Roger Ebert on being well-read

I’ve known for many years, from watching him on TV, that Roger Ebert is a smart guy. I’ve known at least since I read his review of Days of Heaven that he is an exceptional writer. But it is only now that I’ve discovered he is not only literate but literary.

In an article called Does anyone want to be “well-read?”, Ebert reacts to an article in which Cynthia Ozick poses this question:

Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his “field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender, Daniel Fuchs, Hugh Kenner, Seymour Krim, J.F. Powers, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Rahv, Jack Richardson, John Auerbach, Harvey Swados--or Trilling himself?

“I read through this list with dismay,” writes Ebert. “I have read all but two of those writers, love some, and met five.” Yet noting that Ozick’s list was prompted by her review of Saul Bellow’s letters, he confesses that although he still reads Bellow, “I confess I have no plans to return to any of the other authors on her list in whatever time I have remaining.”

As for me, I’ve read at least 20 of the 32 writers on Ozick’s list. I have heard Mailer, Hellman, and Ginsberg read their work, and met Mailer at a reception afterwards. Robert Lowell is probably my favorite American poet, and I have great affection and admiration for Edmund Wilson, who rivals John Updike for the title of greatest overall 20th century American man (or woman) of letters. Wilson was so prolific, and wrote such clear springwater prose, that it is discouraging how few people seem to read him anymore. Frederick Exley found that in the throes of alcoholism and depression, Wilson was the only person he could read.

Ebert calls Wilson “a role model,” and writes that “I have every one of Edmund Wilson’s books, in the sublimely uniform Farrar Straus & Giroux editions.”

All of them? Really? Even The Undertaker’s Garland? If so, I am very impressed. I have 33 myself, and have read them all, and the only other person I know with a similar collection is the old friend who turned me onto Wilson in the first place. (He now works for the Library of America, the nonprofit publishing project that Edmund Wilson championed.)

Hands Washing Water by Chris Abani

When it comes to contemporary poetry, I’m pretty hard to please. So it was a pleasant surprise to find how much I enjoyed Hands Washing Water by Chris Abani.

The last poem in the book was one of my favorites. It’s dedicated to Percival Everett, author of the novel Erasure.

Unfinished Symphony

The light this morning is an aria.
I turn back to the stirring of coffee.
A way to ground this time
between the hush and the turning. Outside
a hummingbird is spreading rumors
among flowers. Even now.
Even after all the wounds have healed,
I scratch around a phantom scab, avoiding
what lies beneath. When I open the window,
rosemary and thyme spill in.
Later I will work loam in the herb garden,
crumbling the dirt, whispering dirges,
spicing the plants with sharpness. For now,
there is Percival’s painted fire
and the coffee. Sometimes
it is enough.

National Black Writers’ Conference

On Saturday I walked to Medgar Evers College by way of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and sat in on two panels at this year’s National Black Writers’ Conference.

This was the tenth anniversary for the conference, and it seems to have gotten more press than usual this year: an article in the New York Times (though Tayari Jones, one of the participants, noted that several comments on the article were “disturbing’—not to say racist) and a mention on NPR.

I picked two panels to attend because they included writers I already knew and liked: Meena Alexander and M.G. Vassanji speaking on “Literary Encounters: East Meets West” and Chris Abani and Maaza Mengiste on “The Impact of War and Natural Disasters in Literature by Black Writers.” I got to meet each of them afterwards, and came away with signed copies of Quickly Changing River, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, Hands Washing Water, and Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.

(Meena Alexander had disappeared in the time it took me to buy her book, so I had to be satisfied with exchanging it for a presigned copy. I was pleased, though, to find that it included two poems she read during the panel: “Four Friends” and “Nomadic Tutelage,” an homage to Audre Lorde.)

James McBride was also on the war panel. I hadn’t seen him before, or read his work, and was fascinated to hear his description of how the movie of his novel Miracle at St. Anna got filmed. Spike Lee called him up one day to propose the idea, they made a handshake agreement—two black men from Brooklyn, of about the same age—and for the next year McBride wrote the script and discussed it with Spike Lee in various restaurants. No money changed hands. As usual, Spike Lee had great difficulty raising money for the movie, and in the end it came mostly from Italy. (McBride was scathing on the subject of how pathology is the only kind of black story that sells—using Push and the movie Precious as his main examples.)

Chris Abani made more startling statements than anyone else I heard. Every time he publishes a book, he says, someone tells him it will end his career. When he told his publisher the idea for his next book, he said, the man visibly flinched. “My career is entirely about rewriting James Baldwin,” he said at one point, and a little later, “For Baldwin, all love is light. The only aberration is the absence of love.”

Abani once spoke to a Hutu man involved in the massacres in Rwanda. What was the hardest thing about killing your Tutsi victims? he asked him.

“After a while the machete gets dull and you start to get blisters,” the man said, and laughed.

Was it the literal truth? Was it a joke meant to shock? Or was there was an element of both? Abani didn’t try to explain.

Madagascar chocolate

Earlier this week I wrote about Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin, and posted a love poem from Madagascar at Words Without Borders, in honor of Valentine’s Day.

Now, by one of those odd convergences, Seth Godin and Madagascar and Valentine’s Day have come together again. Godin says he doesn’t do consulting, but apparently he’s been talking to the people who make Madécasse Chocolate, “the only imported chocolate made on the continent with local beans.” (Well, Madagascar isn’t technically on the continent, but it’s considered part of Africa.)

As it turns out, Madécasse is based in Brooklyn, not far from where I live, and the chocolate is sold, among other places, at one of my favorite independent bookstores, McNally Jackson.

At any rate, Godin’s point is that you can’t market effectively by being all things to all people. Pick a story and go with it.

For example, the Madécasse story about made by Africans in Africa is very powerful, at least as powerful as fair trade, if not more (they keep four times as much money in Africa by selling a bar as they would if they just sold beans to other companies).

If that’s true, then why not put your workers on the label? Big beautiful pictures that would be an amazing juxtaposition against all the other abstract stuff in the store. Tell me the story of the worker on the back. Make each one different and compelling. Packaging as baseball card. I wouldn’t put a word on the front, just the picture.  Now I not only eat something that tastes good, but I feel good. You’ve made it personal. The story on the back is about a real person, living a better life because I took the time to buy her chocolate instead of someone else’s. When I share the chocolate, I have something to say. What do you say when you give someone a chocolate bar? This package gives you something to say.

The illustration I’ve borrowed here is apparently Godin’s idea of what the Madécasse package should look like. I think it works, and I’ll be interested to see if the company goes with the idea.

Dennis Brutus 1924-2009

When I think of Dennis Brutus, I remember a photo I once saw of him standing in front of a portrait of Frederick Douglass. His graying mane and stoic expression gave him a certain resemblance to Douglass, which I’m sure he was well aware of. I met him several times when I was doing anti-apartheid work in the 1980s, and I was sorry to read of his death.

I once helped organize a fundraising event at Harvard where Brutus spoke about his efforts to have South Africa banned from the Olympics, and about his attempt to escape after his arrest in 1963. Finding himself with his guards on the streets of Johannesburg, he broke free and ran, thinking that they would never be reckless enough to shoot him on a crowded street.

He was wrong. A bullet passed through his body, and before long he was serving an 18-month sentence on Robben Island.

I was carrying a copy of his book A Simple Lust, and before the event I mentioned to him that I liked his poem “The companionship of bluegum trees.”

To my surprise, he stopped what he was doing, sat down, looked up the poem, and read it to me: the only time that I have been privileged enough to be an audience of one for a poet.

The companionship of bluegum trees
their sheen and spangle against the midday
winter sun
and the companionable nudge of my heart
knocking against my mind and memory
with evocation of my student hazy days
condemns me once again
labels me poet dreamer troubadour
unreal unworldly muddle-headed fool
while the trees nod and swagger
and the level sunlight flows.