We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemicals like THC, the active agent in cannabis. But why, they wondered, would we have neuroreceptors for a foreign substance? We don’t. Those receptors are for substances produced in our own brains. The researchers discovered that we produce cannabinoids, our own version of THC, that fit those receptors exactly. The scientists had stumbled onto the neurochemical function of forgetting, never before understood. We are designed, they realized, not only to remember but also to forget. The first of the neurotransmitters discovered was named anandamide, Sanskrit for bliss.
Are you one of those people who writes down interesting snippets of things you hear or read in a notebook? You’re keeping a commonplace book, then. Dwight Garner does the same and got a book out of it. It’s a funny thing about quotes, whenever I read from one of my books of aphorisms, someone inevitably asks me whether all entries in it are written by me. My usual reply is, “I certainly hope so,” but on the inside, I think, “Who would publish a book of other people’s aphorisms with their own name on the cover?” Now, in fairness, I think this guy’s been at it quite a bit and has some interesting connections to make, but there’s my answer.
The contrast between Conroy and McPherson could not have been more stark. Conroy was tall, white, and boisterous; McPherson was short, black, and shy. Conroy cursed, yelled, laughed, and joked; McPherson rarely spoke at all, and when he did his voice was so quiet you often could not hear him. The students dominated his workshops. I was disappointed. McPherson was a Pulitzer Prize winner, after all, the first African American to receive that honor for fiction. He was the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant, as well as countless other awards. I wanted his wisdom. I wanted his insight. He gave it mid-semester, when it was time to workshop my first story.
“Before we begin today,” he said, “I’d like to make a few comments.” This was new; he’d never prefaced a story before. A smile crept on my face as I allowed myself to imagine him praising me for my depiction of a den of heroin addicts, for this was not easy to do, requiring, among other things, an intimate knowledge of heroin addicts and a certain flair for profanity.
“Are you all familiar with gangster rap?” McPherson asked. We were, despite the fact that, besides me, all of the students were white and mostly middle to upper class. While we each nodded our familiarity with the genre, McPherson reached into a shopping bag he’d brought and removed a magazine. He opened it to a premarked page on which was a picture of a rapper, cloaked in jewelry and guns and leaning against the hood of a squad car. Behind him was a sprawling slum. “This person raps about the ghetto,” McPherson said, “but he doesn’t live in the ghetto. He lives in a wealthy white suburb with his wife and daughter. His daughter attends a predominantly white, private school. That’s what this article is about.” He closed the magazine and returned it to the bag. “What some gangster rappers are doing is using black stereotypes because white people eat that stuff up. But these images are false, they’re dishonest. Some rappers are selling out their race for personal gain.” He paused again, this time to hold up my story. “That’s what this writer is doing with his work.” He sat my story back on the table. “Okay, that’s all I have to say. You can discuss it now.”
For a few seconds, the only sound in the room was of my labored breathing. And then someone said, “McPherson’s right. The story is garbage.”
Kaie Kellough is hot stuff these days. Poetry, performance, fiction. He’s nailing it all. But like most Black people, he’s struggled to get here. The Quill interviews him about award culture, performance vs. page, and his next steps to see more people like himself reach the top.
Kellough admits he’s had to come to terms with the fact that as a writer of colour it’s not always easy to get published. Although the Canadian publishing landscape has changed dramatically in the last few years, he found it difficult to have his work taken seriously. Kellough gravitated toward the oral tradition, where he found support among Black writers and artists.
“I felt literary circles to be really difficult,” he says. “So many more opportunities were coming to me from the world of performance: opportunities to collaborate, to record, to travel. Print seemed to have dried up, and publishing always involved knocking on someone else’s door and waiting on their decision, always wondering whether I met someone else’s standard. In many cases that standard was limited and might not even value what I was attempting. It felt disempowering.”
Looks like Joe Byedon took Arizona even as Adonlph Trumpler changes the defence brass to loyalists in preparation for… what, exactly? Going to be an interesting couple months, as I said. Might as well keep up on the book news though, for some reason. It’s important that we keep our normal blahblahblah, said the soon to be subjugated quantum unit of The Masses.
Matt Hollett (a Newf, don’t let the Montreal setting fool you) wins the CBC poetry prize with a Covid poem;
I’m forever amazed by which artists get “cancelled” and which don’t… Sure, most we know of did deserve it, but there are a good few running around out there who have managed to escape notice despite egregious behaviour known widely in the community… Whatever they are doing to maintain their cover, it didn’t work for Wagner;
How to teach kids media literacy (first step, IMHO, wait until they’re old enough to reason with before you give them access to media);
Ever since Wollstonecraft Bushgate broke, I’ve seen a lot of Mary confusion… Shelley vs. the Dub Rock… here’s how to tell them apart (besides, you know, having listened in school);
An interesting personal essay on how Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye led the author to the realization that race and gender are deeply intertwined.
The semester after I encountered The Bluest Eye, a guest speaker visited another literature class. Because he was invited by my favorite professor, it never occurred to me to view this guest with anything other than awe. He dazzled us with readings from his own work and discussion of literary traditions more generally. Toward the end of the class period, he asked whether we could name the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Someone offered, “Toni Morrison.” The guest confirmed the answer and asked if we could list past winners. A string of men’s names followed. I had heard of most of them, but not all. Soon, familiarity with the authors proved irrelevant because the purpose of the exercise became clear. The guest declared, “Toni Morrison won this year’s Nobel prize. You know, it’s a good time to be Black and a woman.”
Suddenly, I felt several sets of eyes on me. Students’ eyes. The guest speaker was too caught up in himself to look in my direction. I was uncomfortable and avoiding the glances that came my way, but I remember looking at my favorite professor, who was watching his guest with pride. The presentation delighted him.
Kama Sutra font porn (Vaguely NSFW, if your place of business is not your home office with the curtains closed and your track pants round your ankles);
You know, when I was a young actor struggling to find even one role for a chubby redhead, I envied Jason Priestly with his big eyes and perfect sideburns and slightly worried/bewildered eyebrows… Now he just looks like a guy who got to the pub two hours before me… Oh, and he’s in a Linwood Barclay adaptation;
No, not in my books. Though I can see the appeal: it’s just nice to see some sort of engagement beyond a fake flag hug and no fear of multisyllabic words that aren’t “tremendous”. This fella in the Guardian talks about being won over by the quotes, though. I suppose that’s fine, if a bit simplistic. I mean, he’s a centre-right placeholder, folks. Better than what we have? Yes. The best case scenario? No. Regardless of who he quotes. I hope he proves me wrong. (Secret: I see a scenario in which Biden passes while in office, we get Kamala for the next four years (after she defeats Ivanka or Jr.) and then AOC runs in 2028. But I’m playing political fantasy football here.)
The bogman himself
There is a depth in Biden’s response to Heaney that clearly goes beyond mere political convenience. He has suffered terrible losses in his life and perhaps he finds particular solace in this poet who voyages into the underworld and speaks with the departed. This appreciation of one of the wisest and subtlest of poets marks out Biden as a truly rare politician.
In general it is a good thing that poets are not, as Shelley claimed, the true legislators of the world. Would you want the antisemitic TS Eliot, Mussolini-supporting Ezra Pound or petty racist Philip Larkin influencing politics? But Heaney was that truly rare thing: a great imaginative artist who was also a wise and noble human being.
Bookninja 