mensah demary

“Publish more books for men and boys,” he urges, but if all those women editors are so blinkered about what men and boys find interesting, how can we expect them to make the right choices? More at Salon.

Call it a lack of interest, but my town’s local bookstore closed about two years ago. A mom and pop shop. I assumed a chain store would swoop in to save the day, but no dice. As of today, there are no bookstores in my little burg (there’s still the library, thank God). My wife to be and I, both avid readers and writers, take a monthly trip 30 miles north to the nearest bookstore. A trip with a new adventure every time.

As we entered the store, I couldn’t help myself. A kiosk for the Nook awaited. My WTB’s opinion on e-readers is pretty straightforward.

“They solve a problem that doesn’t exist.” Fair enough.

Still, I picked it up and I was a little impressed. Nonetheless, I recently found gadget religion: it must do more than one thing…and do each thing well. No Nook for me. Anything it can do, my DROID can do as well (or, in the case of the web browser, better).

Technological advances out of the way, we returned to old fashioned books. I rarely go in looking for a specific title. The titles come to me as I browse.

I saw the paperback of Big Machine (read the hardcover edition. Dope). “Maybe they have The Ecstatic.”

No.

Still, I looked around. Maybe someone placed it on the wrong shelf. Maybe on the endcaps. Maybe behind the front desk.

No means no.

Viva la interwebs: without the blogs and feeds, I wouldn’t know about the newest releases. I found a hardback of Next which, according to the internet, was supposed to dope. Book 1 acquired.

The rest of the sections let me down: poetry, comic books, biography, fantasy. My WTB found me wandering about. Then, it was as if seeing the reds and blues of a circus: sudden and attention grabbing. The both of us realized we never perused the Young Adult section. As we browsed, I said to her, “Now we know where the old lit fiction budgets are going.”

Beautiful and inventive covers, snappy titles and the blurbs with actual exciting plots: the section was alive with teens and adults ravaging the shelves. My WTB hands me a copy of Little Brother.

“His (Marcus) whole world changes when, having skipped school, he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.”

Book 2 acquired. My first YA purchase.

In line to check out, I’m staring at the Moleskine journals when my WTB asked, “Would you ever write a YA novel?”

“I don’t know,” I said. The immediate feeling of illegitimacy ran through me. Write for teens since you can’t write for adults. Irrational, but a true representation of my thought at the time. And I doubt the thought is exclusive to me.

It later occurred to me that most of my stories, at the least the ones I like, tend to involve teenagers. The main character in my first (and dead) novel was a teenager. Being new to the genre as a reader, I don’t know if a teenage protagonist equates into a YA story. Would Catcher In The Rye qualify? If that’s the case, throw in …Oscar Wao while you’re at it. That is to say, something’s missing; consider me “YA-curious” at the moment.

In light of Malcolm X’s assassin being released from prison…

In our household, Malcolm X’s name came up with Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks. Our “big three”, though I’m sure it differs from home to home. What I knew of him was limited to whatever my parents said and scholastic blurbs read during Februaries. In 1992, Spike Lee did this child a favor by directing X starring Denzel Washington. I consider the movie to be a template for all biopics: with three hours, Lee did as much as he could to avoid deviations between life and art. Which explains, in part, Lee’s need to shake people down for funding.

For the next seven years, I regarded X as the definitive work on Malcolm X’s life and death. It wasn’t until 1999, at age seventeen, that I got around to reading the actual source material for the movie, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (written alongside Alex Haley). It’s funny how books find you at the precise, formative period in your life.

At seventeen, I started to write. I (finally) found pleasure in reading. And I was angry. Though never wronged by any white person at the time, little things annoyed me: loose use of the word “ghetto,” which still grates my ears today, rancorous debates on the legitimacy of affirmative action and, of course, lingering dissatisfaction with the OJ Simpson trial. Maybe it took me longer than others, but I started to notice white privilege. I never went without, my parents were (and remain) professionals and I had, by all accounts, a pedestrian childhood. Still, I noticed differences—an air of entitlement that seemed not only undeserving and self-serving, but also smug.

So consider The Autobiography of Malcolm X as an accelerant. How can I convey the significance this book played in my life and, indeed, in the lives of other black boys and girls? If one were to read the narrative as though it were fiction, Malcolm Little’s arc went from poor, yet intelligent child to, in the end, a man free to think and move per his will.

The consistent theme in the book was his willingness to abide by anything that could provide him a modicum of self-worth. This was the character’s weakness: floating from crime to drug addiction to the Nation of Islam—the character wanted to belong, even among those on the bottom rung of society. It took excommunication from the Nation and a subsequent hajj to Mecca for Malcolm X to see that, as a man, even a black man, he was free to follow his own thoughts and dreams. That he stumbled on these notions toward the end of his life makes the story all the more tragic. And poignant.

If I found myself disenchanted with my fellow white students before I read the book, I was downright incorrigible afterward. The book left me raw. Any slight was treated by me as an indictment on people of African descent worldwide. I eventually adopted a new name, grew out my hair and set off on a three year bout with Afrocentricity. I was already hateful. Malcolm X’ s autobiography made it worse. Later, I realized I wasn’t alone in my hyperbolic reaction.

In speaking with my older brothers and friends, they too exploded. What we learned, as the flames cooled, was the true, lasting power of his autobiography—Malcolm X became “free” when he stopped making excuses. His life was an allegory for people of color’s response to this world’s wanton brutality: you can hide behind drugs and crime, you can protect yourself with religion and inciting rhetoric, you can be mad if you want—or you do the little things to improve the world…or, at least, yourself.

Upon read his story, my life didn’t change: I’m still mad, on occasion; I’m not particularly religious; I love menthol cigarettes. But there was a change, one so profound I still haven’t realized it yet. And maybe I won’t. Malcolm X almost didn’t realize it. So goes the hope of, ironically, a happy ending.

I don’t believe new writers—at least not the ones I’ve met—search their hearts for the source of their creative inclinations and hear a voice that says, “Serial killers.” More @ 3:17 AM

I’ve devoured six books in March: Reality Hunger, The Possessed, Miles From Nowhere, On Beauty (finally), The Road and Edinburgh…and the first collection of The Astonishing X-Men (make that seven*…more on that in a few). Amid stressful days at work and frustrating, Hulk-angry writing sessions at night, a good book—or seven—helped to take the edge off. I didn’t set out to read so many books. One after another, I jumped from world to world…just because.

Writers read.

I took this piece of Craftwork to heart some time ago, so I made it a mission to read more, to expand my horizons. And one day while journaling, I stumbled upon a personal, writerly truth, a phantasmal whisper in my ear, familiar and distant beforehand. Ah, the wonders of an imagination stuffed with literature. Good works truly do linger in mysterious ways; they help strip away the lies written in one’s penmanship.

The pivots required to read, in succession, Nami Tun, Zadie Smith and Alexander Chee (give this man more airtime), brought my twisting, breakdancing ass toward the precipice and, peering over the cliff, I asked myself, “Do I want to be a writer or a storyteller?”

Which brings me to The Astonishing X-Men. Admittedly, I’m out of touch with the X-Men mythos (apparently Jean Grey is dead and Emma Frost is co-leader with Cyclops…o rly?). I bought it in part because Joss Whedon wrote the first 24 issues, in part because superpowers and such were on my brain. I miss comics to some degree, but I also miss entertaining stories. Thought-provocation is cool with me; move me and whatnot.

But can I make a black woman powerful and human at the same time? Can she fly and feel no need to save the world? No costumes, no over-exaggerated virtues. She sometimes wants to fuck, hates her job, struggles with self-esteem, deals with getting called out of her name by disrespectful men on corners and one day, poor girl, she comes across a narrator that hurls her into a dramatic situation for entertainment purposes only. So…is it okay if she uses what God gave her like, well, defiance of gravity? Can I suspend belief and simultaneously remind you that the world is both unforgiving and wondrous? May I?

These are more questions I asked myself, FYI.

Listen. Cheers to you literary craftmasters. Indeed, I am happy for you and yes, I will let you finish, but I would also like to say that my desires lie elsewhere, methinks.

Literary fiction, on some level, remains my bag: I overthink, overreach with my language and Oh, Oh how I love to spin words, commas & ampersands into coagulated blobs of paragraphic acrobatics. Look ma, no spell check!

There’s a reason YA got the game in the Cobra Clutch right now. Readers are too fucking smart, too saturated with real-time, real world tidbits to depend on, of all things, a story or a novel to shed light and insight on humanity’s deeper perversions. Straight up, people are broke and scared and worn down to the nub. YA is good marketing. Young Adult. Just nebulous enough to trick grown people to imagine like children and teenagers. Harry Potter and Bella: I’m not shocked anymore. People want to escape: fuck the world, we’re going to Pandora. In 3D!

I want to be both: writer and storyteller. Reading seven books in a row is like committing all the sins at once. Disoriented and stupid, momentarily lucid and consistently loopy: my neural cables have track marks (indicated by wayward adverb usage). It’s frustrating to want to create. Yeah yeah yeah, you know this (know this); going from mind to first draft is like believing you can fly, only to find out you can, at best, glide back to Earth.

Tapping one’s imagination can be equally difficult, depending on certain factors: refusal to infuse hip-hop and mutants and black skin and monsters and banality and do it all in a way akin to the opposite of proper. So when I read my stories and wonder why my characters seem to stand still, should I be surprised? Why dance if the DJ isn’t even poplocking to the beat?

And when I asked myself, “Well gee, why haven’t I read more of what I like,” it occurred to me that I can’t find the stories because they don’t exist because I haven’t written them yet. Word to Toni Morrison, I’m getting the gist.

*actually, eight books…Dance Dance Dance.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they’re running on medicinal-strength Updike. More @ The New Yorker.

“The shock of Terry McMillan is that they didn’t know there were millions of black and white readers interested in the lives and heartaches of upper-middle-class black women.” More @ NYT.

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

Plots are for dead people.

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

A seemingly scatterbrained collage of quotes and one-liners, Reality Hunger will do two things: cause hissy-fits at your local literary social and add swagger to postmodernists desperate to usher in new forms with a stab. How can I best summarize it? Author David Shields contends that nonfiction books, in particular memoirs, are no more factual than novels, and argues the memoir belongs on the same shelf as other works of fiction.

Conversely, the lyric essay, to quote Shields (who quoted Deborah Tall and John D’Agata of the Seneca Review), “gives primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information, forsaking narrative line, discursiveness, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation. [...]The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme.”

From this, Shields posits a literary form more suitable to today’s neo-tastes than, say, The Corrections or A Million Little Pieces; the latter showcased as an indictment of sorts, but toward the reader, a sort of finger-point to the consumer as to say, “Well of course he lied. And your point??” Shields doesn’t defend Frey per se, but does prop Frey and his flogged ilk to suggest that the masses are primed for the literary equivalent of reality TV: slanted, self-centered brevity.

An altruistic desire, in my opinion, because it gropes at a future when “I” is a forwardslash between writer and reader, without the murky business of plot and expository filler stuffed in novels, short stories and memoirs. The writer uses himself as the protagonist, the world’s a stage and the words bring forth that catalytic jumpstart inside the reader’s mind. Fair enough.

There is, however, the issue of the book’s construction.

“The progress of artistic growth in many media,” Shields wrote, “is being hindered, like those poor pine trees in alpine zones able to grow only a few weeks each year. For writers and artists who came of age amid mountains and mountains of cultural artifacts and debris: all of this is part of their lives, but much of it is off-limits for artistic expression because someone ‘owns’ it.”

Well yes, if use of these “cultural artifacts” are pilfered without attribution. The creation of a copyright-less Wild West is tantalizing, though perilous and it is difficult to understand Shields’ true motives for offering the idea in the first place. Never mind compensation for cited works. Shields’ world supposes its citizens would do the right thing, a pinky swear to give a head-nod to the originator(s) of the source material.

More importantly, quoting ad nauseam, as the case in Reality Hunger, conveniently tucks away the author’s opinion on the matter at hand. So easy, so tempting to say in the face of legitimate criticism, or a simple question, “Well, those aren’t my words. That’s not what I meant.” Where is the risk associated with using one’s own words? Where’s the moral stiffness in one’s back when the author-as-character, the slanted “I”, chooses to explain (or not) the use of this word or that phrase?

A parry of literary and critical ownership, a case of “Yeah, I said it” versus “Yeah, I may have meant that through proxy” castrates the idea, the author. Or more colloquial, a reader is left to question if the author truly has the balls to stand on his own, cast aside the rhymes he bit off contemporaries and classic masters alike, and answer for his unfettered stance.

Though the book remained entertaining, this is my primary beef with Reality Hunger and the new era it investigates. Pages 211 – 219 contain the appendix, the bibliography, the primer needed to decode and reveal Reality Hunger as a provocative theorem rendered as a well-researched, painstakingly cobbled book of quotes, similar to those slim, flimsy, cheerful books given for Christmas when Best Buy is out of gift cards. I wanted Shields, I got musings from Nabokov, Walk The Line and DJ Spooky. Reality Hunger and its author had no balls.

A stylistic choice to illustrate the idea, not the word, as all important, the quotes thrust Shields into the realm of “unreliable narrator,” one that is readily available to fiction writers and poets, but not to lyric essayists or, in general, creative nonfiction writers. It raises the question: Why? Creative nonfiction, in all its forms, leaves room for restraint, to withhold backstory in the name of immediacy, while simultaneously inviting the nonfiction writer, the essayist, into the story, a “come hither” for personal expression beyond literary acrobatics.

So why the need for avatars—akin to characters in a novel—to assert an opinion wholly believed, if not entirely understood? Reality Hunger is a “spiral in on itself,” a display of the author’s certainty in what he feels, but not what he knows, as his truth. Creative nonfiction, lyric essay, at its finest.

Shields’ ideas will set the stage for much needed discussion into literature and its relevance to a world dominated by streams of image and sound. There is urgency in Shields’ work, a sense that writers must abide by the times, must find new in-roads to readers, and should consider how to navigate this new, interconnected world without compromise of one’s artistic integrity.

The quotes, however, blunts the message, buffers the messenger. Expression doesn’t blossom, it only sprouts as crabgrass. A simple “I think that” or “In my opinion” would’ve allowed the manifesto to bellow, rather than whimper amid a cacophony of voices foreign to the author. It’s not enough to hint at an idea and let others do the talking. The “I” in Reality Hunger was slanted until I realized I was looking at it, and Shields, sideways.

Book published by Knopf, 2010.

Memoirist Sue William Silverman: “It is voice, then, in all its manifestations, that examines multiple and mysterious facets of a persona: the real ‘you’ deepened into a character.” More @ creativenonfiction.org