[turns white] …I hate when I do that.  You terrestrials don’t have to worry about that condition.  Sure, I hear you might stutter occasionally, or slip in the Freud, or insert the pause of um, like, uh…. but at least you don’t have to worry about inking yourself.  It’s kind of like an underwater Turret’s syndrome… ink ink ink, ink ink ink… so embarrassing.  [Resumes red coloring] Of course sometimes you want to ink yourself so that you can escape under the cover of its wet shadow, blasting off into the night.  But my problem is, I keep accidentally inking myself when I am in the middle of something important.  Imagine how inconvenient it is when you are just beginning to munch on a crab and you ink yourself—a great big HELLO surrounding predators, I am here!  Total miscommunication. Accidental ink.  Spilled script.  Leaked letters.  Tipped text.  A surge of sepia, bleeding into the waters.  Deployed at the wrong moment.  I’m supposed to control my disguise but can’t, can’t restrain the impulse to ink, to ink publically, and faced with the darkening cloud must then flee the scene of the crime and find real shelter for all my tentacular parts.  Hiding, hiding, finally emerging to search for food, until—INK—damn it, always the writer in exile….

We move through life in chapters,
as we learn to read them.
Every lesson is not understood,
Before we turn the page.

As youth we move briskly through the book of life,
Only skimming the text.
Rushing to the next happenstance.
Decreasingly illiterate,
Nonetheless, remarkably unwise.
Hastily making choices,
Re-sculpting the pre-sent, before our eyes,
In misconstrued moments of the present.
Only to revisit those very same moments in the future,
But then as permanently erred yesterdays.

I sometimes close my eyes to replace my own past,
With a then, where I was always right,
Each move fortifying my nirvana.
Molding a perfect past.
One that would have offered me an ideal now.
A yesteryear without goodbyes,
Or Unfortunate untimely exits.
No broken hearts or shed tears,
Flooding the spaces in which I learned life.

I close my eyes, drifting to a place where,
Embraces last a long as the feeling of love.
Love does not play hide-and-seek
Or pull disappearing acts.
Infatuation is honest,
It simply telling you that it is a temporary feeling,
Not made to last,
Like ice cream, Indian Summers, orgasms, and pain.

Masquerading happens in parties,
Not relationships where it hurts souls,
Turning melodious beating hearts cold,
Silencing counterparts,
As they go their separate ways.

I sometimes close my eyes walking to a place where the truth is sweet.
Hearts forever beat, meet and mingle as freely as wandering eyes,
And children at playgrounds in sandboxes,
Free of societal constructs and, any sense of time.
Everything lasts forever.
The word morning never contains a u,
Because you are too busy making me as happy as I make you.
Morning never means bereavement,
It is only early in an ideal day,
Everyday is like Christmas Day,
Full of gifts given and received,
Joy felt, love is expressed intensely, intently.
Selective amnesia chooses all the right moments to forget,
And the balance is euphoric,
So much so that it kind of tingles,
Like she circled yes on that note I passed,
Like the first time confessing, “I love you”.
Like a place where loved ones never leave for any reason.
Eves don’t make apple offerings to stupid men.
They only precede holidays,
And everyday is tomorrow’s eve,
Everyday is the best day of our lives.

I sometimes close my eyes running to a place where a flawless truth is not merely make believe.

Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes, died yesterday. He was 83. It’s sad when you hear about a novelist for the first time on the occasion of their death. I took a quick survey of his novels, and I’m adding his novel, Diana, The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, to a summer reading list that I’ve kicked off with the mind-twisting journal of Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties. I’m settling on Diana partly because of all the controversy it’s attracted over the years. The novel is a story about the affair Fuentes claimed to have had with American actress Jean Seberg. Since the novel came out in 1994, people have claimed that he exaggerated things. NY Daily Times sums it up nicely in a quote by NY Times‘ Paul Theroux:

It is as though with ‘Diana’ Mr. Fuentes is trying to make himself a footnote to history, since, in the thundering herd of Seberg’s lovers, he was lost in the shuffle. Read More…

Fuentes is not the only one that’s been accused of wanting to make himself a footnote to history, in a fictionalized memoir. Wole Soyinka received similar criticism after he published You Must Set Forth at Dawn and portrayed himself as some kind of super hero of world affairs. Either way, I think novelists, because they produce cultural objects, are always already darlings of history.

R.I.P Carlos!

Obituaries

L A Times Obituary

New York Times

UK Guardian

The New Yorker unveiled The Page-Turner today. As if there aren’t enough blogs about lit things. They say the essays featured are “elaborations” on lit chit chat. What you do when you fight about or gush over a certain piece of writing with friends and colleagues and perhaps the stranger you meet at the bus stop. Imagine expanding those sort of exchanges into an essay. 

The inaugural pieces are:

Salman Rushdie on the spectre of censorship; a dissenting view on the immortality of “Death of a Salesman,” by Giles Harvey; Mary Norris on the subtle marvellousness of the medieval thorn; and Nick Thompson on the risks of the running life. Read more…

Anyway, I’m hurrying off to the books section of the UK Guardian, so I’ve only had the chance to read Rushdie’s piece. Is it old age or what? Why does Rushdie keep spouting these foofoo liberal cliches about freedom and creativity. Last time he was at Duke Uni, it was: “Man is a storytelling animal.” Today on Page-Turner it’s: “Liberty is the air we breathe.” And why is Rushdie spending three chunky paragraphs explaining how no one takes notice of the air we breath because it’s free, how creative freedom is, in a sense, like air, and how we need freedom to be creative?

Please Page-Turner, go easy on the token essays by big names. We’re hankering for genuinely lovely essays. Hope you deliver.

Photo Credit: Eiler, Lyntha Scott

After a good day of novel reading and cafe lounging, I ended up at the Salvation Army not far from my house. At the thrift shop, anything can happen. You could find the first artist print of a fairly popular American painter. Or you could spend a couple hours sniffing dust and  Febreeze and find nothing. I’ll let you decide what kind of day it was–Check out all the books I found. Guess how much?

PLUS  +

Chronicles of a Death Foretold by G. G. Marquez

Penguin Complete Collection of Keat’s poems

Faust by Goethe

The Sorrows of Young Werner by Goethe

Exile and the Kingdom by Camus

The Eyrbyggja Saga

Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays by Camus

Mary Wollstoncraft’s Memoirs

TOTAL PRICE: 16 bucks

Feeling lucky in Chicago already. It’s going to be a great summer!

When the behind-the-scene video is cool enough to be an official video, you know it’s all going to be worth the wait. “Princess of China” is a song from Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto album. I’ve read enough fairytales to expect princesses to have their castles, ball gowns, and enchanted rings. But it’s Rihanna and she’s the Princess of China (P. O. C.), so the script is a little different. She’s a kungfu princess playing with swords, sexy make up and Samurai moves. And Chris Martins is as handsome and mysterious-looking as ever. The lyrics of “Prince of China” may not be the sexiest and smartest lyrics ever written by Coldplay, a band known for deep and perplexing writing, but the video would be pretty and cool. Really can’t wait for this to come out.

Feature Image: Ruth St. Denis in a Burmese Solo dance. 

Songs of Solomon.

Isoken did not leave the staff room of Patricia Primary School when the closing bell rang. Everyone else did. It would appear that she was inspecting the attendance booklet on her desk. Actually, her mind had taken her elsewhere, perhaps, to the room she was renting at no. 15 Furniture Rd. The dread of loneliness, that was what glued her on to her seat and gave her this lost look that an onlooker could easily mistake for boredom or tiredness. She could leave the staff room and walk the 2 miles home, but what would be the point. There isn’t a pinch of voltage coursing through the old wires in the room. It’s been dark nights ever since the heavy rain– the first of the season–came and blew up the transformer. But the room was dismal in other ways. It tired her to live there alone, she and her Ghana-Must-Go bags still unpacked after two years of living there, she and the pots that have stayed on since her college of education days in Warri, she and the only thing hanging on the wall, a picture of Jesus holding a bleeding heart and Mary standing right next to him looking beatific as she always manages to do in the face of the most absurd suffering. It was also a calendar. And of course, she and her Gideon bible opened to Songs of Solomon–”Ah, my beloved, you are beautiful.” Chapter 4 of the Songs of Solomon. And of course, she and the leftover Egusi soup.

Leftover Egusi Soup.

Not a happy thought…this business of going home to no-one and some leftover Egusi soup. And maybe the last bit of Ijebu garri, which she’d use for eba. Tart eba. Eba that would set her teeth on edge. Not a bad idea. With the dullness and all of her life. A little electricity in the mouth is not entirely a bad deal. But she’d eat alone, perhaps, while sitting on her bed, on which no man had slept for a long worrying while. The last time…it…happened was when that Okada rider dropped her off at home and then said he was thirsty for water and followed her into her room. They first did it standing against the wall, right next to the Kero stove. Then the pot of Jollof rice fell from the stove–rice, pot, cover and all landing on the ground–because their feet kept hitting it. Then there was all this sound. They stopped for less than half a millisecond and then laughed. That instant of noise, passion and laughter was something Isoken could never name and so could never forget. A needling little instant during which noise arrested the force of passion and produced laughter. They did it a few more times in a few more places until they ended up in bed, reeking of love without ventilation. She woke up late at night to find he’d gone and left behind a 200 naira note smelling of sweat and pocket. She got up and ate cold Jollof rice, alone and in the dark.

The featured image is a painting by Renoir titled “Onions” and painted in 1881. 

“Graylen Epicenter” by David Binney (please listen while you read the post)

I click on my iPod immediately when I step out of the building. The force of the wind tunnel barreling down the street slams into my face as the first sounds emerge. Lately, I’ve been listening to Dave Binney’s 2011 album Graylen Epicenter for hours on end.

I’m walking at a clip toward the Morgan Avenue L train stop. Past bodegas opening for the day, kids walking to school with their parents, a baseball team finishing up an early practice.

Track two, the title track, starts out bustling. Brian Blade’s ride cymbal sears at double time. Bass, piano and guitar leap together in dense clusters. Alto saxophone and trumpet soon enter with one of Binney’s characteristic unison horn lines, soaring contrapuntally with the jumping clusters.

After a minute of swirling lines, Blade cuts back to half time, slamming his open snare drum on two. The pulse opens. It breathes.

Wayne Krantz’s guitar rips in overtop the looping chord progression. Spacious. Measured. Lyrical. Krantz’s lines lie back just behind the beat, stretching the pulse elastic. The horns enter with a unison line gliding in the background, propelling Krantz’s leaping intervals forward with the drums smashing from below.

I turn onto Bogart Street, just steps from the station.

Within five paces, the pulse disintegrates, Krantz’s solo blurs out of time. Blade lifts the group into rubato with his cymbals. Binney’s alto and Ambrose Akinmusire’s trumpet seep in, weaving in and out of one another. The bass lulls underneath. Blade splashes his cymbals with mallets. The pallet is wide open, released from its former structure.

I’m on the platform and the train arrives, crashing through the whispering free-structured sounds in my headphones. I enter the car, standing just inside the threshold, listening, among others.

The alto and trumpet continue their improvised, interwoven lines.
Blade drags his sticks against the cymbals. High-pitched tones, like pulsating bells, or revolving metal wheels, slowly, quietly screaming to life.

I close my eyes in the train. The intimate sounds seem so disjointed from inside the hovering capsule and from each person’s experience of this public space. We all occupy our own insular worlds in the subway. Insulated within our ear buds, our books, our cell phones, our thoughts. It’s a shared experience, but also a detached one.

Blade’s eerily high-pitched cymbals continue to resonate. Akinmusire’s trumpet screeches in the distance, blurring into the fluttering high frequencies. The sounds are drifting. Creeping. Like circular movements felt but unseen.

Craig Taborn breaks the frozen time with a soft voicing on the piano. Gretchen Parlato’s wordless voice emerges with the pulse, resting on top of each piano voicing. She slides into each pitch, nearly whispering. There’s an astonishing beauty in Blade’s circulating unearthly tones, in Taborn’s light chords, in Parlato’s soaring voice out front. The kind of beauty that momentarily stops time. Erases your thoughts. Throws you into a profound experience of the immediate moment.

I’m riding out the music in my ears, in my own space, my own perception of the train’s ebb and flow, flying under the East River. Krantz’s elastic guitar lines. Blade’s circulating frequencies. Parlato’s lyrical articulations soaring above. Taborn’s subtle touch underneath. Binney’s screaming saxophone ricocheting off the driving bass.

This is my space. Perhaps others have theirs. But this is mine.

*******

Photo Credit: Hubbard, Tom courtesy of Special Media Archives Services

Feature photo:  Hubbard, Tom courtesy of Special Media Archives Services 

Marlene Nourbese was already in the room when I arrived. To call the Gothic Room a room does it so much disservice. The interior of an Edwardian chapel maybe or something close to it but certainly not a room. Chairs were lined up semicircular in front of a podium. She sat to the left of the podium, engrossed in a chat with Fred. I strained to hear the sound of her voice, hoping it would help solidify some of the assumptions I had already made about her, but I got nothing. Bald head, white tunic, black tights–she stood before us when called upon to speak. After a brief intro, she began to read from Zong!

Surprising how she could imitate the sound of sea water with her mouth, even though she was not saying anything, just moving her mouth like she was drowning and gasping and shouting all at the same time. It was not a two-minute thing. It went on for an uncomfortable while. She just stood there and belted out these voiceless screams. The result was a strange silence, an impure silence commanding the space in such a way that any intruding sound–a shuffled feet, a cough, an aborted sneeze, humming light bulbs, murmuring fans–ended up participating in this silence they were too powerless to interrupt. Eerie is the only way I can describe the unease, boredom, and wonder that mingled within me and made me wish silently that she would speak.

And she did. But I could not follow the fragments of the words and phrases she was reeling out and her awful pronunciation of the West African names she kept calling out. Undocumented names of the Africans thrown overboard the ship called Zong in 1781. 133 of them. Her book of poem titled Zong!was an attempt “to not tell the tale that had to be told” about these dastardly murders. And her mispronunciation was, perhaps, an instance of not speaking the names of those that had to be named.

At some point she shared with us what it was like to finish writing Zong! and to realize how much working ruthlessly at it had grounded her. And so how life after the book brought about a “falling silent,” a kind of post-completion depression that seemed to be common among artists.

An evening of solemn awesomeness!

Yet when someone asked me what I thought of Nourbese’s reading from Zong!, all I could say was “the ridiculous phrase,” it’s different, or “some similarly feeble and useless cliche.”

Video of her in Toronto.

Photo Credits: The Princess Madia (State Library and Archive in Florida)

Feature Photo: Midnight Sun in Advent Bay (Library of Congress) 

On Perusing the Comments on Bellanaija Wedding Features

To The August Society for All Things Matrimonial,

Those who know philosophy are familiar with Occam’s Razor: the simplest solution to a problem is always the best solution. Once a Nigerian woman hits a certain age, 20-somethings and above, most things about her begin to make sense in relation to a category called Husband in the official language of matrimony but Man Issues on the streets.

It’s no secret. After a certain age, any woman on Lat. 10 degrees North and Long. 8 degrees East, also known as Nigeria—be she fat or thin, an orange seller or a party planner, God fearing or idol-worshiping, a Christ Ambassador of a Redeemer, politically-minded or fashion conscious—can always be reduced to a set of problems. After careful meditation and conducting the purest form of inductive reasoning, I’ve come to the conclusion that no behavior, no idiosyncrasy exhibited by said women cannot be explained by the desire or lack thereof of marital bliss. Permit me to identify a few examples: If a single woman is friendly, she’s willing to be husbanded. If she’s sad, she’s frustrated at being husbandless. If she’s happy, she’s definitely got a man. If she’s career-crazy, she’s a man-eater. If she’s religious, it’s no a secret what she prays for.

If she dresses skimpily, she’s desperate for a man. If she covers up, she’s trying too hard. If she’s loud and rude,  she’s ruining her chances of ever finding a man. If she’s chilled and passive, she’d probably be passed over, unnoticed. If she’s ugly, she should be ready for hard times at the nuptial market. If she’s pretty, she’s a distraction to men of good character. On and on it goes. Everything a woman is and does, down to the color of her nails and the sound of her sneeze, make sense in connection to the status of the man in or outside of her life.

Photo: Norma Cabral