Walter Mosley's Blog, page 4
September 5, 2018
Walter Mosley: Enough with the Victors Writing History
They burn whatever and whoever disagrees with our conception of the world
September 5, 2108
By Walter Mosley
LitHub.com
For more than 15 years I’ve been working on a novel called John Woman. You might say that I’ve been pondering this idea my entire adult life, ever since I enrolled at the radical arts institution, Goddard College, up in Vermont.
The concept was simple: if you control the idea of history, the content of what people think has come before, then you have access to the near-absolute power associated with that knowledge. Revolutionary political institutions and conquerors have claimed that supremacy down the ages by eradicating any contrary data existing in schools, libraries, languages, religions, and even entire cultures.
For those in power this manipulation was simply executed: you burned whatever and whoever disagreed with your conception of the world. You fired teachers whose minds were tainted by the dead hands of the past. You banned religions and books, burned entire libraries, and made sure that your people ran, regulated, and bankrolled those institutions of knowledge that carried the stories of a carefully fabricated and agreed upon past.
You co-opted the language, tore down past heroes, made shit up—anything to prove that you, your people, your made up history was the only truth.
Once that system of knowledge was ensconced there dawned an age of belief, creating an entire population that espoused and deeply loved a system of truths wrought by prestidigitation just half a century before.
In the current world so-called white men, descended from Europe, have crafted our understanding of history. Using the modern-day weapons of capitalism and war-time technology they have dismissed diasporic Blacks, Indigenous New Worlders, women and the monoliths of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Entire dynasties were eradicated. The number of genders was winnowed down to about one and a half.
“If you deny your past your future will be a detour around your fondest hopes and dreams.”
That’s real power. When you can eliminate or paralyze identity, make your enemies’ cultures either nonexistent or criminal then you’ve done one better than genocide—you’ve made it so that not only is your enemy gone, she never even existed.
That’s real power; the second greatest power in humanity’s drive to control that which they can never fully comprehend, history… the greatest power is encapsulated in the white man’s white man’s poet, T.S. Eliot when he penned, “In my beginning is my end.”
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I have studied the great powers that vie to control what they want us to believe about the past; but I don’t identify with them. I identify with the librarians who, when asked by GW Bush to report on their visitors’ reading habits, held up a hand and said, “First Amendment.” I identify with outsider artists and labor organizers and autodidacts who either refuse to or are unable to believe in the lies foisted upon us by the conquerors. I identify with the belief that there exists a history out there just beyond the reach of our powers of cognition. And I believe that a lie is a lie; that if you coexist with a population that helped to build your house, your culture, your music, a population that helped to raise your children and fine-tune your language, and you deny that culture’s impact on who you are… then your knowledge of history will fail you and the past will devour you and your children.
If you deny your past your future will be a detour around your fondest hopes and dreams.
And so I wrote a novel about a deconstructionist historian. A pleasant sociopath who knows enough to understand that he’s too small to contain the monumental content of history; that history starts with the Big Bang then trickles down to bacteria, termites, and even humanity. John Woman, my protagonist, understands the sacrifices a real historian has to make. He knows that the ancient philosophy encapsulated by the Latin term “amor fati,” love your fate, is true for every being, every rock, every subatomic particle that tumbles through a universe that beguiles and probably loves us.
John’s journey is extraordinarily pedestrian but the world around him and those he meets, and sometimes loves, and sometimes slaughters . . . that world, in his words, is composed of, “bodies formed from the fabric of the universe and so consequently there is a touch of the divine in each of us. You and I are part and parcel of history, slaves of history, playing out our willing and unwilling roles—and so it has been for every living being, every species on earth and, quite possibly, life elsewhere.”
May 19, 2018
May 9, 2018
WPKN Community Radio Interview with Novelist Walter Mosley
Kevin Gallagher: My guest on this segment is one of my favorite authors Walter Mosley creator of the Easy Rawlins Detective series. Some of you may only know of his work through the movie Devil with the Blue Dress, with Denzel Washington, but he is much more than that. Walter Mosley is here on the occasion of the publishing of his latest novel “Down the River Unto the Sea” which features yet another new memorable fictional Detective “Joe King Oliver”.
May 7, 2018
The Tea May Book Selection: Down The River Unto The Sea
The Tea reviews “Down The River Unto The Sea” as part of their May Book Selection.
December 1, 2017
Down the River unto the Sea
Introducing King Oliver
AmazonB&NYour local bookstore Available: February 20, 2017
On February 20th, Mulholland Books will publish a new novel from Walter Mosley titled Down the River Unto the Sea. In this book a former NYPD cop once imprisoned for a crime he did not commit must solve two cases: that of a man wrongly condemned to die, and his own.
Joe King Oliver was one of the NYPD’s finest investigators, until, dispatched to arrest a well-heeled car thief, he is framed for assault by his enemies within the NYPD, a charge which lands him in solitary at Rikers Island.
A decade later, King is a private detective, running his agency with the help of his teenage daughter, Aja-Denise. Broken by the brutality he suffered and committed in equal measure while behind bars, his work and his daughter are the only light in his solitary life. When he receives a card in the mail from the woman who admits she was paid to frame him those years ago, King realizes that he has no choice but to take his own case: figuring out who on the force wanted him disposed of—and why.
Running in parallel with King’s own quest for justice is the case of a Black radical journalist accused of killing two on-duty police officers who had been abusing their badges to traffic in drugs and women within the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Joined by Melquarth Frost, a brilliant sociopath, our hero must beat dirty cops and dirtier bankers, craven lawyers, and above all keep his daughter far from the underworld in which he works. All the while, two lives hang in the balance: King’s client’s, and King’s own.
November 29, 2017
Conspiracy theories about Obama spun out to their wackiest sci-fi conclusions
By Neely Tucker, The Washington Post
November 28 at 2:50 PM
Resistance takes many forms, particularly in the current political climate. Few methods of protest are as cheerfully strange and purposefully bizarre as “The Obama Inheritance.”
This collection of 15 short stories, inspired by right-wing conspiracy theories about the 44th president, take aim at the freak-show realities of the 45th. Talents such as Walter Mosley, Robert Silverberg and Kate Flora start with the right-wing delusions that Barack Obama was a closet Muslim, a Kenyan, a socialist or just the creator of death panels — and spin them out to their (illogical) conclusions.
Edited by the crime novelist Gary Phillips, this science fiction literary act of resistance aims to be a “thrill ride of weirdo, noirish, pulpy goodness.” You’ve got talking dogs, Obama as a space alien and a floating biomedical freak named Balthazar.
The big idea is a nod to the pulpy sci-fi mags of the early to mid-20th century. For pennies to the pound, sweaty-palmed readers could indulge their paranoia in tales of the weird, the fantastic, the alien and the just plain disturbing. Magazines such as Argosy, Weird Tales and Amazing Stories did this in ways good, bad and truly awful.
The covers usually featured scantily clad babes in wardrobe (if not mortal) peril from creepy space freaks. The stories inside were just as garish. The rats were always in the walls, the monsters were always due on Maple Street, and something wicked always came this way.
The diamonds in the dreck were writers such as horror master H.P. Lovecraft and science fiction guru Isaac Asimov (whose first published story was in Amazing Stories). These magazines would prove to be the cultural grist for everything from “The Twilight Zone” to the entire career of Stephen King.
The subtext of horror today is not the Red Menace or the atomic age, but racism, Islamophobia and ham-fisted greed. Some stories in “The Obama Inheritance” feel like they are one degree from reality; others are a good pole-vault from it.
Thriller writer Kate Flora gets things started with a story set in the recent past, “Michelle in Hot Water.” The first lady joins a group of vigilante-minded women who camouflage their meetings as the Tall Girls Book Club. Working in disguise, the crew kidnaps big-pharma execs, injecting them with a solution that renders them impotent, incontinent and bald. The profit-hungry honchos can get the antidote when they lower drug prices for critically ill children to a “reasonable” level.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is cloning herself in Nisi Shawl’s “Evens.” Flesh-eating lizard people terrorize a right-wing radio host in Eric Beetner’s “True Skin,” which might be my favorite.
“Mr. Obama, I want to see your real skin!” roars Russ, the one-named host, into his microphone one afternoon. “Your lizard skin. You and all your liberal, lizard-people cronies in Washington, in Wall Street, in Hollywood. One day, as God is my witness and with one hand on the Holy Bible and the other on the Constitution, I will unmask you and your kind.”
Russ probably was not expecting the resulting visit from, well, lizard people. Flesh-eating chaos ensues.
In “I Know They’re in There,” Travis Richardson takes us into the mind of gun-toting Lloyd, who just knows the Affordable Care Act has “death panels,” because Sean Hannity said it on TV, Rush Limbaugh said it on the radio and Breitbart wrote Web stories about it. (Yes, I know; this hardly qualifies as “fiction.”)
Walter Mosley kicks in with “A Different Frame of Reference,” which follows an unusual member of a Klan-like group in Ohio, Whiter than White, Sons of the Light. And in Anthony Neil Smith’s “I Will Haunt You,” rogue fishing boats roam the decimated Gulf of Mexico after the new administration kills regulations of the trade. The unnamed president who set this into play “died of a massive heart attack on the golf course (so we were told. No one ever saw the body), before his son-in-law executed the vice president for treason and took over the Oval Office himself.” One of the few good captains out there is Joe, who pilots the Great White.
One of the purposes of fiction is to address reality in a slightly reflected light, like a fun-house mirror, in which we see ourselves in a new way. These tales finish as an entertaining, if uneven, look at the world we live in. Phillips worries that the collection might not be weird enough, given that the sitting president “tweets out mind-numbing pronouncements derived from alt-fact sources and [puts] people in charge of federal agencies who are the antitheses of what those agencies are supposed to do.”
He may be right.
November 20, 2017
It Occurs to Me That I Am America
COMING IN JANUARY 2018
A provocative, unprecedented anthology featuring original short stories and art from some of today’s most acclaimed writers and artists.
October 9, 2017
Collection Puts A Playful, Pulpy Twist On Preposterous Stories About Obama
Fifteen writers riff on various wild conspiracy theories generated about President Obama over the years. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the sly short stories in The Obama Inheritance pack a punch.
September 15, 2017
Mystery Writers of America Interview
Laurie R. King in conversation with Walter Mosley, June 3, 2017. Sponsored by Mystery Writers of America, NorCal chapter, and by the Bay Area Book Fest.
September 13, 2017
Light the Dark
LIGHT THE DARK, a new collection of 46 acclaimed authors writing about their creative process and what inspires them, is now available from Penguin Books. The collection includes Walter Mosley’s essay titled “How I Awoke” on how discovering Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye at the age of fourteen changed his life. “For the first time I understood the power of language to reach beyond the real and into the metaphysical and metaphor…It was a step beyond the limitations of the physical world and into a realm where a thing and its opposite could meet and magically become something else.”
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