p.s. Hey. ** CAUTIVOS, Hi. It’s hard for me to imagine Reed’s work having the same excitement level in translation, but I know translators work magic since I only read translations. No hang over for me. I don’t drink, and I don’t even have a psychological hangover. Thanks! ** _Black_Acrylic, Fantastic news about the Flash Fiction course’s reprieve! Yay! Get those symbolic ink pens full of symbolic ink. ** Dorna, Oh, wow. Hi, Dorna! Thank you, thank you. I miss you! I so wish I could see you! I’ll be in LA a lot until the end of April, so if you make a trip back there for some reason, let me know. I hope everything is spectacular with you. ** Dominik, Hi!!! ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ is incredible. Yes, stupidly, really, I hung onto my LA apartment all this time because it’s really cool, and perfectly located, and still fairly inexpensive since I lived there so long. My friend/roommate Joel lives there and takes care of the place. Thank love for me about the duet. I’ll keep my ears wide open. Ha ha, and thank your yesterday love for being so practical. It’s probably good that I got the Switch right before leaving for a while because I don’t want to start a game and then have to pause it for weeks. This company that makes a grilled seitan product that I live and eat all the time just stopped making it, so I’m going to have to ask love to be a prick and threaten the company with bankruptcy unless they reverse course immediately, G. ** Billy, No, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. That was a horrible idea. We outliers will find a way. We always do. Thanks about the film. We’re getting there. Love to you too. ** David Ehrenstein, Indeed. ** malcolm, Shoot dates! Awesome! And so soon. Ours is in mid-March and that feels really, really soon. Do hook me up with the kickstarter campaign. And awesome you got your dream lead! His name is familiar. I will check out those songs, hopefully today, thank you! I’m really excited for you. And for me and for us. We have a ton to do on the upcoming trip. Secure the shooting location (90% of the film takes place in and around one house), cast the remaining three important roles, find a DP (we’re way behind on that), figure out the shooting schedule, find a sound guy, and other stuff. It’s going to be intense. Love in mega-return. And of course also mega-luck with your film if you need any positive outside vibe-based interference. ** Minet, Hi. Yes, I love ‘The System of Dante’s Hell’. I did a post about it. Let me see if I can find it. Here. I’ll do my best to spread the good word fruitfully. Not having played games for, like, four years due to my lack of system, there are a ton of games I want to get. ‘Breath of the Wild’, of course. Top priority is the newest Paper Mario because I absolutely love those games. I guess if I had to choose, I’d say my favorite Zelda games are ‘Majorca’ and ‘Windwaker’. Ha ha, yes, on the Smash Brothers battle. Wow, good one. xo ** Loser, Hi, Twelve, assuming that’s still a moniker option. Thank you for the kind words too. I interviewed Lukas Haas while he was making ‘Boys’ for Spin Magazine, although they only published a tiny slice of it. He was so cool and sweet. At the time he was about to star as Pecker in John Waters’s ‘Pecker’, but then he got sick and couldn’t do it, sadly. Anyway, blah blah, yes, I agree with you. ‘Boys’ should’ve been a thousand times better. Such a wasted opportunity. ** ellie, Well, you made my month, so take that, ha ha. I’d aim for Reed’s ‘The Free-lance Pallbearer’ or ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ if you haven’t read them. Thank you, pal. <3 ** Bill, Thanks, B. Are you on your way home now? Yikes, just thinking about that flight shivers me timbers. I have an 11 hour skyward jaunt on Sunday, which is quite enough. ** Robert, Hey. Yeah, they always talk about eldest child syndrome or whatever. Although the artists I like seem to come from all over the sibling spectrum, so I don’t know. It was an interesting train of thought. I think I’ve only ever been miserable in the classic sense twice in my life, and I don’t remember them helping at all. Wow, ‘Moby Dick’. That’s a biggie. I do really recommend ‘Mumbo Jumbo’, and it’s a million times easier and less lengthy and funner to read than ‘MD’. ** Nick., Hi! Yeah, it was nice: the dinner. The Switch is red. It looks snazzy on my boring floor. Oh, Tennis, I like them. I’ve never seen them live. I’ll watch my local listings, as they say. That trip: It was pretty insane. Like I would be in the world and kind of functioning, but then I would go off into these hallucinations and reality was just gone for hours, and then I’d come back to the real world again sort of, and the really weird thing was that all the time I was completely gone, I had apparently been functioning somewhat normally –walking around, talking to people, doing whatever — without being aware of anything or having any control over myself physically at all. So it was like I was on auto-pilot or something. The trip took place in Hawaii on a family vacation. It went bad when my friend and I were hitchhiking and got picked up these Hawaiian guys who said they were going to kill us, and they drove off the road into a pineapple field, and I just totally lost it and started convulsing and stuff, and that weirded them out so they just dumped us in the pineapple field and drove off, and then I kind of convulsed and screamed and stuff for about eight hours while my poor, also high friend stayed and watched over me. He was as high as me, but luckily at that point he was in a kind of semi-alert state. It was terrible. It wiped me out for months. My favorite joke is a really old one that sadly everybody knows now and is kind of dated but it still cracks me up for some reason: ‘What were Kurt Cobain’s last words?’ ‘Hole’s gonna be big’. What’s your most laughter inducing joke? And have an amazing day. ** Caesar, Hi. I’m good, yes, thanks. Ha ha ha. The new movie is about a strange family that turns their house into a haunted house attraction and charges people to go through it, basically. But lots of weird, unpredictable things end up happening that would take me too long to describe. I’m about 100% sure I’m not a witch. But, if I was, I would have lowered your temperature because I would be a good witch. As I’m typing this it is 10:33 am Paris time. The French kiss when they say hello and goodbye too. One kiss on each cheek. The same there? Your English is good. I like your English, and I think I understand everything. Have a great one. ** Montse, Montse! Yeah, when we’re editing, it’s pretty non-stop and consuming. And we’ve committed to screening the film here in Paris at a big art foundation around Halloween, so we’ll need to work hard to get it ready by then. Jeez, Primavera sounds really good this year. Oh, well, there’s always Youtube. Read ‘Mumbo Jumbo’. It’s so great. So, so good to get to talk with you, my buddy. Zac sends you his warmest hug. Huge love! ** I made a Tough Crowd post much like this one years ago, and I liked it, so I made a sequel. Pretty simple. See you tomorrow.
‘”The crows have left,” Ishmael Reed said, explaining the chorus of songbirds. It was a clear spring day in Oakland, California, and I had just sat down with Reed, his wife, Carla Blank, and their daughter Tennessee in the family’s back yard. The eighty-three-year-old writer looked every inch “Uncle Ish,” as he’s known on AOL: sunglasses, New Balances, a Nike windbreaker, and an athletic skullcap covering his halo of dandelion-seed white hair. He described his war against the neighborhood crows with mischievous satisfaction, as though it were one of his many skirmishes with the New York literary establishment.
‘“They had a sentinel on the telephone wire,” he said, and were chasing away the other birds. But Reed learned to signal with a crow whistle—three caws for a predator, four for a friend, he inferred—well enough to manipulate the murder. Before long, he said, “they thought I was a crow.” Now the songbirds were back. The four of us paused to take in their music, a free-verse anthology of avian lyric. When Blank mentioned that a hummingbird frequented the garden, I wondered aloud why the Aztecs had chosen the bird as an emblem of their war god. Reed answered instantly: “They go right for the eyes.”
‘Ishmael Reed has outwitted more than crows with his formidable powers of imitation. For half a century, he’s been American literature’s most fearless satirist, waging a cultural forever war against the media that spans a dozen novels, nine plays and essay collections, and hundreds of poems, one of which, written in anticipation of his thirty-fifth birthday, is a prayer to stay petty: “35? I ain’t been mean enough . . . Make me Tennessee mean . . . Miles Davis mean . . . Pawnbroker mean,” he writes. “Mean as the town Bessie sings about / ‘Where all the birds sing bass.’ ”
‘His brilliantly idiosyncratic fiction has travestied everyone from Moses to Lin-Manuel Miranda, and laid a foundation for the freewheeling genre experiments of writers such as Paul Beatty, Victor LaValle, and Colson Whitehead. Yet there’s always been more to Reed than subversion and caricature. Laughter, in his books, unearths legacies suppressed by prejudice, élitism, and mass-media coöptation. The protagonist of his best-known novel, “Mumbo Jumbo,” is a metaphysical detective searching for a lost anthology of Black literature whose discovery promises the West’s collapse amid “renewed enthusiasms for the Ikons of the aesthetically victimized civilizations.”
‘It’s a future that Reed has worked tirelessly to realize. Mastermind of a decades-long insurgency of magazines, anthologies, small presses, and nonprofit foundations, he’s led the fight for an American literature that is truly “multicultural”—a term that he did much to popularize, before it, too, was coöpted. Through it all, Reed has asserted the vitality of America’s marginalized cultures, especially those of working-class African Americans. “We do have a heritage,” he once thundered. “You may think it’s scummy and low-down and funky and homespun, but it’s there. I think it’s beautiful. I’d invite it to dinner.”
‘Many writers of Reed’s age and accomplishment would already have settled into a leisurely circuit of dinners in their honor. But he’s proudly bitten the hands that do such feeding. Several years ago, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a longtime booster of Reed’s fiction, proposed writing the introduction for a Library of America edition of his novels. Reed, who considers Gates the unelected “king” of Black arts and scholarship, mocked the offer by demanding a hundred-thousand-dollar fee for the privilege.
‘“The fool can say things about the king that other people can’t,” Reed told me. “That’s the role I’ve inherited.”’ — Julian Lucas
‘Ishmael Reed has been renowned as a novelist, poet, and playwright for more than half a century, yet his progress in the music world came more slowly. Introduced to jazz music in the front room of a bootlegger’s house at age four, Reed has been immersed in the genre his whole life. He would later tell Max Roach that bebop kept him and his friends out of reform school because they were too busy listening to records to get into trouble. Reed first recorded in the early 1980s, performing vocals and recitations alongside Conjure, a supergroup of jazz musicians—including Allen Toussaint, Olu Dara, Taj Mahal, and David Murray, among others—that Kip Hanrahan, of American Clavé Records, had assembled to arrange music for Reed’s poetry. “But I wanted to apply my ‘sensibility’ to more than songwriting,” Reed later said. “I found that lyrics ranked second to music, and though I had written the songs and poetry, the famous performers had a higher status than the writers.” And so, at the age of 60, he began to study jazz piano seriously. In 2007, a cancer diagnosis motivated him to assemble an ad hoc group and record a collection of jazz standards, For All We Know. Fifteen years later, he finally steps out as a composer on The Hands of Grace, a sweetly earnest and stirringly beautiful collection of jazz tunes for piano and ensemble.’ — Matthew Blackwell
____ Extras
Ishmael Reed at the Brockport Writers Forum
Ishmael Reed in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist
A Lecture on Ishmael Reed’s “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto”
To Become A Writer, Ishmael Reed
_____ Interview
REGINALD MARTIN: Camus wrote in “Neither Victims nor Executioners” that the only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance. In many respects, I see you that way, but many of your critics, Houston Baker, Jr., and Addison Gayle, Jr., for example, seem to throw out any possibility that issues they support may also be issues that you equally support. ISHMAEL REED: I saw Houston Baker, Jr., recently in Los Angeles. I don’t bear any ill feelings toward him. In fact, he was very cordial toward me. I feel that the piece published in “Black American Literature Forum” that was edited by Joel Weixlmann was irresponsible, and my point is that they would never attack white writers the way they do black writers in that magazine, and I still maintain that. All these scurrilous charges that Baraka made against black writers—and I’ve discussed this with Baraka—those charges were outrageous—he called them traitors, capitulationists.
RM: Did you see Baraka’s recent piece on PBS in which was outlined his recent battles with police, where they accused him of beating his wife in his car, when they were just having a domestic argument, disagreement— IR: That kind of thing happens to black people every day in this country, and they don’t receive that kind of sentence he did, which was to go to prison on the weekends; I think he lectured there—an outside lecturer.
RM: What did Norman Mailer receive for stabbing his wife with a pen knife? IR: Well, they all like that, they all love that kind of stuff in New York. This Son-of-Sam syndrome, where, I guess, this comes from an interest in Russian psychology, Russian literature, this Raskolnikov notion, that there are some people superior to other people, that Dostoyevsky trip, you know, and that these people are above the kind of rules that apply to you and me. And I think that people who indulge in bizarre behavior are existential heroes, like Jack Abbott, Gilmore, I think even Baraka had that kind of role in cultural hero. As a matter of fact, there was someone in France recently, and the Mitterand government intervened to get him out of jail, a poet, or so he called himself a poet, and he went out and robbed a bank again or something. I don’t know, there’s this fascination with this kind of character. And I feel that that is just a kind of an Eastern, Manhattan, intellectual obsession.
RM: Addison Gayle, Jr., speaks critically about your perception of the relations between black men and women when he reviews “Flight to Canada” in relation to “Eva’s Man” by Gayl Jones. He writes: “Reed, of course, is an anomaly, and if much of his fiction, “Louisiana Red” and “Flight to Canada”, proves anything, it is that black women have no monopoly on demons, real or imaginative. These two novels demonstrate that, like the ‘buyer’ in “Caracas,” like blacks in general, male and female, the web of folklore which has circumscribed much of our relations with each other from the days of slavery to the present time, have been impervious to the best efforts of conscientious men and women to tear it down. Thus, Reed’s central argument, as developed in both “Louisiana Red” and “Flight to Canada,” may be summed up thusly: since the days of slavery, collusion between black women and white men has existed in America. The major objective of this collusion has been the castrating of black males and the thwarting of manful rebellion.” IR: Well, I think that anybody who reads that ought to go and read his autobiography, “The Wayward Child,” and pick up on some of his notions on black women and white women. As I said in a letter to “Nation” magazine recently, women in general make out better in my books than black men do in the works of black women and white women, feminist writers. And I gave the example of Gayl Jones’s “Eva’s Man”—not to mention “Corregidora”—in which black men are portrayed as brutes, apes, but also Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” in which the character Jude is burned alive by his mother, something I had heard of in black culture. And Alice Walker’s fascination with incest—which can always get you over, if you have the hint of incest. I mean, it got Ellison over; there are a lot of male critics who are interested in that, who are interested in black male sexual behavior—they’re fascinated. There was recently a review on Louis Harlan’s book on Booker T. Washington, by Malcolm Boyd—he used to be a hippie preacher or something; I don’t know what he’s doing now. And he spent a whole lot of the book—he spent the whole article on this story about Booker T. Washington being caned for knocking on a white woman’s door or something like that. Of all the things Booker T. Washington had done! This man was just fascinated with this. He spent three or four paragraphs talking just about that! So there’s an obvious fascination with incest and rape, and Alice Walker picks up on things like this. I tried to get my letter published in “Nation” magazine. I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch. He had all the facts about my career and publishing activities wrong. They see Al Young and myself as leaders of some multicultural revolt threatening the things they’re doing—against their interests. But in “Nation” I wrote that the same charges that Alice Walker makes against black men were made about the Jews in Germany. I guess we don’t have a large organization like the Anti-Defamation League or a large pressure group or lobby—
RM: Then it goes without saying that these people—not just the black critics but all critics—invent things that they say make up the black aesthetic, in fact that becomes a limiting label. IR: They haven’t investigated Afro-American folklore, nor have they investigated voodoo. I call it Neo-HooDooism. So there’s a reference that goes back to shed light on the aesthetic I’m working out, which I consider to be the true Afro-American aesthetic. When I say Afro-American aesthetic, I’m not just talking about us, you know, I’m talking about the Americas. People in the Latin countries read my books because they share the same international aesthetic that I’m into and have been into for a long time. And it’s multicultural. The West’s Afro-American aesthetic is multicultural—it’s not black. That’s what they don’t understand. This black aesthetic thing is a northern, urban, academic movement—that’s why you have a fancy word like “aesthetic”, which nobody figures out. When you come to talk about standards of taste, everyone differs. It’s a vague enough word so that they can get away with it. And even though they try to make it sound like it’s really important—that’s the black intellectual pastime—discussing all these phantoms and things. You look at all these conferences for a hundred years, same questions.
RM: That was a great Chester Himes quotation that you included in “Shrovetide,” to the effect that he had searched all his life to find one place in the world where he did not have to be a nigger, only to find that there is no such place. And that he could have just developed his writing wherever he was and marketed it to those who were interested. IR: Well, I think that the black male is a pariah all over the world—well, maybe not all over the world, but it seems in my experience that in South America, the United States, places like that, the black male is a pariah. That also gives you an advantage. Because there’s a certain desperation, a certain creativeness, originality, that comes from being at the bottom. A lot of our great art comes from the Afro-American male experience. Just think of all the great male jazz musicians. They’re innovators, these guys are hungry, Louis Armstrong and those guys were really hungry, they’re originals; and look at all the black males in politics now; all the feminists are criticizing black males now, black feminists and white feminists, but they got all their strategies from black men. The black males are the ones whose strategies are used all over the world—Martin Luther King in Ireland, Russia, these Pentecostalists in Russia singing “We Shall Overcome.” So black men are geniuses, and many times their desperation, their position as being pariahs, leads them to great originality. I heard a black female pianist who is a real man-hater, I think, but all the pieces she was playing were by Bud Powell and Monk. So that’s very important. But I don’t think you hear much about the black aesthetic anymore. Blacks are probably more American than any other group here. I know that a lot of blacks have Native American ancestry—I know I do, and it’s something to be paid more attention to. You see, this black aesthetic thing was not scientific, as I guess a lot of things which came from the English department are not. Social sciences are not—but this black aesthetic was a classic example in imprecision. Because Africans do not consider Afro-Americans in this country to be really black, because their ancestry is so mixed up—you know, Indian, European, African—so actually one could say that by singling out one part of your ancestry and labeling that might be considered racist. So that’s why I was always intrigued that these professors who are supposed to be scientists would try to peddle that.
RM: You said earlier that the writing going on now cannot really be called a black aesthetic; it’s much more diffuse— IR: I don’t know about aesthetic. I think people are going to write anyway. Aesthetic is like the Holy Ghost or something. People are just going to write.
RM: The subtext of “Mumbo Jumbo” seems to be saying that “there are many aesthetics in the world, lots of ways of doing things, and mine is just as good as yours—maybe better.” IR: The thing about the Afro-American aesthetic is that they can prove that it is an aesthetic. The thing that became the settler phase of America is just a phase. The European phase in the Americas is coming to an end, and that’s why there’s all this paranoia and retrenchment mentality, and the so-called “back to basics” movement, which means we should emphasize American and European history. The president of Tufts—amazing for someone who runs a sophisticated, modern university—a woman, right?—trivialized African studies, saying it was like “basket weaving” or something, and how we ought to stick with “our” civilization. This is a big misunderstanding that the fundamentalists have in this country, cultural fundamentalists: that America is an extension of European civilization. A lot of people who should know better say things like this, like Chicano intellectuals I’ve talked to speak of “Latin” America, and there’s just as much African influence on South America as any other. The thing about the voodoo aesthetic is that it’s multicultural and it can absorb, while the settler thing is monotheistic and nonabsorptive. In other words, if you’re not on my side, I can do anything I want to do with you. Those are the forces that come together in “Mumbo Jumbo.”
RM: Would you trace voodoo from West Africa to the Caribbean, to New Orleans and up the river, or would you say it starts in the Caribbean? IR: I think Haiti is internationally recognized as the origin of voodoo. I’ve decided that gospel music is just a front for voodoo. Mahalia Jackson had a difficult time getting her brand of gospel over to the orthodox ministers. And I think when they’re praising Jesus, they’re really singing about Legba or someone like that . . . Damballah. The rhythms are voodoo. The genius of voodoo is its camouflage. I’ll give you a very amusing example. In the 1960s, everyone was into these amulets, and in the 1960s I had a black ebony cross made up for me—not the Greek cross—and I was in Washington, D.C. staying at the hotel Intrigue—”Intrigue,” strange—but this Christian delegation was getting on the elevator and they said, “Are you with us brother?” And that shows the genius of it right there. It has elements that appeal to everyone.
RM: Some Afro-Americans who are interested in literature are turned off by your perceived liberal stances. What do you think about that? IR: I think Afro-Americans as a group are probably very conservative. I think they are very suspicious of what has been called the avant-garde. Now, what I’m doing is not avant-garde, but a classical Afro-American form. And it’s been beaten out of them. They’re supposed to hate that, shun it, fear it. So I think that’s one of the problems. They used to say the same thing about Miles Davis thirty years ago. They thought bebop was crazy. They said that about all the jazz greats. So they don’t say you’re crazy anymore, but black men don’t have any credibility in this country. We steal, we mug, all the stereotypes.
RM: In “Flight to Canada,” you continually attack the term “universal.” Would you define the term “universal” as it applies to a criticism of literature? IR: Well, it’s not a criticism of literature. Lorenzo Thomas tracked the term “universal” to Tolstoy’s essay on art, in which he says that universal art is the art of the people. The other art is landlord art: ballet. They got it all wrong, and they use the term to dismiss works which they consider too local or too ethnic, critics from the East. Someone was telling me that a great book would never be written in Yiddish, and then about six months later, Isaac Singer won the Nobel Prize for literature. I think if Faulkner had been a black writer, he would have been considered ethnic. I would say 60 percent of Faulkner’s work is written in black English. People just seem to be blinded to reality when it comes to dismissing languages. I don’t think there is any standard English. I think there is such a thing as protocol English.
___ Book
Ishmael Reed The Last Days of Louisiana Red Columbia University Press
‘When Papa LaBas (private eye, noonday HooDoo, and hero of Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo) comes to Berkeley, California, to investigate the mysterious death of Ed Yellings, owner of the Solid Gumbo Works, he finds himself fighting the rising tide of violence propagated by Louisiana Red and those militant opportunists, the Moochers.
‘A HooDoo detective story and a comprehensive satire on the explosive politics of the ’60s, The Last Days of Louisiana Red exposes the hypocrisy of contemporary American culture and race politics.’ — UoCP
Excerpt
*
p.s. Hey. ** rigby, Happy not so new year to you too, rigby! My birthday was very warm gray compared to your current circumstances, but I was good with it. Thank you a lot for your great part in the tribute to Joe. Yes, dryness galore to you, pal. ** Misanthrope, Thanks, man. It was a nice b’day. I’m good with it. Happy reading and, I imagine, working. ** Minet, Hi. I love ‘comrade’. Oh, gosh, I’ll have to go back and look more closely even to pick faves, but I was honestly blown away across the board. The art world, or parts of it, actually pays pretty close attention to artists showing their stuff on Instagram. They just have to know where to look. I’ll slip in recommendations to my connections when I can. I was actually pleasantly surprised by what you managed to make AI do. Your wiliness is impressive. No, I never met Guibert. My Paris time didn’t coincide with his being alive, or I guess a couple of visits did, but I don’t think I knew his work then or else just never imagined he would be interested to meet. I don’t now if Dustan and Guibert knew each other, but I can only imagine they would have really hated each other if they did. Bon Wednesday. ** CAUTIVOS, Thank you, sir. Uh, my books are published by a bunch of presses in different countries. In the US, Soho Press did ‘I Wished’. The others were from Grove Press, Harper Perennial, and a couple of others. In France it’s Editions POL. In the US, it has changed a fair amount, although Grove Press published all of my earlier books. In France it’s been POL from the beginning. I suspect your book isn’t in English? If it is, I’d love to read it. Sales don’t say anything about a book’s value, that’s for sure. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thank you, thank you! Yes, I’m going to LA on Sunday, staying until Feb. 9th, although that return date might change. I’d be over the moon if either Robin Zander or Robert Pollard sang happy birthday to me. Maybe love could arrange a duet? Thank you! Love not letting me waste all my time playing games on the Nintendo Switch I got for my birthday yesterday, although it wouldn’t be wasted, G. ** T. J., Thank you so much! ** Jack Skelley, Ha ha, if only, dude, if only. Love in gargantuan form back to you, J. ** David Ehrenstein, I fall into the strung out camp, I guess. ** scunnard, Thank you very much, Jared. ** Montse, Hi, Montse! I ate nachos, which were kind of like a busted, non-sweet cake. Thank you for the vibes. We need them. No way, Boy Harsher is reading ‘The Sluts’? That’s amazing! Wow! That’s crazy! Thank you for telling me that. Wow! I’m pretty sure we’ll be heavily involved in editing the film when Primavera happens, but, oh, that would be so nice. You going? Anyone particularly exciting playing this year? Yes, come to Paris! I’ll try to let you know when we’ll be back. End of April is an early guess. Caesar wrote to you in the comments if you didn’t see it. Lots of love to you and the mighty Xet! ** Sypha, Thank you, James! ** Tosh Berman, I just read what you wrote about Jun Togawa the other day, which is what brought her back to mind and back into my playlist. Thanks, T. ** Steve Erickson, Thanks a lot, Steve. Togawa is wonderful. See what you think. ** _Black_Acrylic, I’m happy you found him/it of interest. I still haven’t seen ‘Vortex’, weird. I really need to. ** Jamie, Hi, J. I’m so happy you brought some Frampton into your day. I think he’s a total genius. My b’day was pretty normal until I had a nice dinner with pals. Philosophical is the way to go. That’s what got me through mine at least. Cool about the Akerman, and its reception. She’s actually a viral thing right now. It’s crazy. Happy you’re writing, obvs. We’re in a rough patch with the film, but I think when we get to LA, we can get past it and into the good stuff. I hope. I saw a mosquito in my kitchen the other day, shockingly. If they start surviving winter, we’re all fucked. I hope your Wednesday lacks buzz of that brand. Immediately thinking of Wim Wenders’s ‘Million Dollar Hotel’ which is definitely, definitely not good love, Dennis ** Daniel, Aw, thanks, Daniel. Superb day to you, maestro. ** Philip Hopbell, Hi! Thank you for the reassurance. It’s a little daunting to turn this age to say the least. You met Frampton? Wow, I’m super impressed. He’s a serious god to me. Thank you so much for coming in here and saying that, Philip. Obviously, feel very free to come back anytime. ** Robert, I hope you like his stuff. Needless to say ‘Bernhard-y’ is an immensely intriguing descriptor. Heavy encouragement from me. I have three siblings: two brothers and one sister. I’m the oldest. You? ** Derek McCormack, Thank you, thank you, oh great friend and hero!!!!! ** Alex Beaumais, Hi! Thank you very much, Alex. I’m proud to have had your book on my blog. In fact, I have a copy of it right here within eyesight on my immediately to read pile. Take care. ** Dom Lyne, Thanks, Dom. Warmest hugs right back at you. ** Charalampos Tzanakis, Thank you very much, CT. No, I didn’t listen to my favorite songs. I should have. Cool, I listen to ‘Talby’ all the time. Pinback are so, so, so underrated. ** Billy, Many, many thanks to you, Billy. I hope your day had an inordinately fun aspect. ** Caesar, Thank you, C! Yeah, ‘IaGC’ is intense, no? I’m glad you got to see it. No, I actually lived near Cortazar’s apartment. Well, if it helps, being in the ‘profession’ of experimental fiction writer is definitely not a money maker either. Yes, my collaborator Zac and I are shooting our new film in March. Luckily, I’m not a fan of resting. Otherwise I would be a bit insane at the moment. Right, you’re in summer. I’m happy to share some of our cold and rain if I can figure out how to do that. ** James, Thank you, James. No, no cake, just nachos. After that I was too full. Love, me. ** l@rst, Thanks, big l. And excellent about the clever library. ** politekid, Hi, Oscar! Thank you very kindly, my pal. And thank you for the link/gift. You know me so well, ha ha. I’m glad you survived the mega-shift. Kind of a nice term. ** alex, Thank you very, very much, Alex. ** h now j, Thank you! It was alright, all in all. Yesterday, I mean. Hugs! ** Billy, Ha ha, awesome that I flummoxed Chat GPT. Gold star for me. Someone for sure will make a transgressive version, don’t you think? ** rafe, That thing you made is great! Thank you a lot for letting me peep at it. I hope today rules on your end. ** Damien Ark, You’re way not too late, and thank you, Damien! ** Brian, Hi, Brian! Thank you, pal. Let me know how you and yours are doing when letting me know feels like an interesting to do. ** ellie, Hey! Wow, that’s completely gorgeous! Thank you, wow! You don’t mind if I click and drag it into my private computer screen realm? It’s beautiful! Love, me. ** Paul Curran, Thanks, Paul! Definitely on the Japan trip. Man oh man. The second that time allows! Elephantine love, me. ** Nick., Hi, Nick! The day itself was kind of average, but then some friends and I ate nachos, and I got a few gifts including a Nintendo Switch which I’ve been dying for and procrastinating about buying for, like, four years. So, not bad. Your satellite day of my b’day sounds enviable. I decided to live a daring life when I was about 12, but I don’t think I went on a big adventure until I was 15 when this boy I was, whatever, ‘dating’ and I decided to take LSD 24 hours a day for a month, which led to me having a massive mental breakdown, and I really don’t recommend it, but it was .. an adventure. Nothing to lose is a good motto, or, well, not always — see my LSD story — but yeah. I think my favorite ever concert was seeing Gang of Four right after their first album ‘Entertainment!’ came out. I went kind of nuts, in the good way. What’s yours? Great to talk with you as always. ** ShadeoutMapes:v, It wasn’t bad, thanks! I’m going to look up George Pell, because I’m blanking, but congratulations! Publishing books is cool, but not publishing them can be just as cool. And as someone who quit college after one year, I can assure you that an awesome life is fully possible without that. What you write about ‘broken’ makes absolute sense. I used that term way too lazily. Sometimes the p.s. makes me write faster than I think. Mm, as someone who was for a long time, and may still be, pretty ignored, looked down upon, etc., it’s amazing what can happen when you end up finding the right people here and there to repopulate your world. I was a really messed up person when I was young, and I never would have ever imagined what’s happened to me happening. I still sort of can’t believe it. So, don’t give up on believing that life can totally surprise you, I guess. I haven’t ever investigated Sinead O’Connor apart from the obvious stuff of hers that you hear casually. I’ll make it a point to dig further into her stuff. Your rant, which wasn’t even a rant, hit nothing but high marks. ** malcolm, Hi, malcolm! How’s it? Frampton is a huge favorite and hero of mine. I hope his work infiltrates you. No, my b’day was nice. It was good. I was just being a dreading grump. How are you? What are you working on? ** Okay. I was in the mood to read Ishmael Reed the other day because his early novels are so rambunctious and fantastic. I’ve already done posts on his best, in my opinion, novels ‘The Free-lance Pallbearer’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’, so I decided to spotlight my third favorite of his novels, which right up there. See what you think. See you tomorrow.
Ishmael Reed The Last Days of Louisiana Red
Now available in North America 