Welcome to Litsy!

“Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion.” How prescient those words!
Often bleak, sometimes funny, always well written, these 8 stories of 8 black men (or 7 men and one boy) moved me. The final story, which I quote above, was perhaps my favorite. All will stay with me a long time.

A flawed, but incredibly powerful collection of stories.

It serves as a commentary on the Jim Crowe South…and also oddly on (the awkwardness of?) Communist idealism. It also has some beautiful use of idiomatic language, terrific characters, and insane dramatic tension. 

Etchings are by John Wilson for the story Down by the Riverside.
#RichardWright

Started a new book this morning.

#RichardWright is a planned 2023 theme for me. This collection of novellas was his first published book, originally published in 1938 and expanded in 1940.

But the photographs...

Called poetic or elegant prose, this is really a kind of historical manifesto on the crimes of America against African Americans, contextualized as an economic power struggle between the wealthiest (whites), and on the manipulation of poor white tensions by directing them towards white/black divisions. The photographs, almost all depression-era images from the FSA, are magnificent. Terrific text/photo combo.

Poirier‘s fact-dump on post-war Paris - 1945-1949 - is more like a biography on Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, but without getting too close. It‘s so fact dense, that it practically lacks a narrative. Unfortunately it‘s compromised on audio by a terrible effort that make no distinction of tone or subject changes. It becomes monotonous facts. They‘re deadening at their worst, but hit strides of fascination. My last audiobook for 2022.

Found this in my mailbox this morning, a 🕎 present for myself. I‘ve started reading. What the back of the book calls “beautiful prose” is so far a historical manifesto of the legacy of slavery, mixed with magnificent depression era FSA photography. Originally published in 1941.

So, this sentence may have stopped me: “Focusing on the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, then, this chapter explores how she employs ethnography to orchestrate the difficult task of offering a public articulation of African American identity and artistic production in the midst of twentieth-century U.S. global expansion and a growing sense of black modernity, which would eventually help enable the integration of black ⬇️⬇️

Trying out another library book. Might be too academic for me, but I‘m not sure. The intro is both very elegantly written and a bit challenging to read.

She covers Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Chester Himes. Wright got me here. I know almost nothing about Himes.

Good morning. Just took me 5 hours to work through this abbreviated but informative biography of Richard Wright, author of Native Son and Black Boy. He will be a 2023 theme for me. He was an independent spirit always. He grew up in the Jim Crowe south, became communist in Chicago & New York before moving to Paris. He never settled down, had numerous affairs, was watched by the CIA, and had some strange ideas at times. ⬇️⬇️

New audiobook - partially because Richard Wright is a subject, and partially because I found @batsy ‘s comment of interest on the book motivating. ☺️