It's time to dust off our copies of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1984, Farenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, The Handmaid's Tale, 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).
