In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.” The United States has brutalized not only the black body but the indigenous body, simultaneously denying these people, along with women and non-Anglo immigrants and their descendants, the full rights of citizenship. Since the late 1960s, it has been commonplace for the arts to highlight American hypocrisy. And so, hearing, in the age of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, of a hip-hop musical about the American Revolution and the early days of the Republic, written by and starring a Latino-American with African American actors playing most of the second leads, one might reasonably assume that such a play would drip with irony. One might anticipate raps about the three-fifths clause and property requirements for voting, eleven o’clock numbers by displaced Shawnee, and choruses sung by Sally Hemmings’ children. One would be wrong.
Caravaggio (Redux)
One night in bed you asked me who was my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer. Caravaggio. My own reply surprised me. There are nobler painters and painters of greater breadth of vision. There are painters I admire more and who are more admirable. But there is none, so it seems—for the answer came unpremeditated—to whom I feel closer.
Greider and Goodwyn
William Greider published a piece last week criticizing a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” take on Trump (and Bernie Sanders) that conflated their political theater with American populism. Greider emailed a link to his Nation piece, which he self-deprecatingly described as a “rant,” to me (and others). I responded as follows…
Is Dan Mad?
George Trow’s magnificent, prophetic piece on Dan Rather—first published in First of the Month in 1999—never grows old.
Square Dance With God
The author is a physician and priest who has been working in Haiti for more than a generation, running hospitals and social programs in Port au Prince as well as a Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos (NPH) orphanage on the outskirts of the capital. Fr. Frechette is the author of The God of Rough Places, the Lord of Burnt Men and First has often posted his stories from Haiti.
The Other 9/11
On September 11th, every year, it became a habit for certain melancholic leftists who consider themselves heretical thinkers to reflect, not on the Ouroboros of McEmpire and McJihad, or whatever, but on Allende shooting it out with fascist generals with Castro’s sub-machine gun.
The African Lady (Redux)
When Ta-Nehisi Coates was trying to make sense of the world as a young student, his first working theory “held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture.” With help from teachers at Howard, Coates thought his way out of compensatory history. Coates’s movement of mind sent your editor back to the following post by Anita Franklin, which originally appeared here in 2013. B.D.
Very Serious Fantasts
P.W. Singer and August Cole have just published Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War.
Doom in the Bud: Golding’s Studies in a Dying Culture
Full Communism
Communism is free time and nothing else, he thought when he woke up in the morning. And when he went to sleep: predicting what life will be like under communism would be like packing for a dream.
Enigma & Genius: On Lebron James and Draymond Green
After a grueling six preparatory weeks of the NBA Playoffs, basketball fans and Lebron James followers alike had a week off before the Finals began. After conquering the Eastern Conference, King James seemed as worn out as I felt, but one could hope that the rest would be as rejuvenative as the two week mid-season rest he gave himself for his thirtieth birthday, after which he returned to his own self, turning around what looked like a disappointing season for the returning Odysseus of Northeast Ohio.
Kazin, Bellow and Trilling: A Tryptich
I have a stake in Zachary Leader’s new huge first volume biography of Saul Bellow that has just appeared. Bellow was a friend and Leader gives a brief account of the exchange I had with him days before he died. When I visited, his assistant told me that Saul had not been speaking for days and would I try to get him to speak. I asked Saul “what do you have to say for yourself?” A pause and he lit up. “I’ve been thinking: am I a man or a jerk?” I said “would you believe my answer?”
Part Two
What follows is the second installment in an ongoing serialized essay about two overlapping developments within modern American culture: the questionable popular demand that political leaders come “with a narrative” and, on the literary front, a general revival of approval for long serial narratives.
Ambassador Satch’s Talk-Back
Julian Bond dug the first issue of First of the Month and stayed in our corner. While his support for First was of vanishingly small import compared to his other services to our country, it was an honor to know he was paying attention. After Amiri Baraka died last year, Bond sent First a swatch of an interview he’d conducted with Baraka under the aegis of the University of Virginia’s “Explorations in Black Leadership” program. Once it was edited and published he wrote to say “it was great to read this again, especially the Louis Armstrong section.” What follows is the section he highlighted.
Giving Us Something We Can Feel
You couldn’t buy a copy of Between the World and Me on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a stretch last month since it was sold out of every book store. It was rousing to find out readers were hungry for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s polemic against structural racism.
Shelby Steele’s Historylessness
What follows is a compacted version of a critique of Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character (1991) that originally appeared in The Trouble With Friendship (1995).
Southern Changes
Dylann Roof almost didn’t go through with it–“everyone was so nice to me.” The thought of him waiting/wondering in the church before he used the gun he bought at “Shooter’s Choice” reminds me of this passage in Intruder in the Dust where Faulkner claimed every white Southern boy could lock into the moment before Pickett’s Charge–the disaster at Gettysburg that came to stand for the Confederacy’s mad gambles:
Teaching the Conflict
Writers and cartoonists who refuse to honor Charlie Hebdo aren’t thinking straight. Yet I don’t hate their impulse to distance themselves from those who are down with gratuitous humiliation of Muslims in France or anywhere else.
Thought Balloons
—If Smoler is to be criticized for anything, it is for an excess of kindliness…
The Trouble with Charlie
In 2006 Charlie Hebdo republished the Jyllands-Posten cartoons (as did First of the Month), and were sued by three Muslim organizations. This attempted use of the courts to punish speech did not provoke any memorable censure by the people who have recently protested PEN’s decision to honor the courage of the journalists who worked (and then died) at Charlie Hebdo. In that same year Alberta’s Human Right Commission investigated a newspaper (the Western Standard) over its republication of the cartoons; defending itself cost the Western Standard $100,000 (which would have bankrupted First of the Month many times over) and cost the organizations making the complaint nothing—by no means an inefficient approach to suppressing speech. Teju Cole and his allies within PEN seem to have let this episode, too, pass without comment. On November 2, 2011 the offices of Charlie Hebo were firebombed, which seems to have yet again failed to provoke any indignation from Cole, Prose or the rest. On January 7th Islamist murderers shot dead twelve people in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and at this point Teju Cole could no longer keep silent. In a piece titled “Unmournable Bodies”, which was published in the New Yorker a few days later, he attacked the dead journalists.
Happy Birthday, Mister Frank
The date was November 19, 1995. The place was the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California. It was there that a two-hour television special was being taped—yes, taped—celebrating the oncoming eightieth birthday, December 15, to be exact, of the preeminent singer of the twentieth century: Francis Albert Sinatra. Broadcast on December 17 by ABC, the program Frank Sinatra: 80 Years My Way featured a hodgepodge of acts from Salt-n-Pepa to Vic Damone to Steve & Eydie to Bruce Springsteen performing songs Ol’ Blue Eyes had made famous. Seated at an elevated table facing stage right, surrounded by family, a tuxedoed Sinatra appeared to take in the parade of performers with a respectful, ruminative restraint. He dutifully applauded each rendition—even joined the star-laden audience in a couple of standing ovations for Patti Labelle and Ray Charles—but maintained a sense of emotional remove. Age and frail health be damned, the Chairman of the Board was holding court in public and he was determined to maintain his legendary cool.
Then Bob Dylan appeared onstage.
“Money” Mayweather: A Postmodern Triumph
Modern professional athletes are entirely beholden to their corporate masters. Fuck up the brand, and you’re gone. Pete Rose, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson. On and on.