Between The World And Me

I have read the most glorious books so far this year that I am hesitant to keep reading for fear of breaking the streak.

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Between the World and Me

My Documents

David Benem Excerpts

All very different and all written by people different than me (other than Benem, who is only bigger than I am and drinks Bud Select in I unfathomable volumes. But all brilliant.

I love to travel because it opens my eyes to the beauty and suffering in the world and helps me appreciate my easy (albeit hectic) life. But reading is almost better because writers can take us to places with depth and forethought that my scattershot "travels" often lack. I can observe the poverty of the Deep South but I cannot experience the lack of opportunity for someone born there without reading about it from someone who has lived it. I can visit Ferguson but not experience the loss of a mother who invested he love and 18 years of time and treasure in a son, only to see this asset gunned down and gone forever. But writing takes you there.  

The book "Between The World and Me" is Coates letter to his son. Toni Morrison called it "required reading" and while initially suspicious, I can only echo that sentiment. Coates refers to people like me (and probably you) as "dreamers" who have had an entire reality system constructed around us to keep us from waking up and having to confront the the obvious truth and ugliness of what we have created and profited from. He derides me for my obliviousness and pushes me, but not to action. He makes very clear that what has been done by our country in regard to the black race cannot be "fixed”, at least not quickly and by half measures.  Instead he shoves me to thought and conversation, intolerant of denial and remaining in the comfortable sleep of a dreamer.

He starts the letter when his 15 year old son retires to his room to be alone after hearing that the killer of Michael Brown will not be charged… with anything.

To begin,  he outlines his own life to his son, negotiating violence in his home, in his school and on the street. Never having the luxury of being asleep but always awake to the possibilities of harm should he ever not be alert, afraid, paying attention. To always be awake to the taking of his body and the bodies of others.  Then he recounts how he went to Howard University (the Mecca) and first experienced the depth of black culture and community. How he had to be awoken from that by a fellow student, unarmed and gunned down outside of his suburban home by an undercover police officer.

He displays the lessons for his son not to call his son to anger and violence but to incite awareness and understanding that he will not, cannot and should not ever be a dreamer but by the necessities of our societies plunder of his race and his body must instead be vigilant, and appreciative and also... most importantly to find joy.

This is a humbling letter and many of us don't want to read it but we should. We cannot "fix" our nations history of enslavement, rape, and systemic, organized, relentless exploitation and marginalizing of black people in America. We can seek to understand it amd discuss it and OWN it.

It is a sad book to have to write to ones own son. But it is a beautiful picture of a father urging a son, his son, his joy, towards a life of understanding, meaning and appreciation of his own beauty and the beauty of an ugly, broken sinful world.

Not for the squeamish but an important book never the less.  To read it is to be humbled and perhaps to be called to greater understanding, a non-dismissive understanding iof what it is like to e called “equal” and yet find over and over again that you are “other”.

The Sellout

Soooo.... this might just be a book review this year.  But probably not.  Politics is exhausting, Iowa is tomorrow and for all the passion, all the talk of precipice and disaster... I would rather read something.  My law school classmate Richard Dooling recommended this to me.  He knows my tastes and in the first ten pages I admired the authors style... his..."patter".  Beatty immediately establishes a tone and a cadence which separate his prose out from the pack.

I don't know if it s "post Ferguson" book.  I rather doubt it because it is too lovingly scripted to have just come about in the last year and a half.  The story is narrated by a young black man who recalls growing up in urban LA in a town that has since been swallowed up, called "Mitchell".  If this were not odd enough the man's father and then the narrator himself farms land in this urban wasteland and he takes pains to point out through the book, is not a wasteland at all.

The book revels in blackness.  I cannot recall if there is single white character other than perhaps the police who wade in occasionally and with impact.  His father is a self schooled intellectual and an expert on the black struggle who raises his son on books and pop quizzes about America, racism and history and is a great case for the premise that no one impacts a child's upbringing like his or her parents.  His father holds court in the neighborhood with a group of like minded characters at Dum Dum Donuts and they hold forth, big time one another and solve the worlds problems.  This west coast, black Algonquin Round Table features his fathers cohort and nemesis, Foy Chesire who rights blackcentric rewrites of American classic literature. for example, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn becomes “The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.”  You get the idea.

When the narrators father is "Accidentally" shot by the police he takes on his fathers mantle locally and also has a sidekick who is the narrator's slave named Hominy.  Hominy is the sole surviving "Little Rascal" and he adds sadness, humor and weirdness to an already offbeat story as the narrator attempts to date, surf, recreate the town of Mitchell and re-segregate schools to challenge ALL thoughts on race, racism and the American dream. 

It is a funny book and sad book and above all a well written book which causes people like myself, who have the best intentions, to evaluate where this intentions and instincts come from and whether they are real empathy for the sufferings of others or does that empathy just serve to allow us to maintain the status quo and feel bad about it with our half hearted hearts.  There is nothing half hearted about Beatty's book and it a really good literary read.  It is also an easy read.  Buy it.