I remember as a kid, aged eight or nine, watching The Apprentice on TV with my mom. I went to a Christian school (fundamentalist Baptist), so it seemed like something we weren’t supposed to be watching, but who doesn’t have their harmless little sins?
Month: February 2017
Someone’s in the Kitchen
Lucille told me not to come in the kitchen. In my young days when I wanted to watch her slice vegetables and pluck chickens, she warned: “This is no place for the likes of you. I’m telling you, standing next to me at this counter won’t get you nowhere at all. As good as looking a blind cat in the eye. And you know you don’t want to do that.”
But I did. I wanted to see that blind cat all the way through, into her milky eyes and beyond. Sacred it was, that kitchen: the shiny surface near the sink covered in blood, the gizzards and neck put aside to be fried later and eaten—Lucille’s special delicacy—and her tidying up after the mess of flour and butter, her thick batter where she rolled chicken breasts and thighs before frying them in the skillet at dinnertime for the “white folks.” That’s what she used to say, with a grin and a nod, adding: “But we get the good parts.”
Bloodland
Last November, I spoke with PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist John Edgar Wideman just before the publication of Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File. Wideman’s book—part history, part memoir, part fiction—begins with an investigation into the recently declassified details of the 1945 court martial and execution of Louis Till, a black private in the segregated U.S. Army stationed in Italy during World War II. Louis Till’s name surfaces rarely if at all as a footnote to the horrific, and much better-known story of his son, Emmett Till, an African-American teenager from Chicago who was kidnapped, bludgeoned almost beyond recognition, shot, and dumped in a river in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. As a distant precursor to his interest in Louis Till, Wideman recalls being haunted by the image of Emmett Till’s mangled face from the moment he saw it in Jet magazine in 1955. The young Wideman—then 14 years old, just like Emmett Till—found himself filled with dread by a single, unshakable thought: “That could have been me.”
Notes from the Resistance
We are on the side of the species’ eternal Life, our enemies are on the side of eternal Death. And Life will swallow them up, by synthesizing the two terms of the antithesis within the reality of communism.–Amadeo Bordiga
I
The night Trump was elected, there were celebrations on the streets of Juba, South Sudan.
Orson, a thirty year-old State Department employee, groped for a word from the nauseous pit of his groin–a groin inhabited by a succubus of pure fear–and found (implausibly, for an unconscious child of the Sokal Affair) “lumpen.”
Lumpen: a Marxist word, more or less.
Trump and Legitimacy
Let’s begin with the word “legitimate.”
