Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of short fiction. Recent stories and essays were published in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, Surreal South, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and Best American Mystery Stories 2008.
Gypsy/Romany/Traveler Photographs by Lyn Smith, from the DX Collection
How do you study a people who don’t have a fixed national home, about whom there is no scholarly consensus about how to define the object of study, and who largely don’t want to be studied in the first place? That’s the difficult task faced by David J. Nemeth, ethnographer, “radical geographer,” and curator of the DX collection at the Carlson Library of the University of Toledo, where you can peruse photographs, video and audio recordings, blogs, and bibliographies related to the study of Gypsies, Romanies, and Travelers.
Madison Smartt Bell, badass
I’ve spent every minute, day, week, fortnight I can beg, borrow, or steal in Haiti for the last three years. I went the first time because a film director had enticed me to go in preparation for a proposed project for which I was to write the screenplay, but then pulled out at the last minute when the book he wanted to option fell through (the author unfortunately was booked on the Oprah show and had dollar signs in his eyes). By then I had been studying my Pimsleur language tapes (woefully inadequate), my Edwidge Danticat stories (magic on paper), and my C.L.R. James (men in chains, severed heads on posts, quills dipped in skulls filled with the blood of white men), and it was love from afar. I had to go, so I started going, and I’ve been going ever since.
Most the time I’m in Ouest Province — Port-au-Prince, Petionville, Fermathe, Callebasse, Artiste, Barette. But this summer I traveled north for the first time, to Cap Haitien, near where King Henri Christophe hired an Italian architect to build him the most beautiful royal complex in the Western Hemisphere, bid him adieu, then sank the architect’s boat in the harbor with his cannons, so he would never be able to build anyone else anything like what he had built for Henri Christophe.
I’ve tried my best to experience Haiti as the Haiti I am experiencing, through the filter of my own experience and through the eyes of the friends I have made in Haiti, rather than on the terms set by books. But it was difficult to visit Cap Haitien and not be constantly in mind of its foremost American interpreter, Madison Smartt Bell, whose trilogy of the revolution set a standard for precision and exhaustiveness that the rest of our practitioners of historical fiction have yet to match, and whose uncollected essays on Haiti reflect a degree of insightfulness I doubt I’ll be able to achieve twenty or thirty or a hundred years from now unless I finally give in to an impulse my family considers dangerous and move to Haiti for good.
An excerpt from Bell’s “Miroir Danjere,” an essay about vaudou, a religious expression to which Bell has become an acolyte:
According to the vaudou beliefs in which the country has been saturated since the time of slavery, the ocean surrounding Haiti is a mirror, whose surface divides the world of the living from the world of the dead. The division is not absolute, however, for in vaudou as in the African religions from which it springs the dead do not depart, but remain present and available for communion with the living. It’s fortunate that no one really dies in Haiti, since it has always been a bloody place. READ MORE >
1. She brought him what she had promised, and they did it in his car, on the top floor of the car park, looking down onto the black flat roofs of buildings, and she said, or thought she said, “I like your skin,” when what she really liked was the color of her father’s skin, the mottled white of his arms and the clay color at the roots of the hairs along his arms.
2. I once saw a man hook a walking stick around a woman’s neck.
3. She was out of practice, and he wanted practice, so they started kissing each other, and they called it practicing, this kissing that occused him.
4. I date an old man, a man so old, I am afraid to see what he is like under his clothes. READ MORE >
Bill Roorbach — nature writer, story writer, elder statesman, and Mr. Companionable (if his literary voice is to be trusted) — has shed the curmudgeonly Luddite persona he adopted in the early years of the Internet. Big time, too. Together with David Gessner, editor of Ecotone (which is a damn good magazine), he’s launched Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, where he’s blogging, trading punches (but mostly kisses) with Gessner, and, best of all, posting a massive “video memoir” in irregular installments, as he completes the installments. The project, titled “I Used to Play in Bands,” chronicles his present family-man life in rural Maine alongside reminiscences of his wilder past life as a carpenter, piano player, and aspiring writer in New York and other places. It’s simply done, and strangely hypnotic.
Here’s Chapter 13. To see the rest, you’ve got to visit I Used to Play in Bands.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ5YQPVCb4Q&feature=player_embedded
Sentence One of V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River:
“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
Density of White People in New York, WIMBY v. NIMBY series, Bill Rankin, 2010
Bill Rankin’s maps are not only representations of physical landscapes. They also attempt to explain how people live in the places they live, and the social and political implications of what his maps show is difficult to dodge. The maps are confrontational. They uncover the everyday things that our individual geographic habits might hide from us. To see more of Rankin’s maps, click here.
The map above is part of Rankin’s WIMBY v. NIMBY series, which he describes like so:
Another take on the fragmented racial landscape of American urbanism, inspired a bit by Debord’s classic cut-up psychogeographical maps of Paris. Segregation creates cities-within-cities, islands and seas of inclusion and exclusion.
All maps show the same portion of greater New York — an area about 40 miles square, centered on Manhattan.
Compared to other American cities, however, New York does have many areas of genuine diversity, where the well-armed not-in-my-backyarders compete with the fiesty and loosely organized welcome-into-my-backyard brigade. The battle of the NIMBYs and the WIMBYs continues apace.
Note: “Diversity” here indicates the chance that two randomly chosen residents will be of different races or ethnicities — i.e., the Gibbs/Martin/Blau index of diversity. All data from the 2000 U.S. Census.
Apprentice Oulipian
A Coat
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eye
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
A Coating
I made my songbird a coating
Covered with embryos
Out of old nags
From heifer to thrombosis;
But the feet caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyeball
As though they’d wrought it.
Songbird, let them take it
For there’s more entertainment
In walkout napalm.
Silkscreen collaborations between Kurt Vonnegut and Joe Petro III
A few years before Kurt Vonnegut died, I paid a visit to the studio of Joe Petro III of Lexington, Kentucky. Petro was Vonnegut’s late-life collaborator on several series of silkscreened art based upon Vonnegut’s drawings, some of which were new, and some of which were elaborations upon the drawings he had incorporated into middle-period-and-later books such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Hocus Pocus.
Petro generously offered me a tour of his studio, where, in addition to his work with Vonnegut, he had completed work for the likes of Ralph Steadman and Greenpeace. The Greenpeace work had caused him some problems, so he was a little nervous about people knowing where he lived. Nonetheless, he wanted to do his part to champion the work that had become the passion of Vonnegut’s late life, so he consented to an interview, and then he consented to put me in touch with Vonnegut, who had indicated that he, too, was willing to yammer with a nobody such as I was, so long as that yammering was about drawings and silkscreenings. READ MORE >
Note the similarities (and, as importantly, the differences) between the openings to Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be An Other Woman” (from Self-Help, 1985) and Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” (from Drown, 1996), a story that seems to this reader to be written in homage, ten years later, to Moore’s story. Both stories are from debut collections, both collections introduce voicey masters to the world, both masters continue to write deeply idiosyncratic work subsequently, but usually not in second person:
From Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be an Other Woman” READ MORE >