The Paris Review's Blog, page 115

Staff Picks: Mothers, Grandmothers, and Gardens

Tove Jansson, 1954. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

My grandmother will be ninety-six this September. Lately she has taken to expressing herself with an almost childlike wonder, finishing television shows or simple meals or songs on the radio with jaw-dropping admiration, claiming them the best she has seen or eaten or heard in all her days. Thinking about this sometimes apt and more often comical appreciation for life’s otherwise ordinary details puts me in mind of another fanciful grandmother and her adventures around a small Finnish island on the heels of her six-year-old granddaughter, the spritely Sophia, in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. In the twenty-two vignettes that make up the book, told in the third person and translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, the narrative focus is shared between the main characters, often drifting subtly over the course of a story, illustrating the delicate overlap between the two, one’s perspective mirroring or adding to the outlook of the other. In “The Tent,” Sophia learns to observe the outdoors anew, having “really listened for the first time in her life,” and her relation of that strange new experience helps Grandmother relive her own childhood experiences as “new images came back to her, more and more of them.” Youth and age, awe and understanding, innocence and experience—what beautiful complements they can make. To my grandmother, who now seems as much the seasoned matriarch as she is the imaginative girl, and to her youngest daughter, my incomparable mother, who has taken expert care of us both—happy Mother’s Day. —Christopher Notarnicola 

Silver Beach, Claire Cox’s debut novel, revolves around a mother both mighty and pathetic, a petite blond nightmare in white slacks and pearls. We meet Linda in the final stages of alcoholism—and narcissism—through the eyes of her two living daughters: Shannon, the messy pothead who lives with her outside San Diego, and Mara, the snobby, linen-wearing librarian who grew up with her dad in Massachusetts. Both are damaged by Linda and depressed; both find themselves unsatisfactory daughters and humans. Beyond these similarities, the sisters are apparent opposites. As they clash over what to do with Linda in her final days, the post-Linda stages of their lives begin to germinate, terrifying and hopeful. With precise, wry prose that alternates between Shannon and Mara as they observe each other after a lifetime of estrangement, Cox pulls off a neat trick of enabling the reader to love and hate both of them, all the complicated emotions of siblinghood concentrated in a few stressful weeks. Linda gets her own chapters, too, when she’s conscious—shaky yet stubborn, made of mostly scar tissue. She herself lost more than one mother figure over the years, and her eldest daughter drowned in a rip current. Seawater seeps through the book: a heavy Pacific fog lying over the town, the ocean itself often in view. Even when Shannon takes off for the desert in a half-assed attempt to get away, she sees the floor of an ancient sea. But no one ever goes swimming, unless you count throwing Linda’s ashes off a jetty. Ocean as mother is an old trope but a good one, nicely twisted here—it feels right to see Linda, the motherless daughter, the mother who lost daughters to death, distance, and plain old alienation, dissolve at last into the water’s expansive embrace. —Jane Breakell

 

Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay. Photo courtesy of Get Fresh Books Publishing.

 

Green-thumbed witch, cultivator of all things chlorophyllous: we find ourselves in the midst of gardening season, your favorite time of year. Your sprouts have sprouted, the seedlings are already placed in the beds you built and the ground you tilled, and now we wait, whispering all the while, “Grow, grow, grow!” Those tiny things surely need the encouragement. While you count the days until the flowers bloom and the tomatoes redden, here is Lace & Pyrite. Lush, florid, floral, the language bursts across the page, nearly riotous, just like the overgrowth in August. Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay, friends and avid gardeners, wrote this epistolary book, sending poems back and forth as they chronicled a year in their respective yards: rebirth, renewal, dirt underfoot, dirt in palm, then back again. I can smell the lilac, hear the toads croaking, and see the grapevine winding up the fence on every page. Of course, just as a garden is more than just a garden, these poems are about more than just gardening. All told, the chapbook, rereleased by Get Fresh Books Publishing this past week, is breathtaking. I think you’ll love it, Mom—your copy is on the way. —Mira Braneck

In Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli, a mother is not simply a mother. The name of the book is the name of its narrator’s parent, a Latin word that means something to the effect of “celestial altar.” As one might expect from such a premise, her son—Emanuel, a self-loathing bourgeois—has many, many complexes rooted in his relationship to her. Written in 1982 and translated into English by William Weaver in 1984, this final novel by one of Italy’s most beloved twentieth-century authors is a dark and strange work of avant-garde writing that ruminates on Italian Fascism. Emanuel’s memories from childhood unspool as he travels back to Aracoeli’s hometown of Almería, but Morante lets the timeline and narrative structure slowly fray into a satisfyingly unwieldy novel with a sense of disorientation that feels befitting of post-Fascist modern life. —Lauren Kane

I don’t think there are many readers, Mum, who anticipate the arrival of a new Tom Pow collection as eagerly as you and I do. (J and C and J, perhaps. But counting them isn’t fair.) Well, May 30 will see the publication of Naranjas, and I happen to have had a sneak peek at an advance copy. It’s a joy—his best yet, maybe. You’ll love “Paris Syndrome 1962,” and smile at a young Pow touring that handsome city with his mother and father and sister:

Next day,
it was dreich and every toilet
in Paris was closed.

You might feel sad to encounter Alastair Reid, though I’m sure you’ll tell me that this is the proper place for him. (You’d be right, of course.) My favorite moment is of a rather older Pow standing alone at a village bar in Grez-sur-Loing, France. One of a handful of unshaven, largely silent old men bunched around the bar, Pow remarks:

This
is one of the things I do well and I do not say it
lightly. I have learnt, over many years, to hold
myself within my stall, as if standing here alone
is all I need.

In these socially distanced times, this scene at the Bar au Puits d’Amour takes on an almost elegiac quality. I once heard Pow describe the impulse to write a poem. He said it tended to follow “an experience that you think is kind of poem shaped.” Rather good, that, isn’t it? Still, it strikes me that the character of this impulse has changed slightly for Pow over the years. For me, his early poems reveal an urge along the lines of: Here is an experience; if I don’t write a poem, I’m not sure what I’ll do with it. In Naranjas, that instinct is still there, but it has evolved. He seems now to be saying: Here is an experience; by writing a poem, I will begin to reveal its shape. It’s a wonderful, assured, tender development, and Naranjas is a remarkable collection. Pow’s powers as a poet seem to be growing stronger with each passing season. This, of course, will not come as a surprise to you, Mum. I can already hear you, laying down the book, putting the kettle on, and twittering away to yourself as you look out the window: There we are, Robbie—there’s life in the old codger yet! —Robin Jones

 

Tom Pow. Photo courtesy of Galileo Publishers.

Poets on Couches: Sara Deniz Akant Reads Naomi Shihab Nye

The second series of Poets on Couches continues with Sara Deniz Akant reading Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Missing the Boat.” In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across distances.

“Missing the Boat”
by Naomi Shihab Nye
(Issue no. 72, Winter 1977)

It is not so much that the boat passed
and you failed to notice it.
It is more like the boat stopped
directly outside your bedroom window,
the captain blowing the signal-horn,
the band playing a rousing march.

The boat shouted, waving bright flags,
its silver hull blinding in the sunlight.

But you had this idea you were going by train.
You kept checking the time-table,
digging for tracks.
And the boat got tired of you,
so tired it pulled up the anchor
and raised the ramp.

The boat bobbed into the distance,
shrinking like a toy—
at which point you probably realized
you had always loved the sea.

 

Sara Deniz Akant is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Babette (Rescue Press, 2015). Two of her poems appeared in the Winter 2020 issue. Read an interview with her.

Time Puts Its Stamp on Everything

In  The Shabbiness of Beauty , published this past month by MACK, the artist and writer Moyra Davey places her work in conversation with that of the photographer Peter Hujar. Before becoming a book, the project appeared as an exhibition at Berlin’s Galerie Buchholz in spring 2020. Thousands of miles away, confined to their New York City apartment, Eileen Myles printed out Davey’s and Hujar’s photographs and mounted their own private rendition of the show. The essay Myles wrote about this experience appears below.

Peter Hujar, Paul’s Legs, 1979, from The Shabbiness of Beauty, by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021). Courtesy The Peter Hujar Archive LLC.

Steve died. He was huge. He was fifty and lived in the apartment downstairs right by the front door. His Yankees sticker is still there. He went into the hospital on March 2 and died on March 22. Anna at the laundromat told me. Anna’s quite bent, deep into her eighties. I remember her in her fifties a mean and vivid woman. She got older the place is filthy many of the machines are broken but it’s on the corner and I’m weirdly loyal to it. Steve worked there usually standing outside and I think he delivered bags for Anna. He helped me lug things upstairs too. Years earlier he lived right next door to me with a crowd of people. I remember when he was a little boy and he was thrown butt naked into the hall as a joke. I was coming up the stairs and he was desperately pounding on the door. Your neighbor died Anna told me when I was getting my change. Steve I asked. He’d be standing outside my front door when I came home from wherever. Hey Steve. Was it COVID I asked. We don’t know. His sister comes once a week to get the mail Anna said. She comes on Tuesday. They still send it. I told her the post office doesn’t take you off for a while. They’re worried the landlord won’t give back the security she intimated. What’s it like five hundred dollars. Two. Two hundred and something. Then I turned hoping his sister would come in. And now this place is familiar less. I mean everything perpetually feels more unconnected to a past when I was young and the Tin Palace on East Second Street was a jazz/poetry bar and Stanley Crouch held court at the bar. He died last week. My friends who were bartenders lived in this building and I just went over here one day on my break and I could have it the super said and I moved in. This is like 1977. Time puts its stamp on everything.

This leg. I’m beginning to print the pictures out. Fifty-five or fifty-six of them. It looks lousy but you get the graphic thing of it. I have four hanging over my bed. Moyra was interested in the quality of hair smooshed when wet. It’s about not shaving. Isn’t it funny or cool that hair does this. And those droplets below the ankle. One on the calf. It’s a specimen leg, not unloving or dead. Just deeply specific. To take my leg or that leg and say this. The black line at the bottom further holds back the organic nature. Like suturing it. So the show goes Leg, Nude, Kate (without scruple). I’ll print out Nude now.

 

Moyra Davey, Leg, 1984, from The Shabbiness of Beauty, by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

 

That’s Peter. Haptic. I’m thinking of smell too, a palpable kind of photography. It’s 1979. Not so much gym-bodied. A little pimply. But rounded in a creamy way, the shadows merely enhancing the casual folds of skin around the waist. Not fat, but turning. Everything’s turning. Like flesh is the clothing of something I think the spirit. And this is definitely the photograph of the person (taking it) who knew that he was attractive so though it doesn’t wind up being about him, it is an affirmation of a touchable world, a world close. The picture is chosen by Moyra Davey who among other things when she sees (whether she’s shooting or curating) is I think interested in the exquisite math of it. The body. The leg. The time of day (I’m thinking now of Jason in his studio) when your love is young and you already see him for years.

What’s Moyra’s birthday. August 13. Leo. She doesn’t even know her chart. Of course. Peter’s a Libra. Seems right. The surgent woman and the sexy dead man. Here’s Kate (without scruple) and scruple is such a catholic word. Scruple is a unit of measurement. An apothecary word. Even Canadian. In 1981 Moyra Davey is twenty-six and Kate, delicate—is exposed here as muscle, frame and pose. She’s not uncomfortable. It’s a little regal, a little stiff. There’s a pathetic quality, like a ceremony is begun in these early shots—a female career—gendered by the impromptu (but private) studio of sisters, family and this elaborate challenge (Kate) that makes me fool differently with the lens of my understanding of what a body is. Who’s looking, who’s positioning who. It’s vernacular yet deliberate. It’s intense. It’s a subversion, I believe. The stiffness of these early photos is like waking in the prop room of Moyra Davey’s later films. What I experience here is without words, an ambient feeling, though Kate’s name is there on the wall and a declaration of freedom is within—without scruple not cold but coolly pronounced on that teeny black border—and this composition (of everything) has begun.

 

Moyra Davey, Jane, 1984, from The Shabbiness of Beauty, by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

 

I like troubled Jane even more. Her nipples and her shadows. The fact that her body is covered a little bit by the lines of shade cast by the high lighting I’m guessing in a bathroom makes privacy. Jane goes in. Jane is the name of something we can’t quite get. She’s got on one of those fisting wrist bands that seem incredibly advanced for a teenager if that’s what she is or someone in her early twenties who is fully in her capacity to refuse. It’s like a note she left on the door.

I went out to the pier for Jack’s sixtieth birthday party. Gail Thacker was there. I have this little office across the street I never used. I got it when my mother died three years ago. I thought I’d like a little room to work in across the street. I got a desk and a lamp and put some of my mother’s dead possessions in there. But there wasn’t a window so Jerome used it these few years and he doesn’t need it now. He’s okay he just doesn’t want to work that much. I asked Gail if she had any use for the little desk. It’s a cute little desk. She’s moving. Yeah probably. Would you take a picture.

I do have Scotch tape and I can probably stage some parts of the show right there on that empty wall at the end of the bed and think about what these combinations mean. Am I planning it or doing it. It’s an essay right?

The black dog has some white on its muzzle. People love to point out white hair on dogs like they’ve sleuthed the incredible fact of dogs aging. This is such a good dog. I’ve pasted these two up in the kitchen. Moyra’s Water Print 1 is immersive and even a little hypnotic next to Clarissa Dalrymple’s dog, Kirsten. Clarissa was or is hot. She would have a good dog. Moyra’s water is painterly.

She told me she initially printed out the photos and spread them around her apartment. Hujar believed in separating genres in his shows. Moyra says she mostly did but not always. She told me they (the gallery) wanted to do a Hujar show and then it became that Moyra Davey would curate and her own work too, which made for this entirely bountiful result.

 

Peter Hujar, Study of Thek’s hand, 1967, from The Shabbiness of Beauty, by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021). Courtesy The Peter Hujar Archive LLC.

 

Moyra Davey’s array shuffled in with Hujar’s. Thoughtfully. At the end we get Peter’s photos (in color) of Paul Thek, his lover (1967). The two sets (Hujar and Thek, Moyra and her sisters) bear relation to one another and the show becomes like a snake biting its own tail. It opened for a few weeks last February then the thing happened. I keep thinking about the living woman and the dead man. Like a forest.

That it’s kind of spectral. I mean and then the pandemic. But in the enormity of time in this graveyard (or in the work of these two photographers) you can do anything you want.

Lots of people saw it in the first couple of weeks. Then did it just sit there. Did they take it down. No. I guess they opened it again. It circulated on the internet a lot.

Peter’s horse speaks for the shabbiness of beauty. The thick fuzzy mane curlicues behind the ear. The animal gaze not saddened but unshaking, the horse’s muzzle abuts a rough fence, and a weird shadow makes me go closer and closer (via control +) to see that shadow is just the sun concluding too that the horse is there one day in Warwick.

Her: It’s pictures but it’s thinking about pictures. His sea puckers like knots in a tree.

Do the young always carry entire history. Sophie Mgcina and Thuli Dumakude—South African Play “Poppie Nongena,” 1983. I’m looking into the South African understudy’s eyes in the embrace of the older actress who is somewhat turned away and it strikes me that experience makes a human’s willingness to show it all become occluded, eventually, but that is also an aspect of feeling.

Hujar’s nighttime photos from the seventies and eighties of the West Side from Fourteenth Street south to Wall Street (which are not here) are legendary. So it puzzles me he would also make this crisp portrait of the view of Lower Manhattan from the three-year-old building that was the World Trade Center. The view practically crackles like a new deck of cards. I decide his precision here is rage.

I’m standing out in the hall of my building looking at Moyra’s knobby horse, the sweet horse head covered in flies and all the world holding the horse up against a vivid white sky, maybe it’s a roan horse and the day cloudy I mean pale. It’s a little like a historical painting, a blown-up moment in one, and of course as well it is a portrayal of the horse’s thoughtfulness. Which only exists in a ratio to space.

Feet chickens water chickens Jason. You could miss the mountains for the man. They’re behind him but so what. Before, a table full of light. The composition is quiet, still yet she lends authority to the sprawl. While Hujar is holding up the dark. His work is often feminine. He was twenty-three when he shot these chickens in a yard in Key West. The trashed fence reminding me of a world I knew as a kid. It was then, 1957. It’s one of the two oldest images in the show. Moyra picked a lot of Peter’s water shots. They are film—I mean I could say that in general Hujar seems to be creating neorealist stills. The elegance and the shadowiness that nearly subsumes his portraiture (including these pics of seas, brooks, and rivers) seems passionately postwar.

 

Peter Hujar, Wave, Sperlonga, 1978, from The Shabbiness of Beauty, by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021). Courtesy The Peter Hujar Archive LLC.

 

I look at his oily dark surface, his haptic black sea I don’t think “immersive” like Moyra’s. It’s the Hudson in the seventies. Dirty as fuck. Moyra’s chickens researching in the yard are peck pecking in the timelessness of a day are like a gang of kids. But they are sensations: down low, gathering knowledge for her. We always explain animal intelligence in terms of the ages of children. Since we don’t execute them (kids) for food before they have time to grow they function as living measurement for all other creatures. Chickens can count and in many cases are simply smarter than kids.

Hujar’s chicken is a soldier, an ornate warrior about to get thrust into our mouths. Which is war.

Vali Meyers’s feet are covered with, I suspect, animal names. Hujar photographed them in 1981. I remember her being introduced to me with great reverence one night at the Chelsea in 1982. I think if I saw her feet I would have been in awe. There’s even a little claim here to being the buddha.

It makes sense that Moyra Davey would wind up expanding into writing—out here in art everything is given (supposedly) but in writing you can’t see the intention. Visual art is mapped on the out there. Writing’s like a cat. I would say Moyra’s a cat photographer.

I’m looking at Peter’s swarthy Circus Elephants. There’s pity in the framing. What’s most evident is their closeness. They’re not performing now. The feeling among them is almost heard. I get texts from an animal rescue group. There are elephants who work alone in the world for years since they were babies and if they ever arrive at a sanctuary toward the end of their long lives and they finally see another elephant. Wow.

The longer you look at them you really get the shape of the elephants’ heads, part of seeing is understanding how they are built. And not stopping at the photograph. What would its value be if this photo was about itself and not finally about the elephants.

In a way the total picture of our time is the abstract sum total of the awareness of all the creatures who live in it. No matter what power chooses to do. It’s the greatest loss, the irreverence and disregard for the rich chaos of knowledge and presence that defines life on this fading planet. The chain at the elephants’ feet is surrounding us all.

 

Peter Hujar, Nina Christgau, 1985, from The Shabbiness of Beauty, by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021). Courtesy The Peter Hujar Archive LLC.

 

I’m obsessed with time. Though I recently learned it doesn’t exist. The past is perfect, remains back there in memory and future is intention and the present is gone just this flow through. In physics the particles flow through these slits

Tossed on a wall in Berlin

In Memory Bernadette talks about the pre-WTC neighborhood Vito Acconci lived and moved around in.

I realize I’ve passed through a certain stage with these pictures and now they are friends. Moyra rustling through it all, entering his archive with hers, staggering the experience. I can only write about my world, the vanishing building, and slowly install the memory of this show on my walls.

Looking at earth from outer space. If these are specimens of our time here. But I print these to see them on my desk. With my phone and stapler and coffee cup. That show.

I am trying to enter her photographs not his.

Finally I get it out into the hall. I hear my young neighbors laughing in their first apartment. I tape Times Square on my door. Lousy print. It’s not even that.

John with the white horse Goya is catholic. I insist. I get so close—the glory of never seeing pixels—to see his veins, his something on a chain deep under his rumpled probably red old turtleneck.

I think he’s WASP, she shrugs.

The horse is squinting. The horse is not squinting. The horse around the forehead and eyes is covered with flies. Charlie (Flies). It’s moist. The flies attracted to the sweet tears of the horse. The horse is spotted and its lower quarters darkened by the eventual merging of the spots. I’m easily moved toward this thought. Is light a thought. Ask Moyra. If the flies are not such a bother, and it’s summer, well it still must be difficult standing on all fours in a body of fur.

These three young men, Barney, Eric, Leo, the one on the left, Barney, good-naturedly honoring his artist parent, while a bar of light straps them all in. Leo is gregarious, Eric, in the middle, is dreaming. That’s interesting says Moyra. In another photo he grasps his own wrist.

Eric is haunted by his beauty, awkwardly enunciating it by this fashion choice, his hair.

Manny I and Manny II from 1981 is from the apex moment of Puerto Rican pride. I believe these are their real names. This double portrait installed this night outside the once door of the Guzman family simmers with a quiet challenge—the arched eyebrows and a small facial scar on the side of one man’s eye, the intense folds in the other’s white quilted shirt, the manicured fingers hooked modestly into his front jean pockets. Full of loaded detail, nonetheless the picture warms continually. The small guy in the dark shirt leans forward, arms held behind his back. Both are ferociously neat and full of strength, their masculinity exulted by the detail.

Look at the horse’s effort and that single forward leg. And the triangle, the crotch of everything at which leg meets mountain.

I love that Emma, her back covered by a spider tattoo, turns to Moyra, “You got it?” Can I stop?

A small dog is alerted to the complications. Is this one in Florida too?

 

Moyra Davey, Armpit, 1984, from The Shabbiness of Beauty, by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

 

Moyra’s sliced quadrant of a female chest. Armpit. It’s conceptual demon youth. Wet armpit hair. Hair wisping around a small red nipple. Her love and her estrangement from female bodies is practically a font.

To wake at weird hours trying to finish this and there’s Jane, there’s the World Trade Center. Remember that morning? In my building, dying batteries squeak.

Blind Mare (pair bond) is its title yet what I overwhelmingly see is the humpy earth. What I figure about her work is it’s always relational. It’s confident and this is the Leo side of her world. All of it. The pitch the animals are standing on, the crooked earth itself forcing my own lenses to work. I ratchet up to the picture best I can the body adjusting through a long forest of tweaks to look, to see, that pitch eventually wrestling, humping my parts to the position I think she meant.

I in my bathrobe and the shifting temp and the unsteady floor

I was thinking about how blur works in his pictures because he doesn’t use it—well, in Rapids, Hyrkin Farm (I), the out of focus wave crashes into the surgent. The blur sucks the power away and the dominant wave is actually the smaller part of the picture.

The word surgent had its heyday in 1917, but it never really was a hit, always supporting something else while it is simply rising.

I think his blur is in service of the explicit emotion. Hers is more like the apparatus. Like why is the marquis empty. And the people walking by just a blur. I think this is the profoundest statement I can imagine of the emptiness of now. There are lights but there’s nothing here.

I use Twitter as a slot machine. I pledge ten dollars on “Puddin” an adorable dog. Wait and see if he’s rescued or winds up a digit in the day’s kill. That long double row I saw yesterday of dogs that were just euthanized in a shelter. I leaned in to see if there’s anyone I know.

Hujar is making records of his senses. The baby cries through the camera pretty much. Moyra’s efficiency is a way of gasping at the kinds of holes moments fall in. She’s tricking it for sure.

Michelle Collison is languorous, casts a sentimental look like a nineteenth-century painting. I searched Michelle wondering who she was but nothing came up. A few brokers.

 

Moyra Davey, Plymouth Rock, 2019, from The Shabbiness of Beauty, by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

 

This chicken’s shape is bulbous. Ha and the name Moyra gives it Plymouth Rock is foundational, implying this chicken does everything. You can meet it, you can eat it, you can wait for each brown egg.

I was going to make an American joke (“land of opportunity”) but she shot it in Canada.

I thought Mark was a jeweler but it’s the beginning of the day perhaps. The intensity of focus at the beginning. Even being young as a subject (again). I meant to ask Moyra who this guy is.

Colt with Mother, Italy (1978). This horse is his. The colt’s legs are sort of blobby and shaky. The joints come in before the spindly legs fill out. The colt’s eyes cast down while trailing the mother’s butt.

 

Peter Hujar, Colt with Mother, Italy, 1978, from The Shabbiness of Beauty, by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021). Courtesy The Peter Hujar Archive LLC.

 

In the kitchen (mine) Paul Thek cheats toward us a bit in this tiny close up portrait, his eyes damp feeling like the melancholy Russian poet Yesenin.

And then, just his paw out, presented: my hands my human hands

I’m sitting in Joe and Charlie’s apartment and because Charlie knew Peter I asked him to “give me something.” I thought any stray fact about Peter Hujar would be good. He said that Hujar was a very attractive man. Joe and I smiled. Yeah. Is it so unimportant to nail the exact spot in someone’s mortality when they took these pictures. I feel like we’re all handed a hundred years to move around in. You might get a tiny piece of it. My friend talks about tarot yesterday. She was talking about transmission. The spirit coming through the cards. Or through the photographer. A man gone for thirty-three years.

His waterscapes:

veiny sea,

two-part combat
out of focus, fuzzy force

the audible, breathing ocean

oily dark surface, haptic black sea

Vali’s feet are pathetic. I won’t go into it here but I’m seeking a global reevaluation of the word, making it central to the pith of the approach to governing we want. Who are the pathetic.

Because there are chickens on both sides of the show there are simply more chickens.

You can feel her touching and weighing her infant’s clothed feet. Its meaning? It’s the pressure of presence. Syncopation. Like the pressure of love. Do I love the sheer sexism of the title: Dina and John McClellan. It could be funny.

The ocean is crowning.

Often I’m working fast off essentially sketches bad copies. (This is Gary and John, the printers’ worst nightmare!)

Now the small dog seems patient, beleaguered.

 

Moyra Davey, Rosie (bedroom), 2013, from The Shabbiness of Beauty, by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

 

In Rosie (bedroom) her noble inquisitiveness, her rolling stars of gleam and wrinkles, the white patch on her chest, her belly genitals her sweet paws press in a yogic dog way.

This cock puzzles me frankly though I would definitely have uses for its banded strangeness. I’m pasting cocks up in the hall.

The chickens don’t know what to do about those boots.

Neil Greenberg’s Feet. They are young dirty feet. Neil was stretching at some point. Peter went oh that’s nice can you stay there. Neil visited Peter in the hospital—on Thanksgiving the day he died. He kept pointing at Neil and Neil thought Peter wanted something but he was just laughing at some silly design on Neil’s shirt. Like the dying are so serious. He called it the horse-pistol. I’m sweet on you Peter said. They met at The Bar on Fourth and Second Ave and were walking home and suddenly he stopped. There was a car outside covered with drops of rain. Now that’s beautiful said Peter.

In this “studio” shot at the end of the show Paul Thek resembles a butcher in a fairy tale—proud of his work, which is to cut up men. The photo’s in color of course. The severed hands are strewn matter-of-factly on a worktable.

As the light suffuses him.

Ask Moyra what color is this shoe. In her mind I mean. She can’t pass through and find it out. She can only choose.

I mean what does she believe. Gray? Pink?

 

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems, and Chelsea Girls. They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue in New York City. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, Texas.

The Shabbiness of Beauty , by Moyra Davey and Peter Hujar, was published by MACK in April 2021. Text © 2021 Eileen Myles.

Picture Books as Doors to Other Worlds

Carroll Jones III, Bricks, Door and Cat, 2016. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

My Catholic picture books made me think heaven was a town built on a layer of stratocumulus clouds, which disappointed me, because I wanted a heaven like the garden on the other side of the door in Alice’s wonderland. I considered myself the true owner of the library’s copy of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, nesting in its puffy white VHS case until I could bring it home again. I studied Alice as she crept through the black woods and sat in disoriented defeat among the mome raths. I watched her shrink and grow. I was looking for the garden, too. Our lawn violets never spoke. There had to be a door somewhere, but I couldn’t even find a rabbit hole to fall down. In the woods, I turned over rocks, looking for the underworld, always fearing I’d find a nest of snakes instead.

Once I could read, I worked through the book enough times to memorize parts. Maybe my woods were already wonderland. Maybe my cat would dissolve into a hanging grin. At school, when boys played games that ended with the loser having to kiss me without my invitation, I understood I was stuck somewhere, like Alice: “There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.”

In the Disney adaptation, Alice faces only one door. It is locked, and has a talking face. “You did give me quite a turn!” the door puns, and makes sure we get the joke: “Rather good, what? Doorknob, turn?” Alice peers through the keyhole mouth at the garden. In my recollection of the movie, the viewer sees what she sees. I can picture it: fountains, hedges, rosebushes, topiaries.

But I imagined the image. Alice doesn’t look through a door-portal until the film is nearly over. She’s been crying in the woods, singing to the creatures gathered to gawk at her pain, saying to herself, “It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change!” when the Cheshire Cat, a puff of purple around a crescent moon of teeth, tells her there’s a way out. He makes a door appear in a tree trunk. Alice steps in to meet the tyrant queen in her garden. I should have seen this as a cautionary tale: the girl thinks she’s looking for something that makes sense, but the deeper she pushes, the closer she gets to the seat of senseless violence in the world.

*

Early colonizers of the Americas believed the devil lived here, having been banished from Europe through religious effort. Europeans believed Native peoples worshipped gods that served Satan. Sixteenth-century Spanish colonizers executed a Guachichil woman whose people resisted conquest. She lived in a place occupied by Tlaxcalan and Tarascan converts to Christianity, and she tried to persuade them to rebel against Spanish rule by threatening them with black magic. The Spanish, fearing a loss of control, charged her with witchcraft and killed her immediately. Alison Games recounts this in Witchcraft in Early North America, writing that “witches were not only rebels against godly order (as they were throughout Europe), but also armed rebels bent on overthrowing established governments.” Revolts were blamed on the devil. The settlers became obsessed with witches.

But I didn’t know about any of this when I was four, as my parents read to me from my favorite picture books, Patricia Coombs’s Dorrie the Little Witch series. Every book begins the same: “This is Dorrie. She is a witch. A little witch.” Some arrangement of introductory details follows: her room is messy, her socks mismatched. She has a cat named Gink and a mother known as the Big Witch. Dorrie strives and fails to be good; the Big Witch is important and busy. Left alone to figure out how to behave, Dorrie often ends up in the secret room where her mother makes magic. She fumbles with spells, coming up with her own elixirs after failing to find them in the Big Witch’s book of magic.

I don’t know whether I understood that world to be pretend. My mother was a big witch, too: important, a role model, and a healer, in a way, a nurse with national recognition and local renown. But I was left alone only when I wanted to be. It was my mother and father who read me the books.

I mixed every liquid hair product in my parents’ bathroom cabinet, hoping to come up with the spell Dorrie sought to ease the constriction of adult reality’s force upon the glittering cloud of childhood. I held out hope for finding a book of magic that might have what I needed.

My schoolbooks held only dead ends: a rule for every known thing, and every thing was a known thing, except for the things the church knew to be unknown, like the mechanism God uses to turn bread into his body or what that even means since the Communion host doesn’t seem like anything but an unusual cracker melting on the tongue.

But there was something existing in my house—not a being like God or Satan, but something potent and present as a gas. In the hallway, surrounded by the bedroom and bathroom doors, I felt I wasn’t alone. Belief in ghosts seemed to fall under superstition, which was sinful as a subcategory of idolatry, so I didn’t let myself think of the women in the large old photo hanging in our house’s hallway as anything but ink on framed paper. The standing woman smiled and the sitting woman did not. Their hair was gathered tight behind their heads and their skin was cloaked in black cloth. My mom said they were my great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, granddaughter and daughter of Tumulth, but this was impossible. I had never smiled at anyone as if my eyes were jaws and I had never sat with my sadness as if it were a second nervous system. They wore black, like witches, but they couldn’t be, because all witches were white.

They knew something, though.

I decided to read every book in the library, looking for instructions I could use. The books I found weren’t about witches—they were about otherworld travelers. In The Castle in the Attic, by Elizabeth Winthrop, a boy uses a magic token to turn people into miniatures who can pass through a toy castle into another world. Lynne Reid Banks wrote about similar magic five years earlier in The Indian in the Cupboard, but I didn’t take to that book, probably not because it features a white boy who plays God with a tiny Iroquois man—I was used to that—but because I wanted to travel to the otherworlds, not have their residents come to me.

In Anne Lindbergh’s Travel Far, Pay No Fare, two children use a magic bookmark to go into the worlds of books. Inside one, a woman says, “Houses aren’t the only things with windows. Time and space may well have them too.” I collected library bookmarks and tried every one, hoping to travel across the threshold of the page. I even made my own, carefully lettered with the words from the book: Travel far, / Pay no fare, / Let a story / Take you there!

I couldn’t get it to work, so I reread the book periodically, looking for a missed step in the instructions. I found my answer in A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. The journey between worlds was a tesseract, travel in the fifth dimension, possible only by the thoroughly initiated, which I was not. “Playing with time and space is a dangerous game,” says the protagonist’s father. “It’s a frightening as well as an exciting thing to discover that matter and energy are the same thing, that size is an illusion, and that time is a material substance. We can know this, but it’s far more than we can understand with our puny little brains.”

All these books illuminated small pieces of the same set of principles. There were too many connections for the magic not to be real. The books never taught me to travel to other worlds, so I began to wonder whether I could manipulate this one.

*

I think dreams are riddles because they need to be solved. I am sure dreams are enigmas because they really can’t be. After I read The Battle for the Castle, Winthrop’s sequel to The Castle in the Attic, in which the hero and his friend defend their castle from attack by large rats, I began dreaming I was in a besieged castle. I never dream I’m naked, flying, or falling. In my nightmares, I don’t have long before the people outside the walls come to kill me.

*

I was prepared to see books as riddles long before high school teachers taught me the mode of literary study I’d have to unlearn, searching texts for the single correct interpretation coded in symbols and subtext. In one of my favorite childhood books, there really was a solution. The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery is a picture book by Graeme Base in which an elephant named Horace throws a party for his eleventh birthday. He invites ten animal friends to his house, plans eleven games, and prepares a feast to be served at eleven o’clock. But the guests arrive to the banquet hall to find the food already eaten. Readers are tasked with identifying the thief using “a little close observation and some simple deduction.” The solution is in a sealed section at the book’s end, following a warning: “Do not turn this page until you have tried your hardest to unravel the Mystery—for the getting of wisdom is no match for the thrill of the chase, and those who choose the longer road shall reap their reward!”

Clues are encoded in basic cryptography in every illustration: WATCH THE CLOCKS lettered into the wrought iron of the property’s entry gate, RED HERRING spelled out on fallen tennis balls, PUT NO TRUST IN HIDDEN CODES AND MESSAGES decoded from symbols substituted for letters, a verse visible when the book is held up to a mirror: “Yea, all who seek take heed forsooth—For everyone has told the truth!” Technically, that is factual. But someone is lying, of course, by omission.

The Eleventh Hour, I Spy, Where’s Waldo?, Magic Eye: I wanted all books to make me feel the way these did when my whole body and brain lurched with the click of visual recognition. I still do. I want the whole world to make me feel it.

 

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of White Magic, My Body Is a Book of Rules, and Starvation Mode. With Theresa Warburton, she is the coeditor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She’s a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, a Creative Capital awardee, and an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.

Copyright © 2021 by Elissa Washuta. From White Magic , published by Tin House.

Redux: About You I Know Only the Weight of a Little Ink

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Shelby Foote.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re spilling ink. Read on for Shelby Foote’s Art of Fiction interview, A. S. Byatt’s short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” and Jean Sénac’s poem “Young Deluge.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, subscribe to our new bundle and receive Poets at Work for 25% off.

 

Shelby Foote, The Art of Fiction No. 158
Issue no. 151 (Summer 1999)

INTERVIEWER

What precisely is a blotter?

FOOTE

This is a blotter [pointing] and if you haven’t got one you’re up the creek. You use the blotter to keep the ink from being wet on the page. You put the blotter on top and blot the page. I was talking about blotters in an interview, what a hard time I had finding them, and I got a letter from a woman in Mississippi. She said, I have quite a lot of blotters I’ll be glad to send you. So I got blotters galore. Ink is another problem. I got a phone call from a man in Richmond, Virginia who had a good supply of ink in quart bottles. I got three quarts from him, so I’m in good shape on that.

 

Photo: Eric Magnan. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye
By A. S. Byatt
Issue no. 133 (Winter 1994)

The phrase was, of course, not her own; she was, as I have said, a being of a secondary order. The phrase was John Mil­ton’s, plucked from the air, or the circumambient language, at the height of his powers, to describe the beauty of the primordial coils of the insinuating serpent in the Paradise garden. Gillian Perholt remembered the very day these words had first coiled into shape and risen in beauty from the page, and struck at her, unsuspecting as Eve. There she was, sixteen years old, a golden-haired white virgin with vague blue eyes (she pictured herself so) and there on the ink-stained desk in the dust was the battered emerald-green book, ink-stained too, and second-hand, scribbled across and across by dutiful or impatient female fingers, and everywhere was a smell, still drily pungent, of hot ink and linoleum and dust if not ashes, and there he was, the creature, insolent and lovely before her …

 

Photo: Max Stanworth. CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Young Deluge
By Jean Sénac, translated by Mark Polizzotti
Issue no. 96 (Summer 1985)

Nothing.
About you I know only
the weight of a little ink in a bookseller’s stall
and the rumbling of
keg-laden trucks on a ramp.
(Curved wood and the dregs of
childhood you lead me to.
Oh, to know nothing.
— I’ll call your name when your thighs
in hurried strokes weigh blue on the poem
you dredge from my body.)
I’ll call your name …

 

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The Travels of a Master Storyteller

It is one of the ironies of literature that the Thousand and One Nights should owe its global fame to stories—“Aladdin” among them—that never belonged to the original collection in Arabic. They were the work, invented or recycled, of a young Syrian man named Hanna Diyab. Perhaps the most influential storyteller whose name is known, Diyab himself remained obscure until a memoir he wrote in eighteenth-century Aleppo was discovered at the Vatican Library more than two centuries later. The Book of Travels, edited by Johannes Stephan and translated by Elias Muhanna, appears today in English for the first time. The English edition, published by the Library of Arabic Literature, contains the following foreword by Yasmine Seale.

Photo courtesy of Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

One morning in October 1708, two men walk into a room at Versailles where King Louis XIV is waiting to receive them. Between them is a cage of curious animals: a pair of honey-colored mice with giant ears and long hind legs, like miniature kangaroos. The older man, Paul Lucas, has just returned from a mission to the Ottoman Empire, where he was sent to hunt for coins, gems, and other precious things to feed the royal collection. Among the loot he has brought back are these strange, alert creatures. The king wants to know more. Lucas boasts that he “discovered” them in Upper Egypt, despite their being very difficult to catch. (He is lying: in fact, he was sold them by a Frenchman in Tunis.) And what are they called? Lucas, unable to say, turns to the young man by his side.

“I replied that, in the lands where it is found, the animal is called a jarbu‘.” Of how many people can it be said that their first words to the Sun King contained the Arabic pharyngeal ‘ayn? The pharynx, and the story, belong to Hanna Diyab, a multilingual monk in training from Aleppo who, around the age of twenty, dropped out of the ascetic life to be Lucas’s assistant on his voyage—translating, interceding, and, once or twice, saving his life—in exchange for the promise of a job in Paris.

It was probably through Diyab that gerboise, the desert-dwelling jerboa, entered the French lexicon. At the king’s request he writes down the animals’ name. At the request of the king’s son (“of medium height and quite rotund”) they are painted onto an enormous illustration of wild beasts. Then Diyab is marched around the palace to be peered at, by princess after princess, until two in the morning. He peers back.

The promise is eventually betrayed; after two years with Lucas and no job forthcoming, Diyab returns home to Aleppo where he spends the rest of his life selling cloth—and, no doubt, telling stories of his adventure. Fifty-four years after the facts, unknowably transformed, he commits them to paper in the form of a memoir, The Book of Travels.

Time is also a translator. After telling us about his encounter with the king, Diyab adds: “Is it possible I could have retained perfectly everything I saw and heard? Surely not.” It is the only moment in the memoir when he calls his own reliability into question, pointing to the half-century that separates the tale from the event. Yet the most astonishing scene in The Book of Travels, its perihelion, is also its most believable: the royal curiosity rushing to classify, the chubby prince, the little lie.

You are reading Diyab’s true story because of others he made up: “Aladdin,” “Ali Baba,” a dozen more told to the scholar and translator Antoine Galland over a handful of spring nights. These encounters, among the most consequential in literature, are recorded in a cooler key, offhand. Nothing could be more normal, less worthy of note than the telling and swapping of tales—“collaborative sessions,” as the editor of this volume aptly puts it.

Aladdin, readers are sometimes surprised to learn, is a boy from China. Yet the text is ambivalent about what this means, and pokes gentle fun at the idea of cultural authenticity. Scheherazade has hardly begun her tale when she forgets quite where it is set. “Majesty, in the capital of one of China’s vast and wealthy kingdoms, whose name escapes me at present, there lived a tailor named Mustafa.” The story’s institutions are Ottoman, the customs half-invented, the palace redolent of Versailles. It is a mishmash and knows it.

Like Aladdin, like Aleppo, Diyab’s is a story of mixture. He knows French, Turkish, Italian, even Provençal—but not Greek: in Cyprus, unable to understand the language, he feels like “a deaf man in a wedding procession.” Slipping in and out of personae, he is alert to the masquerades of others. Behind the European envoy’s mask we glimpse a con man: Paul Lucas travels in the guise of a doctor, prescribing remedies in exchange for treasure. He treats a stomachache with a paste made of parsley, sugar, and crushed pearls.

To meet the king, Diyab has been encouraged to wear his native dress: turban cloth, pantaloons, dagger. But the calpac on his head is actually Egyptian, and his trousers cut from londrin—London or Mocha broadcloth, a textile made of Spanish wool, manufactured in Languedoc and exported to Aleppo by merchants in Marseille. His outfit, like his mind, bears a pan-Mediterranean print.

In The Book of Travels he is forever drawing comparisons: between Lyon and Aleppo, Seine and Euphrates, Harlequin and Karagöz. Against the clash of cultures, here is a cradle; against the border, a lattice. Here is a Syrian’s view of France, a description of Europe where Arabs circulate and thrive, a portrait of the Mediterranean as a zone of intense contact and interwoven histories.

This is also an old man’s account of what it was to be twenty years old, gifted and curious, somewhere new. Time has sharpened its colors. Its thrill is picaresque: a tale of high drama and low ebbs, the exuberant perils of early modern travel. At a Franciscan monastery in Cyprus, Diyab is kept awake all night by the grunting of pigs. He is eaten alive by mosquitoes in Rosetta, by lice in El Faiyûm; ambushed on the way to Livorno by corsairs who cry “Maina!”—lingua franca for surrender; abandoned to the whims of muleteers. Tobacco is smuggled in a mattress, a mummy in straw. Much energy is spent evading English pirates.

In the long tradition of Arabic travel writing, Diyab is different: he lets us in and keeps us close. Unlike Ilyas al-Mawsili, whose account of the Spanish conquest of America Diyab seems to have owned, he is not a cleric seeking to secure his reputation. Nor is this a self-consciously literary document in the vein of ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi’s descriptions of his journeys through the Muslim world. There is no poetry in The Book of Travels, no quotation. Its cadences are those of Syrian speech, its subject everyday emotions: fear, shame, astonishment, relief.

Some of the most vivid pages concern a storm in the Gulf of Sidra, where Diyab and his companions nearly drown. By the time the castaways reach land, their throats are so dry they cannot speak, and their food has turned soggy with seawater. For days they eat nothing but dates, then they are reduced to eating cats. When they finally reach Tripoli, after fifteen days without nourishment, and are given bread, Diyab is unable to swallow it: “It tasted like ashes.”

Then there are the fifteen icy days in December 1708, the coldest winter in five hundred years, during which tens of thousands froze to death. “Paris was a ghost town … The priests of the city were forced to set up braziers on the altars of their churches to prevent the sacramental wine from freezing. Many people even died while relieving themselves, because the urine froze in their urethras as it left their bodies and killed them.” Diyab has to be rubbed from head to toe with eagle fat (another of Lucas’s remedies) and wrapped in blankets for twenty-four hours before he recovers sensation in his limbs. It is in these moments of plain, precise language that hunger, thirst, and cold—untranslatable pain—come through.

Unusually for a travel writer, Diyab is a working man. For all the pomp of the French court, his attention remains trained on those who, like him, labor invisibly: hospital workers who serve soup three times a day in tin bowls; nuns who launder clothes in the river; prostitutes whose doors are marked by a large heart made of thorns. Striking, too, is the sheer violence of everyday life. In Livorno he sees a soldier punished for desertion—nostrils slashed and forehead branded with the king’s seal. In Paris he goes to a courthouse to watch the trial of highway robbers, and to the public square to see them killed.

A thought recurred as I read: you couldn’t make it up. While Lucas bathes rusty coins in vinegar to reveal their inscriptions, Diyab probes the strangeness of the world. Miracles—magical causes applied to mechanical effects—jostle with the most daily phenomena. The true colors of things take on a hallucinated quality. If the dauphin’s bestiary contains no jerboa, can his own eyes be trusted? If the remedy is bogus, but you were healed, what then?

Scholars argue over how much of Diyab is in Aladdin, where to draw the line between fiction and truth. The Book of Travels smudges such distinctions by showing how fantasy is woven into life, how enchantment is neighbor to inquiry. At the opera, Diyab is dazzled by stage contraptions. Knowing how they are built does nothing to lessen their spell. Mechanical causes with magical effects: this is art.

 

Yasmine Seale’s essays have appeared in Harper’s, The Poetry Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She has translated many texts, classical and contemporary, from the Arabic and French. She is the winner of the 2020 Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry. Her translation of Aladdin is out with W. W. Norton, and she is currently working on a new translation of the Thousand and One Nights for the same publisher.

The Talents of the Saar Family

In recent years, the work of the ninety-four-year-old artist Betye Saar has experienced something of a critical reappraisal, with major retrospectives appearing concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019. When asked why this sudden resurgence in attention might be occurring, she replied: “Because it’s about time! I’ve had to wait till I’m practically 100.” It’s baffling that she had to wait at all: Saar’s work, especially her Joseph Cornell–inspired assemblages, is without peer. Thankfully, a new show at the Crocker Art Museum, in Sacramento, California, suggests that talent travels matrilineally in the Saar family. “Legends from Los Angeles,” which will be on view through August 15, features twenty-three works by Betye and her daughters Alison and Lezley. A selection of images from the exhibition appears below.

Betye Saar, Woman with Two Parrots, 2010, mixed-media collage on paperboard, 12 x 24 5/8″. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Emily Leff and James Davis III. © Betye Saar / Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

 

Alison Saar, Jitterbug, from the Copacetic portfolio, 2019, linocut on handmade Japanese Hamada kozo paper, 19 1/2 x 18″. Crocker Art Museum purchase with funds provided by the Marcy and Mort Friedman Acquisition Fund; and Janet Mohle-Boetani, M.D., and Mark Manasse. © Alison Saar. Photo courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery and Mullowney Printing.

 

Lezley Saar, I turned my back on the ocean, 2019, paper collage on photograph, 10 1/2 x 8 1/4″. Crocker Art Museum purchase with funds from the Forrest and Shirley Plant Fund. © Lezley Saar. Photo: Agust Agustsson, courtesy of Walter Maciel Gallery.

 

Alison Saar, Hades D.W.P. II, 2016, etched glass jars, water, dye, wood, cloth and ink transfer, electronics, and found ladles and cups, 30 x 50 x 16″. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Loren G. Lipson, M.D. © Alison Saar. Photo: John Wynn / Lafayette Art Galleries.

 

Betye Saar, Now You Cookin’ with Gas, from the series “Six Serigraphs: Bookmarks in the Pages of Life,” 2000, serigraph, 14 1/2 x 11″. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Loren G. Lipson, M.D. © Betye Saar / Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

 

Alison Saar, Man in Blue Suit, 1981, mixed media, 10 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 3 1/2″. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Emily Leff and James Davis III. © Alison Saar.

 

Lezley Saar, Zerpenta Dambullah: Born under the shade of a black willow tree in New Orleans in 1826 sat on a rock turning rain into tobacco smoke, 2019, acrylic on fabric with fringing, braided tassels, and curtain rod, 68 x 40″. Crocker Art Museum purchase with funds provided by Emily Leff and James Davis III. © Lezley Saar. Photo: Agust Agustsson, courtesy of Walter Maciel Gallery.

 

Betye Saar, Remember Friendship, 1975, mixed media, 10 3/4 x 17 1/8 x 1 1/4″. Crocker Art Museum, gift of the Sacramento Chapter of Links, Inc. © Betye Saar / Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

 

Alison Saar, Torch Song, from the Copacetic portfolio, 2019, linocut on handmade Japanese Hamada kozo paper, 19 1/2 x 18″. Crocker Art Museum purchase with funds provided by the Marcy and Mort Friedman Acquisition Fund; and Janet Mohle-Boetani, M.D., and Mark Manasse. © Alison Saar. Photo courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery and Mullowney Printing.

 

Betye Saar, We Was Mostly ’Bout Survival, 1998, serigraph, 25 5/8 x 19 7/8″. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Shirley and Guy Moore. © Betye Saar / Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

 

“Legends from Los Angeles” will be on view at the Crocker Art Museum, in Sacramento, California, through August 15.

Staff Picks: Sweaters, Sisters, and Sounds

Maryanne Amacher, one of the subjects of Sisters with Transistors. Photo: Peggy Weil. Courtesy of Metrograph Pictures.

Such care is taken with the visual and aural elements of Lisa Rovner’s Sisters with Transistors, a new documentary profiling women composers from the early days of electronic music, that watching it feels more like observing a cinematic poem than a cut-and-dried work of nonfiction. Featuring a voice-over by Laurie Anderson alongside decades’ worth of rare archival footage, the movie examines the careers of ten women—Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, and Wendy Carlos—and the gender disparity that has led to so many of them being overlooked, forgotten, or outright erased from the history of electronic music. The relationship between art, humans, and machines is one I find constantly fascinating, and Sisters with Transistors is filled with moments that explore just that, from an account of how Derbyshire’s early memories of air raid signals in the Blitz influenced her ghostly compositions to video of a bemused Thurston Moore watching Amacher fling her body between stacks of keyboards as she plays in her equipment-stuffed home. Sisters with Transistors is available to stream on Metrograph Digital through May 6. —Rhian Sasseen 

If you are a certain kind of obsessive jazz fan and record collector, there is no grail holier than a Mosaic box set. Since the eighties, Mosaic has released lavish limited-edition compilations stuffed with hours and hours of gorgeously remastered music from eras past, available only via direct mail order. The company’s latest offering is The Complete Louis Armstrong Columbia & RCA Victor Studio Sessions 1946–1966, which features two discs’ worth of his singles on the RCA label from just before the LP era, and five more discs that include three of Armstrong’s masterful LPs for Columbia as well as hours of alternate takes and studio conversation. The period represented here was a time when jazz was enthralled with bebop, which created the basic template for almost all jazz since. Many listeners then felt Armstrong was past his prime, a holdover from an earlier time, but as he says in a quote in the deliciously exhaustive booklet that accompanies the set, “I’m playing better now than I’ve ever played in my life.” And with the resources of Columbia Records and new recording technology, he and his bandmates sounded better than ever, too. One of the albums included here, Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy, is in fact one of my favorite jazz albums of all time. It opens with a thundering rendition of “St. Louis Blues” and deepens from there, climaxing with the rollicking “Long Gone (From Bowlin’ Green).” Armstrong sings like the loveliest gravel pit ever to hold a mic; either you hate his voice or you’re certain it’s the best thing ever (I’m in the latter camp), and there’s lots and lots of it here, along with solo after stunning trumpet solo. This sort of box ain’t for everyone, but if it’s for you, I don’t have to convince you of what a treasure it is. —Craig Morgan Teicher

 

Brandon Taylor. Photo: Bill Adams.

 

There is a lot of writing online these days. Besides most of my work, the screen plays host to most of my conversations with my colleagues, much of my interaction with friends and family, marketing emails, donation appeals, reliable news, unreliable news, Instagram captions, tweets, recipes, and online journals (like our own Daily). There are also increasing numbers of platforms by which writers, people whose work commands attention and capital in many currencies, can send their words to subscribers either for a fee or for free. Substack is mostly a CSA model of writing or, put another way, an OnlyFans model: you can pay to get content others don’t. The writer Brandon Taylor gives it away—in a manner of speaking. In his Substack newsletter, Sweater Weather, Taylor writes perfect essays with titles such as “not this morality play,” “i read your little internet novels,” “zola was kind of a zaddy, no?,” and “how come these ghosts is white?” Taylor is the author of Real Life, the best novel of 2020 (says me but not only me—it was short-listed for the Booker Prize). He was also a doctoral student in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin before he became a novelist, and he’s an active Twitter user. In other words, he speaks many languages via many mediums. In Sweater Weather, these languages combine into a solution so beautifully complete that it works on the body like the winter ocean. In “this the country,” Taylor guides the reader—college-tour style, backward and never missing a step—through art criticism, crystalline commentary on race in America, and enormously vulnerable memoir. I read it on my phone. Someday, though, a canny editor will gather these gems and put them in a beautiful hardcover edition, with a Helen Frankenthaler on the cover, and I will pay thirty-five dollars to read them all again, and you will, too. But I recommend you start now. —Julia Berick

I’m big into all things lunar, so I was thrilled to read the first installment of The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin’s new column on the Daily. Every month for the next year, MacLaughlin will publish an essay in advance of the ever-reliable occurrence that is the full moon; this month’s piece is aptly titled “Pink Moon,” which, I learned, is the designation in the Old Farmer’s Almanac for April’s biggest lunar event. It feels like a natural turn, then, to go from reading “Pink Moon” to listening to Nick Drake’s album of the same name. The third and last of Drake’s albums before his death at age twenty-six, Pink Moon is generally pegged as sad, which it is—I won’t argue that. It’s not, say, celebratory or particularly joyous, even if Volkswagen did deem the title track cheerful enough to use in a 1999 commercial. More than sad, though, the album strikes me on this week’s listening as lonely. It’s a sparse, stripped-down series of songs, composed almost exclusively of Drake’s vocals and a single acoustic guitar. The lyrics are so condensed as to approach the cryptic; they suggest a deep turn inward. But I find that there’s a sort of resonance between the stark, solitary nature of Pink Moon and MacLaughlin’s subject matter. Not lonely, perhaps, but always alone, the moon remains solidly singular, perpetually flying solo. —Mira Braneck

When it comes to the performing arts, there really is no substitute for the stage—the dark in the wings, the tactile reverberation of dialogue, the collective energy at curtain call. In the absence of these dramatic signatures, here is a standing ovation for Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside. The play follows Bella Lee Baird, a middle-aged creative writing professor at Yale, as she deals with a terminal cancer diagnosis and the sudden attention of Christopher Dunn, an ambitious and embittered undergraduate. While the story may have been best told during its Broadway run, the published version by Theatre Communications Group makes for a truly engaging read. I think the page serves these characters well partly because they are writers who address the reader (or audience) with the kind of narrative attention one might expect from a first-person novel—not so much breaking the fourth wall but ignoring it right from the start. Because this play is so much about the written word, it is nice to be able to slow down and lean into the nuances of Rapp’s language. But if you have a hankering for that performative edge, Audible just released a version narrated by the original cast members, Mary-Louise Parker and Will Hochman. Listening on the couch, eyes closed until the end, one could be forgiven for mistaking a lamp in the living room for the raising of houselights. —Christopher Notarnicola

 

Adam Rapp. Photo: Sham Hinchey.

Poets on Couches: Donika Kelly Reads Taylor Johnson

National Poetry Month is almost over, but the second series of Poets on Couches continues. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across distances.

“States of Decline”
By Taylor Johnson
(Issue no. 228, Spring 2019)

The room is dying honey and lemon rind.
Soured light. My grandmother sits in her chair

sweetening into the blue velvet. Domestic
declension is the window that never opens—

the paint peeling, dusting the sill, and inhaled.
It is an american love she lives in,

my grandmother, rigored to televangelists
and infomercials. Losing the use of her legs.

Needing to be turned like a mattress.
No one is coming for her. The dog is

asleep in the yard, her husband,
obedient to the grease and garlic

in the cast iron, salting her
death in the wind house.

 

Donika Kelly is the author of two collections of poems, Bestiary and The Renunciations. She teaches at the University of Iowa. Her poem “Dear—” appeared in the Winter 2018 issue.

Everything Writes Itself: An Interview with Black Thought

Black Thought. Photo: Erica Génécé.

In 2016, wearing a white shirt with tiny embroidered roses, Black Thought centered himself in front of a whispering audience at the Harvard Innovation Labs. He had just finished a conversation with host Michael Keohane about the hand-painted clothing he’d made as a young artist, his rise within rap music, and his eventual aspirations as an actor. To the delight of the campus crowd, he asked, “I can kick a rhyme?” Nudging up his glasses, he then unleashed five minutes of complex stanzas, double entendres, and expository verses. Somewhere within the burst of sentences, he veered into the biographical. “I got to see how gangstas played at such an early age. What my father was into sent him to his early grave. Then mom started chasing that base like Willie Mays … Trouble was my ball and chain.” And then, after a pregnant pause—“Black Thought is what that all became.”

Despite almost three decades of recorded material and myriad rhymes, Black Thought has remained low-key about his life offstage. Black Thought, a.k.a. Tariq Luqmaan Trotter, grew up alongside hip-hop itself. His first purchase at a record store was Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock. His early love of rap music gave way to an enduring interest in the written word. “I remember thinking how much I just loved writing,” he says. “I’d write all kinds of things down all day long. I was around nine years old when I tried to write my first rhymes.”

He spent his formative years at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts. During this time, a chance encounter with a young drummer, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, would change the trajectory of both their lives. The two, along with the rapper Malik B., formed the Square Roots, a name shortened to just the Roots by the time their first release, Organix, arrived in 1993. Running counter to hip-hop’s celebrated history with sampling, the Roots became known for their use of live instruments and a rotating lineup of band members. They experimented with sampling more in their later work, but live instruments were foundational to their ascent, and word spread about their exuberant stage show.

Their 1995 album, Do You Want More?!!!??!, and its 1996 follow-up, Illadelph Halflife, were springboards that took them around the globe for the next fourteen years—world tours, Woodstock, television, film, their very own music festival, even the White House—all of it halting somewhat when they became the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2009 (and eventually The Tonight Show). Collectively, the Roots have amassed more than twenty studio projects, live works, compilations, collaborations, and more. They’ve been nominated for fourteen Grammy Awards and won three, including one in 1999 for their juggernaut single “You Got Me.”

Throughout the Roots’ expansive catalogue, we’ve witnessed Black Thought’s maturation as an artist, his gravelly, aging voice and renewed boldness on recent material, all of it quite fitting of his sage persona and increasingly sermonic verbiage. There’d long been attempts made at solo projects over the years, but a perfect storm of industry semantics and gridlock deadened many would-be albums. The Roots’ Phrenology in 2002 was in fact a project whose entire framework was built around sketches intended for Black Thought’s solo debut. Phrenology signaled that Black Thought was undeniably emerging into his own, and his peers were taking notice.

In 2018, he released Streams of Thought, Vol. 1, the start of what has become a series of solo projects, each recorded with different producers. As expected, the Streams of Thought series represents a deviation from the material Black Thought has recorded with the Roots. Here, he’s more inward, more confessional, touching on topics like his family and his anxieties as an artist. To date, there have been three volumes, but a fourth is afoot—it seems to be ongoing, a living document that he’s committed to for the longterm. “Am I a journal or journalist? Olympic tournament–level genius author? Affirmative,” he rapped in a 2020 NPR Tiny Desk performance, sitting stoically in house slippers and dark glasses. He’s also been working on a Broadway adaptation of George Schuyler’s 1931 Afrofuturist satire Black No More, which he’s producing, writing music and lyrics for, and costarring in.

From our respective corners of the country, Black Thought and I spoke a couple of times over the past year, discussing watershed moments of his artistic growth, important Roots history, and the nucleus of his whole enterprise: his use of language and the written word.

INTERVIEWER

What are your earliest memories of rap music?

BLACK THOUGHT

I’m about the same age as hip-hop itself. Kool Herc and those guys started going back and forth on disco breaks in July or August of 1973, and I was born in October of that year. I was invented just a couple months after the breakbeat was invented. Some of my earliest memories are of breaks being spun at disco parties in the neighborhood. Music-wise, record-wise, though, it would be “Rapper’s Delight,” whenever that hit.

INTERVIEWER

When did your interest in writing begin? What sparked it?

BLACK THOUGHT

I was nine years old when I started writing. A rapper named RC LaRock got popular and really made an impression on me. He made me want to write actual rhymes. In 1980 he had a song called “Micstro” that was a huge influence in regards to my style. Then “Superrappin’,” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, came out, and they did a particular style that was comparable to what the girl group JJ Fad popularized on the song “Supersonic.” Then Kool Moe Dee and the Treacherous Three came out and influenced me a lot, too. But I remember “Superrappin’ ” in particular because it’s a serious record that starts out at a moderate pace. By the end of it, the verses are lightning fast. I wanted to write my first song in that same cadence.

INTERVIEWER

Your writing has such novelistic detail. What subjects interested you most in school?

BLACK THOUGHT

I was always really influenced by what I had to read. Even more than English and literature, I was influenced by history and social studies. I’ve always liked to write about people, and the ways of people, and the way we are. I like to write about humanity in whatever narrative I’m telling.

INTERVIEWER

Walk me through your writing process. Do you actively take notes and mark things down for later use? Are you constantly connecting swirling sentences in your head all day?

BLACK THOUGHT

These days I sit down and write on the computer or in the notes section of my phone. I was late to the whole electronic writing game, actually. I made fun of my counterparts for years and laughed at all the rappers I’d see writing shit in their phones. I was stubbornly analog for a long time. About a week ago I had time to go through all these old containers at my office. I found like twenty notebooks with original drafts of stuff I had written. A lot of Roots classics were in there—“Web,” “Rising Down,” “The Fire,” “Star,” and others. And that was just at first glance. I’m glad I held out for as long as I did because now I have all these notebooks to look at. It’s different from getting your music down digitally from the cloud. All that being said, I’m making a return to the pen and paper.

INTERVIEWER

When you write by hand, what do you use?

BLACK THOUGHT

I like to write in Five Star multisubject, spiral-bound notebooks. And I use a Pilot Dr. Grip retractable ballpoint. I also like the Fisher Space Pen. It’s what the astronauts use, and I like it because I can write upside down.

INTERVIEWER

How did you and Questlove first meet?

BLACK THOUGHT

It sounds cliché, but we met in the high school principal’s office. He was a year, maybe two years ahead of me. I was in trouble. He was not. [Laughs] He struck me as an odd fellow but also a serious musician. He had a super unique look, and his musicality really appealed to me. Then, when we kicked it, I noticed his extensive knowledge of breaks and how he knew the origins of so many songs that eventually became rap songs. He knew what that overall process looked like, and all of it was just the perfect missing piece to my personal creativity at that time. I was fourteen, I think.

INTERVIEWER

What were the early days of the Roots like?

BLACK THOUGHT

Questlove and I founded the Square Roots in 1987, when we were in high school. In our earliest incarnation, we were a duo who had other musicians float in and out of the equation as they were needed. After high school, we all went to college elsewhere, so it required a little more effort to keep the band together. Ahmir worked with other musicians, and I worked with other ones as well. Primarily, for me, that person was Malik B. Malik and I worked a lot together in those years when we were in school in upstate Pennsylvania. Eventually we left Millersville University and came back to Philly. It was a reunion for me and a new connection for Malik with Questlove. That was the first time they met in person. But even before that, when we were away at school, we would rap over beat tapes that Ahmir would send me in the mail. So once we cliqued up, it became Malik, Ahmir, and me.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned Malik, and we’d be remiss not to bring him up, especially with his recent passing. Tell me about your relationship and what will stand out to you most about your time together.

BLACK THOUGHT

The most striking thing for me—and I feel like for anyone whose life he touched—was that he was just a sweet person. He was gentle. He was always very curious, in a childlike way, his whole life. There’s something to be said about maintaining that curiosity because it’s something we lose as we become jaded adults. He never lost that. You know how when it comes to the stock market they say you should “ABC”—“always be closing”? Malik’s ABC was to “always be creative.” He literally wrote rhymes on the walls and doors of his house. He would go to sleep with hundreds of pages scattered around him in bed and wake up surrounded by these pages and pens and start writing again.

INTERVIEWER

I’d like to talk some more about the Roots’ earlier projects, the ones you cut your teeth on. You mentioned Organix as sort of a demo that became your first album. How did that come about?

BLACK THOUGHT

I remember having to record Organix out of necessity, because we had secured a gig to go perform in Germany and the people who hired us asked what kind of merch we had. At that time, we didn’t have anything to sell, so that prompted us to get T-shirts made and press up CDs. While we prepared the CDs, we recorded a demo. It wasn’t our first time recording—we had made rudimentary recordings and mixtapes and demos before. But this was the first time we went into an actual studio with a more knowledgeable engineer, and what began as just wanting to record five or six songs to burn CDs to bring with us to sell became something closer to seventeen or eighteen tracks. And what we thought would serve as our demo is now our first album. At the time it felt natural, and we didn’t overthink things. We went into it without specific intentions and made the record in a couple weeks.

INTERVIEWER

Looking back now, how did that time in your life feel? What do you remember most about that process?

BLACK THOUGHT

It felt magical—recording all night until daylight broke, then going home to sleep, and heading back there again in the morning. We didn’t know that that would become our eventual lifestyle, for all parties involved. We all sort of grew up from that point on and became studio rats. That approach to musicianship and creativity became a way of life. It became all that we knew.

INTERVIEWER

When was the last time you heard Organix?

BLACK THOUGHT

I haven’t heard Organix in years, but when I do, it’s by default. I’ll hear someone else listening to it, or someone sends me a link to something. It’s a little painful to hear my voice before it was developed, in the same way it’s painful for a musician to hear something they may have recorded when they were in school, or an actor to see their screen test reels. That said, I know what it has come to mean to so many people. So I don’t downplay it. It’s a part of my contributions to the arts. That’s my history, and that began the trajectory of the Roots. You never know what or how something you may consider a throwaway, or something considered a spur-of-the-moment, is going to affect someone else for years to come—or even the rest of their lives.

INTERVIEWER

And your development as a rapper and writer has grown hugely through the years. Let’s circle back to your rhymes and the process itself. You typically include a plethora of references in your stanzas. Do you consider yourself, for lack of a better term, a filter, of sorts?

BLACK THOUGHT

That’s exactly how I think of it because if it’s a play or a book or a song, whatever the medium is, it’s culture at the end of day. And I go through life like a sponge that soaks up everything. And eventually I pour everything out in my verses.

INTERVIEWER

How does being such a constant and prolific writer impact your daily life? Or does it?

BLACK THOUGHT

I’m always searching for that one word or one sentence or one remark, and I’ll let it sit with me, I’ll think on it, and I’ll later use it as a springboard for a verse. If I’m at an art exhibition, I’m closely reading the little description that accompanies a sculpture or painting. It just needs to be fly and maybe I’ll use it in a song somehow. I listen loosely to conversations, too. There’s something to be said about the conversational tone of a rhyme and how that can be the most accessible. That’s something I always strive for. Sometimes it’s more easily achieved than others. I’m always searching for what doesn’t sound contrived, something that feels like an organic conversation.

INTERVIEWER

If we were to open up your notebook right now, what would we find?

BLACK THOUGHT

Last night I wrote these words, and I don’t know what they have to do with one another, but I have a blank page, and in the center it says “vigilant enigma.”

INTERVIEWER

What are some things you think younger writers and rappers should focus on?

BLACK THOUGHT

I think a writer should always be aware of his or her surroundings. The material is there. It’s already in the world. You have to be in tune with it to hear it and see it. The best essays, the best books, all wrote themselves. Same with paintings and dances—all of the best art, all of that shit just comes from the universe. You have to master the art of being in tune enough when it’s time to create.

INTERVIEWER

What’s the process like when you’re in the room with a producer?

BLACK THOUGHT

Step one is really trying to dial all the way in to the emotion of the music that I’m writing to. There’s a specific tone that’s set by instrumentation, and I try to vibe with it on whatever level that resonates with me. So I basically try to rise to that same level of energy. I’m able to write or rap at the drop of a dime, but every verse isn’t always the best verse. I’m also conscious of the story that’s being told in the music before words even exist. I’m there to accompany it in the best way possible and to add my own color and dimension to the song. You can easily detract from the music if your approach isn’t right.

Sometimes it begins with music that is already further along, but in other instances, it’s a race against the clock in that I’m writing to something that has yet to reach its final form and my words are emerging at the same time as the track. The idea is that when the music takes its final shape, my words will be in the same place. What dictates one process or the other is the emotion and energy of the room and what happens organically between the producer and myself—or other musicians. It’s all about chemistry in that way.

INTERVIEWER

Does Black Thought get writer’s block? What do you do when your ideas bottleneck?

BLACK THOUGHT

I get writer’s block, for sure I do. There have been times when I’ve tried to force things that weren’t in the cards. But to me, those were just things that weren’t destined to be created in that moment. When I’m able to pause and breathe and reflect, becoming one with the music and with the universe, everything just writes itself. People have said things like, How did you think of that dope verse? And I’ll be like, I didn’t. I might’ve just thought of something five minutes ago, but I’ve had things in my head much longer than that. I’m constantly jogging my memory, and I can always build a song out of that. I mean, I can spit a verse and force something from nothing, but it wouldn’t resonate with anyone, as it would or could have, if it didn’t resonate with me first and foremost. Some stuff that you end up spending a lot of time on ends up on the cutting room floor. But sometimes the stuff you end up keeping is what just quickly occurs and comes to fruition on its own.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s talk about your solo releases, the Streams of Thought series. You’ve released three volumes already. Tell me about the next chapters and the main concept behind those projects.

BLACK THOUGHT

For me they represent a different dimension, a different frontier as an artist, where I’m able to be more vulnerable and more personal and tell stories that resonate on a more emotional level than some of the Roots’ stuff. I feel like I’ve built a career in the Roots in attempts of making myself a face for the faceless, or to represent the unseen, a voice for the voiceless. But this is my own voice, unadulterated and less compromised. I’ve intentionally made each volume an effort between myself and one other producer. The Roots has always boiled down to Ahmir and myself, and we’ve always had the majority vote even though it’s a collective. This is less of a collective thing than anything I’ve done in the past. It’s very personal. I would meet folks who told me they were fans since day one and always supported me and the Roots, but that in all of their years, they still felt like they didn’t know me well as a person—things like what makes me tick, where I come from, where I’m headed, where I see myself, what my process is. I feel like the Streams of Thought series represents all of that. 

INTERVIEWER

Have you been writing more with all that’s taken place in the past year or so?

BLACK THOUGHT

I haven’t been writing more, per se, but I’ve continued to write. I’ve been slightly more productive overall because I can sit still and finish what I started. Salaam Remi and I work well together, so we completed a few songs virtually as well.

INTERVIEWER

For me to get an even better sense of your process, can you share something you’re working on?

BLACK THOUGHT

Sure. The night before, I wrote, “We’re our ancestors’ wildest dreams. How we rose to the pantheon of kings, out of modest means. To advance beyond”—and then there’s a blank and a last line that just reads, “ … I believe.” So I’ll go back and fill in the middle portion that I left unfinished. From there, it might be tomorrow or six months from now, but I’ll look at that and see what kind of headspace I was in, and I’ll be able to construct a whole verse around it.

INTERVIEWER

A Black Thought guest verse is highly sought after. Have you been doing more features recently?

BLACK THOUGHT

Yes, I’ve been doing a lot on others’ projects—like a lot of features. I have twenty or so verses that I’ve been able to do recently just from working at home. I guess I just have a hard time saying no. [Laughs]

INTERVIEWER

Looking back just on the past few years of your career, how has your mental state been? Do you keep up with the news to inform your writing? In what ways do you think it’s impacted your art?

BLACK THOUGHT

With everything that’s taken place, sometimes it gets to be daunting. I definitely don’t watch the news as frequently or closely as I had before this past year because I feel like it’s inevitable at this point to be exposed to what’s going on even if I don’t watch it. More recently, I’d say in the past few weeks, I’ve tried to wean myself off social media as well. That being said, because I have children and work at The Tonight Show, there’s no escaping the news. The way it’s affected my psyche is that it’s pushed me into an ultracreative space. I’ve been writing and recording and reading as if the livelihood of myself and others depended on it—which it does, actually.

INTERVIEWER

What goes through your mind when you contemplate your legacy?

BLACK THOUGHT

I’m very conscious of what my legacy is going to be and what I’m leaving behind and what my contributions will be for generations to come. I’ve just been really conscious of that and just recording and being creative in multiple different mediums to solidify my legacy. I want to make sure I’m leaving my mark in a proper way that is most representative of what my evolution has been. This is as close to collapse as we’ve ever come in some ways, so I’ve approached this important time as I would if it were the end of the world.

 

David Ma is a longtime journalist whose work has appeared in Wax Poetics, NPR, the Guardian, The Source, Billboard, and others. He is part owner of Needle to the Groove Entertainment, cohosts Dad Bod Rap Pod, and maintains Nerdtorious.com, a repository and remnant from the blog era. He writes from the Bay.