Mr. James > Recent Status Updates

Omri is taking Little Bear to school in his pocket. WTF? Being a retired adolescent boy, the worst place to keep anything is your pocket. All it takes is for Omri to graze the school bus headrest and LB will be bloody gut squash, or at least, have a dozen broken bones. Regardless, if Little Bro were in my pocket, he'd end up in the washing machine.

Oh the irony: Imagine Stephen King telling Richard Bachman to murder a room full of corporate executives because he didn't want to get his hands dirty.

You bring to life a three inch plastic indian, causing all kinds of shit to go sideways. Naturally, the next logical step is to bring to life a three inch cowboy. The deductive reasoning of adolescent boys is uncanny... meaning stupid.

Well, Omri is a murderer. Yay! He's feeling the consequences of being a god. He's also learning that Little Bear is a little tyrant: he wants what he wants when he wants it.

That reminded him -- where was the horse? He looked around in a fright. But he soon saw it, trying forlornly to eat the carpet. "I must get it some grass," thought Omri, meanwhile offering it a small piece of stale bread, which it ate gratefully, and then some water in a tin lid. It was odd how the horse was not frightened of him. Perhaps it couldn't see him very well. -- LRB

If you could bring a plastic object to life, who or what would it be? I know who I'd bring to life... and it's a very bad idea.

King's side gig at the laundromat is paying off. He can't get stains out of your blood soaked t-shirt, but he'll make a badass tie-dye.

Studies in American Africanism, in my view, should be investigations of the ways in which a non-white, Africanist presence and personae have been constructed -- invented -- in the United States, and of the literary uses this fabricated presence has served. -- TM

An author is not personally accountable for that acts of fictive creatures, although he is responsible for them. And there is no evidence I know of to persuade me that Hemingway shared Harry's views. In point of fact there is strong evidence to suggest otherwise. -- TM

During a passionate scene of lovemaking [...]. Marie asks her husband:
"Listen, did you ever do it with a *** wench."
"Sure."
"What's it like."
"Like nurse shark."
This extraordinary remark is saved and savored for Hemingway's description of a black female. The strong notion here is that of a black female as the furthest thing from human, so far away as to be not even mammal but fish. -- TM

... for not only is the Hemingway Ranger invariably accompanied but his Tontos, his nursemen, are almost always black. From the African bearers who tote the white man's burden in the hunting grounds of Africa, to the bait cutters aboard fishing boats, to loyal companions of decaying boxers, to ministering bartenders -- the array of enabling black nursemen is impressive. -- TM

The solution is an awkward, oddly constructed sentence: "The *** was still talking her out and I looked and saw he had seen a patch of flying fish burst out ahead." "Saw he had seen" is improbable in syntax [...] and tense but, like other choices available to Hemingway, it is risked to avoid a speaking black. The problem this writer gives himself, then, is to say how one sees that someone else has already seen. -- TM

4. Fetishization. This is especially useful in evoking erotic fears or desires and establishing fixed and major difference where difference does not exist... Blood, for example, is a pervasive fetish: black blood, white blood, the purity of blood; the purity of white female sexuality, the pollution of African blood... Fetishization is a strategy often used to assert the absolutism of civilization and savagery. -- TM

What is not stressed is that there is no way, given the confines of the novel, for Huck to mature into a moral human being in America without Jim. To let Jim go free, to let him enter the mouth of the Ohio River and pass into free territory, would be to abandon the whole premise of the book. Neither Huck nor Twain can tolerate, in imaginative terms, Jim freed. That would blast the predilection from its mooring. -- TM

The major controversies about the greatness or near greatness of Huckleberry Finn as a American (or even "world") novel exist as controversies because they forgo a close examination of the interdependence of slavery and freedom, of Huck's growth and Jim's serviceability within it, and even of Mark Twain's inability to continue, to explore the journey into free territory. -- TM

Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not dammed, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny. -- TM

On his deathbed, Parker's father whispered, "Boy... It ain't what you do... It's who you know." After his father's death, on a cold November morning, Parker went to the pub. He knew the barmaid well.

Getting into the Set: To join The Set, you must purchase the proper garments, wear intricate accessories that hang at all angles, manicure the lawn to 2 inches, and have an iphone 17 nestled in the cockpit of your mercedes. You've followed the instructions: celebrate. As you enter the restaurant you notice that The Set's table is full. So you wait at the bar, sipping at a martini -- waiting your turn.

Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens in that violent, self-serving act of erasure to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise. -- TM

Oh, the room -- the music -- the people leaning in doorways. Silhouettes kiss behind curtains; playful fingers examine and caress [...]. This is the market where gesture is all: a tongue's lighting lick; a thumbnail grazing the split cheeks of a purple plum. Any thrownaway lover in wet unlaced shoes and a buttoned-up sweater is a foreigner here. This is not a place for old men; this is the place for romance. -- TM

In war or at a party everyone is wily, intriguing; goals are set and altered; alliances rearranged. Partners and rivals devastated; new pairings triumphant. The knockout possibilities knock Dorcas out because here -- with grown-ups as in war -- people play for keeps. -- TM

Autonomy is freedom and translates into the much championed and revered "individualism"; newness translates into "innocence"; distinctiveness becomes difference and the erection of strategies for maintaining it; authority and absolute power become a romantic, conquering "heroism," virility, and the problematics of wielding absolute power over the lives of others. --TM

Made in Heaven: Hold your breath and lean in; the choir has stopped. You think, She's Catholic; I'm free to love her. Why can't time move backward as she steps forward? You repeat, "Body of Christ." She touches your hand with her fingertips: they linger. The wafer drops to the ground. Yes, you think, we're free to love.

The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom -- if it did not in fact create it -- like slavery [...]. What I wish to examine is how the image of reined-in, bound, suppressed, and repressed darkness became objectified in American literature as an Africanist persona. -- TM

If the New World fed dreams, what was the old world reality that whetted the appetite for them? And how did that reality caress and grip the shaping of the new one? -- TM

The music bends, falls to its knees to embrace them all, encourage them all to live a little, why don't you? since this is the it you've been looking for. -- TM

Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape. -- TM

"Where you pick up a wild woman?"
"In the woods. Where wild women grow." -- TM

To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming. -- TM"

Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer's imagination, for the world the imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of risk and safety. -- TM