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I finished Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs last weekend. It’s a novel made up almost entirely of shaggy dog stories, a novel of ideas, a quick and engaging read whose characters are mainly forgettable. I then tried reading Anchee Min’s Red Azalea and got most of the way through part one. A memoir of the author’s life in China during the Cultural Revolution, every incident in it is played up for maximum impact. I guess I’m spoiled by having read Liao Yiwu’s masterpiece The Corpse Walker earlier this year. It's hard to compare almost almost any artistic treatment of recent Chinese history to that harrowing and brilliant book. Finally I read William Shakespeare’s History of Henry IV, Part One, a play of doubles. For Falstaff, who makes his first appearance in this play, every word has a double meaning; Harry Hotspur and Prince Harry are hotheaded doppelgängers; neither Hotspur nor Falstaff know how or when to stop talking; the twofold revolts at the play’s heart, both against King Henry IV and both carried out by the young Harrys, are reflections of Henry IV’s own uprising against Richard II; and Hotspur even gets to die two deaths, in a way. I’ve now begun Chris Offutt’s Country Dark . . .

Dream Facts

I dreamed I was walking on a grassy bluff in Mobile Bay and saw three stone houses occupied by African American families. I learned that these were the oldest houses in the Mississippi Valley, the Stone Houses, built in 1615.

This is what comes of reading and writing about Barracoon and fondly remembering my exploration of the Mobile area three summers ago. Of course, in my dream I didn’t realize that Mobile is not in the Mississippi Valley; nor that the oldest house in the Mississippi Valley was made of wood in 1757 in Pascagoula; nor that the oldest house in Mobile was made of brick in 1827.

Sometimes I want to live in a world of dream facts. I want to be able to Google them and put them in my books.

But then I remember how happy my waking is when my nightmares get everything wrong.

My Thirty-Three Favorite Can'ts

“I Can’t Dance” (Gram Parsons, 1970)

“I Can’t Even Drink It Away” (Charlie Rich, 1970)

“I Can’t Find My Money” (Mekons, 1987)

“Can’t Find My Way Home” (Blind Faith, 1969)

“Just Can’t Get Enough” (Depeche Mode, 1981)

“I Can’t Get Next to You” (Al Green, 1971)

“Can’t Get Out of This Mood” (Lee Wiley, 1957)

“I Can’t Get Over You to Save My Life” (Lefty Frizzell, 1973)

“Can’t Get Used to Losing You” (Andy Williams, 1963)

“Can’t Give It Up” (King Floyd, 1975)

“I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” (Billie Holiday, 1937; Judy Garland, 1960)

“I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” (Daryl Hall & John Oates, 1981)

“You Can’t Have Me” (Big Star, 1974)

“I Can’t Hold Out” (Eric Clapton, 1974)

“Can’t Let Go” (Lucinda Williams, 1998)

“Can’t Make a Sound” (Elliott Smith, 2000)

“I Can’t Make It Alone” (Dusty Springfield, 1969)

“You Can’t Miss What You Can’t Measure” (Funkadelic, 1973)

“You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” (Johnny Thunders, 1978)

“I Can’t See” (Sebadoh, 1987)

“I Can’t Sleep at Night” (Gary Higgins, 1973)

“I Can’t Stand It” (The Velvet Underground, 1969)

“Can’t Stand It” (Wilco, 1999)

“I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)” (James Brown, 1967)

“I Can’t Stand the Rain” (Ann Peebles, 1974)

“U Can’t Stop Me” (Basement Jaxx, 1998)

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” (Lauryn Hill, 1998)

“You Can’t Turn Me Away” (Sylvia Striplin, 1981)

“Can’t Wait (Alternate Version)” (Bob Dylan, 1997)

“I Can’t Wake Up” (KRS-One, 1993)

“Can’t You Just Feel It” (Lonnie Smith, 1966)

“Can’t You Just See Me” (Aretha Franklin, 1964)

“Can’t You See” (Hank Williams Jr., 1975)

Next up: my eleven favorite won’ts.

The Reef and Barracoon

This week I finished reading two books.

Edith Wharton’s The Reef (1912) concerns American expats in France, but it’s really about the shadings of love, jealousy, and class, and in its minute dissection of its characters’ psychology, it resembles both Henry James and Marcel Proust. Although it’s a superb and compelling read, full of nuance, tenderness, and pain, it was panned upon publication and criticized by the author herself, who called it a “poor miserable lifeless lump.” James disagreed and told Wharton it was “quite the finest thing you have done.” Of its primary protagonists, he wrote, “Each of these two figures is admirable for truth and justesse; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes (that is some of them) sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I'm not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself.”

Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon was completed in 1931 but unpublished until this year; it is essentially a recasting of a series of interviews with Cudjo Lewis, an ex-slave born in Africa and kidnapped as a teenager, conducted in 1927 and 1928. Because I have closely edited three volumes of slave narratives, written a book about the author, and visited Africatown, where it takes place, I was quite anxious to read Barracoon when it was published, but I had trouble getting a copy, since the publisher didn’t anticipate the demand for it (it debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list). The book is superbly packaged, and the ancillary material, most of it by Deborah Plant, is exemplary, with one exception. Hurston utterly fictionalized her own story in the book, pretending that the interviews took place between June and October, and that they were all done under the auspices of Charlotte Mason, her patron. In fact, she first interviewed Lewis in the summer of 1927 under the auspices of Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and those initial interviews were unsuccessful; she then went back that winter to conduct a series of much more successful ones. I think this fictionalization should have been pointed out somewhere. But that’s a quibble. The meat of the book is Cudjo’s own story, which is unusual in its emphasis on the role of Dahomeyan slave traders. In every other slave narrative, the most evil parts are played by American slaveowners; in this one, the African slave traders take the prize. It’s also unusual in its emphasis on the cruelties of post-Emancipation Southern life, as what happened to Lewis’s family on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, during the sixty years after Emancipation is more horrific than what he faced during the few years he was a slave. In no other slave narrative is there such a palpable warmth and tenderness between the narrator and his amanuensis; in no other slave narrative does one come away with a better picture of the daily life of the narrator at the time of his narration; in no other slave narrative that I’ve read is homesickness for Africa such a pervasive theme.

I want to close with a brief excerpt from my book Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal about Barracoon.

Cudjo Lewis, the reason for Zora’s presence in Mobile, was idealized at the time as the last true connection between Africa and America. (Zora later found an even older woman who had been on board with him.) The Clotilda was the last known slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States: it was secretly commissioned by a wealthy Mobile businessman and arrived in 1859, over fifty years after the United States had abolished the African slave trade. Lewis and his fellow shipmates were slaves only a few years. After the Civil War, they established an extensive community called Africatown a few miles north of Mobile, with shotgun shacks dispersed over a large wooded area. Unlike in Mobile, there were no sidewalks, paved roads, electricity, or gaslights. (Home to lumber mills from the time of its inception, the community has been continually plagued by industrial pollution, and even now its poverty is shocking. “We’re still burying most of our people between the age of 40 and 50 right now,” a resident stated recently.)

            Cudjo’s house had no windows, so he left the door open in the summer. He grew sugarcane and clingstone peaches in his garden. Speaking in a thick West African accent, he was somewhat cagey about his past. Zora helped him sweep out the church he attended and drove him to Mobile to buy turnip seed. But she was unable to obtain sufficient information from her interviews to complete the kind of report Carter Woodson expected. So she padded her article with lengthy uncredited excerpts from the 1914 interviews with Lewis that Emma Langdon Roche had published in her book Historic Sketches of the Old South, and submitted the resulting piece to Woodson, likely with no intention of having it appear in print. Woodson, however, unaware of her plagiarism (the last seven pages were taken almost verbatim from Roche), published the report under Zora’s name as “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver” in the Journal of Negro History. Zora never told anyone what had happened, and it wasn’t until long after her death that her copying was discovered and revealed. Biographer Robert Hemenway believes that her plagiarism was a kind of subconscious academic suicide attempt, since Zora was at this point tired of being beholden to academic standards. Certainly if Woodson had discovered her source, it would have been the end of her academic career. Zora would, however, go back to interview Lewis again, much more successfully, later that year and the next, and would use those interviews as the basis for a book, Barracoon, completed in 1931 and finally published in 2018. In it, she heavily fictionalized her own experience, presenting her visit as having lasted from June to October, all under Godmother’s auspices. But Zora told Cudjo’s story faithfully, backing it up with copious research.

Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell

“Everybody left the table and Bobby and I were sitting there. After a long silence he said, ‘If you were gonna paint this room, what would you paint?’ I said, ‘Well, let me think. I'd paint the mirrored ball spinning, I'd paint the women in the washroom, the band . . .’ I said, ‘What would you paint?’ He said, ‘I'd paint this coffee cup.’”

—from Cameron Crowe’s July 26, 1979 Rolling Stone interview with Joni Mitchell

Books I've Read Recently

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Blood Horses is really two conjoined books, one a funny and generous memoir of his father, a sportswriter plagued by bad habits and blessed with excellent humor, and the other an exploration of American horse-racing, replete with aperçus and hilarious set-pieces.

In Anne Patchett’s Commonwealth, booze-fueled parties go bad, children run amok with guns and gin, an alcoholic novelist falls for his bartender, and destiny always comes from left field. It’s tender, very funny, and unexpected. My wife and I both loved it; now it’s my daughter’s turn.

In The Tragedy of King Richard the Second by William Shakespeare, the eponymous monarch expounds his every belief/conceit with breathtaking eloquence only to change his mind on a dime again and again. I especially enjoyed his poeticizing on dirt (“Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs”) and thought-breeding (“A generation of still-breeding thoughts; / And these same thoughts people this little world”). Everyone here seems to act without motive or foresight—Richard sends Bolingbroke and Mowbray into exile on a whim, we never find out why he murdered Gloucester, and Bolingbroke’s real thoughts on usurping the throne remain utterly obscure (especially since his cousin Edmund, the rightful heir should anything happen to Richard, isn't even mentioned). And then there’s Act IV Scene I, in which lord after lord, one by one, accuses the last one of lying and challenges him to a duel, all without consequence. The political world here, much like that of our own, is one of constant alteration/altercation without a center, without reason. But oh, the poetry that spills from Richard’s lips . . .

I’m now in the middle of Edith Wharton’s The Reef and Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon and am about to start Eugene Lim's Dear Cyborgs, and will doubtless have something to say about them all soon.

"Has anyone noticed how fulfilled Sisyphus is?" (Dean Young)

I have to admit I’d never heard of Dean Young until I read five of his poems in the new issue of the Oxford American, which you can buy here. According to the “Contributors” section of the magazine, he is the author of “numerous collections,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and received the Academy Award in Literature. (I didn’t know they had Oscars for literature.) According to his poems, he is “ornately thorned and easily torn,” his “throne is a sardine can,” he is “so used to not getting the joke” that he is “probably mostly joke by now,” when he was younger he “could not draw a rabbit but / could an exploding cube full / of flaming tubas and eyeballs / and that has made all the difference,” and he “could use a smoke.” I think he might be lying, but, as he says, “It’s hard to ruin poetry.” You can probably guess that I admire these five poems. They remind me of my own, though his are a lot better. You can read some of his poems here. You can read some of mine here.