It's time to dust off our copies of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William Shirer), 1984 (George Orwell), Farenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury), Lord of the Flies (William Golding), The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood), and other dystopian books. They will help us cope with the dark, far right- leaning days ahead. And, I hope, they will motivate us to find ways to overcome them.
If you don't own a copy of these books, visit your local independent bookstore or the public library.
Here are two very creepy stories that I recently re-read. They are, I think, appropriate reading for Halloween:
The first is "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. It was first published in 1948 in The New Yorker magazine. The ending shocked readers and caused many to angrily cancel their subscription. Jim Freund, the host of Hour of the Wolf, a weekly sci-fi/horror/fantasy talk show on WBAI in New York, calls it the greatest horror story. (The story was anthologized in 50 Great Stories, edited by Milton Crane, Bantam Books, 1983, 46th printing.)
The second story is "The Fly" by George Langelaan. It was published in Playboy magazine in its June 1957 issue and was about a scientific experiment gone wrong. It later became the basis for the 1958 movie and the 1986 remake. (The story was anthologized in Stories of the Supernatural, edited by Betty M. Owen, Scholastic Book Service, 1967 and Pan Book of Horror Stories, edited by Herbert Van Thal, Pan Books, 1960.)
Happy Halloween, folks!
I enjoy reading biographies. I especially enjoy reading biographical novels. Because much of what's in these books are "products of the author's imagination," they shouldn't be regarded as completely factual. But unlike biographies, they do offer the reader a you-are-there, fly-on-the-wall, get-inside-the-minds-of-the-characters approach which can be a more dramatic and captivating experience.
The following are four biographical novels I am eager to read:
1. The Queen of Paris: A Novel of Coco Chanel by Pamela Binnings Ewen (Black Stone Publishing, 2020). According to The Last Collection: A Novel of Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel by Jeanne Mackin (Berkley, 2019), Chanel's archrival in the world of high fashion was Schiaparelli. It will be interesting to see if Schiaparelli makes an appearance in Ewen's novel.
2. Ella: A Novel by Diane Richards (Amistad, 2024), based on the life and career of Ella Fitzgerald, who has been referred to by one jazz radio DJ as "The First Lady of Song."
3. The Blue Period: A Novel by Luke Jerod Kummer (Little A, 2019). The Spanish painter Pablo Picasso is the focus of this book.
4. The Age of Light: A Novel by Whitney Scharer (Little, Brown and Company, 2019). This debut novel retells and examines the romantic and professional connection between the photographer Lee Miller and the artist Man Ray.
There was a New York publishing house called Four Walls Eight Windows. That name always sounded incomplete to me. How about Four Walls Eight Windows and One Door?
The following is from the transcript of an interview I did in 1989 with the late gay Haitian-American poet/essayist/playwright Assotto Saint (1957-1994).The interview was mainly about his theater piece, New Love Song, which was part two of a trilogy. (Part one was Rising to the Love We Need and part three was Nuclear Lovers.) He and others performed New Love Song in 1989 in a small theater in New York's Greenwich Village. Assotto Saint, whose birth name was Yves Lubin, died in 1994 of complications from AIDS.
Charles Michael Smith: Why did you decide to do multimedia?
Assotto Saint: I hate conventional plots and I usually don't have the patience to deal with that kind of situation. Multimedia*--nonlinear situations, dramatizations--works best for me because it becomes more immediate. Time is not sequential. The present is mixed with the future is mixed with the past. I jump in and out of sequence. That works best for me.
CMS: Are you worried about the audience's ability to follow what's going on?
AS: Actually, no. When theater started, it was also nonsequential. The roots of theater are based on rituals, which mixes the present with the past and the future and also a lot of theater that's being done these days is nonlinear. The whole theater of images that has gained so much popularity during the past ten years is nonlinear, is nonsequential. As black people, we have locked ourselves in so much realistic drama at times.
CMS: What are the sources of your work?
AS: The Yoruba and voodoo religions are very present in the pieces I do. I basically work in rituals. I'm trying to create rituals, black gay rituals in my work. I grew up in Haiti and I was surrounded by voodoo and I also grew up in a strong Catholic family. Therefore I was grounded in the rituals of the Catholic Church and the rituals of the voodoo ceremonies.
I wanted to go back to the roots. To move forward you look back and then you go on. Some people feel looking back is death. But for me, it is necessary at where you came from and you move on.
CMS: How would you describe the segments of this theater piece?
AS: Some are stories, some are monologues, some are essays. Everything I do is complex. (He laughs heartily.)
CMS: Tell me about your self-published books of poems. Why do you self-publish?
AS: As black gay people, we must always search for new ways to establish our own institutions and that way we empower ourselves and become autonomous. It's necessary. We can do it. The women's movement has been an example. They inspired me.
*Multimedia also includes music, film and video clips, sound effects, photo slides, artworks, narration (live and/or recorded).
This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of Baldwin's birth, a perfect time to begin reading them as a way to commemorate that significant event.
1. Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin by Herb Boyd (Atria Books, 2008).
2. Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie Glaude Jr. (Crown, 2020).
3. The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America by Nicholas Buccola (Princeton University Press, 2019).
The following is from the transcript of my telephone interview in 1985 with the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987).* He was also known as Bruce Nugent. Parts of the interview were used for an article I wrote about Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance for Joseph Beam's In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology.
Charles Michael Smith: It was hinted that [the poet Countee] Cullen and [Harold] Jackman [a schoolteacher] were lovers. It's hinted at in everything.
Bruce Nugent: You see, there was no such thing as a closet, particularly then [the 1920s]. It's just that nobody spoke about it. They didn't speak about quote heterosexual unquote relationships either. But people kind of knew. You don't get on a rooftop and shout "I slept with my wife last night" either.
CMS: You were considered the most flamboyant then.
BN: I've always been flamboyant. There weren't many black bohemians, I gather, at the time. I didn't wear socks I guess because I didn't have them sometimes. Sometimes because I didn't feel like it. Like today, I don't have on any socks. When I want to or when I think about it, I put on socks.
[He told me he was "very fond of the name Michael," my middle name.]
["I almost find it difficult to become friends with people who call me Richard."]
["I dabbled in everything," e.g. poetry, painting. "I've never been as diverse in my abilities as people are now. I didn't know music. I was just familiar with it, but I didn't know it. Popular music of the day, jazz, so-called classical music. Somebody asked me, 'Do you like classical music?' The first thing I said was 'No. Sounds stuffy.' And yet everything that was played at concerts I already knew because Mother and Father used to play it and sing it at home."]
[Wrote the gay historian Eric Garber: "...Nugent dabbled successfully in painting, drawing, poetry, and dancing. He was self-consciously avant-garde and often had no permanent address. Preferring to drift from place to place. Nugent spent much of his time drawing erotic, often phallic, drawings." (The Advocate, May 13, 1982.)]
["I thought everybody was in the life" if he thought they were attractive. He was involved in a three-way fuck with Philander Thomas, who was "classically good-looking. By classically I mean that in Africa he would have been a classically beautiful person. What they didn't know then was that Africans frequently had features like that, aquiline, Caucasian features. He was quite, quite beautiful. Philander didn't do anything. [He was] very much a playboy. He brought people together. That's what he liked to do. Not a matchmaker in that sense, but bedmates. [People who came to Harlem did so] to vent their pleasures and Harlem was the place to be and everybody thought they could, and Philander saw to it that they did.
CMS: Did Philander have a sense of humor?
BN: Oh, yes [said with pleasure in his voice]. He was quite a man, quite a funny man. I loved Philander. I liked his random freedom. Real freedom. Very few people have it. I had it.
CMS: Do you know where Philander Thomas came from?
BN: I know very little about anybody's background. Apparently that's a failing of mine.
CMS: Did Philander live in Harlem?
BN: Oh, yes.
CMS: He didn't work for a living. He more or less put people together.
BN: He put together homosexual people. He liked to do it and I suppose it was a time when people made their money any way they could. [Nugent said Philander Thomas was "truly named."]
CMS: Was he an actor?
BN: Oh, yes.
CMS: How did you meet him?
BN: I met him in Porgy [a play based on the novel by DuBose Heyward. The play became the basis for Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin and his brother Ira]. He was much more outgoing than I.
CMS: What did you do to amuse yourself?
BN: Go to shows, go to parties.
CMS: How did gay men meet then?
BN: I'm always kind of thrown by that question because it seems to me people just meet people. Like it is now. I understand that there were gay bars, gay places. I never patronized [them] because I was not fond of the company of gay people. I still don't enjoy their company very much. They don't have anything to talk about.
["If I had a place of my own, I would much rather be the host than the guest. That's still true." He goes to parties, but "They're not my favorite form of entertainment." "I've never been one to gravitate towards gay bars, gay restaurants, gay this, gay that. Any more than I've wanted to go to black this, black that. I go to people bars.]
CMS: Was Langston Hughes a gay man?
BN: I have strange feelings about Langston as well as I knew him. And it has been said that except for [writer] Arna Bontemps, I was Langston's best friend. Certainly, I knew him longest. My personal feelings about Langston is that he was asexual. I had a big argument with Faith [Berry, a Hughes biographer] after that. She implied that he was homosexual. I said to her, "How do you know that?" As long as I've known him, I didn't know that. He had a longstanding friendship with a boy named Zell Ingram. There were people who felt that Zell and he were lovers. I don't know whether they were or not [sleeping together]. A lot of those kinds of things weren't important to me. I know it was unimportant to Langston what people thought about them.
CMS: Was Zell gay?
BN: I don't know.
CMS: What about traveling?
BN: I love Italy. I go whenever I can, which is very seldom. I used to go every summer. There are caste differences in Italy. People are divided from each other in Italy.
[He still has an eye for the boys? "Of course I do. My only objection is they don't have the eye for me (laughs). I have to wait for those peculiar people who like older men. They are very few and far between."]
[His father "knew I was going to be gay." "One day we were playing checkers and I kept winning games. My father said to me, 'It's time for me to die when you can beat me in checkers.' And he'd say, 'Never do anything you'd be ashamed of and never be ashamed of anything you do'."]
[He got married in 1953; 17 years (length of marriage); his wife died of cancer; "My love [for her] wasn't a physical love."]
[He was part of the staff of the short-lived magazine Fire!! as well as Harlem.]
CMS: You wrote "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" for Fire!! It is considered the first short story to deal with black homosexuality.
BN: People began to say, "How could you write anything so gay in 1926? I didn't know it was gay when I wrote it.
CMS: The protagonist seemed to be bisexual. He was not an exclusively gay man. At the time you wrote the story, a lot of people were scandalized by it.
BN: He called the man beautiful, and I did it. I even named one Beauty.
CMS: You were rejected for a couple of days.
BN: I don't think they rejected me. I just think they were a little shocked and scandalized.
CMS: Why so many ellipses in "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade"?
BN: It was my device for having people [get the impression] that I was talking with them. When you talk, you have these periods, shorter and longer periods. It wasn't originally written with three dots between everything. Now three dots, now five dots, now two dots. But the printer said, "We can't be bothered with doing that. We don't have that many dots." I would still like to do it sometime with the proper dots.
CMS: You did it deliberately to shock the middle-class people.
BN: Wally [Thurman] and I thought that the magazine would get bigger sales if it was banned in Boston. So, we flipped a coin to see who wrote bannable material. And the only two things we could think of that was bannable were a story about streetwalkers or prostitutes and about gay people, homosexuality.
CMS: Thurman was a gay man himself and he had a problem around that.
BN: Oh, God. Everybody did.
CMS: He more so.
BN: Wally was a deeper thinker than I was. I didn't think very much. I wasn't a very cerebral person.
CMS: Was he fun to be around?
BN: We lived together. You don't think I'd live with somebody who wasn't fun to live with. Yes, Wally introduced me to so many, many, many facets, things. He was very widely read and that's all I can say about him. He was absolutely a fascinating person. And perhaps with the exception of maybe one person, George Schuyler, who was more brilliant than he.
The Blacker the Berry [Thurman's novel] is pretty bad. He wasn't a very good novelist. You have to be your characters when you write a novel. He tried to be a woman.
CMS: He was writing about himself.
BN: He was ambivalent about his color. He grew up in Salt Lake City, that Mormon place. I was from Washington, D.C. and in Washington, we didn't associate with people who were as dark as Wally. And Wally was pretty black. My description of him [in David Levering Lewis's book, When Harlem Was in Vogue]: black with a sneering nose. He was very self-conscious about being black.
CMS: Was he effeminate?
BN: He was not. As a matter of fact, when we were living together, people thought quote that he was the husband, and I was the wife. I'm sure they thought that. I was the one who had the gay reputation. People put their own interpretation to anything.
CMS: His novel, Infants of the Spring, was autobiographical?
BN: That was almost all autobiographical. I think he was more successful in that [novel].
CMS: You say your marriage was not a physical love.
BN: We were very much in love with each other. I spent two years trying to prevent her from marrying me because she was definitely a heterosexual woman and a very beautiful one. Men were after her all the time. I told her [I was gay] but I suppose she had that dream that makes them think they can change me. Gayness is just a phase, an adolescent phase, you outgrow it. [No children were produced from the marriage.] Anybody, people who saw us together at that time never would doubt why we married. We were so much in love. Taxicab drivers would stop [and say] "Were you flagging a cab?" We'd say, "No!!" So, he said, "Where are you going, I'll take you. I've never seen people so much in love."
CMS: When did you know you were gay? At age 12, 13?
BN: I discovered that I liked men long before that. Seven, eight, nine, before I had any sexual experience at all of any kind. There used to be a man, a Filipino. There's a strong prejudice as you probably know among American Negroes toward anything that's not American Negroes, be it African, Filipino, Puerto Rican, whatever. This boy's mother was not accepted into Washington Negro society. Mother befriended him. I was very fortunate in my parents. The only word for them was that they were bohemians. My mother played piano; my father sang. Mother played by ear. She was invaluable when [the mixed-race British composer Samuel] Coleridge-Taylor came to America. No one could play his music. Coleridge-Taylor's music was too complicated and too much very sundry other things. I remember Taylor would come past the house and talk with Mother and he would hum it [his music] for Mother and Mother would play it. Later on, she learned to read music, but at the time she didn't. So when [John Philip] Sousa's band couldn't play the music, my mother accompanied them.
I came from a middle-class Washington family. My mother studied to be a schoolteacher. She never taught. My father was a Pullman porter. It was very respected; one of the few ways to make money. At that time [his parents] were pillars of society in Washington, which meant fair [in complexion], quote good hair, all the other bullshit. As a matter of fact, it was because of all that crap that I left Washington.
CMS: Why did you move to Hoboken [in New Jersey]?
BN: I couldn't afford to live in New York. [He has lived in Hoboken for seven or eight years.] I have a habit of living wherever I happen to be.
CMS: What do you do now in your spare time?
BN: I still write and draw. I get Social Security and brunches on the goodwill of my friends.
Nugent spoke at a gathering of the members of Black and White Men Together/New York. He told them, "If you don't have the courage of your convictions, nobody is going to be able to give it to you. If you don't have enough love to share, you're not going to get it. You can't love anybody else if you don't yourself because what are you loving from? I've always felt like this. This is probably what makes me a bohemian. It's probably going to keep me alive another seventy-some years. If you can't take me the way I am, it's your problem. It's certainly not mine."
*Three artworks by Nugent, including a self-portrait, are on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in a show called "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism." It closes on July 28, 2024.
Combs had been caught on a 2016 hotel surveillance video brutally assaulting his then-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura.
It has also been alleged that he was involved in sex trafficking.
Summer of Soul, released in 2021, is a movie I hope to see on a DVD. It's a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969. Among the performers who appeared on stage were Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, B. B. King, and Mahalia Jackson. The above wall mural appeared on the side of a building that's located on the corner of West 124th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The building is one block from Mount Morris Park (renamed Marcus Garvey Park), where the historic event took place.
I worked as a proofreader at the iconic New York alternative newspaper, The Village Voice, in 1982 and 1983. Back then Monday nights were special because around 7:30 or 8 o'clock the editorial staff were treated to a different national cuisine. I remember, for the first time, eating a pierogi, a sort of Polish dumpling.
At 8:30 or so, we got in a van and headed for the printing plant in Hackensack, New Jersey, working until seven the next morning, checking the page proofs for any last-minute errors that crept in before we went to press a few hours later.
Before arriving at the plant we would stop at a Dunkin' Donuts shop to pick up a couple of boxes of donuts. There might have been coffee purchased, too. Although my memory of that is kind of hazy, it seems unimaginable to eat donuts without something to wash them down.
I say all this because I recently picked up from the Little Free Library a book called Chowdaheadz: A Wicked Smaaht Guide to All Things Boston by Ryan DeLisle and Ryan Gormady, two Bostonians, with humorous illustrations by Kevin Mulkern, another Bostonian (Globe Pequot/ Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
In this book I learned that Dunkin' Donuts began in 1950 "as a single donut shop in Quincy, Massachusetts" that "has morphed into a Massachusetts icon." The authors further state that "[t]he endless drive-through lines at every location at any given hour prove that Boston runs on Dunkin." (The book spells Dunkin' without the apostrophe. Store signage puts it in. I chose to follow the latter.)
This might sound sacrilegious to a Bostonian, but I don't like Dunkin' Donuts. They remind me too much of those terrible donuts sold at the Winchell's donut chain stores in the Los Angeles area. My go-to donut store is Krispy Kreme, of which there are too few in New York. I like their soft, sugary, and somewhat greasy texture, especially after they are freshly made.
So if I ever get a chance to visit Boston (don't call it Beantown), I would be hunting for a Krispy Kreme shop, not a Dunkin' Donuts one. And I would make sure to carry with me a copy of Chowdaheadz* as well as a good street map.
*The authors explain what a chowdahead is. It's "someone who lives, or has lived, in Boston and maintains a wicked big sense of regional pride."
Reminder: National Donut Day is celebrated on the first Friday in June. In 2024, it will be on Friday, June 7th.
The playwright Reginald Rose's jury room drama, 12 Angry Men, began as a one-hour play performed live on network television in 1954. When it became a feature-length movie, released in 1957, it was a box office flop, despite receiving widespread critical acclaim.
Decades later, writes Phil Rosenzweig, in his book, 12 Angry Men: Reginald Rose and the Making of an American Classic (Fordham University Press, 2021), it "is revered as one of America's greatest motion pictures," written by one of television's Golden Age writers.
The stage play version, popular with both professional and amateur productions, caused one current critic to note that the play "still manages to grip an audience as though it were ripped from today's headlines." One New York Times writer, however, called attention to the "legal and social anachronisms" present in the play (and the movie) such as an all-white, all-male jury, the allowing of jurors to smoke in the jury room, and the mandatory death penalty (in New York State). There is one other anachronism, Juror #8 (Henry Fonda's character in the movie) brings a switchblade knife to the jury room that's similar to the one used as evidence in the murder trial. Today, with metal detectors present at the courthouse entrance, the knife would have been immediately confiscated by court officers.
Otherwise, I agree with the Times writer's assessment that "the play [as well as the movie] remains fresh, engaging, and powerful."
Galimoto by Karen Lynn Williams, illustrated by Catherine Stock (HarperCollins, paperback, 1991, approx. 32 pp., suitable for ages 4-8).
Kondi is a small boy who lives in a village in the African country of Malawi where the national language is Chichewa.
"I shall make a galimoto," he tells his older brother, Ufulu. (Galimoto, the Chichewa word for "car," is what a small push toy is called. It can be made of wires or some other material.) Ufulu laughs and tells Kondi that he doesn't have enough wires to make his toy. That sets Kondi on a neighborhood search for wires. Along the way he encounters adults who at first don't understand what he is doing when he climbs over a fence or innocently cuts in front of a long line of housewives patiently waiting to have their maize ground by the miller at the flour mill.
Undeterred, Kondi continues his search for more wires. When he achieves his goal, Kondi makes a toy car that he pushes with a long bamboo stick to the delight of the other children in the village. After succeeding in making his galimoto, he dreams that night of what he will make next. Perhaps "an ambulance or an airplane or a helicopter."
Galimoto is a riveting story that is told in simple language and is beautifully illustrated with watercolor drawings. The book is meant to be read aloud and is sure to please children in the four to eight age range.
The story took me back to my own childhood when I would make a bus or a train out of an empty quart size milk container or cardboard boxes. I had plenty of store-bought toys but I also enjoyed making things by hand.
Galimoto is a great way for parents to encourage small children to let their imaginations have free rein by using everyday items to create their own toys and not depend solely on those that are ready-made.
At a time when kids have their eyes glued to mobile devices, this book introduces them to the printed page, shows them the simple pleasure of creating something with their own hands, and allows them to see how a child in a far-away land uses his leisure time.
