Sunday, December 25, 2011
Harold Bloom and me
I don't know how I just learned this, but I was greatly honored to discover that my 2001 critical essay "Phoenix has no Coat: Historicity, Eschatology, and Sins of Omission in Eudora Welty's 'A Worn Path'" was anthologized in an edition of Harold Bloom's influential series Modern Critical Views, this one devoted to Eudora Welty, which Bloom edited and for which he wrote the introduction. Even though Bloom and I diverge widely in our view of literature and interpretation, I am honored to have had my work selected for his anthology. A great holiday surprise.
Friday, December 23, 2011
For anyone interested, Amazon.com has my article "Phoenix Has No Coat: Historicity, Eschatology, and Sins of Omission in Eudora Welty's 'A Worn Path," for download from The International Fiction Review. At the risk of egotism, I do think the piec offers a very different view of a beloved and frequently taught story.
http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Has-Coat-Historicity-International/dp/B0008IBRMY
http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Has-Coat-Historicity-International/dp/B0008IBRMY
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Autumn in New York
A fabled season in a fabled city, autumn in New York is that rare phenomenon that actually exceeds the hyperbolic adoration that it generates (and the one horrific film that bears the same title as this blog. Richard Gere, Winona Ryder, burn in hell). Despite bizarre October snow, this fall has been unusually warm (today, Nov. 20 the temperature will rise to 60 degrees and the city is suffused with sunshine) and lovely. This is even more the case in my neighborhood, East Harlem, aka El Barrio, aka Spanish Harlem.
The long rays of afternoon sunshine that characterize autumn everywhere are especially lovely here, their radiance stretching down Harlem's narrow, apartment-rimmed streets and brushing the buildings, which in El Barrio are typically splashed in Caribbean pastels, with soft golds, ambers, and yellows. The confluence of warm sunlight and vivid paint, the collision of the tropical and the coming cold here, produces an effect unlike any I've seen elsewhere.
Unseasonably warm days like today seem to interject a kind of reflective thoughtfulness into the constant conversational energy that is as much a part of El Barrio's atmosphere as oxygen. I don't understand more than 3 words of Spanish, the dominant language here, but whether it's the few snatched words of Twi, the Ghanaiain language I know a few terms of (including the phrase for "Enormously tall gigantically huge white man," a comment I heard often as the only 6'5" white man in sight while visiting there), or the Senegalese residents speaking Wolof, which I recognize only as such, everyone seems to me more bemused, thoughtful, pensive -- appreciative of the reprieve in the weather, but aware that this interval will be brief indeed.
On the Harlem Meer's always beautiful waters, its constant residents the Mallards have been joined by migratory Northern Shovelers and Buffleheads, the former large skimming ducks, the latter teeniny diving fowl, and both beautiful beyond description. The Shovelers, the males arrayed in blazing green, white, and buff colors, circle with their mates while skimming the lake surface for food in a graceful dance that seems clearly and intricately orchestrated; the madcap Buffleheads, the males and females sharing a gorgeous white patch on their temples, with the males' coloring augmented by a formal tuxedo of black and white, dive randomly and explosively for their dinner.
Today I first heard and then was lucky enough to see a lone Mockingbird, a hardy soul apparently determined to stay out the winter -- what a wonderful compensation for New Yorkers, and how grateful will I be on that sunny frigid day when I hope to chance upon his spontaneous outbursts in utter defiance of the cold. Judging from the bird's incessant singing today -- I recognized expert imitations of six different bird songs in less than a minute -- this year-round New Yorker is a male. How Mockers survive a Northeastern winter is a mystery to me, given that they are dependent on insects and berries, but especially so in Manhattan, even within the perimeters of Central Park.
Keats famously wrote that "A thing of beauty is a joy forever/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness..."
But less well known is his clarification of that renowned passage: in order to be fully human for Keats, we must develop bonds to the beautiful aspects of the human, natural, and cultural world so that they
"Haunt us until they become a cheering light/ Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast/That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast/ They always must be with us or we die."
Keats optimism would be easy to dimiss as childish naivete, given that he was barely into his twenties when he wrote these words. But he was a singular prodigy, not only in the mechanics of poetry, but also in the existential truths of mortality. He was dead a few years after he wrote those words, and he knew the tortuous death that was coming for him.
So at a time of especially profound loss in my own life, of confusion, conflict, and doubt, I am doubly blessed to have had a golden autumn day of East Harlem sunshine enriched by the winged denizens who live here with me. Nothing is solved, no mystery resolved, but solace and comfort were given unforeseen. And for that I am grateful.
The long rays of afternoon sunshine that characterize autumn everywhere are especially lovely here, their radiance stretching down Harlem's narrow, apartment-rimmed streets and brushing the buildings, which in El Barrio are typically splashed in Caribbean pastels, with soft golds, ambers, and yellows. The confluence of warm sunlight and vivid paint, the collision of the tropical and the coming cold here, produces an effect unlike any I've seen elsewhere.
Unseasonably warm days like today seem to interject a kind of reflective thoughtfulness into the constant conversational energy that is as much a part of El Barrio's atmosphere as oxygen. I don't understand more than 3 words of Spanish, the dominant language here, but whether it's the few snatched words of Twi, the Ghanaiain language I know a few terms of (including the phrase for "Enormously tall gigantically huge white man," a comment I heard often as the only 6'5" white man in sight while visiting there), or the Senegalese residents speaking Wolof, which I recognize only as such, everyone seems to me more bemused, thoughtful, pensive -- appreciative of the reprieve in the weather, but aware that this interval will be brief indeed.
On the Harlem Meer's always beautiful waters, its constant residents the Mallards have been joined by migratory Northern Shovelers and Buffleheads, the former large skimming ducks, the latter teeniny diving fowl, and both beautiful beyond description. The Shovelers, the males arrayed in blazing green, white, and buff colors, circle with their mates while skimming the lake surface for food in a graceful dance that seems clearly and intricately orchestrated; the madcap Buffleheads, the males and females sharing a gorgeous white patch on their temples, with the males' coloring augmented by a formal tuxedo of black and white, dive randomly and explosively for their dinner.
Today I first heard and then was lucky enough to see a lone Mockingbird, a hardy soul apparently determined to stay out the winter -- what a wonderful compensation for New Yorkers, and how grateful will I be on that sunny frigid day when I hope to chance upon his spontaneous outbursts in utter defiance of the cold. Judging from the bird's incessant singing today -- I recognized expert imitations of six different bird songs in less than a minute -- this year-round New Yorker is a male. How Mockers survive a Northeastern winter is a mystery to me, given that they are dependent on insects and berries, but especially so in Manhattan, even within the perimeters of Central Park.
Keats famously wrote that "A thing of beauty is a joy forever/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness..."
But less well known is his clarification of that renowned passage: in order to be fully human for Keats, we must develop bonds to the beautiful aspects of the human, natural, and cultural world so that they
"Haunt us until they become a cheering light/ Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast/That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast/ They always must be with us or we die."
Keats optimism would be easy to dimiss as childish naivete, given that he was barely into his twenties when he wrote these words. But he was a singular prodigy, not only in the mechanics of poetry, but also in the existential truths of mortality. He was dead a few years after he wrote those words, and he knew the tortuous death that was coming for him.
So at a time of especially profound loss in my own life, of confusion, conflict, and doubt, I am doubly blessed to have had a golden autumn day of East Harlem sunshine enriched by the winged denizens who live here with me. Nothing is solved, no mystery resolved, but solace and comfort were given unforeseen. And for that I am grateful.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
"Near Wild Heaven" excerpt
Below is a chapter excerpt from a draft memoir I've been working on that describes my childhood growing up before and after my hometown of Columbus, Georgia was forcibly desegregated in the early 1970s.
Chapter Five
“Pot Pie and Gatorade at Twilight”
“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong:
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
--Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
By the late 1960s, when I began third grade and my brother Tod second, we were already veterans of Columbus High School football games. The Blue Devils were my parents’ passion. My mother taught history and was cheerleader advisor at CHS, which had also been Carson McCullers’ alma mater, a fact much less important than the team’s record any given year; my father was unofficial team photographer, so we were granted unlimited sideline access. Even with a capacity crowd, our ramshackle municipal stadium still hosted more rats than spectators. A few blocks away sat the city’s desolate public housing projects, home to those African Americans not forced to live in the even bleaker ghetto that most whites called “Niggertown,” a term my parents never tolerated.
We also looked forward to Fridays at the stadium because of another seasonal phenomenon: just before dusk great swarms of chimney swifts would rocket from the vast smokestacks of an abandoned cotton mill nearby. But even more astounding was watching the myriad birds -- one of the world’s fastest species -- wheel and career towards the stadium lights. The air there, fraught with insects, was a chimney swift buffet, and the birds, tiny daredevils on a search and destroy mission, gorged themselves in preparation for their approaching migration south. I wondered what mystical capacity allowed them to race across the violet sky and then abruptly change course without crashing into each other. Later I would learn that scientists still have no idea what that secret power is.
But we learned about more than the avian world at that stadium: we encountered a realm beyond the all-white crowd in the bleachers; we gained a broader grasp of the society into which we’d been born, and began to understand how privileged we were simply to be white. At our ages, Tod and I were bored easily, even by live football, and so we would often mill around, searching for ways to entertain ourselves. Using a wadded Coke cup for a ball, we would play football or improvise a game of baseball, using our hands for bats.
One night, while playing in our favorite spot, an unused, dimly lit area between one of the end zones and the parking lot’s chain-link fence, I was stopped in the middle of my wind-up by a whispered “Hey! White boys! Over here!”
Against the fence stood a group of five or six African American boys, all about our age, waving us towards them. We went over hesitantly.
“You gots to let us in!” one of them implored.
A low concrete wall bordered the fence’s bottom, preventing it from being pulled outwards by would-be interlopers. However, it could be pulled inward, which we did. The boys scurried under, escaping the security guards’ attention. Excited about the break-in, they instantly treated us as though we were old buddies, slapping us on the back, asking us our names. We learned that the ringleaders’ nicknames were Gatorade and Pot Pie. Apparently these distinctive monikers originated in Pot Pie’s great passion for Swanson’s frozen pot pies, while Gatorade was obsessed with his namesake sports drink -- luxuries their parents could rarely afford. My brother and I had spent nights with our maid’s family at her house, but we’d never had African American friends our age. That we now did struck us as cool, but more importantly, here was a group of boys who wanted to play some serious football.
For the next two seasons, we waged epic battles at every CHS home game. Each contest featured a different quarterback, with everyone else playing wide receiver, a recipe for divine madness: we would veer around much like the swifts above us, except for our frequent and spectacular collisions. Often three or four of us would crash into each other, determined to grasp the Coke cup “football” and run for immortal glory. Each play usually ended in a tangled pile of laughing black and white bodies. Once Pot Pie smuggled in a Whiffle ball set he had gotten for his birthday. He couldn’t have been more excited about the inexpensive toys if they had been treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamen. None of us had played Whiffle ball before, and our inexperience was compounded by the dim light of our hideout area. The ball was hollow and perforated with large holes and so bobbled around like a knuckleball from hell. We swung the bat madly at it, like blindfolded, manic kids swinging at a birthday pinata. Because we dared not draw attention to our fence scam, when tired we watched the “real” game -- unlike ours, always played by all-white teams -- from the darkness just above our play area.
Once our friends arrived at our meeting place loaded with the sizeable harvest of a maypop expedition. Maypops, the fruit of the passion flower vines that grow wild across the South, have served as projectiles in pitched battles between boys of all races there from time immemorial. On contact the small pods explode with a gratifying, harmless “pop!” (hence the name), leaving only a stringy web of seeds on the victim. I remember my father’s bewilderment when we returned to the sidelines after an especially heated fracas, our hair and clothes festooned with the slimy seeds.
Now I realize that those nights, a full two years before desegregation, were not just played in the literal dusk of fall evenings, in the shadowy border between the illuminated stadium and the darkness beyond the fence. Our no-man’s land was a figurative one as well, a haven from a larger world in which our friendship was untenable, impossible. We were playing in the twilight of the old segregation, the detestable Jim Crow apartheid that not only condemned our friendship but sent my brother and me home to a comfortable house in a safe neighborhood while our friends returned to the dismal, crime-ridden projects circling the no-man’s land around the stadium.
Yet for two short football seasons, we came near wild heaven, an alternative universe of our own devising.
Like the swifts, our friends would leave us at the end of each autumn and we would be forced to confront the larger world, a world much harsher for them than for us. And one season there was no reunion. We hoped that they would maintain as clear a sense of direction and purpose as those migrating birds, that the world would not strip them of their exuberance, of their accepting natures, nor of the creativity exemplified by their very names.
But we would learn in the coming years just how bad the odds against them were.
Now whenever I see swifts I think not just of determination, of beauty and grace, but of transition, of the passage from one world to another -- and of the dire human costs exacted by that journey.
Chapter Five
“Pot Pie and Gatorade at Twilight”
“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong:
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
--Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
By the late 1960s, when I began third grade and my brother Tod second, we were already veterans of Columbus High School football games. The Blue Devils were my parents’ passion. My mother taught history and was cheerleader advisor at CHS, which had also been Carson McCullers’ alma mater, a fact much less important than the team’s record any given year; my father was unofficial team photographer, so we were granted unlimited sideline access. Even with a capacity crowd, our ramshackle municipal stadium still hosted more rats than spectators. A few blocks away sat the city’s desolate public housing projects, home to those African Americans not forced to live in the even bleaker ghetto that most whites called “Niggertown,” a term my parents never tolerated.
We also looked forward to Fridays at the stadium because of another seasonal phenomenon: just before dusk great swarms of chimney swifts would rocket from the vast smokestacks of an abandoned cotton mill nearby. But even more astounding was watching the myriad birds -- one of the world’s fastest species -- wheel and career towards the stadium lights. The air there, fraught with insects, was a chimney swift buffet, and the birds, tiny daredevils on a search and destroy mission, gorged themselves in preparation for their approaching migration south. I wondered what mystical capacity allowed them to race across the violet sky and then abruptly change course without crashing into each other. Later I would learn that scientists still have no idea what that secret power is.
But we learned about more than the avian world at that stadium: we encountered a realm beyond the all-white crowd in the bleachers; we gained a broader grasp of the society into which we’d been born, and began to understand how privileged we were simply to be white. At our ages, Tod and I were bored easily, even by live football, and so we would often mill around, searching for ways to entertain ourselves. Using a wadded Coke cup for a ball, we would play football or improvise a game of baseball, using our hands for bats.
One night, while playing in our favorite spot, an unused, dimly lit area between one of the end zones and the parking lot’s chain-link fence, I was stopped in the middle of my wind-up by a whispered “Hey! White boys! Over here!”
Against the fence stood a group of five or six African American boys, all about our age, waving us towards them. We went over hesitantly.
“You gots to let us in!” one of them implored.
A low concrete wall bordered the fence’s bottom, preventing it from being pulled outwards by would-be interlopers. However, it could be pulled inward, which we did. The boys scurried under, escaping the security guards’ attention. Excited about the break-in, they instantly treated us as though we were old buddies, slapping us on the back, asking us our names. We learned that the ringleaders’ nicknames were Gatorade and Pot Pie. Apparently these distinctive monikers originated in Pot Pie’s great passion for Swanson’s frozen pot pies, while Gatorade was obsessed with his namesake sports drink -- luxuries their parents could rarely afford. My brother and I had spent nights with our maid’s family at her house, but we’d never had African American friends our age. That we now did struck us as cool, but more importantly, here was a group of boys who wanted to play some serious football.
For the next two seasons, we waged epic battles at every CHS home game. Each contest featured a different quarterback, with everyone else playing wide receiver, a recipe for divine madness: we would veer around much like the swifts above us, except for our frequent and spectacular collisions. Often three or four of us would crash into each other, determined to grasp the Coke cup “football” and run for immortal glory. Each play usually ended in a tangled pile of laughing black and white bodies. Once Pot Pie smuggled in a Whiffle ball set he had gotten for his birthday. He couldn’t have been more excited about the inexpensive toys if they had been treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamen. None of us had played Whiffle ball before, and our inexperience was compounded by the dim light of our hideout area. The ball was hollow and perforated with large holes and so bobbled around like a knuckleball from hell. We swung the bat madly at it, like blindfolded, manic kids swinging at a birthday pinata. Because we dared not draw attention to our fence scam, when tired we watched the “real” game -- unlike ours, always played by all-white teams -- from the darkness just above our play area.
Once our friends arrived at our meeting place loaded with the sizeable harvest of a maypop expedition. Maypops, the fruit of the passion flower vines that grow wild across the South, have served as projectiles in pitched battles between boys of all races there from time immemorial. On contact the small pods explode with a gratifying, harmless “pop!” (hence the name), leaving only a stringy web of seeds on the victim. I remember my father’s bewilderment when we returned to the sidelines after an especially heated fracas, our hair and clothes festooned with the slimy seeds.
Now I realize that those nights, a full two years before desegregation, were not just played in the literal dusk of fall evenings, in the shadowy border between the illuminated stadium and the darkness beyond the fence. Our no-man’s land was a figurative one as well, a haven from a larger world in which our friendship was untenable, impossible. We were playing in the twilight of the old segregation, the detestable Jim Crow apartheid that not only condemned our friendship but sent my brother and me home to a comfortable house in a safe neighborhood while our friends returned to the dismal, crime-ridden projects circling the no-man’s land around the stadium.
Yet for two short football seasons, we came near wild heaven, an alternative universe of our own devising.
Like the swifts, our friends would leave us at the end of each autumn and we would be forced to confront the larger world, a world much harsher for them than for us. And one season there was no reunion. We hoped that they would maintain as clear a sense of direction and purpose as those migrating birds, that the world would not strip them of their exuberance, of their accepting natures, nor of the creativity exemplified by their very names.
But we would learn in the coming years just how bad the odds against them were.
Now whenever I see swifts I think not just of determination, of beauty and grace, but of transition, of the passage from one world to another -- and of the dire human costs exacted by that journey.
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