This is just two pages! Four haiku on each page. 817 total. Nearly all of them just like…😍
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This is just two pages! Four haiku on each page. 817 total. Nearly all of them just like…😍
pickNear the end of his life, Richard Wright, best known for his 1940s novel of Black repression, Native Son, (not read), began writing haiku.
To say that these are some of the best English Language haiku I have ever read is not hyperbole. It‘s evident in every line that Wright was enamored by the deceptively complex form and respected it.
Wright, a Black Man in 1950s America, found in Nature a place of belonging. Such is the power of haiku.
I‘m posting one book a day from my massive collection. No description, no reason for why I want to read it (some I‘ve had so long I don‘t even remember why!). Feel free to join in!
#ABookADay2024
pick“Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion.” How prescient those words!
Often bleak, sometimes funny, always well written, these 8 stories of 8 black men (or 7 men and one boy) moved me. The final story, which I quote above, was perhaps my favorite. All will stay with me a long time.
A flawed, but incredibly powerful collection of stories.
It serves as a commentary on the Jim Crowe South…and also oddly on (the awkwardness of?) Communist idealism. It also has some beautiful use of idiomatic language, terrific characters, and insane dramatic tension.
Etchings are by John Wilson for the story Down by the Riverside.
#RichardWright
Started a new book this morning.
#RichardWright is a planned 2023 theme for me. This collection of novellas was his first published book, originally published in 1938 and expanded in 1940.
pickBut the photographs...
Called poetic or elegant prose, this is really a kind of historical manifesto on the crimes of America against African Americans, contextualized as an economic power struggle between the wealthiest (whites), and on the manipulation of poor white tensions by directing them towards white/black divisions. The photographs, almost all depression-era images from the FSA, are magnificent. Terrific text/photo combo.
so-soPoirier‘s fact-dump on post-war Paris - 1945-1949 - is more like a biography on Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, but without getting too close. It‘s so fact dense, that it practically lacks a narrative. Unfortunately it‘s compromised on audio by a terrible effort that make no distinction of tone or subject changes. It becomes monotonous facts. They‘re deadening at their worst, but hit strides of fascination. My last audiobook for 2022.
Found this in my mailbox this morning, a 🕎 present for myself. I‘ve started reading. What the back of the book calls “beautiful prose” is so far a historical manifesto of the legacy of slavery, mixed with magnificent depression era FSA photography. Originally published in 1941.
So, this sentence may have stopped me: “Focusing on the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, then, this chapter explores how she employs ethnography to orchestrate the difficult task of offering a public articulation of African American identity and artistic production in the midst of twentieth-century U.S. global expansion and a growing sense of black modernity, which would eventually help enable the integration of black ⬇️⬇️
