Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark, read by Channie Waites

3/5 stars

P. Djeli Clark is the nom de plume of Dexter Gabriel.  Gabriel is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut who specializes in slavery, abolition and emancipation, and slavery in pop culture.  The Clark penname allows him to distinguish is academic writing from his fiction.  His academic and popular products are distinguished stylistically, not by subject.  Clark’s fiction is greatly informed by his scholarship and his stories often feature black/African culture.  When we celebrate diversity in authorship, it is precisely the knowledge base that Professor Gabriel can leverage to produce Clark’s novels that we hope to foster.

Unfortunately, this is not a blanket endorsement of Clark’s work.  I’ve read two of Clark’s stories, the Nebula winning novel A Master of Djinn, and this Nebula award winning novella, Ring Shout.  In general, I find Clark’s writing overwrought.  There is too much exposition, dialogue often states the obvious, the emotional palate has the contrast so cranked up the image is blown out, and twists are telegraphed well in advance – only the characters seem caught by surprise.  None the less, these are fascinating stories with unique perspectives and I’m not sure they could have been conjured by a lay, white writer.

The title Ring Shout is a reference to an African tradition carried by slaves into the New World.  The tradition involves dancing and singing or chanting in a circle.  In the novel, the ring shout is an antidote, a counter punch in a supernatural battle between Black Americans and the Ku Klux Klan and their respective trans dimensional allies.

That last paragraph has me a bit woozy.  When explained that way, Ring Shout sounds ridiculous, bear with me a second.  The Klan’s leaders have historically held the title of Wizzard.  Klan rituals are secretive, ritualized, and rich with symbolism.  Cross burnings are their calling card and when they engage in violence they do so with great theatrics: masks and robes and public displays of desecrated bodies.  Is it really so hard to see how someone might recontextualize a fight against the Klan as a Hellboy-esk battle against the supernatural?  Add in the rich cultural traditions Black Americans inherited from their slave forebearers and it is odd this story hasn’t already been told.  African religion is polytheistic, with close, personal relationships between deities and practitioners, much like Greek, Roman, or Norse mythology.  If the Black American community were to find itself in such a fight, it would not be defenseless.

This is Clark’s central insight.  American cinema is bursting at the seams with multiverse content where differing story telling traditions are leveraged to create new, grander tales.  But the American Black experience is itself a multiverse tale.  African traditions crossed the Atlantic but not perfectly intact.  The distortion did not destroy those traditions, only changed them.  As those traditions were married to the Western Christian tradition, they morphed again.  Clark is merely mobilizing the lived cultural reality of a people to tell what feels like a trendy story. 

The Klan isn’t just a convenient bad guy though.  Opposing the Klan is not merely a question of taking sides, it is also a question of why one side is right and one side is wrong.  Ring Shout confronts this question at philosophically, interrogating the distinction between hate and righteous anger and making the case that while they are superficially similar, there are substantive differences with ethical implications.

I don’t think Clark is a great storyteller, but Clark’s stories are topical, and appropriately and effectively multicultural.  A lot of this must be attributable to Professor Gabriel’s academic background, but some if this must come from who the author is.  The first time I was struck by how much an underrepresented author brought a story to life that no one else could have was Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu.  Lai conceptualized of bodies in a way that only a woman might have.  Gabriel/Clark has matched that accomplishment and when my kid recently asked for some book recommendations, I heartily added this to the list.  

Decodependence: A Romantic Tragicomic by Lila Ash

Unrated

I am not entirely sure why I read Decodependence by Lila Ash.  A friend read it and posted a review of the book on Goodreads.  The cover and description were provocative and I guess I wanted to know more.

What was promised was salaciousness and drama.  The book definitely delivered some salacious content, it was more muted on drama than expected, what it delivered in spades, though, was activism.

Lila Ash is a cartoonist.  She recounts a young life filled with fraught romantic relationships in which she conflated being sexually available to the men with being personally valued by them.  The story has some steamy moments.  That said, the story is not about sex, it especially isn’t about good, fulfilling sex. 

Non Sequitur

I just cleaned peanut butter off the ceiling.

How!?

Peanut butter doesn’t splatter…right?

Book Review: A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

4/5 stars

The very title, A Modest Proposal, for most people, conjures a fairly accurate and comprehensive summary of Jonathan Swift’s 1729 pamphlet satirically proposing that the poor be permitted to sell their unwanted children as food to the well-to-do.  For this reason, I never felt the need to actually read the pamphlet, but that was misguided.

Firstly, A Modest Proposal is extremely short: just a few pages, single spaced – perhaps a 15-minute read. 

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the pamphlet is hilarious.  Swift is not merely making an outlandish suggestion with a straight face.  He is satirizing a broad swath of British social policy toward the Irish.  Swift provides justification ­- economic, religious, and social – as well as serving suggestions and predictions about how introducing a new food item to the table of fashionable society might influence culture.  In sum, Swift really goes all in.  At the risk of overselling it, even today, I was taken aback with simultaneous horror and amusement.

Taken together, A Modest Proposal is high return on time investment even if you already know the punchline. 

Book Review: Mythology by Edith Hamilton, read by Suzanne Toren

4/5 stars

My in-laws are building a new home.  They are getting rid of everything they can in preparation to move.  That is how I came home with the collected high school readings of my wife and her siblings.  Going through the stack of books was like an archeological dig.  Firstly, I went to a crap high school and read shockingly little.  In some respects, this stack of books was the first exposure I’ve had to a quality secondary literary education.  But I was also digging through my wife’s family’s educational history.  I’d thumb through a book and ask, “did you read this,” and my wife would own a book or guess whose it was.  Many of the titles and authors were familiar, I have a small collection of Dickens now, but some of the material was new to me.  Edith Hamilton’s Mythology was the later.

Non Sequitur

Pardon my French, fuck sinus congestion. 

On what lunatic side trek down our evolutionary path did holding our breath for days at a time whilst waiting for our mucus membranes to stop strangling us make sense?

It seems maladaptive to me.

I sincerely hope meth is every bit as potent as I’ve been led to believe, an OTC precursor chemical is my only hope….

Book Review: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass, read by Charles Turner

4/5 stars

There is little need to say much of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  Douglass’s name and story are well known.  An escaped slave, autodidact, and abolitionist, Douglass is a figurehead of the anti-slavery movement in the leadup to the Civil War and in the Civil Rights Movement during Reconstruction.

Besides the fact that so much has been said of Douglass and his book, it is also fraught to repeat many of the highlights.  To call Douglass courageous rings hollow from those who lack the lived experience to understand what his courageousness meant.  To celebrate his self-taught reading and writing talents can come off as condescending, as though our judgement could validate these accomplishments.

What I can say of the book is to list the things that I didn’t expect and surprised me.

Book Review: The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger

Not rated…I’m not sure how to rate this book.

Spoilers:

It seems The Night Bookmobile is an inducement to suicide for bibliophiles. 

The Night Bookmobile is a graphic novel about a bibliophile who would rather die than live without unfettered access to her books.  She is rewarded for having the courage of her convictions with an eternity as the librarian of another reader’s lifetime of reading.

There must be something I am missing.

I don’t, strictly speaking, object to the book.  The book should not be banned or censored, but I do wonder if the content of the book is safe for all readers.  Should there be a trigger warning on the cover?  I mean the theme song for MASH, if you’ve not seen the movie, is titled, “Suicide is Painless,” which sarcastically chronicles the wisdom of suicide…but it is a joke, in a comedy.  The Night Bookmobile is, best as I can see, on the level.  “Go gently into that good night,” it seems to say, “and bring an excellent book.”  Not sure this will be the book I am bringing when I go.

Book Review: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, read by Becket Royce

4/5 stars

Eddie Izzard does a bit where he compares American blockbuster movies to European arthouse cinema.  The blockbuster pounds like the driving beat of a EDM song.  Profanity, shouting, and violence set the tempo for tossing back fistfuls of popcorn.  In the arthouse flic, the protagonist is struck dumb by the sheer complexity of their emotions when interrupted while sorting matchsticks on a rustic table in a spartan room.  The arthouse movie, like a down tempo experimental jazz tune challenges the audience both to understand what is going on and to give a damn to make the effort.

Literature, as distinct from just books, can conform to this stereotype.  How many literary masterpieces can be lumped together with the Oldman and the Sea archetype: brooding character, barren setting?  I just read Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News about a hapless man, his family, and his ancestral home in Newfoundland.  And now, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.

Non Sequitur

In the aftermath of the Colin Kaepernick kneel-during-the-National-Anthem controversy, I see a lot of bumper stickers that say, “I kneel at church, and stand for the Anthem,” or something thereabouts.  Usually, the sticker has cross and flag graphics to drive home the point. 

I have to say, the whole thing always seemed much ado about nothing.  Neither standing nor kneeling is inherently disrespectful…it just seems one of those cases where people will get their panties in a twist over just about anything. 

That said, insisting on a single posture as the only acceptable one during an Anthem that concludes with the line, “land of the FREE and home of the brave,” strikes me as a bit prescriptive.  Does freedom not encompass posture during songs?

So, the bumper stickers can’t be insisting that others adopt a given practice, they must simply be sharing their choice in the matter.  

Which got me to thinking, where do I have strong feelings about posture during activities.  My first thought was, “I stand to pee, sit to poop, and kneel to vomit.”  But that isn’t strictly true.  I have certainly sat to pee and I vaguely recall a circumstance where it was prudent to kneel while urinating.  Vomiting too is quite flexible.  While kneeling is the norm, I am likely to adopt all three orientations in any one bout of illness.  If you count squatting as kneeling, I have even pooped while kneeling.  The only combination I can’t say has ever made sense was standing to shit.

Perhaps that is why it is disrespectful not to stand during the National Anthem, it is the posture least conducive to pooping…