Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

Despite frequent editorials to the contrary, hip-hop is not dead, nor is it dying.  Hip-hop is as dead as jazz is: that is to say, there’s still great music being made, even if mainstream media ignores said music.  It’s also true that I won’t hold my breath for the next Bird, Monk, Ornette, or Trane to lay down a style-wide marker for before and after artist x, and just the same I am not expecting a new Chuck D or Rakim to make everyone in hip-hop pay attention and re-evaluate.  Hip-hop is either commercialized or underground, the former pernicious, the latter often as great as the Greats but rarely known outside of a tiny group of fans and, one has to think, not making a great living at it.

My wife borrowed this book from the library and then, half-way through or something, bought it.  Jeff Chang‘s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop was indeed worth the money, I discover, particularly when one buys a used copy.  It’s subtitled “a History of the Hip-Hop Generation,” rather than of hip-hop, and this it is, all for the better.

Chang excels at context, which to me is both the mark of a clear thinker and, completely related to this, the most important consideration in understanding anything in its social aspect.  Indeed the book, as much as documenting hip-hop itself documents the broadening context of the movement (of which I am prone to follow in its musical form, rap) which to my read can almost entirely explain hip-hop’s changing form and content.

The book begins in the 1970′s Bronx and Jamaica–the island nation, not Jamaica, Queens–and clearly documents that hip-hop’s originators were people totally abandoned by their governments and societies.  Particularly of value for the reader in the United States is the material on the Bronx, simply because public discussion of poverty in the United States has not really happened for some long time, certainly since Johnson’s Presidency.  As an aside, there is much talk under Obama and a real measure of action to shore up the beleaguered middle classes of which I am a part, all well and good, but totally ignoring the growing number of people this country has all but left for dead.  Chang documents how thoroughly the Bronx was targeted–not hyperbole–for destruction.  Urban planners, police chiefs, and the racist swine Daniel Moynihan are correctly fingered for the crime.

I was one of the white kids who got really turned on to hip-hop when Public Enemy put out It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.  I was a freshman in college when it came out, and I bought it that summer.  It’s hard for me to overstate how important Public Enemy was and continues to be for me.  I had grown up a massive Beatles fan, and had always wanted to know the feeling I’d read about, when Sgt. Pepper’s came out, when everybody was listening to it and talking about it, and when it seemed to lay down one of those cultural markers, like those of Bird and Ornette, of before and after.  It Takes a Nation was precisely that.  I had long discussions about it and, particularly the “Fight the Power” 12″ (which was the greatest single record I could remember being released) with my friends Greg and Ross.  I took Chuck’s advice and listened to Farrakhan, and like Chuck I took what was valuable and discarded that which was not.  I was a good white kid with good intentions before PE, but Chuck D put me on a better road than that.

I say this because I came to the book with opinions and expectations about N.W.A. in particular and “gangsta rap” in general.  I appreciated Chang’s depiction of the controversy Straight Outta Compton engendered, not so much in the mainstream media but within hip-hop itself.  I participated in these discussions, very much on the fringe of a tiny group, in college.  I wasn’t really one of the hip-hop crowd, but was close with some people who were (as problematic as that sounds) and I was indeed obsessed with Public Enemy.  That said, I remember feeling that N.W.A. was a betrayal, and voicing this to a friend who was himself from Compton and truly one of the hip-hop crowd.  I leveled all the appropriate criticisms, and my friend, while agreeing with all of my substantive points, said, “yes, but it’s real,” meaning simply that Ice Cube depicted things that were part of his world, though by no means things he was close to personally involved with.

Chang more or less takes the line my friend took, and that’s fair enough.  In recent years I will admit that my thoughts on “gangsta rap” have taken on a conspiratorial tone.  I think it was after reading Mike Davis’ City of Quartz years ago–don’t blame Davis for my errors–and digesting how thoroughly the various powers that were and continue to be in L.A. used gang violence as a pretext to implement genuinely genocidal policy in working-class black and brown neighborhoods, I over-conflated the beginnings of “gansta rap” with those policies.  Chang clearly demonstrates how thoroughly grass-roots N.W.A. were in their beginnings, and indeed I found myself having some sympathy for them and Eazy-E in particular as people who had dreams of doing something big but who were, because of where they were from, total underdogs.  Compton–and Chang makes this point explicitly–and South Central L.A. in general were left for dead in the 1980′s just like the Bronx was 10 years before.

What Chang misses in this, the only part of the book that I had any real prior knowledge about, or rather what he leaves out, is a contextual critique of “gangsta rap.”  I remember being furious at Rolling Stone’s one-star review of Public Enemy’s Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age, in which the idiot reviewer (significantly, I can’t find a link to the review online) called PE out of touch, because things had moved forward–not my opinion–with “gangsta rap.”  I did not have the language for a critique at the time, but in hindsight I do, and I wish Chang had pursued this line: we know that the big market for hyper-violent rap is white.  N.W.A. may have themselves, at least to begin with, been truly D.I.Y., but we have to put ourselves in the shoes of white media execs and ambitious white journalists with no personal stake in the future of positive hip-hop.  It doesn’t take an idiot to know that you will have an easier time selling a black musician who confirms white racist stereotypes to white people than you will a black musician who confounds them.  That is the contextual story of “gangsta rap,” and Chang doesn’t really pursue it.

That said, great read, and as far as I can tell indispensable if one wishes to understand the last quarter of the 20th century in the United States.

Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method

One of the great pleasures in my life is having gone to grad school but having not pursued an academic career. I would love to be sure an academic gig, but only if I could jump the ten years plus that I’m striving for tenure (or however long it might be, less or more) and go straight to the part where I’m so tenured I only have to worry about showing up for the few classes I’m asked to teach. That way, I could read whatever I want and have a ton of time to do it. As it stands, I have summer vacations, and for my entire teaching career I have read what I pleased, as I pleased to. No need to keep up with ever little detail in my field.

That said, I studied history in school because I liked it, and I can say that I like reading academic history more than histories intended for the general public, most of the time. I say this not to sound elitist, but because the best academic history operates on a much greater level of detail than popular histories, and I find that detail interesting. One of my big questions as a person is that of the relationship between general and specific.

A number of years ago a friend TA’d for a course in which the prof had assigned Carlo Ginzburg‘s The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries, which on my friend’s recommendation I purchased. I began reading it, liked it, got distracted, and gave it away with the rest of my library when I moved to Senegal. In the intervening years, however, I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and for my birthday I asked my parents each to get me some Ginsburg books. This one, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, I actually bought myself to round out the set, breaking my rule about not buying books any more. The library didn’t have it, I say in my defense.

The book is a series of articles, the contents of which I checked out before buying it, which seemed most interesting to me when they focus on what Ginsburg is justly famous for: documenting popular culture, witchcraft particularly, using sources hostile to the subject. One title explains the basic point: “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist.” We might actually as a general rule reverse the two and note the Anthropologist as Inquisitor, had not Vine Deloria already done so so beautifully. Ginzburg, however, is dealing with an extreme example of the basic methodological question in history, which is that of source material. Ginsburg uses inquisitorial records of heresy to examine popular religious belief. To do this, he needs to compensate for the inherent bias of the source material, in particular the tendency of inquisitors to understand statements of the accused as recitations of the Church’s notions of heresy–everything leads up to the Witches’ Sabbat–rather than as statements in and of themselves. Nor are the accused speaking freely. Everything the accused says is an attempt to on the one hand be credible to the inquisitor and at the same time innocent of capital crime.

This to me is a fascinating inquiry. As such, the most interesting–and without question, my primary concern to me in reading anything is whether or not I happen to find it interesting–articles in the book are the ones that deal with popular religion and methodology. Codification of eros in Titian is of abstract interest to me, but I’d rather have been told the point in conversation with someone over pints than have taken the time to read the article. I did so as a point of principle, having paid for the book.

Definitely not a starting point for Ginzburg’s work. The Night Battles or, I am told, The Worms and the Cheese are certainly worth anyone’s time. I have those both waiting near my bed to finish by summer’s end.

Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

My wife had raved about Edwidge Danticat‘s writing for years, and finally, on a couch on Maui, I read Krik? Krak! in a couple days.  Again, I am confirmed in my decision not to do a doctorate: the freedom to read widely is a real help to my understanding of the world and one which I would not have were I a specialist.  The book is a collection of short stories, most of which take place in Haiti, the country of Danticat’s birth.  She emigrated to New York City (a city about which I have had numerous dreams recently, for some reason), and writes in English, interestingly.  I had assumed, picking up the book, that I would read a translation.

All of Danticat’s subjects are working-class.  I have a feeling–forgive the lack of citations: this piece is not that kind of project–that much of the critical response to this book in the United States viewed the stories in an essentially, if veiled, racialized view of the developing world and patterns of immigration.  I myself have been guilty of seeing some fundamental unity among people in developing countries: somehow, before moving to Senegal, I had felt like “the Senegalese” was actually a meaningful concept.  When I lived there, I came to realize that we had a) the Senegalese people, and b) the Senegalese elite, and possibly a c) Senegalese trying to enter the elite.  I had never been in such a classist society, or at least not for a long enough time to really notice.

Danticat focuses to my memory (I finished the book nearly a month ago now) almost no attention on race, despite the fact, of which she is certainly aware, that her work in this country is categorized racially.  I suppose this helps one understand the destructive absurdity of race in the United States.  Almost entirely focused on class (and gender, one could suggest, though I wouldn’t), she inevitably is categorized racially.  This isn’t to suggest that her book is not fundamentally reflective of a particular aspect of the Black diaspora–Haitian revolutionary consciousness plays a fairly significant role in at least one of the stories–but that white critical types tend to think that the Black diaspora is always about race.

The back cover stresses that Danticat’s protagonists tend to be woman, and in the last, longest story she covers one woman’s marriage, a rite of passage to be sure, from a sister’s perspective.  All this is marketing.  In my writing I tend toward male protagonists, and this is certainly a flaw.  I do this because I’m male and in my life I live as a man.  It’s not a surprise that I tend to write male characters.  Danticat tends to write about women.  None of this is to suggest that Danticat is not entirely conscious of the political implications of writing about women: she obviously is.  That said, were I to point to a particular theme throughout the stories, their class analysis comes to the fore, not at the expense of anything else to be sure.  I am sure, however, that Danticat gets very little attention for documenting the lives of working-class Haitians, and quite a lot for documenting the lives of Haitian women.  The two of course are the same people, just complex as all people are.

There are two points.  The first is that Danticat, because of who she is, cannot avoid in the market place the various labels that are inevitably applied to her.  Given the context, I assume that she embraces them as well she should.  A corollary to this point is that, just as sure as Danticat can’t avoid labels, they won’t be applied to me in terms of my identity.  Rather, I am labeled by what I do: “singer-songwriter,” which is basically factual.  That said, the second point: neither Danticat nor myself can avoid the political implications of who and what we write about.  Writing about anything has political consequences, and the start to dealing with this well is to be conscious of it.

C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution

Get to a good library, get this book, and read it.

I was at a friend’s house and by my habit was looking at his bookshelf.  I grabbed  Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution as well as a copy of Nkrumah’s autobiography, and he told me to take them home, on the condition that I report back to him on the quality of the books: he had bought them but not yet read them, as many bookworms will do.  C.L.R. James passes the test.  The book is out of print, unfortumately, so get right and get a library card, which is my new modus vivendi as I’ve noted before.

Very briefly, the edition I read was originally published in 1977, the bulk of which was published as a fairly lengthy pamphlet in (according to the copyright) 1962, while Nkrumah was still in power, with additions from the period as he was, in James’ analysis, losing his footing.  James’ dedication of the text, to Nkrumah, whom he called Francis, is quite beautiful:

To FRANCIS

in never-to-be forgotten memory.  Like Cromwell and Lenin, he initiated the destruction of a régime in decay — a tremendous achievement; but like them, he failed to create the new society.

James is among other things one of a tiny few of true stylists of 20th century English prose.  He is most famous for The Black Jacobins for perfectly good reasons–i.e., you won’t read a better book–but, truly, should be required reading for anyone trying to get their prose in shape, myself included.  He’s also one of those examples of the colonially educated who mastered the language of the oppressor to a greater extent than any of the oppressors themselves.  I can’t imagine too many writers today, again including myself, who would bother using the correctly-accented “régime” rather than the lazy man’s “regime,” much less know that there is actually a difference.  James, of course knows that both history and language matter, and thus could not but acknowledge the history of the word as he wrote it.

James writes against an entire literature that posits decolonization as something that Europeans did.  Put so, it’s, I hope, obvious how idiotic an idea that is.  I’d note, however, that there is an analogous trend in US historiography that sees the end of slavery as the work of white people (witness California History Standard 10.3.4, which places the end of the slave trade in the unit on the industrial revolution) or the Civil Rights Act as Johnson’s achievment (witness Hillary Clinton’s campaign).  James begins his text with a discussion of “the Myth,” capitalized.  That is, the notion that there’s no way that Black people could actually make history for themselves.  His book, in addition to an analysis of revolutionary process and a very convincing defense from a Marxist perspective of non-violence, is an illustration of the truth that Black people and indeed all people make their own history, even if as Marx famously noted in the Eighteenth Brumaire that

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

In any event, James amply demonstrates that it was the mass movement in Ghana that required the British to leave.  Nkrumah’s role was to understand this and give it focus.  James’ dedication above places Nkrumah on par with Cromwell (interesting choice, and certainly not one expected by this US-educated reader) and Lenin, and his book absolutely justifies that assessment.  Truly, Ghana’s independence movement was in fact a revolution–not a term one finds in American textbooks in this context–and Nkrumah both a theoretician and practitioner of revolution on par with a Lenin.

I have to think that the broad denial of the term “revolution” to Ghana in our textbooks is part of a general tendency of the propertied classes to erase the idea of revolutionary change from the list of possible futures we face.  The materials we as teachers get to work with, textbooks and such, subtly categorize “revolutions” into two categories: the good and the bad.  The “good” ones are those of anglophonic whites: those of England such as it was and the United States.  Reports of revolutionary violence are minimized in textbook treatments of these subjects or dismissed as aberrations.  That both merely confirmed already-existing elites rather than replaced them exposes the agenda of the textbook writers: convince young people, the ones who might actually change things, that change is at minimum not desirable, more likely not actually possible.  The “bad” revolutions are portrayed as inevitable descents into bloodbaths: we see the French and Russian examples at their worst.  Students who because of their decent nature–that is to say, the very people who under capitalism are most likely to want to overthrow it–would gravitate toward thoroughgoing social revolutions are instead taught to revile the very notion of revolution, because they are taught to mistake revolutionary violence for revolution itself.  Ghana’s counter-example gives lie to this.

A worthwhile video, in two parts:

Part One:

Part Two:

As a postscript, I would note that I will get back to blogging about music on my next post.  Summer started, I relaxed and read quite a bit (have three more book blog posts to go until I’m caught up), and only just put the finishing touches on a new tune I hope to record tomorrow.  I’ll be in Riverside for over a month, and the focus there will be songwriting, as well as getting back into shape.

Jorge Amado, Sea of Death (Mar Morto)

In my post on the book I read on capoeira I mentioned the comic Daytripper that I’ve been reading, and its referencing of Yemanja.  I noted that I’d found reference to a novel in which Yemanja loomed large on Wikipedia and that I’d gone to the library to find it, and it was there that I stumbled on the capoeira book.  This is that novel: I finished it on Sunday, June 14.

Jorge Amado‘s Sea of Death–I assume the title works better in Portuguese–did what I wanted, which was to get some better feel for Yemanja and learn something about a part of the world I know nothing about.  The novel takes form in a way I like: the plot to the extent that there is one is simple to the point of obviousness, and the ending completely predictable.  A structure such as this allows one to focus on what is happening in a given episode for what it is rather than as it relates to a larger plot.  Plot to me is about the least interesting device a writer can have, even if it is a useful one.  There was a Simpsons episode at the end of which the family tried to derive some meaning from the night’s events.  I can’t remember if it was Bart or Lisa who ended the discussion by saying “it was just a bunch of stuff that happened.”  I like my literature and song this way.

That said, the book was absolutely racially problematic.  I am not terribly familiar with Brazilian society or history, but I recall something of a dust-up a few years ago about affirmative action policies put in place in Brazil.  My impression was that white Brazilians, in of course a specific way but not at all differently than white Americans, found it almost totally impossible to acknowledge anything but the most obvious and explicit racism.  Amado is considered a leftist, and with good reason.  He was part of the Communist Party, though he left it, and certainly in this book the focus is on working-class people.

That said, the book absolutely is based on familiar racial categories.  The main character–male, too, as the novel, even when focusing on female characters has a palpably male point of view–is white.  There is an oversexed “mulatto girl” who aggressively seduces that male character to have a child and therefore “improve” her lineage, racially.  I can hear the post-racialists now: “but that is realistic–that’s how things were.  Amado was just showing it for what it was.”  #1: how the hell do you know unless you’ve somehow gained a deep insight into the Brazil of the 1930′s?  #2: while surely there were people who made such considerations, they are normalized or even naturalized unless the author somehow throws them into critical relief.  While there’s definitely no excuse for the oversexed mulatta–not my word, obviously–stereotype, the desire to “improve” her racial lineage could be disarmed and contextualized, and above counterbalanced by a non-white character who embraces blackness, however defined.  Then, instead of the only option being the desire to lighten, we see that that might be a historical choice.  And in any event, I would point out that I don’t know any people of color who want to be white.  In my experience–take it as you will–people want to be who they are but want racism to end.  It’s white people’s fantasy that people of color want to be like them.

Separated into a paragraph of its own, for emphasis: a) I don’t know any people of color who advocate for a post-racial society and b) every person of color that I know advocates for a post-racist society.  The only people I have ever met who advocate for a post-racial society have been white people.  A post-racial society: or, a society without black and brown people.

Jon Krakauer: Into the Wild

Image via Wikipedia

I took on a new student for home instruction, and asked her what she wanted to read for English. She told me she didn’t like to read. I responded that that was nuts, and if indeed she was planning on going to college next year she was going to need to learn to love reading. She then said that, well, she had started this book her sister had, Jon Krakauer‘s Into the Wild. Fair enough, I said, and read it I did.

I was predisposed after a few pages to be unsympathetic to the protagonist, Chris McCandless. McCandless, for those who have neither read the book nor seen the film, was a well-off surburban white kid who went to good schools (Emory, no less, for college), who decided that society sucked and took off rambling on his own, eventually going to Alaska with few provisions, where he met his end.

The read was interesting, not so much for the subject matter–the most interesting parts of the book dealt with the people McCandless met on his way rather than any of the ostensibly primary figures–but my reaction to it. I started off with a great antipathy toward McCandless. As I read, that antipathy diminished noticeably, replaced by an increasingly intense antipathy toward the author, Krakauer. Never had this experience with a book before.

It’s probably not good to speak ill of the dead, but I need to begin with McCandless for my critique to make any sense. Interestingly, fairly early on in the book Krakauer, who had first wrote about McCandless in a piece for Outside magazine, details negative reactions to the subject of that piece. Fairly uniformly, they come from Alaskans who feel McCandless was nuts, stupid, or disrespectful at some level of the “wild” he went into, underestimating the difficulty of living more or less off the land in rural Alaska. None of these critiques is without merit at some level, particularly, I’d think the third.

McCandless thought that modern consumer capitalist (my words, not his) society is bunk, and he was right. He seems to have had some awareness–as far as I can tell from what Krakauer includes an intellectual awareness but awareness nonetheless–of racism, and intellectually, this is at Emory, he put himself on the right side of that discussion. The problem is that well-off, well-educated white people who think that the system is bunk have no right–read that, no right whatsoever–to do anything but get their asses right inside the system and try to help the people whom the system is screwing most egregiously. McCandless’ case is compounded that he was from a Washington, DC suburb and his father worked for NASA. McCandless very likely could have mobilized a lot of personal connections to get involved on the inside.

Krakauer suggests, based on some of McCandless’ last diary entries, that he had decided that his rambling days were through. It’s entirely possible, then, that he would have returned to the lower 48 and gotten down to the real work of trying to fix things. That said, it is a typically but no less unacceptably white (and upper/upper-middle class white) reaction to injustice to take off from discomfort and feel oneself free. That is to say, the typically white response (not exclusively white by any means) is a selfish one. Anyone studying race critically will tell you that while our racial system is obviously unequal, the privilege it doles out to whites is not freedom. White people think that they can be free by running away. We can’t, and that more than anything was McCandless’ mistake, aside from up and dying of it.

The villain of the story, however, is not McCandless, but Krakauer. His metier, part outdoor/part travel narrative journalist, is ripe for willful ignorance about all kinds of social relationships. Without doubt, his trade could be done well: I know a travel writer, but he thinks critically about his own position vis-a-vis his destinations and more importantly the people who live in those destinations. Going far away is, like everything else human, a social relationship. Krakauer has no clue about this. I knew this when I read the following lines, worth quoting:

McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos itself (66).

Those are the words of a lonely, lonely man. Which “women,” Krakauer? This is a man who can’t distinguish woman from woman. His choice of words in this case is way, way too revealing, not so much for the words themselves, but because he reserves archaic language for the points at which sex comes up. You don’t in his book, get “succor” from a well-earned beer after a hike or something, or get together with the gang for some “congress.” Why the change in tone, Krakauer? Uncomfortable? Jackass. There is, indeed, a pattern in the book. It gets better (i.e., worse) on 156:

The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman’s sex.

I honestly don’t know who to despise more: Krakauer or the editor who let that sentence get through. Regardless, these are not the words of a man who gets laid with any consistency, or at all. Women’s bodies–and this underlies the whole book–are in Krakauer’s mental universe, foreign. Just like the “wild,” so-called.

This is the thing. Getting out of a city is well and good, very good as a matter of fact, because as a species we did not develop to live with concrete and cars. Smarter people than me–or, at least, people with more time on their hands to cover it at length–have, however, amply documented the patriarchal tendencies of certain (large) swaths of the get back to nature movement, in addition to the white supremacist/colonialist tendencies, in the United States (my country and therefore my problem), all the way back to Muir, whatever else you will say about the man. You may be pleased that Teddy Roosevelt set up the park system, but you’d be wrong to imagine that his motives were pure, because they weren’t.

To Krakauer, “the wild” is away, somewhere to where one goes. It’s mysterious, forbidding, and other, just like a woman’s body (in his obviously screwed-up psyche). The problem is, any of these places that well-off white people drive their 4WD Subaru station wagons to for some communing with nature are, to some peoples, home.

“The wild” isn’t wild. It’s a system like any other, and as historians have demonstrated–as if this needed any proving if you paid attention to indigenous people–human beings peopled the entire globe by not later than 1000 years ago, and that’s a very, very late date. Some peoples lived more densely on the land than others. When Europeans from a relatively densely populated society come to places that are more sparsely populated, they see “empty space.” Ask the people to whom that land belongs (or vice versa, one might more properly say), and they’ll tell you that the land is not empty, not other, and certainly not wild. There are specific ways in any environment that human beings can survive without carrying their food or using rifle. To Krakauer, though, the land is everything minus the people. Very simply, this is to totally misunderstand everything one needs to understand.

A last gripe: Krakauer explains McCandless partially through the use of a long, autobiographical sketch. This is when I knew he was even more selfish than McCandless, by a longshot.

Bira Almeida, Capoeira: a Brazilian Art Form

At the start of this school year I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to buy any more books.  Rather, I would use the library or would borrow books from other people.  I have in the past spent a fair amount of money on books, though never that much compared to what I have spent on restaurants.  It’s more a question of space to store books—we don’t have a ton of it—and the fact that I haven’t re-read a book in I don’t know how many years.  I get it in my head that I’m going to re-read The Master and Margarita one of these days, but then some new book I haven’t read before steps up and I read it instead.

I’ve read things, then, for which I would not have put down money but which I’ve appreciated.  In the case of Capoeira: a Brazilian Art Form, my path to it began with comic book I’ve been reading, Daytripper.  It’s top notch.  Not to give too much away, but the basic conceit of the series is that the main character dies at the end of every issue.  That is, the same person dies, over and over, in differing circumstances.  The writer and artist are Brazilian and the whole thing takes place in Brazil.  In one issue, the main character and a friend holiday in Bahia.  They meet a beautiful woman and the main character strikes up a flirting relationship with her, thinking he will get lucky.  Turns out that she is Yemanja, the orixa associated with the sea.  He follows her out into the ocean and drowns.

I don’t want to make anything seem more spiritual than it is, but the thought of Yemanja stuck with me, knowing nothing about her, or about candomble generally.  What I can say for certain is that I grew up going to the beach, and spent a lot of time in the ocean as a kid.  I miss it terribly on occasion, one of two things I ever get nostalgic about.  (The other are ice cream trucks.)  In any event, I popped on to Wikipedia one day and looked her up.  A novel was mentioned in the article: Sea of Death by Jorge Amado, which the article read dealt extensively with Yemanja.  I put a hold on the book at the library, and never got a response that it was on hold, despite the fact that the computer showed a copy on the shelf at the Mission branch of the SF Public Library.  Frustrated, I popped down to the Mission to get it off the shelf myself.

This is why actually going to the library beats ordering books either from an online retailer or even having holds put on things over the computer.  They had at the Mission branch a shelf entitled “Latino Interest” or something like it–a wall actually, quite extensive–and I couldn’t immediately figure out how it was organized.  There were clearly like books with like, so it was subdivided somehow, but I couldn’t figure out the logic, and it wasn’t clearly marked.  So I ended up going through each subsection and following the alphabet, looking for Sea of Death.  One stumbles across all kinds of great things one would never find if one approached things intentionally.

I chose the capoeira book rather than a number of other things partially because it was something I knew absolutely nothing about and partially because the book was relatively short and had pictures.  Also, I have as I indicated earlier been reading about the black diaspora for a while and capoeira is an essential part of that process.  The book absolutely did not disappoint.  One thing that was particularly nice was that it’s clear that Almeida is not a professional writer.  The writing was absolutely clear, but at the same time totally without literary conceit.  His intent was to put various ideas about capoeira on paper, not write something that made himself look artsy.  Each chapter tackles a different aspect of the art, from technique to history to the spiritual dimension of it.  Well worth the read.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

I don’t read books as quickly as I seem to be writing posts about them.  I work with a couple of students who for various reasons can’t attend regular school, and one in particular is very bright and curious.  At our first meeting I pointed out that for her English credit we could either read from the regular English textbook or choose novels.  She thankfully chose to read a novel.  It turns out she, as a high school freshman, had read both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and had Down and Out in Paris and London on her shelf ready to read.  I’d never read it, so I agreed happily to read it as well.

I haven’t read much Orwell, and as an adult had only read “Shooting an Elephant,” which I taught for a few years.  I read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in school, but that was long enough ago that I can’t think that I have anything intelligent to say about them.  “Shooting an Elephant” impressed, though I know well that its perspective is limited and that regardless of Orwell’s intent it is, even if polemically anti-imperialist, ontologically imperialist.  One imagines, or hopes at least, that Orwell would own up to that.  Regardless, it impressed, and not just for its prose style.  Orwell was a proper socialist, fundamentally humane, and himself aware of his coming-to-awareness of the absolute awfulness of capitalism, in this case in its colonialist manifestation.

Down and Out in Paris and London is a semi-autobiography or autobiographical novel, for lack of a better term.  More important is that the writing has a palpable authenticity to it.  Orwell did indeed know poverty, the analytical subject of the text, first-hand.  He comments here and there, a few times at length, that those who don’t know poverty or poor people directly are more or less inevitably prone to misunderstand the matter.  It’s very true.

The book jibed very well with the Marx we’re currently engaged with in my reading group.  In particular–and I have this sense that this is more applicable to London than Paris, and possibly more to the United States than England–one sees how poverty and therefore class is, regardless of all the rhetoric about social mobility, a closed system.  There is nothing in a capitalist economy that exists to faciliate social mobility upward, only down.  One sees this again and again in Orwell, in concrete situations.

I came to the realization a while ago that while I get a lot out of reading history, and while therefore I’ve read a lot of it, I do well to balance historical or theoretical writings with novels.  One gets a feel for things with novels that one does not get with any work of history or theory.  This isn’t an original observation, but I’ve re-learned that it’s true in the last six months, when I’ve spent a lot of time with novels.

Last: I don’t need to say too much about the anti-semitism and homophobia that pop into the book every now and again.  It’s a problem.

Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

I’ve kept this blog for writings about my own tunes thus far, but I’ve thought for a few weeks now, having finished or nearly finishing a number of books I’ve been working on, to create a blog on which I respond to the things I read.  Among other things, I’ve realized over the years that I am in a process of forgetting the things I’d read in my twenties.  I don’t want to do that, and as I donated my library to the Riverside Public Library when we moved to Senegal, I can’t just go to my shelves to remind myself.  I began a separate blog, but realized as writing that I would do as well to keep all my writing in one spot.  In any event, the tunes I write have everything to do with the things I read and have read.

Last thing I finished was Mumbo Jumbo, which I’d been told made Ishmael Reed‘s reputation.  I finished it a week ago Saturday, I’d read a piece he’d written for Counterpunch on “Precious,” obliterating the film in what is in hindsight an obvious way but which I’ll say I didn’t piece together myself. In any event, it put it in my head that I needed to read one of his books as I hadn’t yet.

The short and long of it was that it was a fantastic book, and I’m more satisfied with it than I think any novel I’ve read in a long while.  Reed’s approach to text is idiosyncratic, but totally controlled.  I’ve always liked writers who tweak the language, and it’s probably that which made me go through my Joyce phase right after college.  I like Amos Tutuola as well, even though he got unfairly promoted as the stereotype of a primitive, unschooled writer, which is totally beside the point and which takes an imperialist approach to pidgins.

Reed is more of a tinkerer with syntax along the lines of Joyce than Tutuola, which is to say his control is totally obvious where Tutuola’s is hidden to the imperialist eye.  The sentences in the book have an almost clunky rhythm to them, but absolutely consistent throughout and sort of reminiscent of the way dialogue would run in Stanley Kubrick‘s later films.  I gather that Kubrick would run an absurd number of takes with actors and their dialogue would gradually become less natural, producing a type of stilted interaction that gave the impression that the characters were simultaneously in monologue and dialogue, a dissociation from the other.  Kubrick used this to produce a sense of alienation, where on the other hand Reed produces a sense of absurdity–while dealing with absolutely serious questions–which is not unlike Gogol in effect if not intent.

Stylistic questions aside, for the last 10 years or so I’ve read more and more in what my wife calls the Subaltern Canon, beginning I think with C.L.R. James–The Black Jacobins, of course–and then to people like Vine Deloria, etc.  My wife, too, has studied Vodun and thought deeply about it.  Combining this, it was really a treat to find that Vodun and Haiti were so central to the text.  I suppose I felt that I’d made some progress over the last 20 years or so.  I had a pretty typical Western Civ. type of education, excepting my courses with Allen Greenberger at Pitzer.  If I’d been assigned this in college, not only would I not have gotten any of the references, but I wouldn’t have been likely even in a position to have them explained to me.  At 40, things fit together like pieces in an easy jigsaw puzzle.  I know what loas are.  It made for a great read.

Of additional interest: the book has numerous images, but–and I have to say this reminded me a bit of what I myself did when I would make those little booklets with my records and put them in ziploc bags, back in the old days–they were rarely directly related to the accompanying text.  The result is to dislodge the reader from what is immediately present in the writing and expand the potential meanings of the novel.  It engages a reader: because the images are generally not directly explained, one must engage one’s own creative mind to produce meaning.