George, a friend to whom I've been neglectful, pokes me with the phrase:
Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?
It turns out that if you google 'brooklyn writer' you get the phrase above. It was disconcerting for a moment because I thought that was his original note. But attribution is such a slippery thing between Twitter and Facebook. In the end I fell upon a paragraph I might have written myself, but instead it was written by Colson Whitehead, the writer I might have been if I loved English more than Perl.
But I don't love English so much that I would bother to slave for its doyennes, masters and mad escapees from Iowa. In fact I don't love anybody that much, so I pretty much slave for my wife and three children - which is what anybody must do I reckon who has not been acknowledged as having anything more important than DNA issuing from them. We do it all for the acknowledgment of course. And for that one gets the privilege, on the occasions of romancing English bloggy style, of being called an idiot for asking questions about the existence of God in the minds of scientific atheists. By a drunk named Andy no less.
My auntie's boyfriend Richard once had me holed up for the evening at the Hollywood Holiday Inn in 1976. He had come West with his silk shirts and fancy new Nikon to present a demo tape of a group he produced to Stevie Wonder. So Richard and I had a date to go up the canyons and meet The Man Himself. Except that we didn't. We had a promise of a date. He told me something I can never forget or escape which is that Hollywood is a business just like any other business, except the people are 10 times as flaky. They're cruel too, which is worse. I further could never get over the idea that tenured professors, are most likely to deal with no more than 10 people of equal standing in their employment, yet thousands of undergraduates. It's not a situation conducive to humility or good grounding, I think. That leaves what for a writer? It was a question I could not answer and chose not to. I walked away from that Brooklyn and only periodically do I reveal a symbolic tattoo of a tear on my face.
Somewhere in my disambiguated soul is a spot for my existential partners. Currently it is buried under a great deal of misguided passion but I have yet to really tell whom all that passion belongs to. Speak of 'the fate of the black man' in mixed company and maybe you can tell me. But in that spot was some sort of filial affection for a short list of men I thought might be responsible for being what it is we black writers were supposed to be, saying what had to be said. Except there's a big whirlwind of 'what do you mean we' that pulls in detrius from a million neighborhoods papering over that would be garden spot. Sometimes a whole damned marina, the contents of a bodega and upside down hothouse have crash landed in the area. The hothouse in which Mr Tibbs names his price. How's that for a metaphor? But my soul is ambiguous as is my desire for naming partners. I'd settle for somebody to buy me a beer. If I drunk beer.
This morning, one of the fine men frontmost in mind for that list, a man who has actually bought me a beer talked about the late lamented Code Magazine. I didn't remember it. Nor did I disambiguate its editor for a more commonly known gentleman of the same name. What did Gandhi say about western civilization?
For the record, when Colson moved into Brooklyn, I was already gone. To Atlanta. The Black Mecca. I am no longer there either.
So it seems to me that we are stuck with a sort of stupid Global America. See nobody really cares if you write from Brooklyn because it's all connected and stitched together with this ungodly web, where sometimes it doesn't matter where you get your verbs. If a writer writes a masterpiece and Google doesn't index it, does it really exist? We talk in terms of 'eyeballs'. To be read doesn't result in action you can see outside your window. I fell in love with the romance of Vikram Seth's Golden Gate, and I joined 'The Well' somewhere back in the early 90s - so early in the life of this internetworked leviathan that the term 'digital divide' hadn't even been invented yet. Slipperier and slipperier still. Maybe we all need a Brooklyn to hang on to. It's not just black men whose fate draws a whirlwind of speculation and upendedness. It would be progress to know if we are actually going to Hell in a handbasket - at least we have a certain destination and means of transportation. But who is going to care about a Great American Novel today or tomorrow. We're all telling the ghosts of our aborted babies that America only used to be great, if it ever was, which we doubt and assume everyone else does as well. The Iranian Bombmaker's Daughter. There's a book that'll sell or at least get distribution. Find it at The Pirate Bay, download a copy to your iPod. Listen to it during your commute, or backpacking in the Sierras.
I like Christopher Hitchens. He knows when to uncap his Sharpie. It means something when British writers get punched out by Nazis in Lebanon. I'm going to say so unambiguously. So hook me up with him, because I think he's on the side of liberty and that's still something worth writing about and fighting about. You can see that from Brooklyn or Atlanta or Los Angeles if you're listening to the right frequencies. Writing into cyberspace diesmbodies thought from the gravity of location. It can give one a sense of vertigo that I can say from experience does not compare favorably to dancing with Rosie Perez. I think I can also say that no matter what storms try to topple our sense of brotherhood, when we see our souls clearly something righteous and profound always emerges. It is not, in the end a love of English or of place, but of humanity itself. Wherever we write that, however we read that, the reward is clear.
Recent Comments