General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe author of one of my favorite novels ever tears American culture and correctness to shreds
In the late sixties, while we were still teenagers, my brother turned me on to one of the coolest novels I ever read. I think I went back and reread this one more times than any other book I have ever read. I hope the link does not end in a paywall. This man is an American icon: Ishmael Reed.
The interview goes on and on--lucky us!!!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/ishmael-reed-gets-the-last-laugh?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_072321&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9f7db2ddf9c72dc87eb5d&cndid=20545388&hasha=f024163ea28a2a887424d42e83165cb2&hashb=c6da299d1d5b4ccae7dff151037e2cbdfe37e807&hashc=00863475a7e9257be3bf82da28be937df6d9d1420610bc654ff80dba798872ff&esrc=5122_TRANSFER&utm_content=A&utm_term=TNY_Daily
brush
(53,776 posts)frazzled
(18,402 posts)Ishmael Reed has outwitted more than crows with his formidable powers of imitation. For half a century, hes been American literatures most fearless satirist, waging a cultural forever war against the media that spans a dozen novels, nine plays and essay collections, and hundreds of poems, one of which, written in anticipation of his thirty-fifth birthday, is a prayer to stay petty: 35? I aint been mean enough . . . Make me Tennessee mean . . . Miles Davis mean . . . Pawnbroker mean, he writes. Mean as the town Bessie sings about / Where all the birds sing bass.
His brilliantly idiosyncratic fiction has travestied everyone from Moses to Lin-Manuel Miranda, and laid a foundation for the freewheeling genre experiments of writers such as Paul Beatty, Victor LaValle, and Colson Whitehead. Yet theres always been more to Reed than subversion and caricature. Laughter, in his books, unearths legacies suppressed by prejudice, élitism, and mass-media coöptation. The protagonist of his best-known novel, Mumbo Jumbo, is a metaphysical detective searching for a lost anthology of Black literature whose discovery promises the Wests collapse amid renewed enthusiasms for the Ikons of the aesthetically victimized civilizations.
Its a future that Reed has worked tirelessly to realize. Mastermind of a decades-long insurgency of magazines, anthologies, small presses, and nonprofit foundations, hes led the fight for an American literature that is truly multiculturala term that he did much to popularize, before it, too, was coöpted. Through it all, Reed has asserted the vitality of Americas marginalized cultures, especially those of working-class African Americans. We do have a heritage, he once thundered. You may think its scummy and low-down and funky and homespun, but its there. I think its beautiful. Id invite it to dinner.
DFW
(54,370 posts)Somebody criticized me for being a one-man band, Reed told me. But what am I supposed to be, slothful? Since The Haunting, hes published a new poetry collection, Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues; a novel, The Terrible Fours; short pieces for Audible; and a steady stream of articles that settle old scores and commemorate departed friends, like the groundbreaking independent Black filmmaker Bill Gunn. (Their 1980 collaboration, Personal Problems, a metasoap opera about working-class Black life, is featured in a Gunn retrospective now at New Yorks Artists Space.) Nor has he been shy about public appearances, from acting in preliminary readings of his plays to performing as a jazz pianist at a London exhibition by the British designer Grace Wales Bonner. Models walked the runway in tunics emblazoned Ishmael Reed and Conjure, the title of an early poetry collection.
Theres a measure of defiance to his late-career productivity. Wary of being tethered to his great novels of the nineteen-seventies, Reed is spoiling for a comeback, and a younger generation receptive to his guerrilla media criticism may be along for the ride. Im getting called a curmudgeon or a fading anachronism, so Im going back to my original literature, Reed told me. In the projects, we had access to a library, and Id go get books by the Brothers Grimm. Now, he says, Im reverting to my second childhood. Im writing fairy tales.
A California literary institution who grew up in Buffalo and made his name in New York City, Ishmael Scott Reed was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His mother, Thelma, brought him into the world alone, amid considerable hardship, in 1938. In her autobiography, which his press published in 2003, she describes the young Reed as an inquisitive old soul who admonished his elders to start reading the newspaper and stop wearing expensive shoes. A superstitious friend noticed tiny holes in his ears and pronounced him a genius.
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In New York, Reed behaved like a green bumpkin, as he put it, earning the nickname Buffalo from a musician friend. But, within a year, he found a home in the Society of Umbra, a writers collective that published a magazine and was described by one of its founders, Calvin Hernton, as a black arts poetry machine. It was an ideologically fractious incubator of avant-garde expression, whose members included Lorenzo Thomas, N. H. Pritchard, and Askia Tourélater an influence on Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement. Reed shared an apartment with several of the groups protoBlack nationalists, but eventually chafed against their dogmatism; it didnt help, as he has written, that his hard-line roommates were sometimes unemployed while he worked part-time jobs to pay their rent. (Though he never joined the Black Arts Movement, Reed likes to say that he was its first patron.)
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I mean, this interview reads almost like a biographical novel. I'm pretty sure Yellow Back Radio is available almost everywhere. No matter what your ethnic background, it'll take you on a wild ride. Reed seems to hate labels as much as I do. Maybe that's why I like him so much.
DFW
(54,370 posts)The book was "Yellow Back Radio Broke Down."
Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)DFW
(54,370 posts)Pryor wasn't one for letting himself get confined by parameters set by other people, either.