The Pen Behind Jeremiah Moss (Vanishing New York) + 27 Cooper Square Dedication

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For a decade, a blogger writing under the nom de plume Jeremiah Moss has been chronicling the Bloomberg and post-Bloomberg era gentrification--hypergentrification--of New York City, primarily through posts that tally the disappearance of countless small and medium-sized, often longstanding businesses. While not always avoiding nostalgia and though he has mostly focused on Manhattan, Moss's blog, Vanishing New York, has set the standard in consistently demonstrating city and state policies favoring plutocratic real estate interests, in combination with the national and global neoliberal economic system, have had a devastating effect on so much of the city's social ecology, its distinctive neighborhoods, and its diverse cultural vibrancy, let alone affordability, all of which have drawn creative people in particular to New York for more than a century.

Though gentrification in New York is hardly new, Moss has detailed how over the last 10 years, particularly in the lead-up to and through the Great Recession, whole sections--and increasingly boroughs--of New York have transformed into hollowed out museums of themselves. (Lost City was another blog that contemporaneously recorded the loss of many New York landmarks, from 2006 through 2014. Gothamist also provides updates amidst its general news about the city.) Among the terms I've learned from Moss's blog are yunny (young urban narcissists), zombie urbanism, and hypergentrification, to name just a few.  From my first encounter with Moss's lamentations--appropriately enough, an early entry from 2007 bore that title--and jeremiads, I became a fan, finding in his posts arguments that compellingly articulated what I saw happening as far back as the period right after 9/11, in 2001, and also underway simultaneously and without explanation, in Chicago.

From Jeremiah's
Vanishing New York

Certainly many have written persuasively about gentrification and its effects, and we can always use more informed takes. But Moss has also urged readers to go beyond mourning and support the pro-small business, cultural landmarking, anti-chain approach of SAVE NYC. Moss also has tried to address readers' questions, including why he began the blog, whether gentrification is (ever) good for working-class and poor people, how Bloomberg's tenure really affected New York (for the worse), and how New York City has become increasingly suburbanized, or a dense, vertical simulacrum of the suburban--an elite suburb, that is. Notably, he also has not shied away from addressing questions of race, class, and political access, among other topics key to the problem of hypergentrification.

For his efforts he has received a great deal of press, and some awards. Until now, Moss has not compiled his thoughts in book form, but that is set to change with Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul (HarperCollins), which will hit bookshelves shortly. A book party is set for July 27, in SoHo.

What also has remained unknown to most readers of Moss's blog is who the writer really is. (In fact I have to admit I was quite willing not to have his real identity revealed.) Recently, however, in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" piece by Michael Schulman, Moss does share with the world who he really is: Griffin Hansbury, a transgender psychoanalyst, social worker, and aspiring novelist who has lived in New York for more than a quarter of a century. He lives in the East Village, and has shifted, as Schulman points out, from elegist to activist, when he rallied readers behind the attempt to save Midtown's Café Edison, which did not succeed but which fed into the #SAVENYC campaign.
So why did Moss (Hansbury) unmask himself?

[He] decided to reveal himself, he said, so he can show up at his own rallies and on panels. Also, “Vanishing New York” is now a book. Walking down St. Mark’s Place, past a dark-glass building that he called the Death Star, he mentioned a study that measured pedestrians’ skin conductivity outside a sleek Whole Foods and on a more diversified street. “They found that blocks that are all this glass stuff actually shorten the lives of senior citizens, because they’re so depressing,” he said.

And, as I can attest, they can turn into giant magnifying glasses, scorching the ground around them. I hope to share this and other thoughts--like the increasingly disturbing lack of adequate infrastructure in New York and New Jersey, especially to handle all of the building, new arrivals, or catastrophic contingencies like a worse version of the 2003 blackout (which I experienced firsthand) or another tropical storm as strong as or stronger than 2012's Hurricane Sandy-- in person with him, at his book event or another, but either way, I'll be picking up a copy of Vanishing New York, the book version, while continuing to read his blog.

***

A few days ago, another New York City blog I regularly browse, EV Grieve, posted about a plaque dedication at 27 Cooper Square on June 21. Though increasing swaths of Manhattan and New York City have been or are being leveled or built over in favor of the kinds of cookie-cutter designer glass luxury towers that Moss has decried on his blog, 27 Cooper Square managed to survive the wrecking ball, mainly because, as EV Grieve points out, two of the building's resident, including acclaimed poet and memoirist Hettie Jones, balked at moving out so that the Cooper Square Hotel could be built next door. Jones and her fellow tenant had secured artist loft status in the 1980s, and thus had the law on their side. Now, as the luxe Cooper Square Hotel looms beside them and an increasingly hypergentrified Downtown New York surrounds them, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP), in partnership with Two Boots Foundation, will commemorate 27 Cooper Square's importance as a cultural node during the 1960s.

The 1845 building, as the plaque announces, was the home of several key artistic figures during the 1960s. Quoting EV Grieve (and the email the site received from GVSHP):

In the 1960s, this 1845 former rooming house became a laboratory for artistic, literary and political currents. Writers LeRoi [later Amiri Baraka] and Hettie Jones, their Yugen magazine and Totem Press, musician Archie Shepp and painter Elizabeth Murray all had homes here. The vacant building was transformed into a vital hub of cultural life, attracting leading figures including those from the Beats and the world of jazz. It was also the childhood home of a second generation of East Village artists and thinkers.

GVSHP and Two Boots Foundation will install a plaque on the building at 27 Cooper Square to mark the significance of the site in the artistic legacy of the East Village.

The event's slated speakers included Archie Shepp's son Accra Shepp, a noted photographer, and Hettie Jones, as well as a representative of the GVSHP, and poet and Bowery Poetry Club co-founder Bob Holman. You can watch a video of the dedication on YouTube, and see photos on Flickr. Though cultural producers still live in the area, as Jones pointed out in the 2008 New York Times article on her successful battle against the Cooper Square Hotel, "This used to be an area where people got their start. Now it’s a place to land once you’ve made it." And it's only more so these days, but the plaque will remind people, at least those who stop and read it, that the area was once more, much more, than a hub of global lucre.

Boston Globe Picks Counternarratives + Matthew Cheney on My Sentences

Counternarratives originally appeared roughly two years ago in hardcover, and since then has received a host of reviews, on these shores and across the Atlantic. What has not occurred since July 2015 (and The Wall Street Journal's positive take) was for a major US newspaper to review the book. So it was both surprising and encouraging that the Boston Globe selected Counternarratives, among a host of other books, for its Summer 2017 Reading Picks, and reviewer Anthony Domestico offered one of the better rationales to check out the book, a one-sentence summary that could serve as a perfect little blurb:

"Keene’s story collection is truly radical — in its politics, in its stylistic restlessness, in its rethinking of the myths we tell ourselves about race and sexuality in the history of the Americas."

The Boston Globe blurb

Beach reading? Why not?

***

It is National Short Story Month--did you know that? I didn't!--and author, blogger and critic Matthew Cheney has chosen to write one of the best short critical assessments of Counternarratives' prose for his friend, Dan Wickett, at the Emerging Writers Network. Titled "Keene Sentences," it provides a perspicuous reading of what he sees the Counternarratives' sentences--and the prose, spreading outward to the stories' structures, and the collection as a whole--undertaking and achieving.   He gets it, and gets it right on target. Here's a quote:

Here, again, deferral: “It was […] the very first thing he saw.” Because of it’s structure, this is not a sentence most readers will absorb fully on one reading. It is a sentence that explodes from the inside, its substance packed in between subject, verb, and object, and as such it enacts many of the ideas of this book — for instance, that the detail and complexity of experience is lost by some ways of telling stories and using language and constructing histories. What Keene is up to in this sentence, and in much of the book generally, parallels some of what Chinua Achebe achieved with Things Fall Apart, reflected in the painful, ironic final sentences of the novel (“One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger”).

The reference to Achebe's writing I take as the highest praise, and I thank him for this deep and illuminating reading, which is what authors hope for from critics. If you want to read more of Matthew Cheney's writing, you can purchase his Hudson Prize-winning short story collection, Blood: Stories, published by Black Lawrence Press in 2016. A fine review of the award is available here, and you can hear Matthew talking about Blood: Stories on New Hampshire Public Radio.

You can also read his 14-year-long blog, The Mumpsimus, which brims with smart literary and cultural readings and critiques, sharp as a laser but never wielded like a blade. In his most recent post, he writes about watching the films of the late German wunderkind director Rainer Werner Fassbinder now. (I keep thinking and hoping that Fassbinder's aesthetically innovative, critically engaged art and his guerrilla approach to filmmaking will inspire younger generations of queer, especially queer POC, filmmakers, and perhaps that's happening, perhaps on YouTube or Vimeo or another platform, so if anyone knows whether this is the case, please do post a comment.

In other recent posts, Cheney has explored Guido Mazzoni's A Theory of the Novel, and earlier posts walk readers through Samuel Delany's temporally-reversed Dark Reflections, and a book by an author I often recommend to students interested in speculative writing and good storytelling, Kelly Link's Stone Animals. There's a lot more at Mumpsimus, so definitely check it out, and pick up his collection if you can.
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Tracy K. Smith New Poet Laureate of the US + Poem

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

In a marvelous move, the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, has just named Tracy K. Smith (1972-) as the new Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress, i.e., Poet Laureate of the US. She is the 22nd person to hold this post, and succeeds acclaimed poet Juan Felipe Herrera, who was the first Latino to serve as in the post. She also will join a long list of distinguished predecessors, including three Black women who have won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, as she did: Gwendolyn Brooks, who served--as Consultant for Poetry, before the Poet Laureate post was officially created--in 1985 and 1986; Rita Dove, who served from 1993 through 1995; and Natasha Trethewey, who served from 2012 through 2014.

Tracy is a native of Massachusetts, and grew up in California. I have known her since her undergraduate years, when she first joined the Dark Room Writers Collective as she was finishing up at Harvard, where she studied English and African American Studies. She later attended Columbia, where she received her MFA, and was a Stegner Fellow from 1997 to 1999. Tracy now directs the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, where she is Professor of Creative Writing.

Her poetry has received acclaim from her earliest book, The Body's Question, which received the Cave Canem Prize and was published by Graywolf Press in 2003. Her second book, Duende, earned her the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was published by Graywolf Press in 2007, and her third book, Life on Mars, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. In 2014, she received the prestigious Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, given for distinguished achievement. Tracy has also published a highly praised work of nonfiction entitled Ordinary Light: A Memoir, and has a new book of poetry, Wade in the Water, forthcoming next year.

Among the last ten or so Poet Laureates, some, like Trethewey and Herrera, have been very active in taking poetry outside the academy and engaging an array of communities in public programs and projects. About her own aims for the post, Tracy has told the New York Times' Alexandra Alter:

“I’m very excited about the opportunity to take what I consider to be the good news of poetry to parts of the country where literary festivals don’t always go,” she said. “Poetry is something that’s relevant to everyone’s life, whether they’re habitual readers of poetry or not.”

I am excited about her appointment, not only because of her gifts as a poet, teacher and poetry citizen, but particularly because if there is anyone who can negotiate and navigate the challenges a Poet Laureate--or any major figure in the arts--might face in our deeply divided country, particularly with the current President and administration operating in the foreground and background, it's someone like Tracy. Congratulations to her!

Update: Although Tracy noted in the Alter article that she did not plan to "advocate social causes," despite the fact that her work has, from the beginning, demonstrated a complex grasp of the world and social engagement, the following first step is a good sign: On the PBS News Hour's site, Tracy recommends four poetry books to read, and all are not just fine works of craft, but each speaks in a different and necessary way to our current political moment: Solmaz Sharif's Look; Erika L. Sánchez's Lessons on Expulsion; James Richardson's During; and Claudia Rankine's Citizen.

***

Here's one of Tracy's eponymous poems from Duende, her second collection, my personal favorite of her three poetry books, and perhaps the most formally daring, borrowed from the Poets.Org (Academy of American Poets) website. (One poet who comes to mind whenever I read Tracy's Duende poems but whose name I've never seen mentioned in conjunction with hers is Jay Wright, oddly enough.) The voice in this collection's poems immediately grabbed me. Tracy's lyric transformations, the dramatic movement in these poems, which follows not just the actions the poems describe but the pathways of feeling flowing throughout them, show incredible skill, and often in this volume, as here, cast a spell.

DUENDE

1.
 
The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of furious music heavy in the throat.
They drag it out and with nails in their feet
Coax the night into being. Brief believing.
A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies.
And in this night that is not night,
Each word is a wish, each phrase
A shape their bodies ache to fill—
 
         I’m going to braid my hair
     Braid many colors into my hair
         I’ll put a long braid in my hair
     And write your name there
 
They defy gravity to feel tugged back.
The clatter, the mad slap of landing.
 
 
                                    2.
 
And not just them. Not just
The ramshackle family, the tíos,
Primitos, not just the bailaor
Whose heels have notched
And hammered time
So the hours flow in place
Like a tin river, marking
Only what once was.
Not just the voices of scraping
Against the river, nor the hands
Nudging them farther, fingers
Like blind birds, palms empty,
Echoing. Not just the women
With sober faces and flowers
In their hair, the ones who dance
As though they’re burying
Memory—one last time—
Beneath them.
               And I hate to do it here.
To set myself heavily beside them.
Not now that they’ve proven
The body a myth, a parable
For what not even language
Moves quickly enough to name.
If I call it pain, and try to touch it
With my hands, my own life,
It lies still and the music thins,
A pulse felt for through garments.
If I lean into the desire it starts from—
If I lean unbuttoned into the blow
Of loss after loss, love tossed
Into the ecstatic void—
It carries me with it farther,
To chords that stretch and bend
Like light through colored glass.
But it races on, toward shadows
Where the world I know
And the world I fear
Threaten to meet.
 
                                    3.
 
There is always a road,
The sea, dark hair, dolor.
 
Always a question
Bigger than itself—
 
          They say you’re leaving Monday

          Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?

Tracy K. Smith, "Duende" from Duende.

Copyright © 2007 by Tracy K. Smith.

Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.
www.graywolfpress.org

Book Expo America 2017

Part of my book haul (I had Sinclair's
book, so now I have an extra copy)

In 2013 I wrote about my first visit to Book Expo America (BEA), which I'd heard about but never attended. Or had the opportunity to attend, as I usually was in Chicago and Evanston in the spring while BEA was running in New York City. (Ironically BEA initially began in Chicago, though before my time there.) I returned the following year, and then BEA returned to Chicago (and my knees began acting up), so I ended up taking a few years' hiatus from this massive publishing fair. Oddly enough, I did not go either year that Counternarratives appeared, either in hardcover (2015) or paperback (2016) version, though I believe I made up for it by attending a wide array of other book events, from AWP to the Brooklyn Book Fair. In any case, I also gave myself a short reprieve on gorging on free books, which is one of the great benefits of BEA, and a chief reason that, as I witnessed during my prior visits, so many attendees arrive and depart with suitcases, roller bags, and other large mobile containers to haul as many books back home--for their own libraries, public and private ones--as possible.

This year I decided to drop by the Javits Center on the festival's final day primarily to see several events my friend David Barclay Moore was scheduled to participate in. David's debut book, The Stars Beneath Our Feet, is a Middle Grade novel set to appear this September from Random House, and as part of the book launch he was on several panels, including one for "Buzz Authors" (writers singled out as likely to create a buzz among readers this year), and  also participated in a single author book signing in Random House's ample, skillfully arranged publisher's area. (Congratulations again, Dave!) I did get to see David speak about his book with other Middle Grade authors, learning something about the genre in the process, and it was also fun to watch him receive VIP treatment with his book signing, which required a ticket to get in line. When I got to his book signing table, I related the following conversation to him:

Woman #1 (in line across from mine, to her friend, Woman #2): Who are you going to see?
Woman #2 (in line in front of me): David Barclay Moore.
Woman #1: What did he write?
Woman #2: The Stars Beneath Our Feet. Who are you going to see?
Woman #1: Lawrence O'Donnell. The TV show host, on MSNBC.
Woman #2: Oh, OK. Tell him I said hello!

Between David's panel and book-signing, and again towards the end of the afternoon, I wandered around the floor, taking in the various booths and designated sections. I did get to see a bit of Lawrence O'Donnell's conversation with Ed Asner, but unlike at the two previous BEAs, where I happened upon Congressman John Lewis, Tracy Letts, Dick Cavett, and others, they were among the very few already famous people I encountered, and I did not step over the cordon to introduce myself to either one. This year the people at the elite university press booths were indifferent at best, or outright ignored me, but since it was the last day of BEA--with Book Con, a book fan-focused gathering at which books are not free--I followed etiquette by asking whether I could take books, and, receiving neither positive nor negative response, I helped myself to a few. Quite a few clusters of people--agents, booksellers, people selling various services (audio rights, etc.)--were huddled at tables all over the place, so the book business writers and certainly most readers rarely see or think about was clearly on display.

At other presses, particularly the smaller university presses, the non-US ones, and the indies, as well as publishers of graphic texts, comics, children's books, etc., the representatives were very friendly, and I ended up collecting roughly a sizable box's worth, which I hauled around at first in my arms until I commandeered one of the rare book bags I could find--most had already been snapped up, I think, over the previous two days and Friday morning--and then mailed straight to my Rutgers office. I won't detail all the books I picked up, but I will mention one book I did grab, after of course asking and not receiving a "No, don't take it": Chris Kraus's new biography of Kathy Acker, simply titled After Kathy Acker. I had to get this book because I was an enthusiastic reader of Acker's work in my youth, and having read and nearly taught Kraus's I Love Dick, and then having watched Jill Soloway's quirky but addictive TV version, I am now on a sort of Kraus kick, if you can call it that. (I taught Kraus's 2013 novel/memoir Aliens and Anorexia as part of a graduate workshop in the spring of 2016. Some of the students loved it, a few absolutely hated it, but it provoked passionate responses in both cases.)

In general I was looking for another literary diamond, one of those texts I'd happened upon before at BEA, like Craig Steven Wilder's Ebony and Ivy, which rocked my world when I brought it home and read it, and which has gone on to become one of the signal texts of the last few years. I did pick up some gems, including Jordan Abel's Injun (Talonbooks) and Hoa Nguyen's Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books), both of which made the Canadian shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and hope to get to some of them before the summer slides into fall. Perhaps because I went on Friday as opposed to the first or second day, and perhaps because it was the afternoon rather than the morning, the fair felt a bit subdued. Certainly some of the booths, like W. W. Norton's, where New Directions' books would usually be, featured shelves stripped bare--by readers, I think--and though I did pass lines for book signings, they were not anything like I remembered in the past. The FedEx office where I mailed my books was packed, though, and as one of the photos below shows, those suitcases were brimming too. Perhaps next year I'll aim to catch more of the readings and events, and maybe I'll bring a suitcase or roller bag. Or maybe not.

David Barclay Moore and his fellow Middle Grade
Buzz Authors: Kamilla Benko, The Unicorn Quest: The Whisper in the Stone;
Molly Ostertag, The Witch Boy; Eucabeth Odhiambo, Auma's Long Run; and
Jake Burt, Greetings From Witness Protection!

Dave, Kamilla and Molly

Filmmaker Ndlela Nkobi, another friend,
recording the panel for posterity

David and fellow Middle Grade authors

One of the displays

The Confucius Institute's books

London Review of Books (LRB) booth

African American Expressions booth

Columbia University Press, Princeton UP, etc.

New books signing tables

Skincare treatments for book lovers

Barron's financial press books

A kiosk with a book signing behind it

Ed Asner (center) and Lawrence O'Donnell (right)

Printing Korea booth

Counterpoint Press/Catapult/Soft Skull
(with one of my incoming student's first
novel prominently displayed above the
head of the man at right!)

Some great books from Coffee House
Press and others (Dawn Lundy Martin's stunner
Good Stock Strange Blood among them)

From Talonbooks

The line for Dave's book signing

Random House scanning badges
 for the book signing

David signing books for his brother
and niece, in from Atlanta

Directing readers to another book signing

David Funches, of Lion Forge Press

Books by Olive Senior and others
(they would not gift me with these)

Graywolf's offerings (including a new
book by Danez Smith)

Kevin Hart, in cardboard form

Readers, checking out books

A subsequent panel, featuring designer
Zac Posen (at right)

This booth had something to do with
L. Ron Hubbard, I think,
hence the person in the costume

Harvard theorist Danielle
Allen's new nonfiction book
about her cousin, Cuz

Packing those suitcases!

The Javits Center Atrium at the end of the day

RIP Bernard Hoepffner & Juan Goytisolo

It is with sorrow that I report the passing of Bernard Hoepffner (1946-2017), the belauded French translator of many Anglophone authors and works, including Mark Twain, James Joyce, Robert Burton, Martin Amis, Edmund White, and Robert Coover, as well as my Counternarratives--his masterpiece of a translation appeared last year.  First, the sad, astonishing news: on May 26, French news outlets reported that Hoepffner had disappeared after being swept away by a wave on the Welsh coast, near St. Davids Head, Pembrokeshire, on May 6. (His body was recovered yesterday on Tywyn Beach in North Wales.) With this almost inconceivable event, the world of letters and translation, in France and worldwide, has lost a major, deeply appreciated figure, as a number of his colleagues have readily attested. His varied career before becoming a translator included having restored Asian art in the UK, and a run a farm in the Canary Islands. Once he undertook translation as a career, he ranged widely, never shying away from difficult books, and as the list above suggests, he translated classics as well as newer authors with aplomb. To his family and friends, I send my deepest condolences and prayers.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Bernard Hoepffner in person, but over the span of a year, and as recently as April of this year, we had exchanged emails, first about the collection of stories, and, more recently, about a volume of his long correspondence with the late American writer Guy Davenport, another original in the world of literature, that he hoped to place with a US publisher. As a translator, he was as much as an editor as any I have ever worked with, and his subtle readings of my English were often so perceptive that they enlightened me to what I had intuitively achieved--or only thought I had. Sometimes he would ask questions that forced me to justify choices, such as whether there were "falls" on a river--I was able to find links saying that there were--and whether an anachronism like "scenario" (which entered English only in 1878, as he reminded me), was appropriate for a story whose bulk was set in the 17th century. It was, I was able to say, because the story itself opens in the present, shifts back in time, and the narrative voice is constitutively unstable. In other cases, he caught errors produced by my pen listening more to my ear than eye, which then allowed me to rectify them in English and, upon his translation, French (and now, any other language).

When I communicated with him, Bernard was generous and rigorous, often witty, and capacious in his knowledge and sense of how English prose might become and work as French. As a writer and a translator, I learned a considerable deal from our exchanges, and I am applying our lessons as I write and translate new work this summer. I only wish I had been able to go to France late last summer when the book launched, which also would have provided an opportunity to meet not just my French publishers, Éditions Cambourakis, but Bernard as well. His influence among his peers in terms of opening up the body of English-language for French publishers and readers was and is significant. On his personal site, you can see how rich his trove of translations, as well as other literary and artistic projects, actually is. Here is one encomium for him from the notice in Libération: Joëlle Losfeld writes

«Il m’apportait des textes (Coleman Dowell par exemple, Guy Davenport, Joe Ashby Porter) et je lui en ai donné à traduire. Ma grande satisfaction (ce fut un sujet d’amusement entre nous) a été de lui faire connaître William Goyen qu’il ne connaissait pas, à ma grande surprise car c’est typiquement le genre d’auteur qu’il aimait lire et traduire. Bien sûr, il était pointilleux sur le choix des textes et n’acceptait pas tout, au regard de ses choix mais aussi d’un emploi du temps très chargé par l’ampleur de certaines traductions comme Ulysse par exemple. Et quand il ne pouvait pas traduire, il m’indiquait d’autres traducteurs. C’est ainsi qu’il m’a fait connaître Catherine Richard. Merveilleuse traductrice dont la démarche me semble proche de la sienne. Textes difficiles à traduire mais convertis en jeux dans leur pratique.»

(He brought me texts (Coleman Dowell for example, Guy Davenport, Joe Ashby Porter) and I gave them to him to translate. My great satisfaction (this was a subject of amusement between us) was his getting to know of William Goyen, who he wasn't familiar with, to my great surprise because it is the typical genre of author that he liked to read and translate. Of course, he was picky about the choice of texts and didn't accept everything with regard to his choices, but also because of a work schedule very filled by the size of certain translations like Ulysses, for example. And when he could not translate something, he pointed out other translators. That's how he got me to become familiar with Catherine Richard. Marvelous translator whose approach seems to me to be close to his. Difficult texts to translate but converted into games in their practice.)

Aux anges littéraires, and you can find more tributes to his life and work on the page his brother has established for him. I also hope someone will publish those Davenport letters; reading Davenport alone provides a rich education, so I can only imagine how enlightening Davenport and Hoepffner in conversation will be.

***

When I was in my 20s and first encountered the work of Juan Goytisolo (1931-2017), in particular his 1966 novel Marks of Identity (Señas de identidad), it hit me like a meteor. Not only did the story reset my thinking about how you might draw upon autobiography while writing a story that cast far wider imaginative, philosophical, political, and critical nets, but his relentless experimental method of telling it mesmerized me. What I soon learned was that this novel wasn't the then-35 year old Goytisolo's first, but his tenth, and that while he had written his late 1950s and early 1960s novels, which grappled with conditions in Francisco Franco's fascist Spain in a more conventional, social realist style, by the time he published Marks of Identity, he had begun to criticize his native country openly and harshly, and had been living in exile for a decade, in France. He never ceased his critique nor separation from his homeland, despite periodic visits much later; both extended to the end of his life.

Marks of Identity, I was also soon to grasp, was but the first in a trilogy centering on his literary stand-in, Álvaro Mendiola, and the predecessor to what is his most extraordinary and daring novel, Count Julian (La reivindicación del Conde don Julián). Published in 1970, Count Julian remains a landmark in Spanish language, European and global literature, and is one of the most brutal attacks on national tradition written from within that tradition to perhaps ever achieve major fame. In it, Goytisolo lacerates Spain's history by reinvoking and vindicating a figure thought to be one of Spain's greatest traitors, the eponymous Count Julian of Ceuta, who is said to have opened the door to the Moorish conquest. Taking the linguistic experimentation of Marks of Identity even further, but with his irony sharpened like a straight razor, his Count Julian's recitation of Spain's historical crimes woven like the dazzling threads of an exquisite tapestry as he peers through his window at the monstrous home country across the Straits of Gibraltar, Goytisolo holds nothing back. It is a breathtaking work, and won him readers across the literary landscape, though no few fans among Franco's hierarchy or the country's traditional literary world. It is telling that this magisterial, endlessly inventive writer did not win Spain's major literary prize, the Premio Miguel de Cervantes, until three years before his death, in 2014--and never won the Nobel Prize, though his vision, formal, political, spiritual, far outstrips most of the last decade of recipients of that award.

Anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment--and ever-willing to speak out: you could characterize the bulk of Goytisolo's work this way. A Barcelona native, from a prominent family, he lost his mother to a fascist bomb as a child. His two brothers, the older Jose Augustín Goytisolo (1928-1999) and the younger Luis Goytisolo (1935-), also wrote, but Juan was the towering figure among them. After arriving in Paris Goytisolo initially worked for Gallimard, and met his future wife, novelist, publisher and screenwriter Monique Lange, soon thereafter, but, as he revealed to her and to his readers in his work, he was gay, and together they built a life that acknowledged this crucial aspect of his existence, which shifted more fully into a new form of living after her death and his move to Morocco, where he lived with two former male partners and their extended families.

As a fiction writer, Goytisolo never looked backwards in terms of his aims to push the limits of the genre or the Spanish language, as books like Juan the Landless (Juan sin tierra, 1975), the third novel in the Mendiola trilogy; Makbara (1980), set in a Muslim graveyard; Landscapes After the Battle (Paisajes después la batalla, 1985), which prefigures Houellebecq's Submission, but in more inventive and anti-Islamophobic way; Quarantine (Cuarantena, 1991), which explores the AIDS pandemic; Marx Family Saga (1999, La saga de los Marx, 1993), a witty novel about the Communist founder and his family; and his final novel, Exiled from Almost Everywhere (2008), set in an afterlife accessible via social media, all make clear. His journalistic nonfiction often served as critique and expose, from his early work, Campos de Níjar, about impoverished Andalusia, to 2001's Paisajes de guerra: Sarajevo, Argelia, Palestina, Chechenia.

He was also a literary critic and editor, and undertook a decades-long effort to reconnect Spain to its Muslim roots--and to remind readers of the richness of the North African, Arab and Islamic traditions in their overlapping and longstanding yet changing forms, work that strikes me as particularly salient these days.Goytisolo's frank and disarming memoirs, Coto vedado (1985), and In the Realms of Strife (En los reinos de taifa, 1986), which one of my dearest friends gave me, reminded their readers of his profound humanity and humility, and, yet again, of his fearlessness at sharing truths, his and those of the worlds in which he lived and moved. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his books, however, were banned in Spain until after Franco's death. As I noted in 2006, I was fortunate to catch him during one of periods in the late 1990s when he was lecturing at NYU, though I was too shy to introduce myself, and barely understood his Castilian Spanish. In that blog post, I mentioned Fernanda Eberstadt's New York Times Magazine profile of Goytisolo, "The Anti-Orientalist," which remains an excellent glimpse into his life.

I'll end by restating something that I'd written about back in 2011, which is that one of my favorite works of Goytisolo's is his late, slender novel The Garden of Secrets (Las semanas del jardín, 1997), which is a brilliant novel about storytelling that enacts what it explores. It contains a series of stories in multiple styles, linked through a concentrically circular form, told by various narrators who beguile as they reveal. What I found especially compelling about this novel, though, is how Goytisolo strives to remain true to the pre-literary heritage from which Goytisolo and all written literature draw, even going so far as to remove his name--Juan Goytisolo--from the novel's cover, ceding the credit to the tradition of storytelling. If there is anything antithetical to the culture of contemporary publishing, this certainly fits the bill. It may not be his greatest work, but it is representative of the artist, critic and activist that Goytisolo became, and offers pointers for anyone thinking about how to create and live in this complex, difficult, and riven world we find ourselves in today. For this book and all his others, I express my gratitude.

Quote: William Melvin Kelley

'

William Melvin Kelley (1937-2017: RIP), from "My Next to Last Hit by 'C. C. Johnson'," in Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe, edited by Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, with an introduction by Randall Kennedy, New York: New York University Press, 1993.

(I only learned recently, thanks to an email from Chris Stackhouse, that Kelley had passed away. One of the most inventive and productive--during the decade from 1960 through 1970, when his last book appeared--Black writers of his generation, and the author of four published novels and a collection of stories, he should be read much more regularly as part of the 20th century African American literary canon. You can read a 2012 interview with him here.)

Brooksday: Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial + Poem

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

One hundred years ago today, in Topeka, Kansas, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born to Keziah Wims Brooks and David Anderson Brooks. Before she had turned a year old, her family moved to Chicago, specifically the South Side Bronzeville neighborhood, which became her lifelong home, and which she memorialized in a series of works including 1949's Annie Allen, which would make her first African American and first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, one many august honors.  From an early age, her mother, a teacher and concert-trained pianist, knew she possessed a gift for literature, and told her that she was going to be the "lady Paul Laurence Dunbar" (Wikipedia), and, like Dunbar, she has left a mark that continues to influence, her poetic gifts and her influence among successive generations of writers anchoring her reputation as one of the major figures in 20th century American and African American poetry and literature.

A number of organizations are celebrating the centennial of Brooks's life. One that has a wide array of events planned is Our Miss Brooks 100, which uses the name she liked to be known by, and which is the effort of local Chicago and national individuals and organizations. Through June 2018, Our Miss Brooks 100 will be sponsoring programs. They include:

• January 1-December 31: Hands On Stanzas (which will bring poets into the Chicago-area schools for 20-week residencies) 
• May 12-June 18: ETA Creative Arts Foundation presents "Among All This We Stand Like a Fine Brownstone by Vantile Whitfield", at eta Creative Arts fourth (4th) mainstage production (in Chicago) & repeating throughout the summer 
• June 17: A Gwendolyn Brooks Trolley Tour, Lecture / Discussion, Literature, Guided Trolley Tour (in Chicago)
• Nov. 18: Manual Cinema's Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, Evening performance (Poetry Foundation, Chicago)

On the Our Miss Brooks 100 site, you can find information about her life in Chicago, and links to articles about Gwendolyn Brooks, testimonies by poets, librarians and readers.

The Academy of American Poets site features a Centennial Celebration for Gwendolyn Brooks,  which includes her poetry, an interview with her, lesson plans for teachers, essays by noted poets, and archival audio material, including Brooks's 1983 reading at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. I was quite fortunate enough to hear Miss Brooks read with then Poet Laureate Rita Dove in the early 1990s. The room was packed, and she and Dove, to no one's surprise, brought the house down again and again.

Below is one of the poems from one of her later collections, Blacks, "Boy Breaking Glass," which I reprint from the Poetry Foundation's website. In this poem, she provides a glimpse of the Chicago she lived, knew and captured in her distinctive style, while also underlining her psychological and social perceptiveness, and her deep humanity. Do check out the Centennial Celebration site, and if you have never listened to Miss Brooks, please click on the audio link there, or Google "Gwendolyn Brooks reading" to find more links.

Boy Breaking Glass

By Gwendolyn Brooks

To Marc Crawford
from whom the commission

Whose broken window is a cry of art   
(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.
Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.   
Our barbarous and metal little man.

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.   
If not an overture, a desecration.”

Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.

“Don’t go down the plank
if you see there’s no extension.   
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now
                   I am no longer there.”

The only sanity is a cup of tea.   
The music is in minors.

Each one other
is having different weather.

“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!   
And this is everything I have for me.”

Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,   
the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,   
runs. A sloppy amalgamation.
A mistake.
A cliff.
A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.

Gwendolyn Brooks, “Boy Breaking Glass,” from Blacks
(Chicago: Third World Press, 1987).
Reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions.
Source: Blacks (1987)

Photos II: 2017 G37 Summit of Poetry

All of these photos are courtesy (©) of C. Enjoy!

The poets at the end of the reading,
Piedimonte Etneo

Yours truly

With Josephine Pace, at the TV station
in Caltagirone

At the TV station in Caltagirone 

At the TV station in Caltagirone

The student poets

Antonio Presti, introducing
some of the student readers

Me reading, with Josephine translating

Biaggio Guerrera, reading his poems

One of the students from Giare  reading his poems,
with Antonio Presti at right

Some of the student poets reading 

Michele LaPaglia

The musicmakers

Carmine Elisa Moschetta entering the venue 

Bringing forth the spirit of the birches
and the volcano, as well as poetry and song 

The reading area

Birch trees 

With the students from Palermo

In a square in Castiglione

Sunlight in the piazza

Word art 

The vineyard at the Cantina, at night

Mt. Etna