Two Memoirs by Yongsoo Park

i’ve been meaning to post about these books for a few months — but they’ve been weird and busy months. but just before the quarantine, i received an email from yongsoo park — an author i have admired but never met. he’d written two memoirs, had self-published the first and was about to self-publish the second.

i’d loved and was truly inspired by his earlier novel, BOY GENIUS published by Akashic in 2002. (i remember stumbling upon it probably at one of those pre-AWP small press book fairs they had i believe in what was the old mercantile library. i forget the name of the organization that ran these book fairs and wonder what happened to it. was it run by CLMP? this was before Center for Fiction was there. or was it a different subscription library?) … i can’t remember exactly how i found it, but BOY GENIUS was a revelation. it was asian-american literature far beyond anything i’d read before, importantly different from the (also important) foundational assimilation theme that predominated, and came from a familiar but surreal perspective. i’ve written briefly before about what it meant to me, but its very existence was crucial for me. it inspired me to keep writing, frankly, and to think there were other perspectives (somewhat like mine, near mine) that were possible in a literary world that seemed at the time beyond entrance.

the two new memoirs are very nyc books. one is about his raising his kids in harlem. and the other is about his childhood in the neighborhood where i now live: the area in queens made up of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst.

his queens is no longer there but it was here just a moment ago. he took me to where his dad’s shoe repair store used to be located, in a small stall in the Jackson Heights subway station that i used to pass every day and is now occupied by a barber shop and a cell phone accessory store. i think i moved here just as the old neighborhood was evaporating; in fact no doubt my gentrifying move was part of the titrating force that changed the formula of its place.

i love both these books. the parenting memoir reflected conflicts i’d had (and continue to have) as a korean american father, and his urban childhood — entirely different from my midwestern one — resonated more than harmonically. here’s the overly long blurb i wrote for the more recent one:

The beautifully remembered details of a Queens boyhood circa 1980s is so colored with a particular light of Korean-American immigrant experience that the reader, who could be forgiven for thinking they are reading a folksy document of yesteryear, is so bedazzled that their mesmerized state occurs before they are even aware, and achieved perhaps so subtly that the hypnotized might even deny the trick — except for a lingering and transformative mist…

Frankly, it is difficult for me to convey how gratifying and exciting it is to see such an experience articulated in print. The current argot talks about “feeling seen,” and we are in a season of new (and winning) demands for better diversity of representation in our national media. And yet how can I speak of my wonder for the writings of Yongsoo Park — whose affable and low-key style belies not only an incredible courage but weaves a steady-tempoed music that insidiously, sentence by sentence, recapitulates a past so that one is in tears at the recovery of what one was certain was lost forever. For me, from the beginning of his career with the outrageous Boy Genius to these latest memoirs, Yongsoo Park’s books are the mirror and lens I have been seeking my whole reading life — and ones I have not yet encountered elsewhere.

i’d add that if you have any interest in korean-american literature, they are a must. these are self-published books, which i wish they weren’t. i respect his decision to do so, the fulfillment of an urgency, and its maintaining of certain control — but i wish it was a different world, one that was better prepared to recognize Yongsoo Park’s adult genius. maybe it soon will.

Links to buy the books:

The Parable of Our Giant

april 2, 2020 | this morning i remembered this short short that derek white published in sleepingfish ten years ago and that seems now autobiographical and which i reproduce here in its entirety.

the whole Sleepingfish issue (edited by derek white and gary lutz) is available as a PDF through the calamari archive here: https://www.calamaripress.com/SF/8/line.htm

Interviewed for Machine Dreams podcast

big thanks to Margaret Rhee and her students for this interview! They created a podcast series with author interviews, including those with myself, Mark Doten, Katie Williams, George Abraham, and Darius Kazemi.

Machine Dreams is a podcast created by the English undergraduate seminar in the Department of English at Harvard University. In our course, we’re interested in how machines, robots, and codes are represented in, and shaped by literary texts. For example, in 1920, Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the term “robot” in his play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) and transformed societal conceptions of mechanical beings. The contemporary literature we read as a class, similarly push the boundaries of the intersection of technology, machines, and literature. We had the fortunate opportunity to speak with invited authors on this topic of machines and literature, and engage in a collective conversation together. What follows is a dialogue that explores robots, technology, science fiction, intimacy, human conditions, and literary form. We are also interested in literature beyond the page, and the classroom. Our podcast interview is our gesture to a Machine Dream, and we hope you enjoy listening, and join our exploration together.”

Podcast homepage: http://machinedreams-podcast.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/?fbclid=IwAR032qyD6qwg7mauFo9dLgWWQF9kEiGbVxKnvQOvu6GRRkMkUbJ2TFAOt78

Podcast Soundcloud page: https://soundcloud.com/machinedreamspodcast

Link to episode: https://soundcloud.com/machinedreamspodcast/eugene-lim-dear-cyborgs

New Chapbook called THE BASEMENT FOOD COURT OF FORKING PATHS

seems in/appropriate to allude to maestro and blind librarian jorge luis borges, who i’ve been thinking about prolly too much as i lay about recovering from yet another eye surgery… the dapper manhattan ophthalmologist said in the post-op meeting—and rather frustratingly failed to detail any further what he might mean—that when he went into my eyeball that it had felt very “unusual.” still i like the man very much even despite or maybe because he played jethro tull in the operating theater (during which i was rather squeamishly awake) … don’t worry. everyone says the eye should be nearly as good as before sometime very soon.

anyhoo. this only to say that in my rather mopey cyclops convalescence, i was gladdened this evening to receive copies of a chapbook made from a chapter from the novel-in-progress. it’s called THE BASEMENT FOOD COURT OF FORKING PATHS and the chapbook is a product of the editorial vision of David Gonzalez of Skylight Books, where copies are for sale. they should soon be available also through their soon-to-be website, which will be here. Cover art by Liana Jegers and design by Alex Hemming — many thanks to them!

[as an aside and basically unrelated to the story of the chapbook, the plot of the borges story involves a chinese professor named Doctor Yu Tsun, an early prototype for self-harming victims of the model minority myth, who justifies an act of thankless espionage because he “wished to prove to [the kaiser] that a yellow man could save his armies.”]

my chapter has little to do with borges’s tale (except perhaps in its thinking of the multiverse, chance, and regret) but does celebrate the grimy glory of the original and now-gone Golden Shopping Mall. the chapter also has not a little to do with music and so shout-outs to Danny Tunick and Chris Mannigan who guided the, um, research.

Here’s a bit from the chapbook:

I look up and see Muriel hit a record button. Then she holds up the phone and says:

Do you like it? I’m not sure what I think about it. Because my old one was getting so laggy I had to get a new one.

For the most part I trusted the cloud. That is, I had faith in the current magic to get what I needed from my old exo-brain to the new one. I mean I trusted the marketplace to take somehow from my old phone to my new phone all my memories, years and years of correspondence, all my tiny keys to all my unbreakable tiny locks, lists of songs to private parties, top scores to games I never wanted to play, selfies in front of and by things I wanted to be proven once near. But there was one thing I didn’t trust the cloud with, at least not enough that I didn’t take precautions. These were old voicemails from a friend named Frank Exit who died about a year ago.

Available at Skylight Books and directly from Breaking & Entering Lit.


https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-golden-shopping-mall-queens-new-york

VERNON SUBUTEX by virginie despentes

why are red states red? if you want to read a convincing thesis on WHY the rise of global fascism is being fed by the disenfranchisement of the quote nativist working classes, as well as a deliciously trashy romp through worlds (and maybe an explanation on why the youth seem to have abandoned guitar rock), try VERNON SUBUTEX about an aging French hipster, now down and out. less filled with bloatware than Knausgaard, and as dark but swifter and funnier than Ferrante, Despentes is as perfectly detailed, engrossing and life-filled as both. she is in fact master of the most clever, deep empathies. and you’ll be stunned to be inhabiting the minds of the unexpected.
_______________________________

review in the guardian.
buy the book here.

Dear Cyborgs gets listed in VOGUE as best book read in 2019 by Trisha Low

“In Lim’s work, nothing makes sense except for the sharp absurdity of living within capitalism, and the real threads of resistance that worm their way out of our fantastical, perhaps even delusional visions for a better world. Built out of the crime scene of our past decade, Dear Cyborgs is a book of perfect illogic that I’m grateful will sustain me through the next.”

Read the rest here.

“Shaggy Dog” | new fiction in the Brooklyn Rail

New fiction called “Shaggy Dog” up at the Booklyn Rail, an excerpt of a novel-in-progress.

The good doctor was working on a special kind of AI that anticipates your needs, and, of which, so claims Donna, the dog is a prototype. The program is turning out to work all too well, as the robots not only seem to anticipate when you want companionship or a beverage or the stereo turned on but quickly evolved to discover and emulate that which you most longed for—a desire perhaps unconscious, secret even from yourself—a desire which in most people turns out to be the recovery of the dead. This, though I’m not sure if I entirely believe or trust her explanation, is why, according to Donna, I thought the dog was the reincarnation of my deceased friend, Frank Exit.

“That’s impossible,” I say.

“Of course it isn’t,” Donna replies.

Read the rest at https://brooklynrail.org/2019/11/fiction/Shaggy-Dog

_________________
unrelated, but i didn’t know did you that the wikipedia entry for shaggy dog includes reference to the linguistic rube Goldberg mashing of this ditty called albuquerque by one weird al. end of report.

Interview about being a librarian at Lit Hub’s Book Marks.

Welcome to Shhh…Secrets of the Librarians, a new series (inspired by our long-running Secrets of the Book Critics) in which bibliothecaries (yes, it’s a real word) from around the country share their inspirations, most-recommended titles, thoughts on the role of the library in contemporary society, favorite fictional librarians, and more. Each week we’ll spotlight a librarian—be they Academic, Public, School, or Special—and bring you into their wonderful world.

This week, we spoke to Queens-based writer, publisher, and librarian, Eugene Lim.

Read the rest at:
https://bookmarks.reviews/eugene-lim-on-leni-zumas-rupert-giles-and-libraries-full-of-tears/

May 22: Event for Emmanuel Bove’s MY FRIENDS

NYRB is reprinting Emmanuel Bove’s beautiful first novel, which has arguably the best title ever: MY FRIENDS.

Revisiting French Classics: Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends. With Donald Breckenridge, Eugene Lim, Jonathon Sturgeon, and John Yau.


https://www.albertine.com/events/revisiting-a-french-classic-emmanuel-boves-my-friends/

WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 20196:30 PM

IN ENGLISH. FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. NO RSVP NECESSARY.ALBERTINE
972 FIFTH AVENUE
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES

My Friends is Emmanuel Bove’s first and most famous book. Its narrator, Victor Baton, is a classic little man, of no talent or distinction or importance and with no illusions that he has any of those things. All Victor wants is to be loved, all he wants is a friend, and as he strays through the streets of Paris in search of love or friendship or some fleeting connection, we laugh both at Victor’s meekness and at his odd pride, but we feel with him, too.

With Victor, Bove has created a kind of everyman, an archetypal, indomitable knight of human fragility who invests the back streets of the city and the unsorted moments of daily life with a weird and unforgettable clarity.

On Wednesday, May 22 at 6:30pm, join Donald Breckenridge, Eugene Lim, Jonathon Sturgeon, and John Yau as they discuss Emmanuel Bove’s masterpiece.

In English. Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.


https://www.albertine.com/events/revisiting-a-french-classic-emmanuel-boves-my-friends/

May 19: Reading at the Queens Museum with N.K. Jemisin, and Sabrina Vourvoulias, followed by a discussion moderated by scholar Joy Sanchez-Taylor.

https://queensmuseum.org/events/spring-exhibitions-public-programs

I’ll be reading at 5PM on May 19th at the Queens Museum along with writers N.K. Jemisin and Sabrina Vourvoulias, followed by a discussion moderated by scholar Joy Sanchez-Taylor.

Part of a bold and dreamy series of events put on by the Queens Library’s Science Fiction Festival and the Queens Museum’s Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas.

More info here:
https://queensmuseum.org/events/spring-exhibitions-public-programs


interviewed by John Madera for the Big Other podcast

“This episode features writer Eugene Lim reading from and discussing his short fiction, his novel Dear Cyborgs, and his novel-in-progress.

Among the many things we talk about are writing, literature, reading, books, editing, editors, libraries, librarians, experimental fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, publishing, Ellipsis Press, Third Space Theory, Renee Gladman, Miranda Mellis, Joanna Ruocco, Evelyn Hampton, Tom Whalen, dialogue, monologue, Karen An-hwei Lee, Jean Echenoz, Jonas Mekas, Tehching Hsieh, Adrian Tomine, and more.”

https://bigother.com/2019/05/02/jamming-their-transmission-episode-12-eugene-lim/

“C. ’81” by Alice Notley

C. ’81
by Alice Notley

People with more money than us
don’t seem to
trust us (not strictly true)
We have hardly any, ever
Maybe they shouldn’t trust us
we’re always looking to borrow
five ten or twenty dollars
we only want to have
just enough money, today
they think it all “goes for pills”
how much do they think pills cost
we have no
expensive habits I mean as in
other people’s worlds
clothes, travel, decor, enter-
tainment we do buy books we don’t have a
phone for seven years, no checking account

Of course I’m not being objective it was my life
As a matter of fact I feel positively defiant about it
I liked our economics they were transparent
I understood money thoroughly
I had guilt from borrowing
but never the guilt of having something
the only thing that suffered was Ted’s
health it suffered considerably

I can’t get at the poem of this
I think of ’81, ’82 as rather ugly years
casting cold shadows black
against the sky of a sun disappearing
but back to economics
nobody trusts the poor
the poor are more interesting than others
almost uniformly
they’re crazed resentful struggling paranoid excessive
anxious about their faded rickety possessions
and their stoops
their patches of sunlight or shade on stoops
their children going wrong
and all the disorder of the garbage cans
everyone else boringly has
clean cold spaces new things
private schools self-filled conversations
rooms full of shadow where rage should be
and the voices
of people subject to the fits of demonic radios in their heads
well I’ve had my radio implant at times
and known people with louder ones
everything the voices scream about
relates to money one
way or another

I’m being self-righteous so
I can own my own past again
and so my present, no bondage or confinement
of shame of not making money
it’s a talent people are born with–poetry isn’t it’s
life’s condition poetry’s so common hardly anyone
can find it
money’s common but much more cornerable
poetry’s air and money’s ore–a certain mineral
that slides across distances into hands it fits
born with a hand shaped like money they say, that
cute clean white hand

I can’t get to the poem of this
though I choke with it again being there
in another decade being here’s not much different
the rage of unremunerated work —
can’t you hear the voice in my head
can’t you hear this fucking voice in my head
of course I’m not right I’m never right
I’m fucking lazy unskilled and you deserve your money

from MYSTERIES OF SMALL HOUSES by Alice Notley

hear the poet read it and
learn about the financial lives of certain poets
in this profile of Bernadette Mayer here:
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/the-organist/give-everybody-everything-the-financial-life-of-bernadette-mayer

MUSIC TO WRITE TO

sometimes one’s white (/brown) noise app gets boring, no? buh-buh-billions of testing hours — some of them sad, most of them sleepy — went into the production of this playlist [spotify, youtube], which is what I’ve been writing to… poetaster tested, scribbler approved.

also: i’m reading this saturday afternoon with Caleb Beckwith and Alan Davies. come by?

https://www.seguefoundation.com/calendar.htm | FB EVENT LINK
APRIL 6

AT THE ZINC BAR
82 WEST 3rd STREET, BETWEEN THOMPSON AND SULLIVAN STS.
NEW YORK CITY
SATURDAYS FROM 4:30 – 6:30 PM

CALEB BECKWITH, EUGENE LIM & ALAN DAVIES

Caleb Beckwith is a writer and editor living in Oakland, CA; work includes Political Subject (ROOF), and Heat Win (Gauss PDF).

Eugene Lim is the author of the novels Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press), The Strangers (Black Square Editions), and Dear Cyborgs (FSG). He works as a high school librarian, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, NY. http://www.eugenelim.com.

Alan Davies‘s books include Name/ Signage/ Rave/ Candor/ Raw War / Odes & fragments. In addition to his poetry / Alan is known for his book reviews / critical theory / aphorisms / essays. Long a resident of NYC / Alan can be contacted at idonot@mail.com.

https://www.seguefoundation.com/calendar.htm

 

Interview with Tehching Hsieh in The Believer

tehching hsieh interview in the believer2

Lisa Chen and Anelise Chen and i got to visit the studio of someone who frequently gets called the grandfather of performance art, Tehching Hsieh. the resulting interview has just been published in the Believer magazine — and should be available online soon is available online here.

to talk to hsieh was really an honor. here’s my favorite part of the interview:

_________

Tehching Hsieh: In the beginning I couldn’t meet your kind of people. Your kind of people would say, “What is this guy, a stranger, an illegal?” Because your kind of people—this is the first time I’ve been interviewed by your kind of people in 42 years.

BLVR: Really? Wait, what do you mean, us “kind of people”?

TH: Asian American. [Laughter.] You get it! This is the first time. I’m not trying to make it an issue.

BLVR: You say this is the first time Asian Americans are interviewing you, which I find both surprising and not, but, you should know, for us, you are a very important precedent, a groundbreaker.

TH: I just wanted to say that it’s come late. Forty-two years late.

Read the whole interview here.

 

New work in latest issue of Cagibi

cagibi-with-dandelion-poster-530-x-280

a lot of pitfalls when writing about the immigrant generation. or, to be particular and personal, i find it very difficult to write directly with any honesty about my parents, who i know worked harder and persisted in ways it’s not even in my constitution to comprehend. as, one assumes, was partly the goal. but from which a division is necessarily born.

anyway. this is to say i wrote a thing about my mom. below is a photo of her as a girl (in the darker clothes) circa 1955. many thanks to the editors of Cagibi.

N E S T S

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
—Joe Brainard, I Remember

I remember my mother remembering her father.

I remember walking with my mother through the woods near her home. She points out a small purple flower. She says they called these “ring-flowers,” and in her childhood they would pluck these flowers and make from their stalks a kind of ring. I remember she didn’t stoop to pluck one but mimed the act… [Read the rest here.]

KHL
.
.
.

new story about THE LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE in Wired

dearest library land—

i nostradamussed the future library keeping
our tart hearts in mind. spoiler :
ranganathan and readers advisory still rule, but
no makerspaces.

yours in allegiance,

 

 

The Branch by Eugene Lim

The library of the future is more or less the same. That is, the branch is an actual and metaphoric Faraday cage. You enter, a node and a target, streamed at and pushed and yanked, penetrated by and extruding information, sloppy with it. And then your implants are cut off. Your watch, your glasses, jacket, underwear, your lenses, tablet, chips, your nanos—all go dry…

read the rest here along with the other authors in Wired’s “Future of Work” series including fiction by Laurie Penny, Charles Yu, Charlie Jane Anders, Nisi Shawl, Adam Rogers, Martha Wells, and a great one on smart contracts and crypto by Ken Liu.

“Search History” makes Entropy magazine’s list of BEST OF 2018: FAVORITE ONLINE FICTION & SHORT STORIES

Stoked that “Search History,” originally published on AAWW’s The Margins by editor Jyothi Natarajan, makes Entropy Magazine’s list of best online fiction for 2018!

 

“No Machine Could Do It” in Granta magazine

 Granta 145

very happy to have new fiction called “No Machine Could Do It” in latest Granta magazine.

I’d become friends with a Public Intellectual. He handled everything: scandal, sex, politics, political sex scandals, racism, weather, the racism of weather, Japanese cartoons. Everything was under his purview, but his specialty was the Future. He was a much more successful colleague at the university where I would occasionally adjunct. Several years ago entirely by accident, when collecting some papers from our department’s office, not knowing who he was, I saw him standing next to the faculty mailboxes with a copy of a book I’d just read. I was younger and new to the place and excitable – and so I started up a brief conversation about the book…

Read the rest at Granta (behind a paywall) at: https://granta.com/no-machine-could-do-it/

Some fiction in the beautifully designed 2018 Short Story Advent Calendar

The 2018 Short Story Advent Calendar

Fourth time’s the charm. We’re back with another deluxe box set of 24 individually bound short stories to get you into the yuletide spirit.

The 2018 edition of the Short Story Advent Calendar might be our most ambitious yet, with stories from eight different countries and three different originating languages (don’t worry, we got the English versions). Plus, we set a new personal best for all-new material.

Contributors to the 2018 Short Story Advent Calendar include:

  • Kevin Barry (Beatlebone, City of Bohane)
  • Ben Greenman (What He’s Poised to Do, Don Quixotic)
  • Etgar Keret (Suddenly, a Knock on the Door)
  • R. O. Kwon (The Incendiaries)
  • Sara Levine (Treasure Island!!!)
  • and [REDACTED x 19]!

More info here: https://www.hingstonandolsen.com/store/the-2018-short-story-advent-calendar

INSURRECTO by Gina Apostol

insurrecto

you say you want a.

here’s a line: “He’s not a bad man, just an unconscious one.”

In Insurrecto, a polymath’s lyricism is woven with post-colonial tristesse. A deft and labyrinthine depiction of our helpless condition of ever-revolving insurrection, Gina Apostol has created an elegant mise en abyme wherein the colonizer and the colonized reflect themselves over and over and yet over again.

pre-order!

Apostol-Gina_credit-Margarita-Corporan_773x555

_________________

i found these pages quite helpful :

https://www.praxino.org/chapters-in-numerical-order
and
https://www.praxino.org/album-of-stereo-cards

_______________

GUN DEALERS' DAUGHTER

post scriptum & nota bene : found this following passage in apostol’s also excellent GUN DEALERS’ DAUGHTER (which i read after INSURRECTO and which i think serves as good intro/sequel/commentary to the later novel) :

I discovered that our books of history were invariably in the voice of the colonist, the one who misrecognized us. We were inscrutable apes engaging in implausible insurrections against gun-wielding epic heroes who disdained our culture but wanted our land. The simplicity and rapacity of their reductions were consistent, and as counterpoint to Soli’s version of the past, these books provided, as I admitted to Soli, the ballast for my tardy revolt. Soli reproved me. Why do history books persuade you but not the world around you? You live in a puppet totalitarian regime, propped up by guns from America, so that we are no sovereign country but a mere outpost of foreign interests in the Far East. She said this with such conviction, I could barely reply. But, I countered, the military-industrial complex, as you call it, does it not suggest not only an economic order but also a psychiatric disorder? It occurred to me that it was a system of oppression that spurred both of our delusions—hers (to save the nation) and mine (to save myself). Soli nodded, disarmed at the thought, but in the end she disagreed. Obscurantism, she said, does not serve change. The therapeutic couch may be necessary—at least for some, she said pointedly. But it is not the place for action. Next time you drive home to Makati, she said, look around: all you need is to look out your limousine’s window to know that it is a problem to be living the good life in such bad times.

sometimes apostol is e.m. forster or edith wharton — i.e. a proto-modern who can linger over a scene’s details with almost victorian pacing. simultaneously she’s a wit and an experimentalist à la calvino or cortázar and her novels become a penrose staircase of amnesiac memoirists or an erasing documentarian, mazes of duplicitous memory.

in GUN DEALER’S DAUGHTER there are passages that are downright society farce — until they open into truly darker territory, exposing class relations and imperial power-clutching so that the farce turns into a horrorshow version of upstairs downstairs — a cold and hot class war. the bringing-it-back-around structure was brilliantly executed… a fantastic book!

OREO by fran ross

oreo fran ross

so far ahead of its time it’s painful to think about. funnier than ulysses. smarter than your smart shelf. both the danzy senna foreword and the harryette mullen afterword are great to have in the new directions edition. the afterword has a good deal of originally researched biographic detail and mullen’s scholarship was what brought the book back from obscurity for the Northeastern University Press reprint in 2000.

some links:

the Danzy Senna foreword as it appeared in NYer:

By the nineteen-eighties, black literature was a dark male symphony no longer. Black women writers had come into vogue. And yet, in the nineteen-nineties, as I read “Oreo” in my apartment in Fort Greene, the birthplace of post-soul black bohemia, Ross felt to me like part of some future that had yet to arrive.

•paul beatty shouting it out in a piece on black humor from 2006

darryl pinckney review in nyrb. behind a paywall but pinckney lists other co-contemporary african american novels, arguing: “It took a while for the militancy that had overtaken much work by black poets and black playwrights in the 1960s to find expression in fiction, because it was difficult for black writers to free themselves from the narrative traditions of double-consciousness. In fiction, the movement took the form of escapes from realism, from the pieties of the black condition.” His list includes: William Demby’s The Catacombs (1965), Charles Wright’s The Wig (1966), William Melvin Kelley’s dem (1967) and Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970), Clarence Major’s Emergency Exit (1979), John Oliver Killens’s The Cotillion (1970), Bill Gunn’s Black Picture Show (1978) and Rhinestone Sharecropping (1981), and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972).

tisa bryant’s review, which has this intriguing note: “Fran Ross skewers racism, sexism, homophobia in terms that are prescient for 1974, and still in play in today’s continued push for social transformation. She takes so many risks here, proving the point poet/writer R. Erica Doyle made in a recent conversation: capitalism co-opted fiction, and killed the experimental novel. The experimental novel by a Black writer, then, is more of a rarity now than then.” (bryant, an experimental novelist, also points to xam wilson cartier‘s overlooked status.)

• harryette mullen‘s afterword speaks a great deal to the question of authenticity, especially the question of the authenticity of, and audience for, an experimental fiction writer of color. here are two passages that struck me, the first placing OREO in a historical context and the second particularly good during our moment’s struggle with concepts of appropriation/acculturation/assimilation/cultural exchange:

Paradoxically, as much as it was concerned with defining the cultural distinctiveness of African Americans, the Black Arts movement also helped to create unprecedented opportunities for the creative expression of African Americans to enter and influence “mainstream” American culture. Sometimes the more “black rage” was vented in the work, the more the writer was celebrated in the mainstream culture. In addition to this tense interaction of political, aesthetic, and commercial impulses, another contradiction that the Black Arts movement posed for authors was the idea that black Americans possessed no authentic literature or language of their own. Writers wrestled with the dilemma that they were severed from the spoken languages and oral traditions of their African ancestors, and had no intrinsic connection to the language and literature of their historical oppressors. The English language itself was perceived by some as a tool of oppression. The more fluent in standard English, or other European languages, the more immersed in established literary culture, the more likely one might be accused of forsaking one’s own traditions, or abandoning the black community — by writing works it could not comprehend, or enjoy, or draw upon for inspiration in the coming revolution that radical activists envisioned.

Fran Ross’s novel, Oreo, was published in 1974, when the Black Arts movement had reached the height of its influence. Yet, as its title signals, Oreo does not claim to represent any singularly authentic black experience. More eccentric than Afrocentric, Ross’s novel calls attention to the hybridity rather than the racial or cultural purity of African Americans…

& later:

In Oreo’s interactions with members of both sides of her family, as well as with neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and strangers, Ross’s novel suggests that acculturation is not a one-way street, but is more like a subway system with graffiti-tagged cars that travel uptown as well as downtown, or even more like an interconnected network of multi-lane freeways. Particularly in racially diverse and integrated settings, immigrants of various races and national origins, on their way to becoming American, may emulate the cultural styles of black Americans, since African Americans, though a minority, are as much the founders of American culture as Anglo Americans. Anglos themselves are a minority of white Americans. Oreo’s biracial and bicultural heritage is not so exceptional when one considers that most native-born Americans, regardless of skin color, are products of racial hybridity, just as American culture and language are products of cultural and linguistic hybridity…

Fran Ross, from the frontispiece to her novel Oreo

 

…and last bit, cuz it’s enough to make you laugh so you don’t cry. from the 1975 library journal review: “This novel is experimental, intelligent, and even funny in places. The dialogue, however, is a strange mixture of Uncle Remus and Lenny Bruce, and quite often unintelligible.”

story called “Search History” up at AAWW

i’ve a story up on wherein we’re all reincarnated as a plastic bags and robots.

It was no longer possible to understand being poor or defeated. Which meant she could no longer imagine it. This worried her because it meant if it were ever to happen she would then feel like a fool and this might somehow be more painful than the destitution but, more importantly, this realization worried her because it meant she no longer felt human.

The dysthemic artificial intelligence scientist took a book of poetry off the shelf and sat on her couch… [Read the rest here.]

Scroll to Top