Zachary Gillan

No, but now I’m dying to!

We're Toni-Morrison-maxxing, people, it's the wave of the future

ON MORRISON 26 the novel's aesthetic design in favor of its subject matter. To rephrase Morrison's justification for her spoilers, the inspiration for a novel (what it's about, why you wrote it is no more important than its effects (how we experience it). Trying to write the novel from the black female child's point of view had in fact posed an interesting formal problem: "The main character could not stand alone since her passivity made her a narrative void." Morrison's "solution break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader" —was a formal one, too: "an attempt to shape a silence while breaking it." As she put it in a later essay, she wanted to construct "the story of a shattered, fractured perception resulting from a shattered, splintered life." This led her to realize that "the visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the context in The Bluest Eye." Whether historical, biographical, or literary, all of these reasons for writing the novel have in common a response to absence: "I couldn't find it anywhere"; we were going to "skip over something», "female black children, who have never held center stage"; "a narrative void"; an "attempt to shape a silence while breaking it"; "there is really nothing more to say." This emphasis on absence the void, the vacuum, the vanished; the failed, the silenced, the missingis precisely why The Bluest Eye is not just another identitarian sob story but a work of art. Morrison's form in the novel, her how, operates through negation: she takes things away; she leaves things out; she embeds absence at every level of form, from the novel's structure to its tropes and images, down to the most minute elements of its prose style. And this, I'll sug-gest, is a black aesthetic, part of her effort, as she puts it in her foreword, "to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture."

She goes on to deconstruct the way that Morrison, having tossed out the whole plot of the book, can really emphasize the voids left behind when you know the story’s shape but the main character is largely absent from the telling of it

BBanned as it’s been, everybody knows what The Bluest Eye is about: a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. That’s not really a spoiler. Besides, Toni Morrison didn’t care about spoilers. In fact, she gave away the whole plot of her very first novel in its opening narration: “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.” The gossipy tone and the mystery of the missing marigolds divert attention from those six key words: “Pecola was having her father’s baby.” But these are in fact the book’s shocking revelations: incest, rape, child pregnancy. And as yet more spoilers in these early pages go on to tell us—

“Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too”—stillbirth and death are coming, too. This preface concludes: “There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” Deliberate spoilers like these force the reader to shift their expectations away from narrative suspense and plot resolution. In other words, if we already already know that the marigolds didn’t grow, that the ill-begotten baby died, then we must focus our attention not on what happened or why, but on how it happened, how it felt. Spoilers are a confidence trick, so to speak: a writer must have faith that a mere series of events is less interesting than how it is told.

I'm well on my way to making this book my entire personality but Namwali Serpell's first chapter in On Morrison opens thusly and makes my point better than I ever could:

Nothing makes me want to tear my hair out like reviews/criticism that boil down to plot discussion and nothing else.

Dan.......... read this book

In a word: yes.

ON MORRISON 26 the novel's aesthetic design in favor of its subject matter. To rephrase Morrison's justification for her spoilers, the inspiration for a novel (what it's about, why you wrote it is no more important than its effects (how we experience it). Trying to write the novel from the black female child's point of view had in fact posed an interesting formal problem: "The main character could not stand alone since her passivity made her a narrative void." Morrison's "solution break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader" —was a formal one, too: "an attempt to shape a silence while breaking it." As she put it in a later essay, she wanted to construct "the story of a shattered, fractured perception resulting from a shattered, splintered life." This led her to realize that "the visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the context in The Bluest Eye." Whether historical, biographical, or literary, all of these reasons for writing the novel have in common a response to absence: "I couldn't find it anywhere"; we were going to "skip over something», "female black children, who have never held center stage"; "a narrative void"; an "attempt to shape a silence while breaking it"; "there is really nothing more to say." This emphasis on absence the void, the vacuum, the vanished; the failed, the silenced, the missingis precisely why The Bluest Eye is not just another identitarian sob story but a work of art. Morrison's form in the novel, her how, operates through negation: she takes things away; she leaves things out; she embeds absence at every level of form, from the novel's structure to its tropes and images, down to the most minute elements of its prose style. And this, I'll sug-gest, is a black aesthetic, part of her effort, as she puts it in her foreword, "to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture."

She goes on to deconstruct the way that Morrison, having tossed out the whole plot of the book, can really emphasize the voids left behind when you know the story’s shape but the main character is largely absent from the telling of it

Nobody Knows “The Bluest Eye” Toni Morrison’s debut novel might be her most misunderstood.

(excerpted at www.thenation.com/article/cult...)

BBanned as it’s been, everybody knows what The Bluest Eye is about: a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. That’s not really a spoiler. Besides, Toni Morrison didn’t care about spoilers. In fact, she gave away the whole plot of her very first novel in its opening narration: “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.” The gossipy tone and the mystery of the missing marigolds divert attention from those six key words: “Pecola was having her father’s baby.” But these are in fact the book’s shocking revelations: incest, rape, child pregnancy. And as yet more spoilers in these early pages go on to tell us—

“Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too”—stillbirth and death are coming, too. This preface concludes: “There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” Deliberate spoilers like these force the reader to shift their expectations away from narrative suspense and plot resolution. In other words, if we already already know that the marigolds didn’t grow, that the ill-begotten baby died, then we must focus our attention not on what happened or why, but on how it happened, how it felt. Spoilers are a confidence trick, so to speak: a writer must have faith that a mere series of events is less interesting than how it is told.

I'm well on my way to making this book my entire personality but Namwali Serpell's first chapter in On Morrison opens thusly and makes my point better than I ever could:

Exactly!

Nothing makes me want to tear my hair out like reviews/criticism that boil down to plot discussion and nothing else.

夢遊病者（aka Sleepwalker） is an abstract,improvisational, and experimental psychedelic black metal band in existence since 2015. The band isn't really "based" out of anywhere, assuming immaterial form, and existing as ideas, concepts, and visions that cyclically coalesce into sound. With its members based as far apart as Osaka - Japan, Tver - Russia, and New York - USA, the band was formed after they became acquainted online, and everything Is written sharing ideas and recordings over the internet and finally, when the moment seems right, the three members convene somewhere in person to record. The essence of the band, is to take cues from the improvisational school of jazz and the cathartic nature of ritual folk music and couple it with the raw energy of bands like Voivod, Zeni Geva, G.I.S.M., and the most wretched raw black metal. Thematically and conceptually the band's lyrics and much of the visuals focus on different cultural traditions, superstitions, ritualism, and ceremonies, as well as familial experiences. But at the same time, 5if goes far beyond what is apparent and obvious... Artistic, cultural and musical influences of the band range as far and wide as Keiji Haino, Kazuki Tomokawa, as well as Vladimir Vysotsky, Justin Broderick, Erik Rutan, American noise rock like Unsane, bands like NoMeansNoand, Finnish Black Metal, and 70's psych and prog rock and soundtrack music... And beyond all that still. In the world of 5bt the sole objective is catharsis, and fusing all of these seeming disparities together into something that is completely unheard of, unsettling and violent, but also familiar and seducing.

This is the way

РЛБ30011922, by 夢遊病者 1 track album

Reconfirming my commitment to internationalism [listening to bizarro prog/psych/jazz/improv/black metal band 夢遊病者 (aka Sleepwalker) from Japan/Russia/US] vnkv.bandcamp.com/album/30011922

I do think there is some subjectivity to the definition but I'm hoping that we can keep it from becoming so wide-encompassing that it's use as a term becomes meaningless (personally I blame the marketing folk 😅).

Let the arguments begin!

夢遊病者（aka Sleepwalker） is an abstract,improvisational, and experimental psychedelic black metal band in existence since 2015. The band isn't really "based" out of anywhere, assuming immaterial form, and existing as ideas, concepts, and visions that cyclically coalesce into sound. With its members based as far apart as Osaka - Japan, Tver - Russia, and New York - USA, the band was formed after they became acquainted online, and everything Is written sharing ideas and recordings over the internet and finally, when the moment seems right, the three members convene somewhere in person to record. The essence of the band, is to take cues from the improvisational school of jazz and the cathartic nature of ritual folk music and couple it with the raw energy of bands like Voivod, Zeni Geva, G.I.S.M., and the most wretched raw black metal. Thematically and conceptually the band's lyrics and much of the visuals focus on different cultural traditions, superstitions, ritualism, and ceremonies, as well as familial experiences. But at the same time, 5if goes far beyond what is apparent and obvious... Artistic, cultural and musical influences of the band range as far and wide as Keiji Haino, Kazuki Tomokawa, as well as Vladimir Vysotsky, Justin Broderick, Erik Rutan, American noise rock like Unsane, bands like NoMeansNoand, Finnish Black Metal, and 70's psych and prog rock and soundtrack music... And beyond all that still. In the world of 5bt the sole objective is catharsis, and fusing all of these seeming disparities together into something that is completely unheard of, unsettling and violent, but also familiar and seducing.

This is the way

РЛБ30011922, by 夢遊病者 1 track album

Reconfirming my commitment to internationalism [listening to bizarro prog/psych/jazz/improv/black metal band 夢遊病者 (aka Sleepwalker) from Japan/Russia/US] vnkv.bandcamp.com/album/30011922

This is almost word for word the voicemail I got yesterday

coming soon to a waldenbooks near you

and then it shows up in the mail and it's a dental retainer

Oh I just meant a real person leaving the scammy message, I don’t think there’s much chance CAA is cold calling me for a book that doesn’t exist, sadly

It sounded like a real person… but then I guess it would, wouldn’t it

Just got a voicemail(?) out of nowhere from an agent(??) saying that he was “tasked by his agency”(???) to express interest in representing the book “best weird fiction”(????) which is not a book I’ve queried or heard of(?????) so I’m probably about to be swindled out of my life’s savings

14 ON MORRISON At the same time, both writers willfully, sometimes irrepressibly, penned rather difficult prose. I'm a full professor of English with tenure at Harvard University, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it took me at least three readings to comprehend Beloved at even a basic level. There are passages in Morrison's works that no reader I've ever met understands on the first go. But this literary difficulty was neither aesthetically coy nor glibly aspirational. It was an ethos. Morrison's insistence on making us puzzle things out was an attempt to effect, she said, an "egalitarianism that places us all (reader, the novel's population, the narrator's voice) on the same footing." This democratic orientation to the work doesn't pander. Morrison doesn't condescend to your level; she challenges you to rise to hers. "My writing expects, demands participatory reading," she said. "My language has to have holes and spaces so that the reader can come into it." In other words, this ambiguity has a purpose. The point is that we cannot know, we cannot judge-and sometimes the point is that there are ways of doing both that allow contradictions to coexist. Morrison believed that literary form could instantiate philosophical ideas of this kind. As she said of William Faulkner: "The structure is the argument." As she wrote of Mark Twain: "The brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises."

Sound the productive ambiguity klaxons

I have been reading The Source of Self Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison.

These two short essays are in the book. I think they are a must read.

inthesetimes.com/article/toni...

A killer!

Writing my stupid little bullshit while a death cult sets the world on fire

14 ON MORRISON At the same time, both writers willfully, sometimes irrepressibly, penned rather difficult prose. I'm a full professor of English with tenure at Harvard University, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it took me at least three readings to comprehend Beloved at even a basic level. There are passages in Morrison's works that no reader I've ever met understands on the first go. But this literary difficulty was neither aesthetically coy nor glibly aspirational. It was an ethos. Morrison's insistence on making us puzzle things out was an attempt to effect, she said, an "egalitarianism that places us all (reader, the novel's population, the narrator's voice) on the same footing." This democratic orientation to the work doesn't pander. Morrison doesn't condescend to your level; she challenges you to rise to hers. "My writing expects, demands participatory reading," she said. "My language has to have holes and spaces so that the reader can come into it." In other words, this ambiguity has a purpose. The point is that we cannot know, we cannot judge-and sometimes the point is that there are ways of doing both that allow contradictions to coexist. Morrison believed that literary form could instantiate philosophical ideas of this kind. As she said of William Faulkner: "The structure is the argument." As she wrote of Mark Twain: "The brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises."

Sound the productive ambiguity klaxons

ter. A mother lights her son on fire. A woman poisons her boss. Most people don't know that Toni Morrison wrote horror novels. But she was more invested in genre fiction than you might imagine. She and Nabokov were equally fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe, for example, and firted with melodrama, the fantastic, the Gothic.

I equivocated, Serpell goes for it

Building on some of the stuff I blathered with Casella last year: bsky.app/profile/meal...