Wallace Shawn at The Quarterly Conversation

I'm happy whenever one of my favorite playwrights, Wallace Shawn, gets some attention.  Andrew Ervin has written an interesting personal essay at The Quarterly Conversation about Shawn and white privilege, his thoughts sparked by Shawn's latest publications, Essays and Grasses of a Thousand Colors.

I wrote about those two books and Shawn's whole career as a writer for the most recent print issue of Rain Taxi.  While you'll have to get your hands on the dead tree magazine itself to read it all (for now), here are three paragraphs from it to whet your appetite...

Rain Taxi Auction

Rain Taxi Review of Books is a marvelous magazine, and they've just begun their annual auction, which is an event I always look forward to because of the wide variety of items they have to offer, including dozens of signed books.

The new print issue of RT includes an essay I wrote about the work of Wallace Shawn, a playwright and essayist whose face and voice many people know from some of his iconic roles in movies and TV shows, but whose writing is vastly less known -- he's one of those writers who is more popular outside of his native country than in it.

Aside from a couple short stories that are currently wending their way through the submission process, my major writings since this summer have been the Shawn essay for RT and the essay on Coetzee for The Quarterly Conversation. The effect of spending so much time reading and re-reading the writings of both men is obvious in my latest Strange Horizons column, "On the Eating of Corpses".

Summertime and Coetzee's Countervoices

An essay I wrote on J.M. Coetzee's autobiofictional memoirs, including his latest book, Summertime, has been posted in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation. (I'll note here that the title and the section titles in the essay are not mine: my original, preferred title was "Awakening the Countervoices in One Self: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of the Author", but that's not really very descriptive, so I can see why the change was made. Similarly, I left the sections untitled, but I've titled subsections before, so it's more consistent this way.)

Here's a taste:

In its form and subject matter, Summertime has more in common with Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year than Boyhood and Youth, but some of its central concerns are the same, and it is possible to see the John Coetzee who is the topic of Summertime as an adult version of the John Coetzee who is the protagonist of Boyhood and Youth (if we assume the protagonists of those books are the same John Coetzee . . .). In many ways, Summertime unites the strategies of the recent books with the earlier ones—not only Boyhood and Youth, but Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Foe, The Master of Petersburg, and Doubling the Point.

As usual, this is a rich and diverse issue of TQC -- deserving particular attention is "Translate This Book!", in which dozens of translators, writers, editors, publishers, agents, journalists, etc. offer one title not available in English that they wish were.

Anthologies of African Literature(s)

The new issue of The Quarterly Conversation has been posted, and, as with every issue, it's full of interesting stuff (of special note is Scott Esposito's big essay on the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, but there's tons of other good material, too, including a consideration of the intersections of fiction and autobiography in the works of Janet Frame, to me one of the essential writers of the 20th century. Oh, and a review of the new translation of Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit. Haven't read Platonov? You must!)

The piece that has, for the moment, most caught my attention is a review by Geoff Wisner of Rob Spillman's anthology Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing. I just got a copy of this book, and have been looking through it eagerly, because I know Spillman (the editor of Tin House) cares deeply about African literature and has developed real knowledge of it, having spent time on the continent and having worked with numerous writers there. Thus, his take on contemporary African literature promised to be an interesting one.

A quick glance at the table of contents of the book, though, and I wasn't so sure -- half of the pieces are excerpts from novels (over half if you include Helon Habila's story "Lomba", which is part of Waiting for an Angel), no poetry is included, and the whole thing is a little over 300 pages long. The selections are arranged by geography and language, with sections for north, south, east, and west Africa as well as Francophone and "Former Portuguese Colonies" (here, Mozambique and Angola), and each section begins with an essay. Thus, this is primarily a collection of African fiction, and is more a sampler than anything else. It is clearly aimed at an audience that is unfamiliar with African lit -- Spillman includes a short chronology of "a few key dates to keep in mind" in his introduction, and each section is prefaced with a map. I started reading the pieces I wasn't already familiar with, and enjoyed each of them. I decided to relax a bit -- "You are not," I told myself, "the right audience for this book." I needed to see the book for its intentions, not my desires for it -- I yearn for there to be more comprehensive anthologies of African literatures, and because this is not such an anthology does not mean it doesn't serve a useful purpose or offer plenty of good stuff to read.

Geoff Wisner is the wrong audience for the book, too, but more qualified than I to really assess it, since he is the author of A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books that Capture the Spirit of Africa (which I have not read; here is his African reading list), and so has given plenty of thought to how to introduce unfamiliar readers to the variety of literatures the continent has produced. I found myself mumbling, "Yes, yes, yes..." as I read his review. For instance, he notes one of my first hesitations, the oddity of including Chinua Achebe's classic essay "The African Writer and the English Language" and not an essay by, for instance, Ngugi wa Thiong'o in response -- there has been, for decades, a passionate debate among all sorts of different post-colonial writers about English, native languages, etc., and to offer only one perspective on it, even one as nuanced as Achebe's, does not admit the debate and thus distorts the context. (While chanting my mantra, "You are not the right audience for this book..." the only choice of Spillman's that really bothers me is this one. For some more background on this and other complexities of the topic, see, for instance, African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory or Transition 75/76.)

One thing that Wisner does not note, probably because Spillman likely had no say in it, is the book's cover. In the introduction, Spillman quotes Binyavanga Wainaina's famous and brilliantly sarcastic essay "How to Write about Africa", but doesn't quote from the second paragraph: "Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these." No naked breasts or prominent ribs, but we do have a child with a gun and the shadow of a soldier. Hmmm... The title isn't the greatest, either -- Gods and Soldiers would apply to many collections of geographically-based fiction, except, of course, Stories from the Godless Pacifist Autonomous Zone of Vermont. And it serves to reinforce the primary American image of Africa: polytheists (aka "primitives", "savages", etc.) with guns. But I suppose it's better than Diseased Cannibals or something like that.

(Mantra mantra mantra: "You are not the right audience for this book...")

Gods and Soldiers is a perfectly adequate sampler of some recent writing from people associated with the continent of Africa. (That's not likely to be chosen for a blurb, now is it?) The difficulty such an anthology faces is the difficulty of any marginalized literature -- good, honest, well-intentioned, and knowledgeable work will have to bear many burdens because it will, no matter its goals or qualities, be forced to be an exemplar. A collection of interesting African prose will suddenly become THE Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing and will likely be the only such anthology on bookstore shelves. My grumbles about the anthology are more grumbles about this fact than about the book itself. We need this book, yes. But we need this book to be one of many.

And now, lacking a good segue (this is a blog -- you want a segues, go elsewhere), I want to mention The Feminist Press's extraordinary four-volume anthology series Women Writing Africa. I would shout about these books from the rooftop if my house didn't have a steep tin roof that I fall off of easily. The anthologies are, in many ways, the exact opposite of Gods and Soldiers: focused, historical, as comprehensive as possible, and not at all intended to be a brief introduction. I borrowed one from a library and spent days with it and still felt overwhelmed by the variety and plenitude. They are hugely important books, books for which we should all be grateful. I plan to return to them many times, because they are books I aspire to be the right audience for.

"Coetzee in the Promised Land" in The Quarterly Conversation

My essay "Coetzee in the Promised Land" has just been posted in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation. The whole issue is worth checking out -- it's a particularly rich one, I think.

Also notable: In a nice bit of Best American Fantasy syncronicity, Matt Bell writes about Brian Evenson's new novel Last Days. Brian had a story in the first volume of BAF, Matt has a story in the second volume, and the third volume will be published by Underland Press, which published Last Days. This adds evidence to my hypothesis that The Quarterly Conversation is at the center of the universe. Well, my universe at least...

My own essay is a hybrid/collage of literary analysis, literary historiography, cultural meditation, occasional speculation, semi-educated guesses, and various random ideas that are thrown around with the hope that a few might stick to something. My original intention was to write an essay with a larger scope -- an investigation of South African speculative fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, novels that looked toward a post-apartheid future. But when I discovered Karel Schoeman's Promised Land, I couldn't stop thinking about Coetzee's Disgrace. Over a period of months, the essay began to come together.

I owe special thanks to Scott Esposito at TQC for pestering me to finish the essay -- without his friendly inquiries about how it was coming, I don't know if I would have had the stamina to finish it, and he was an excellent editor when I sent him various drafts.

And while I'm here thanking people, I should also note that I couldn't have written the essay without the help of the excellent staff at Plymouth State University's Lamson Library.