his The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (Oxford University Press, 1986) as "a big, handsome, young black man, about twenty-one years old, who lived with his mother over a popular Cleveland hot-dog shop.")
The trip took them from Cleveland to Florida. And from there to Cuba and Haiti; then back to Florida, where they picked up the black civil rights activist and college president Mary McLeod Bethune in Daytona Beach. She became Hughes's second traveling companion all the way to New York City.
While Hughes and Ingram were in Cuba and Haiti, they encountered enough adventures and misadventures to make a feature-length movie a riveting cinematic experience.
Sometimes I think I should become a movie producer.
Earlier today I re-read the chapter on James Baldwin in Christopher Bram's wonderful book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (Twelve/Hachette Book Group), published in 2012. The chapter is an excellent summation of Baldwin's life and literary career.
What prompted me to re-read the chapter was the idea that came to me that Baldwin's life, especially his early life, would make a riveting biopic. Drawing on previous biographies and his essays, the film would trace his evolution as a writer from his impoverished childhood in Harlem to his first few years in Paris where he, as an American expatriate, struggled to survive while completing his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).
I think this would be the sort of cinematic project that would interest directors like Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, and Ava DuVernay.
Concerning who would portray Baldwin, a good choice would have been the late Chadwick Boseman, who somewhat resembled Baldwin. Unfortunately, since Boseman is no longer available, Don Cheadle, who did a brilliant job of portraying Miles Davis in Miles Ahead (2015), would be another possible choice.
One of my favorite reference books is the Random House College Dictionary. That book defines the word "discography" as "a descriptive list of phonograph records by category, composer, performer, or date of release."
Why am I talking about this word? Well, for one thing, I am a music lover, especially of jazz. Secondly, I am interested in the minutest details about sound recordings. And thirdly, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami told the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" column (November 20, 2022) that he owns The Jazz Discography, a 34-volume set compiled by Tom Lord.
"It takes up a lot of space," he said, "and I imagine most people would find it unnecessary to own, but for jazz collectors it's a real treasure, the painstaking result of years of work."
And no doubt the whole set would cost a jazz enthusiast a small fortune.
I would love to see one of these volumes, just to browse through its pages and immerse myself in its encyclopedic range and scholarship. Contained in those 34 volumes is presumably every, or almost every, jazz recording from the music's infancy to more recent years. That would include famous works, lesser known ones as well as those long forgotten. I would especially want to read the entries for Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (1959), one of my favorite recordings, and Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959), for example, to learn some little known facts about them.
The Jazz Discography, which is available in the New York Public Library, would allow me to finally gain enough jazz knowledge to be able to complete, with more ease and confidence, the esoteric crossword puzzle that appears each month in the New York City Jazz Record.
I'm hoping that the following proposed black film projects will finally get made:
1. About thirty-two years ago, one of the New York tabloids announced that there was a proposed film about dancer/choreographer Arthur Mitchell under consideration. I think it was supposed to be a docudrama that followed Mitchell from his early life in Harlem to his ascendancy to becoming the first black male principal dancer with the New York City Ballet to his co-founding of the Dance Theatre of Harlem shortly after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
2. The Billy Strayhorn biopic, based on Lush Life, David Hajdu's biography of the composer and Duke Ellington collaborator (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996). The author's name is pronounced Hay-doo.
3. A film about Philippa Schuyler, the child piano prodigy and the biracial daughter of the Harlem Renaissance writer George Schuyler. She was later killed in May of 1967 in a helicopter crash while working as a journalist in South Vietnam. In the 1940s, Joseph Mitchell, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote a lengthy article about her when she was a child. It was included in his collection, Up in the Old Hotel, and Other Stories (Vintage Books, 1993). Alicia Keys, herself a piano prodigy, was chosen to portray Philippa.
4. Spike Lee's plan to film a story about the 1938 boxing match between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.
5. The director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther and Fruitvale Station) and the actor Michael B. Jordan's desire to make a movie about Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, who died in 1337.
The novelist Percival Everett was asked in the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" column (December 19, 2021) what books were on his nightstand. He gave an interesting, and somewhat humorous, response:
"On the table are the memoirs of [the Russian composer and pianist Dmitri] Shostakovich. I am not usually interested in memoir and I have to say that I am using this one as a sleep-aid."
Instead of taking an over-the-counter sleep-inducing medication when I have trouble falling asleep, a better solution might be reading a very dull book.
We've all heard stories about writers who've received enough rejection letters from publishing houses to paper a wall. Well, there's a better use for these carriers of bad news.
A useful suggestion was found in an article by a very prolific writer named George Haddad-Garcia. He wrote an article for Writer's Digest (July 1982) that listed thirty cost-cutting ideas for writers. The one I especially liked was number ten: "Scratch pads are often free at hotels and motels; don't overlook these, either. The backs of rejection letters can be used for scratch, jotting down ideas, notes, phone numbers, or for rough drafts."
So those annoying rejection letters not only can make you more determined to succeed as a writer, they can be turned over to the blank side and used to help you create the next award-winning novel or short story collection (you hope).
The science fiction writer Connie Willis, a recipient of several Nebula Awards and Hugo Awards, was asked by a reader on the website Science Fiction Weekly (June 16, 2005) about her writing process. Her response:
"I rewrite everything, long or short, over and over. And it's not a question of a rough draft. It's many, many notes and drafts and cross-outs and retries. When I was done with Doomsday Book [1992], I had three loose-leaf notebooks full of research and two 8 x 12 inch boxes full of rough drafts. I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible."
I recently found in a manila file folder a copy of an e-mail my late friend, the poet Velma Reeb, sent to me in August 2007.
"How is Little Philly?" she asked. Little Philly is the name she gave to a philodendron cutting she took from the house plant she called Big Philly. "The original Big Philly was my friend Alma Stone's plant," she wrote. I'm assuming that Velma's Big Philly was at one time a cutting from Stone's plant.
After giving me instructions on how often to water Little Philly--"Water weekly only; spritz with water mid-week or every few days"-- she described who Alma Stone was. She was "a fiction writer ("The Harvard Tree" and "The Bible Seller")" who "wrote up into her 80's, and died a few years ago in her 90's! In fact, her work can be found on the public library shelves. She won a national award for one short story." The award Stone won, according to Velma, was the O. Henry Award.
These literary works as well as her other papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The location of her papers is fitting because she was a native Texan, born in the east Texas town of Jasper in 1909.
P.S. Fifteen years later, I still have Little Philly. I placed it in my bathroom window, where it receives a lot of moisture and sunlight.
I had four uncles who were World War II vets. Three served in the army, one in the navy. They served at a time when the American military was racially segregated. (A group photo of Uncle John and his shipmates attests to that.)
One of my biggest regrets is that I neglected to interview my uncles about their wartime service when I had the chance. I remember the four of them sitting in Aunt Vickie and Uncle Lyn's living room on 148th Street in Harlem trading war memories. This would have been sometime in the mid-1970s, when I would have been in my twenties. I heard them talking but I showed no interest in what they were sharing. I didn't realize that what I was hearing was important family history. History that should have been recorded on paper and/or tape so the information could be passed down to future generations.
Now I have to hope to find documents like letters and telegrams among family papers that addressed those war years as well as family mementoes from that time. (Aunt Louise, for instance, saved Uncle John's navy uniform including his dark blue sailor's cap. I found these items at the bottom of an old steamer trunk in her bedroom.)
The New York Times, in its October 6, 2022 issue, ran a review of a book called Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking). The author is Matthew F. Delmont, a Dartmouth University historian.
I'm eager to read it, all 374 pages. This sorely needed book highlights the lives and accomplishments of those, one black World War II vet, himself included, described as "a forgotten group of people" relegated to the status of half Americans. I hope this book will be a step toward recognizing their role in preserving democracy in America.
Tomorrow, October 1st, is International Coffee Day. (September 29th was National Coffee Day.) I can't think of a better way to spend a rainy, gloomy afternoon (tomorrow it's supposed to rain all day here in New York) than to curl up with a good book and a steaming hot cup or two of coffee.
The fiction writer Andrea Barrett was asked in the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" column (September 18, 2022) about her childhood reading habits. Ms. Barrett, the author of a story collection called Natural History, replied, "Greedy! Also indiscriminate, and drawn to books supposedly for grown-ups. Luckily the kind librarian at the local Bookmobile let us take any books we could reach (I was ridiculously tall)."
That statement reminded me of my own reading habits as a child. I spent more time in the adult section of my local library in Los Angeles than I did in the children's section. And when I checked books out from that section (mostly mystery and detective novels), the librarian (and my mother) didn't say to me that those books were not age appropriate, as would probably happen today.
The New York Times Book Review recently commemorated the 75th anniversary of the publication of Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement, a bestselling novel about anti-Semitism.
Tina Jordan ("Inside the List," August 28, 2022) reported that Hobson (1900-1986) told the Book Review back then in 1947 that when she was completing work on her novel, she asked her 9-year-old son, "What's prejudice, Mike?" His answer is probably the best definition I've read, putting this social problem in a nutshell. "Well," he said, "I guess it's when you decide some fellow's a stinker before you ever met him."
I couldn't have said it better.
Prior to hearing an interview Sidik Fofana did with Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition, I had never heard of him. The young African-American writer was on the show to discuss his debut collection of short stories called Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (Scribner/Simon & Schuster). The stories are set in a Harlem high-rise apartment building named Banneker Terrace, whose inhabitants are being confronted with a rent increase, gentrification, and eviction, very timely subjects.
After hearing the interview, I read a review of the book in the New York Times Book Review, which led me to short video clips of Fofana discussing the collection on the Internet and then a Q & A interview with the website Literary Hub.
Asked by Jane Ciabattari, in an e-mail interview for Literary Hub, who inspired him as a writer, Fofana offers a lengthy list, some of whom I've read (Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, James Alan McPherson, Jamaica Kincaid, Langston Hughes, Truman Capote), others I have not (Jhumpa Lahiri, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colson Whitehead, Sandra Cisneros), but plan to.
The recent media attention has made Fofana, who has an MFA in creative writing from New York University and is a high school teacher in Brooklyn, New York, an emerging writer to watch.
How long before one of his stories is featured on NPR's Selected Shorts? It's safe to bet that it will be very, very soon.
I wrote a review of Directed by Dorothy Arzner by Judith Mayne (Indiana University Press, 1994) that originally appeared in a monthly book review column that I wrote for the Manhattan Spirit, a weekly New York newspaper. The book, a biography of Dorothy Arzner, the pioneer lesbian film director (1900-1979), was published in the paper's January 12, 1996 issue. (I subsequently published it as a blog post in this blog on October 9, 2010).
Because of space limitations and the fact that the column consisted of three book reviews, I wasn't able to point out at the time that Arzner directed films that starred Clara Bow, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, and Katharine Hepburn.
I neglected to make the correction in the blog post. If the review ever gets republished in a print publication, like a book, I will make sure to include that important information.
In the meantime, I hope to persuade a cinema art house in New York like Film Forum to screen a retrospective of Dorothy Arzner's films. Among her films I would like to see are Christopher Strong (RKO, 1933), starring Katharine Hepburn and Craig's Wife (Columbia, 1936), starring Rosalind Russell.
Gabrielle Zevin's fifth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Knopf), set in the video game design world, is currently on the New York Times bestseller list. In an interview in the New York Times Book Review (July 31, 2022) about her work habits, she's quoted from her website saying, "I'm allergic to being online, but you will sometimes find me on Instagram, and only for the three months before and after I have a book out." Then she continues, "After that time I completely disappear from the internet and resume writing books again."
Her statement leads me to wonder how other writers like Samuel Delany, Larry Duplechan, and Christopher Bram (who are three of my Facebook friends) find the time to write their books. It seems they are constantly posting on Facebook.
One of my favorite movie scenes is the one in Annie Hall (1977) in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are standing on a movie line and behind them is a know-it-all guy pontificating to his girlfriend on the theories of the Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).
Allen goes off screen for a second. When he returns, he has McLuhan with him. McLuhan immediately tells the guy he doesn't know what he's talking about.
I sometimes wish there was a Woody Allen character or characters who would go on camera on one of these talking heads TV shows to challenge hosts and guests about the efficacy of COVID vaccines and the lethality of COVID. The information given seems to be one-sided.
In December 2021, I went through a pile of miscellaneous papers that were on top of the microwave oven. While doing so I found one paper on which I had written the epitaphs engraved on the headstones of two black gay writers I knew. Both of them died from AIDS.
Dave Frechette--"I Regret Nothing."
Donald Woods--"Forever In God's Loving Care."
"I'm not sure what makes a book a guilty pleasure," said Japanese-Canadian novelist Julie Otsuka to the New York Times Book Review ("By the Book," February 20, 2022), "but you definitely know it when you're reading one."
According to People magazine (May 9, 2022 issue), actor Will Smith traveled to India right after slapping comedian/actor Chris Rock at the Oscars on March 27. Smith slapped Rock because Rock made a joke about Smith's wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith, who has hair loss as a result of alopecia.
The trip to India was "for spiritual purposes, to practice yoga and meditation." Too bad Smith didn't do those things prior to Oscar night. He would have avoided being banned by the Academy for ten years. Some people have to learn the hard way.
The free daily newspaper, amNew York Metro, published in its June 29, 2022 issue an alphabetically arranged guide called "LGBTQ+ Power Players." The guide gives a thumbnail sketch of several outstanding members of the LGBTQ+ community in the New York metropolitan area. For me, as a journalist and blogger, it serves as a useful resource.
Among those included are Greg Newton and Donnie Jochum, the co-founders of the Bureau of General Services--Queer Division, the bookstore and cultural center located inside the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan; Rob Byrnes, a Lammy Award-winning author and the president of the East Midtown Partnership; Dwight McBride, president of The New School as well as the co-editor of The James Baldwin Review; and Justin T. Brown, executive director of the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York.
The following are books I plan to read this summer:
1. Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington by James Kirchick (Holt, 2022).
2. Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson by Blair Murphy Kelley (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
3. One-Shot Harry by Gary Phillips (Soho Press, 2022). (Historical crime fiction.)
4. Last Call: True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon Green (Celadon Books, 2021).
5. Greenland: A Novel by David Santos Donaldson (HarperCollins, 2022).
6. Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett (Princeton University Press, 2022).
7. Harlem Sunset by Nekesa Afia (Penguin, 2022). (Crime fiction set during the Harlem Renaissance.)
8. Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem by Kevin McGruder (Columbia University Press, 2021). (A biography of the early twentieth-century black real estate mogul.)
"...[S]cience,...is about knowledge. Fiction, on the other hand, is about feeling. Science as such is not a person, and does not have a system of morality built into it, any more than a toaster does. It is only a tool--a tool for actualizing what we desire and defending against what we fear--and like any other tool, it can be used for good or ill. You can build a house with a hammer, and you can use the same hammer to murder your neighbour."
"Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling--Heaven, Hell, monsters, angels, and all--out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime or even a duty, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we'll be able to do it.
"Or we'll be able to try it, at least."
--Margaret Atwood, from the essay, "Scientific Romancing," in her collection, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021 (Doubleday/Penguin Random House, 2022.)
While browsing the New Fiction section of the public library on 124th Street in Harlem, I came upon a novel called Tenderness by Alison MacLeod (Bloomsbury, 2021). According to the flap jacket copy, it is the story of D.H. Lawrence and the writing of his 1928 novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. (I must confess, I've never read the Lawrence novel, but Tenderness may change that.)
On the back of the book were advance praise blurbs, one of which was from novelist David Leavitt who referred to Tenderness as being part of a literary form called "uchronia."
I'd never seen that word before and since I couldn't find it in any of my dictionaries, I consulted the Internet. Wikipedia defined "uchronia" as "a hypothetical or fictional time period of our world, in contrast to altogether-fictional lands or worlds....Some, however, use uchronia to refer to an alternate history."
Two novels said to fit the alternate history description are The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick and The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.
After I read Amanda Holzer's short story, "Love and Other Catastrophes: A Mix Tape" in the anthology, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers (Houghton Mifflin), it became a story I wish I had written.
The story, originally published in Story Quarterly, follows a romance from beginning to end through a series of song titles and the musicians who recorded them.
It starts off with "All By Myself, Eric Carmen. Looking for Love, Lou Reed. I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Whitney Houston. Let's Dance, David Bowie. Let's Kiss, Beat Happening. Let's Talk About Sex, Salt 'n' Pepa. Like a Virgin, Madonna. We've Only Just Begun, The Carpenters. I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend, The Ramones. I'll Tumble 4 Ya, Culture Club. Head Over Heels, The Go-Go's. Nothing Compares to You, Sinead O'Connor. My Girl, The Temptations. Could This Be Love? Bob Marley. Love and Marriage, Frank Sinatra." And ends several songs later with "I Will Survive, Gloria Gaynor. Hit the Road, Jack, Mary McCaslin and Jim Ringer. These Boots Were Made for Walking, Nancy Sinatra. All Out of Love, Air Supply." Finally ending with the song the story began with, "All By Myself, Eric Carmen."
Altogether about fifty songs, crossing different musical genres. Wow, what an ingenious, inventive way to tell a story, making it a fascinating and humorous journey. You could probably do the same thing with book titles as well.
In fact, in the "Contributors' Notes" in the back of the book, the reader is told that Holzer "encourages you to create your own mix-tape tale." Why not?
When asked "What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?" ("By the Book," The New York Times Book Review, May 8, 2022), author and journalist Candice Millard (River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile, Doubleday, 2022) responded:
"While reading a biography of the Irish writer Bram Stoker, I learned that he happened to be in New York City during the Great Blizzard of 1888, considered one of the worst snowstorms in U.S. history. The city was buried under 22 inches of snow in Mid-March....Stoker was on an American tour with the British actor Henry Irving, whose career he managed before writing 'Dracula.' Also on the trip was Stoker's wife, Florence, a renowned beauty who had been dating Oscar Wilde--yes, Oscar Wilde--when she met Stoker."
Could it be that Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), the revered Irish playwright, novelist, and wit, was more bisexual than he was homosexual?
Adriana Trigiani, the author of the novel, The Good Left Undone (Dutton, 2022), was asked in the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" Q & A interview feature (May 1, 2022), "How do you organize your books?"
Her answer: "Touchy question in my home right now. I hope to install floor-to-ceiling shelves with the ladder on wheels, like Audrey Hepburn had in 'Funny Face,' so all the books are in one room. But I'm clumsy and my husband predicts death by card catalog[ue]. Presently, books are everywhere--an enormous cookbook collection in the kitchen..., the hallway, the office, every inch is filled with books. And here's the crazy thing. Whenever I need a title, I manage to find it."
Lucky her. I wish I could always find a particular book among my vast collection.
P.S. Death by Card Catalogue would be an excellent title for a murder mystery.
Samuel R. Delany, the award-winning author of many science fiction books, and who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, had this to say to T: The New York Times Style Magazine in its Culture issue (April 24, 2022) about sources for his fiction:
"When I'm writing, I think about the paper in front of me and the story I'm trying to tell. I'm very much aware that almost any idea can be sourced from somewhere, and they're as liable to be from other books as they are from things in life."
Malcolm X once said that anything below the Canadian border was the South, referring to the existence of white racism throughout the United States. That led other blacks to label the so-called "liberal" North as "Up South."
The "Up South" label could just as easily apply to Canada, a destination many fugitive slaves headed for to gain freedom.
In Norman Jewison: A Director's Life by Ira Wells (Sutherland House Books, 2021), I learned that the Canadian-born film director (born in 1926),whose many films include In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier's Story, and The Hurricane, grew up in a Toronto neighborhood that was a five-minute walk from a Lake Ontario beach. At the beach, there was a sign Jewison would see that said, "NO JEWS, N******[NIGGERS], OR DOGS." The sign, writes Wells, a Canadian academic and journalist, was there to ensure that "the sight of a Black person or Jew" would not hinder the enjoyment of the beach by families seeking relief on a hot summer day.
So despite being seen as a refuge for runaway slaves and a land that promotes racial tolerance and multiculturalism, Canada had its own struggles with racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry.
Note: Despite his surname, Norman Jewison is not Jewish. He is a white Protestant of British ancestry.
Nancy Milford (1938-2022), the biographer of Zelda Fitzgerald, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's widow and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, was quoted in a Washington Post obituary (April 1, 2022) as telling the Chicago Tribune in 2001 that being "a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but the stamina of a horse."
The following prayer is from a pamphlet published by The Christophers, a New York City-based inspirational group that was founded in 1949 by Father James Keller (1900-1977), a Roman Catholic priest, who was the son of an Irish immigrant father. According to a Wikipedia article, "The Christophers preach a doctrine of religious tolerance and intend their publications to be generally relevant to those of all faiths."
Their motto is "It's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." The motto, states Wikipedia, "reflects the philosophical orientation of the organization, which emphasizes positive action to create a better world in such various arenas as political honesty, caring for the sick and poor, and dealing with substance abuse." The origin of the motto, notes Wiktionary, is a proverb (possibly Chinese) and means that "in the face of hopelessness and discontent, it is more worthwhile to do some good, however small, in response, than to complain about the situation."
"Writing is a lonely business, Lord.
A Writer sits at a typewriter [,computer,] or with pen in hand--
and often the page remains blank.
Touch their fingertips
and jog their brains
with a spark of your creative power.
Gently direct them
to communicate more for truth than profit
to give us the highest aspirations
of the human spirit
while not flinching from our tragic flaws.
Help them
to share with us
moments of adventure
instants of joy
hours of reflection.
Don't let them down, Lord.
Or let them disappoint You.
In print, or on the stage, or on the airwaves
their words shape our very lives, images, or distortions of the
Word that was 'in the beginning.'
Amen."
At age 53, literary and political essayist Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), among other books, proves it is never too late to learn a new language. When he was asked in the New York Times Book Review (March 6, 2022) "What books are on your night stand?," he responded:
"I am learning Spanish, so the bedside pile consists almost entirely of books I previously enjoyed in English translation and now wish to read, absurdly ambitiously, in the original: poems by Borges and Alejandra Pizarnik, and novels by Antonio Munoz Molina, Rafael Chirbes and Almudena Grandes."
My favorite question asked of those interviewed in the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" Q &A feature each week is "What is your ideal reading experience?"
Novelist Julie Otsuka, I think, has given the best description so far (The New York Times Book Review, February 20, 2022):
"...I love reading and working in public spaces. My ideal reading experience: late afternoon, pre-pandemic, my neighborhood cafe, a seat in the far back corner, a slight coffee buzz. All around me, the pleasant hum of human voices. In front of me, on the table, a book, a pencil for underlining (Blackwing Palomino), a pen and a small unlined Muji notebook, in case I run across a sentence I want to write down, or overhear a good snatch of dialogue (which could end up in my next novel--sometimes I only appear to be reading)."
February is Black History Month. So if I could go back in time, I would want to be transported to the Harlem Renaissance and sit in a room with novelist/anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and journalist/anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, two of my favorite African-American historical figures.
Both Hurston and Wells were contemporaries and probably knew about each other. For me it would be a joy to just listen to them exchange ideas and experiences, especially about the American South. Not only would their conversation be eye-opening, it would be intellectually stimulating.
The following excerpt is from a telephone interview I did with Arthur T. Wilson around 1984. Wilson, who is African-American, born in Newark, New Jersey, could be considered a Renaissance man because of his many achievements as an actor, playwright, poet, educator, dance critic, and co-editor and publisher of Attitude, a monthly magazine devoted to the dance world.
On gays in dance:
"A majority of them [dancers] are [gay] but not exclusively. [New York City Ballet choreographer] George Balanchine was not and he dealt with some of the most beautiful bodies in the world over his 60, 70 years. But he was not gay at all, at all, period. [He had been] married to several beautiful women through his career. There's [choreographer] Jacques D'Amboise, who has a family. There's even [choreographer/dancer/actor] Geoffrey [Holder] himself, who's married to [dancer] Carmen de Lavallade. It just depends."
On the acclaimed Jubilation! Dance Company, founded in 1979 in Brooklyn, New York, by the African-American choreographer Kevin Jeff:
"[Jubilation! appeals] to a cross-section of those who go to dance concerts, period. Going across age. Also [it] appeals very highly to a college crowd. A cross-section of New York State citizenry. That's no different than any other fucking good arts troupe."
On sexuality's importance in creating a dance:
"That issue [homosexuality] is never important. It's the art that's important. Your bedroom politics doesn't make your painting better or your violin chirp any sweeter. Someone's sexual life really plays very little on what they do in terms of how the audience gets it. Now in terms of your sexual life and all that represents you in relationship to how you then create your art, approach your art, yes, it does have something directly to do with it. But not in reference to the curtain goes up and the audience is either entertained or not."
The September/October 1983 issue of Attitude, a dance magazine of which Arthur T. Wilson was an editorial staff member.
As a lifelong reader and book lover, I can totally relate to young Abraham Lincoln's reading habits as cited in the following passage from Brian Kilmeade's The President and the Freedom Fighter: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Their Battle to Save America's Soul (Sentinel/Penguin Random House, 2021):
"Whenever and wherever he [Lincoln] could, he read. He read in bed. He read sitting astride a log by a stream. One friend spotted him reading in the woods, lying on the ground with his legs extended upward along a tree trunk. He read while walking, so absorbed in his text that he would sometimes stop, oblivious to anything but the words on the page, before continuing on, never having lifted his gaze."
A biopic about composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's friend and musical collaborator, is long overdue.
In the 1990s, director Irwin Winkler was set to turn David Hajdu's biography of Strayhorn, Lush Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), into a movie. It never happened. I remember Winkler being quoted in a newspaper interview as saying that Strayhorn was not open about his homosexuality. Clearly Winkler hadn't read the book. I, who read a significant portion of the book, learned early on that Strayhorn was very much open about his sexuality.
"...Strayhorn," writes Hajdu (pronounced Hay-doo) on page 79, "made himself a triple minority: he was black, he was gay, and he was a minority among gay people in that he was open about his homosexuality in an era when social bias forced many men and women to keep their sexual identities secret."
Maybe it was a good thing that the movie was never made. Who knows what other inaccuracies would have crept into the script.
In the right hands a Strayhorn biopic could become a powerful and memorable cinematic experience. Someone like director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk) might be that someone who could accurately bring Strayhorn's life and musical achievements to the big screen.
The big question then becomes this--who would be a good candidate to play Billy Strayhorn?
One of the many books from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that I need to read is George Schuyler's Black No More. It is described as a satirical novel in which, writes historian David Levering Lewis in When Harlem Was in Vogue (Vintage Books, 1982), "Dr. Junius Crookman, an Afro-American scientist, invents a process--'by electrical nutrition and glandular control'--which turns dark skin white and crinkly hair straight."
The book was recently adapted into an off-Broadway musical, complete with choreography by the renowned Bill T. Jones.
Schuyler, a black conservative, and his white wife, were the parents of a biracial child, Philippa, who became a piano prodigy. Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker magazine wrote two lengthy profiles of Philippa in the 1940s when she was still a child. In 1967, covering the Vietnam War as a photojournalist, she was killed in a helicopter crash.
For a time there was talk of turning her life story into a feature-length movie, with singer Alicia Keys, herself a piano prodigy, portraying Philippa.
