Wilson Harris

In this 2003 interview with Fred D’Aguiar, Wilson Harris speaks of place as character:

FD’A: A great magical web born of the music of the elements is how one may respond perhaps to a detailed map of Guyana seen rotating in space with its numerous etched rivers, numerous lines and tributaries, interior rivers, coastal rivers, the arteries of God’s spider. Guyana is derived from an Amerindian root word, which means “land of waters.” The spirit-bone of water that sings in the dense, interior rain forests is as invaluable a resource in the coastal savannahs which have long been subject to drought as to floodwaters that stretched like a sea from coastal river to coastal river yet remained unharnessed and wasted; subject also to the rapacity of moneylenders, miserable loans, inflated interest. READ MORE >

J. Robert Lennon’s Ward Six blog has something interesting at least twice a week. The latest post, “Forbidden things you can do anyway,” concerns:

an amusing exchange with a friend on facebook, a fellow teacher, who presently is grappling with inexperienced writers’ mistakes.  She has been citing the mistakes, and then I have been firing back with examples of really good fiction that uses the “mistake” to greater ends.  For instance, to “it was all a dream” I countered David Foster Wallace’s “Oblivion.”  “Everyone dies in a car accident at the end” reminded me of Charles Baxter’s “Saul And Patsy Are Getting Comfortable In Michigan” (although he did bring them back to life in a later story and novel).  And when my friend complained that her students don’t even know to start a new paragraph for dialogue from a new speaker, I threw down Stephen Dixon’s Interstate.

Reading it put me in mind of a beloved former teacher who intentionally pushed everyone’s dare-me buttons by passing out a list of twenty declarations about writing he called “The Rules” at the beginning of every new class, and no one ever seemed to notice amidst the grousing that Rule #20 was: You can do anything you want, so long as you can get away with it, or that none of his own stories strictly followed the prescriptive regime The Rules would imply.

This week in one of my classes, a student turned in a story that began: Here I am, facing the blank page, and someone said: You can’t do that. But I was thinking of the second paragraph of E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, which goes like this:

This is a Thinline felt tip market, black. This is Composition Notebook 79C made in the U.S.A. by Long Island Paper Products, Inc. This Daniel trying one of the dark coves of the Browning Room. Books for browsing are on the shelves. I sit at a table with a floor lamp at my shoulder. Outside this paneled room with its book-lined alcoves is the Periodical Room. The Periodical Room is filled with newspapers on sticks, magazines from round the world, and the droppings of learned societies. Down the hall is the Main Reading Room and the entrance to the stacks. On the floors above are the special collections of the various school libraries including the Library School Library. Downstairs there is even a branch of the Public Library. I feel encouraged to go on.

A young woman I know once wrote a beautiful story from the point of view of a wine glass that sat in a room where a pair of lovers were ruining themselves. READ MORE >

Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. It is populated by sartorial impresarios such as Julius Soubise, a freed slave who sometimes wore diamond-buckled, red-heeled shoes as he circulated through the social scene of eighteenth-century London, and Yinka Shonibare, a prominent Afro-British artist who not only styles himself as a fop but also creates ironic commentaries on black dandyism in his work. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.

Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity
by Monica L. Miller
(Duke University Press, 2009)