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SUMMARY:Mat Johnson and Toni Morrison
DESCRIPTION:The good Lord was willing but the creek did rise. Last Tuesday no new blog post! The creek was a flood of words on the subject of “Birthing Cynara\, Windsor\, and Hope\: a novel reader turned novel writer (at forty) reflects on\: talking back\, speaking up\, well shaped silences\; the scholars who played midwife to her fiction\; and the novels her novels talk to from Epitaph of a Small Winner to the Coldest Winter ever.” Mainly I talked about ‘the baby plot.’            I am writing from the literal middle of Pennsylvania\, from the Nittany Lion Inn in University Park which this weekend is the epicenter of Contemporary African American Novel studies. Lovalerie King\, a scholar with roots in Arkansas but with a globe spanning reach\, put on a powerful conference.\n             A highlight for me was hearing Mat Johnson read from his work in progress Pym—he’s re-writing  Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket\, that has been re-written by a variety of other authors (including Jules Verne) and is thought to have been an inspiration to Melville.\n                  What Mat read was wickedly funny and sparely elegant. Think Melville crossed with Dubois and inflected with post-soul humor. Johnson’s writing voice is quirky\, intelligent\, erudite and earthy\, razor sharp and warm\; he is well able to convey what is right and what is wrong in his characters and their worlds.\n            His first two novels are Drop which travels from Philly to London and back with it’s main character an aspiring ad man and Hunting in Harlem which looks at  the ungentlemanly underbelly of gentrification\n             Mat Johnson\, scholar and gentleman\, should be better known. I hope the fact he looks a bit like a cross between Dewayne Johnson\, better known as the Rock\, and Vin Diesel\, like a bankable star of visibly ambiguous ethnicity\, doesn’t cause some to underestimate his brain power. They shouldn’t. He possesses the sweep—an ability to fluidly and swiftly connect the present to the past and the ability to link high culture and pop culture\, that makes for a complex and exciting “now” on the page.\n            Some of the conversation of the weekend had to do with making sense of street fiction\, Zane her sisters and her cousins\, and the drama novels. There was a surreal aspect to the conversation that came from the fact we were surrounded by the bucolic but all-so-bright oranges and yellows and reds of Happy Valley in late October. The trees were wearing their gaudiest leaves of the year and nearby there were towns where people still travelled by horse and buggy. The white columned Nittny Inn was a surreal setting\, being that it was utterly comfortable\, for the intense and rigorous  discussions that arose ranging from Houston Baker’s exquisite parsing of trauma inflected love in Toni Morrison’s Love to Post-Soul Aesthetic and New Black aesthetic\, and Black Geekness\, new construction of the minstrel\, and new manifestations and meanings of black face. In the wrap up panel there was talk of Colson Whitehead’s twittered novel—and all through the weekend there had been talk of his Sag Harbor and John Henry days. Colson is king\, was an informal theme of the conference.\n            At three in the morning Friday night\, just hours after I had been honored to give the big dinner keynote in my black knit suit that has done me a good decades service and gray suede pumps\, the alarms went off in the inn and folk started pouring out. I stood in the Pennsylvania night shoeless in a white cotton night gown till a strange young man\, there for a wedding not the conference\, offered me a bright red apparently brand new sweatshirt.\n             You never know when you’re going to meet a knight in blue jeans or when you’ll need a white column to hide behind.\n            A name evoked throughout the weekend was Toni Morrison. It was spoken differently than the other names acclaimed\: Colson Whitehead\; Percival Everett\, Martha Southgate. Sapphire. Sister Souljah. And I mean fundamentally different most times. Sometimes Toni Morrison was Hallelujah Amen.          \n
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CATEGORIES:colson-whitehead,houston-baker,lovalerie-king,mat-johnson,nittany-lion-inn,penn-state,toni-morrison
CLASS:PUBLIC
SEQUENCE:4
DTSTAMP:20100324T065927
CREATED;TZID=US-Central:20091027T084558
LAST-MODIFIED;TZID=US-Central:20091224T150801
DTSTART;TZID=US-Central:20091027T084300
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