How Bush Failed

The question of whether or not Bush's presidency has been a disaster has largely been answered, by the right and the left. But Time Magazine, which has actually been leaning further to the right over recent years in comparison to Newsweek, breaks down Bush's biggest failures in the Middle East in a direct, comparatively unbiased way:

The Five Fatal Mistakes of Bush's Mideast Policy

The Funniest Man Ever

The first time I saw Paul Mooney, I was 16 and sitting in a packed auditorium in Princeton, NJ, waiting for a purple-suited Eddie Murphy to come out on stage and perform Raw. Paul Mooney was the opening act, and on that microphone he was angry and sharp and brilliant and blindingly intelligent. He was so damn smart, I think that's the main reason why it took more than two decades for a random skit like Negrodomus to put him on the map.

When I went to pick up the first batch of Drop softcovers from Bloomsbury in 2001, I was walking down 5th Avenue and saw Mooney walking with a friend. I ran up to him and gave him a copy just so that I could tell my kids that the great man once held my book in his hands. I knew I was playing myself and that the book was destined to be discarded wherever he was going next, but I didn't care. It was still worth it.

A Paul Mooney interview is a glorious thing. It's then that you can see how quickly his mind works, or the true sharpness of his wit.

If you want to see just how funny and smart he is, check out Paul Mooney on Fox News responding to the Kramer Incident. My wife found the clip, so she won the rights to keep it on her site.

Beyond Slavery

A lot of people think slavery really messed our people up. A lot of people in America, black and white, think it is our slave past that is at the root of the economic, educational, and social problems the African American community faces today.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: slavery didn't do this to us. Not true. Not all all. No, it wasn't slavery—it was Reconstruction. Reconstruction really f*cked us up.

We came out of slavery eager to vote, dying to be educated, ready to own businesses and seize the American Dream. In short, you could say that in some ways we as a community were more mentally prepared to thrive in America in 1866 than we are in 2006.

Then Reconstruction happened. Or rather, it didn't. That is the real failure of the United States. That is the real defining moment were the dream became deferred. And the greatest shame of it all is that most of us have no idea what happened.

Do you know about free-range chickens? In New York, to call a chicken a more expensive "free-range" chicken, or sell its eggs as pricey "free-range eggs," the chickens have to be able to walk around out of their cages for a few hours each day. But the thing is that in reality the chickens are so used to their cages that when the farmers open the doors, the birds just sit there, afraid to go outside. I thought about black America when I heard that story. If we as a community are like those chickens, it was Reconstruction and the de facto slavery that followed that did that too us.

PBS has an excellent documentary up about the Reconstruction Era; the entire thing is available for viewing online. Check it out, and send it around if you can: Reconstruction: The Second Civil War

N vs BP

In the latest battle in the war between Niggers vs. Black People, screenwriter/novelist/badass John Ridley gives us The Manifesto for the Ascendancy for the Modern Nigger:

"Let me tell you something about niggers, the oppressed minority within our minority. Always down. Always out. Always complaining that they can't catch a break. Notoriously poor about doing for themselves. Constantly in need of a leader but unable to follow in any direction that's navigated by hard work, self-reliance. And though they spliff and drink and procreate their way onto welfare doles and WIC lines, niggers will tell you their state of being is no fault of their own. They are not responsible for their nearly 5 percent incarceration rate and their 9.2 percent unemployment rate. Not responsible for the 11.8 percent rate at which they drop out of high school. For the 69.3 percent of births they create out of wedlock."

The piece goes on to contrast Condi and Powell's envoy to China (a great moment in black history) with the recent Cleveland rioting (a typical moment in niggerdom).

Now, I'm no fan of Condi. For me, her shoe shopping trip during Katrina says it all (perhaps this is evidence that she, like Ridley, has decided to cut niggers loose as well). And I think both her and Powell's real primary roles in the Bush Administration have been to deflect racial criticism, much in the way Howard Stern uses Robin Quivers. Ishmael Reed called these kinds of people "Automated Robots."

That said, I think Ridley's piece makes excellent points about how we need to redefine ourselves in the African American community, and the importance of breaking away from the now archaic modes of the civil rights past.

Agree or disagree, I think this is the most important African American manifesto since Trey Ellis's New Black Aesthetic.

Read it for yourself, and if you get a chance, tell me what you think.

Lesson #7: The DIY MFA

You don't need an MFA to be a better writer.

It can help. If you're at really good program, it can help a lot, speeding your growth by years. But it's not necessary. An MFA does not make you a writer, like a medical program makes you a doctor. An MFA is not some magical award that bestows powers on its recipient, real or ceremonial. In fact, the MFA didn't grow in prominence until the 1960s, so if you're a writer without an MFA, you're in really illustrious company.

What a good MFA program can offer you is the following:

1. Curriculum: A regime of reading and writing that can spur literary growth.
2. Mentoring: Access to established writers who can offer you advice and guidance.
3. Peers: The benefit of working with other students who are at the same stage in their development.

While guaranteed federal loans make it possible for virtually anyone to attend even the most expensive of these programs, the realities of people's lives often do not. So a graduate degree is not for everyone, obviously.

That said, not being able to get an MFA is no excuse for being a bad writer.

No, that's not true: it is an excuse, but a lazy one, contrived by lazy writers. It's easier to say, "Some of us couldn't go to school," than it is to say, "Some of us need to get off our butts and start working if we want to be taken seriously." If you are content with being a hack, please read no further. But if you are truly willing to do the work necessary to grow, here is how you can use the MFA model without going to a graduate program.

1. Curriculum
Go get a library card and start reading. Read good books, not just books that make you comfortable. I suggest starting in the past at the literary roots and moving forward to the modern era. This goes for the genre writers as well. If you want to write romances, read Jane Austin. If you want to write horror, read the original Frankenstein. If you aim to write mysteries, go for Poe. It doesn't matter if you like these books : if you don't like them, then learn by figuring out exactly why that is. Take pieces from the parts you do like and move forward. Don't avoid books just because they're written by white people: talent doesn't come color coded.

If you want a structured academic syllabus, search online. Many college professors now have their syllabi on their web pages. Some even include writing exercises. If you just want to look for good books, try one of the many 100 Greatest Books of All Time lists and start making your selections. It is impossible to run out of worthwhile books in this lifetime.

It doesn't matter whether you plan on being a bestseller or a literary sensation, either way you have to know your craft to write well. Writers who don't know their craft are, by definition, hacks. If you want to be more than that, you have to do the work required.

2. Mentors
It is easier to gain access to established writers than you might believe. For casual advice, try going to readings and talking to writers there. Every bookstore nowadays has a reading list, so check your local listings (cliche). While famous authors usually speak to packed houses on a regular basis, the vast majority of lesser known authors (like me!) are ecstatic if they get more than a dozen people in the room. Most of the time we don't. I usually talk for hours with whomever shows up. If you buy me dinner, I'll talk even longer. I like helping people, and it's better than going back to the empty hotel room.

If you want your work critiqued by an established author, try attending workshop seminars. These are available everywhere in America at community colleges, writing conferences, and special writing events. Many are reasonably priced, and some are free. Some cater specifically to black folks, such as the Callaloo Writing Workshop (free), The Hurston/Wright Writers Week, or Cave Canem for you poets out there. I've heard that VONA is quite nice, as well. And there are many, many more non-ethnic writing events to get involved in.

I've personally taught at Callaloo and at the Hurston/Wright, and I've remained in contact with students from both, offering advice when I can, for years afterwards. I'll be at the Hurston/Wright this summer, and if you're in my class I will be happy to help you with your novel.

These workshops are also great places to meet your peers, which will help you with the following:

3. Workshop
Form a writing workshop. Get five or more people to meet regularly and exchange work. Do it in person, but if you can't do that do it on the Internet. Don't make it a support group where everyone tells each other how great they are: be honest, fair, and thorough. Tell each other what is working in their work, and what is not. Push each other along. Suggest texts to each other, or assign them. Start each session with a quick writing exercise. Hold group readings annually to celebrate your progress, and gather others to the fold.

In the end, it's not about the title or the certificate. It's about the work. It's about learning your craft and finding your original voice. It's about listening to the literary conversation so that you can join in on the dialogue. It's about pushing out all of the bad writing in your system so that you can get to the good stuff.

To be a real writer, someone who creates work truly worth reading, takes a tremendous amount of work and years of dedication, regardless of genre or style. Where you choose to do that work, or how you choose to do it, is ultimatley up to you. But not whether you have to do that work or not.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

Lesson #6: In Praise of Black Pop Fiction

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Black Commercial Fiction Movement.

In the beginning of black fiction, there was only literature.

That was all that large American publishing houses would publish nationwide. And even in that category it was extremely difficult to get published, because there was a feeling that white America would only buy so many books by black authors each season, and that no black buying audience even existed. So only the very best black authors were published, and it was a given that any fiction published by a black American had literary merit.

Then came The Color Purple. While the book first found an audience among white middle- and upper-class feminists who identified with its depiction of gender politics, as the book gained momentum with first a Pulitzer and then a major motion picture, a black audience formed behind it. A simple novel written at an elementary school reading level (no big words, complicated story or sentence structures), it attracted a whole new, non-traditional reading audience. Suddenly everyday black women, excited to read a book about themselves written in an accessible manner, were buying up the The Color Purple across the country. And once they were finished reading that slim novel, they wanted more.

Into this burgeoning market came Terri McMillan. Smart, astute, and commercially driven, McMillan is rumored to have once told a fellow writer of the Womanist era, "Y'all ladies are good, but I'm not trying to be good. I'm trying to be rich." Waiting to Exhale made McMillan's dream a reality.

In a marked departure from anything on the market before that period, instead of dealing directly or indirectly with issues of white racism, Exhale was set in an insular black world in which white people were little more than an afterthought. Instead of dealing with working-class black life, Exhale's characters were affluent, accomplished, and comfortably middle-class. Instead of being a sophisticated work of literary art with the poetics and weight such as the novels of contemporary Toni Morrison, stylistically McMillan wrote in a simple, motion-by-motion pulp fiction style more like Danielle Steel.

The literary world didn't know what to do with this book: it was smart, but it also had workman-like prose, and was not particularly deep or nuanced. On the one hand, it was clearly a bit of pulp fiction, but on the other hand, it was written by a black person, and almost all mainstream novels by black authors were assumed to have literary merit. McMillan's intended black female audience, however, knew exactly what to do with it: buy it. By 1992, the book had sold 700,000 copies. After a movie was made of the work, those sales creeped up towards 3,000,000. McMillan was rich, and a star. She had not only written a bestseller, she had identified an entirely new audience of black female book buyers that was enthusiastic, armed with cash, and massive.

Hence "Terri's Children" were born. In an effort to cash in on this boom market, publishers started actively seeking the next Terri McMillan, and an entire group of would-be writers stepped up to the plate to give it a shot. Overnight, waves of books with brightly colored, illustrated covers hit the stands, mimicking Exhale's cover. Many of those who still couldn't get published, published themselves, going after that same market. Unable to get into the large chain stores, these self-published writers hand-sold their work at hair salons, churches, and pretty much everywhere that black people congregate. Using these nontraditional methods, these writers were able to sell thousands of books and attract the attention of the mainstream publishing houses, who then snatched them up.

For publishers, it was great deal: each self-published author came to them with a pre-existing audience to take advantage of. Better yet, it was also an audience that had proven that it would buy pretty much anything, no matter how poor the quality. With this group, there was no need to scour the market for the best new writing, then spend a year editing the text, a very expensive process. All the publisher now had to do was find any halfway readable manuscript within the genre, stick a "Terri's Children" style cover on it, and this audience would run to the store with cash in hand. So that's what the publishers did.

In reaction to this commercial wave, an entirely new industry sprouted up overnight. At a time when Barnes & Noble and Borders were effectively closing down small bookstores across America, black bookstores that served this niche commercial market were opening up. In New York, black imprints started popping up at every major publishing house. And the more money this industry made, the more would-be writers came with their books, eager to cash in and be the next big star.

By the time I published Drop in 2000, it had become basically assumed that all black writers wrote Terri McMillan knockoffs. That year, I was introduced at a reading at the Harlem Book Fair with the aside by the MC that, "It's good that brothers are writing books too, because we need to get their take on relationships also." Despite the drop in quality of the black books now being published, the same assumption of literary merit left over from the previous publishing ages was still prevalent, so many acted as if the dominant commercial authors of the modern era were writing on the level of past literary greats (see Lesson #5). This was an opinion shared not just by the writers themselves, or even their readers, but also by some of the editors, agents, bookstore owners, and other industry insiders who were flourishing from the commercial fiction wave.

By the millennium though, nearly a decade after Exhale's success, so many writers had come to McMillan's gravy train that the market was completely oversaturated. Even those writers who found early success in jumping on the bandwagon saw their advances and audiences start to diminish. The market had gone from starving to bloated. Since quality was never an issue, it became nearly impossible for many of them to distinguish themselves amid the now massive crowd. The only thing to do was to look for the next bandwagon. Zane's success as an around-the-way-girl Anais Nin sent many commercial writers in the direction of erotica. The success of Sista Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever proved that "Urban Fiction" or "Ghetto Lit" was the new way to make the big bucks, so a new wave of commercial fiction writers wandered off on that path to the best seller list. For the most part, the groundbreaking era of Terri's Children seemed to be coming to an end.

At the height of this period, I found these commercial books to be trite, cliche-ridden, and unimaginative. Some I found embarrassing, some boring, some unreadable. Occasionally, I came upon a good one in the bunch, but that only made the overall mediocrity of the rest of them stick out even more. Overtime though, with distance, I began to view these writers and their books differently. Sure, the writing in these books was bad, but what I came to realize was that it was never about writing. It was about money. More specifically, it was about class.

At a time when African Americans were moving in record numbers up into the middle-class, the black commercial fiction movement reflected that both in its content and in its very being. Terri's Children never comprised a literary movement: they were part of an entrepreneurial movement. These authors were not really writers: they were small businessmen, looking to identify and serve a consumer base so as to build and maintain wealth. Much like the corporate Hip Hop artists of the same era who rapped about being CEOs and set up their own record labels, many of these writers did the same by setting up their own agencies and publishing imprints.

In the white publishing world, there is a general understanding that there is a difference between commercial and literary fiction, and as such Jackie Collins and Joan Didion should not be judged on the same merits. In the black American publishing world, in part because of our general aversion to any form of criticism, that line has been considerably blurred, and often willfully ignored. This has not only done a disservice to the African American literary canon which has been repeatedly defamed by those who would seek to lower its standards, it has also been unfair to those commercial fiction writers who have succeeded on their own terms, and not been given their just due for that accomplishment.

Judge solely as an entrepreneurial movement, the era of Terri's Children was a very successful and historic one. In a largely stagnant and dying medium, Terri's Children managed to create a new audience where others said none existed. Instead of relying on mainstream publishing's lackluster business model, they created their own, promoting it creatively and teaching the entire publishing industry about how to build an audience for books in the modern world. Terri and her Children effectively proved that black Americans will buy books, books about black people and dealing with issues important to black people, if given the chance to. Most importantly, they proved that we as African Americans can support our own literary world, and that we don't need to pander to a larger white audience in order to be successful.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

Lesson #5: The Difference Between Commercial and Literary Fiction

Or: Why I No Longer Go to the Harlem Book Fair.

A couple of years ago, there was a panel at the Harlem Book Fair called "Black Male Writers: Continuing the Legacy of Ellison, Baldwin and Wright, or Just Hanging on the Coattails of the Sistahs?" With a title like that, there was really no chance it wasn't going to be an hour and half of pure stupid, and of course it was. The guests (and I don't blame them for the title) were E. Lynn Harris, Brian Keith Jackson, Kenji Jasper, Nelson George, and Omar Tyree. I showed up a bit late, scammed my way into the already full hall, and caught the tail end.

Omar spent the majority of the time trying to talk over everybody else on the panel, talking about how his books were "new American Classics," bragging that he took one month to write them and eleven to promote them, and pushing his new book imprint and other snake oil products. An audience member indignantly wanted to know why the "so-called" literary writers didn't go on tour constantly like the more commercial ones did (implying they were uppity), and Brian responded that the goal of the literary writers was to make money off academic speaking engagements, endowed chairs and college reading lists.

The panel ended with Nelson George saying to the room jokingly, "There's no difference between commercial and literary fiction, because Sumner Redstone gets paid from it either way."

Now, I like Brian, and I think he was angling his answer so that the audience member could understand how the lit fiction writer manages a livelihood. And I have an immense amount of respect for Nelson George: Buppies, B-Boys, Baps and Bohos was like a bible to me, and I was heavily influenced by his concept of post-soul culture. But let us be intellectually honest about this topic, if only to honor the legacies of the literary giants mentioned. Or, to use the vernacular popular fiction is so fond of, All y'all need to stop lying.

The truth:

The purpose of commercial fiction is to write a bestselling novel.

The purpose of literary fiction is to write truth.

Why are these two intents so different? Because you don't give people truth if your goal is to get money from them. If you want to cash in, you tell them what you think they want to hear, what will entertain them, what will confirm their views of the world. You try not to piss them off, avoid anything too difficult or uncomfortable that will make them turn away. You don't try to do something new, you just try to do a new version of a proven seller.

In literary fiction, you say what you want to say. You don't think about the market, or at least not while you're writing. You hope that if what you do is good, that that will be enough to find it some kind of audience. Therefor, instead of focusing on publication and marketing, you focus on trying to become a better writer.

Now, if you want to be a bestseller, you go for it. But if you make it, don't then start trying to front like you're a literary writer, trying to lower the standards of the canon so you can fit your work in. Just be happy with the bed you made, the hefty advances, the huge print runs, the mass appeal.

On the other side, you literary writers, you get the prestige, the respect, the nice reviews and the chance that your work will be read by generations to come. So stop whinging about how nobody reads your books, or about how small your advances are. What the hell did you expect? If you want to support yourself, get a job. And die happy that you've tried to put truth on the page, a reward in itself.

Best,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

Lesson #4: Black Lit is for White People

In one of the comment sections on another piece, a librarian made the astute point that she found it difficult to get her younger readers to look past the works of "Omar Tyree, Eric Jerome Dickey, Zane etc." towards more literary fiction. The reason? This pop fiction is set primarily in the present, while African American literary fiction is usually set in slavery, or elsewhere in the historic past. That's a really interesting hypothesis, so let's test it out.

A literary novel's success is not judged by sales, but by critical praise. There is no higher praise, of course, than the literary award, which makes writers into literary stars. Therefore, a closer look at the four major American literary prizes over the last 25 years will give us a good cross-section of the most successful African American literary novels. They are as follows:

Pulitzer Prize
2003 Known World by Edward P. Jones
1988 Beloved by Toni Morrison
1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker

PEN/Faulkner Award
1991 Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
1984 Sent for You Yesterday by John Edgar Wideman
1982 The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

National Book Award
1990 Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

National Book Critic's Circle Award
2003 Known World by Edward P. Jones
1993 A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

Surprise. Our librarian is right: all but one of these books is set in the historical past. More specifically, Beloved, The Chaneysville Incident, Know World and Middle Passage are all set in part during the slave era. The Color Purple, Sent for You Yesterday and A Lesson Before Dying are set in the earlier 20th Century. Only Philadelphia Fire is set in the modern era. Four out of eight of these books are set in part during slavery, or 50%. Six out of seven are set in the past, or 88%.

Stunning, right? We all live in the contemporary era, and of course many a fine and brilliant novel has been written in the present. In fact, I would guess that most literary fiction is probably set in the present. So what's up with the Lords of the Niggerati? Why do we set almost everything in the past, then?

Well, we don't. While there are many great African American historical novels, there are also many fantastic African American novels set in the contemporary era as well. Books that have nothing to do with slavery, don't focus on white racism as the center of their narratives, and deal with the myriad of other ideas and experiences our people have in this country. You just never hear about them: they don't get big awards, they don't get reviewed by major papers, and their authors, people like Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett and Gayl Jones, write for decades in relative obscurity.

Why? Well, because the judges who sit on these award panels, the critics who write the reviews, the gatekeepers of the world of literary fiction, are almost entirely white. And white people have quietly decided that what black people should be writing about is racism. Or more specifically, white racism. Or even more specifically, on effects that white people have had on African American culture. That's right, they like it when we talk about them.

Part of this is historic: the black prose tradition starts with the slave narrative, which was a central tool of the abolitionist movement. It morphed into the novel with the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the success of which inspired black authors to use fiction as a protest tool as well. The protest novel has a strong tradition, finding its way to Richard Wright and beyond. Native Son, of course, is written for white people, to show them the error of their racist ways. For much of the 20th century, white America looked to black writers to hold a mirror to white culture. Much like a slave master would use his house slave to hold up his mirror while that master shaves.

It's not all racist, in part it is just human nature: people like reading about themselves. White people love reading about white people, even if the text is an admonishment. In fact, literary whites love that even more. For every defiant brother thinking he's sticking it to the man with his novel about white racism, somewhere there is a white liberal reading it in masturbatory glee as he basks the masochistic nature of it all.

Black writers who write good books about the internal black world, or whatever esoteric interest attracts their attention, are usually ignored by the predominantly white literary establishment. On the other hand, black writers who write good books about slavery or white racism in general are rewarded greatly. They're often given awards, fellowships, national critical attention, and heralded.

Now, if your book sucks, focusing it on slavery or the effects of white racism ain't going to help. But if it's a really good book about white racism then the literary establishment is prepared to whisk you through the velvet ropes to the Literati's Champagne Room. And they're serving rave reviews in there, awards and fellowships too.

Case Study: Edward P. Jones. Ed Jones is a brilliant writer, the kind a generation is lucky if it gets. Now Ed's first book, Lost in the City, was a collection set in contemporary Washington D.C. It was also superb, and rightly so it won the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Lannan Foundation Grant. Based on the number of awardees and total past grant amount, it seems that the average grant for the Lannan is $68,000. These are impressive honors that anyone would be proud to receive, but they are not really star makers in themselves. For the next seven years, Ed worked as a proofreader at a tax magazine, living in obscurity. Then, in 2003, he came out with Known World, which is set in the slave era and features a black slave owner. While not (in my opinion) better than his last book, Known World was rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize, and Ed Jones was promptly (and deservedly) given the MacArthur Award. The Pulitzer is America's biggest prize. The MacArthur pays $500,000.

Now, this is certainly not to dismiss these books or their authors in any way. It's also not to say we shouldn't write about the past, white racism, or slavery (by the way, I have a slavery book coming out this February, and you really should buy it). But it does raise serious issues about the ongoing affect of white patronage on African American literature.

By contrast, the commercial fiction people are writing books for black people. That is their intended audience, that's whose needs they are trying to cater to. Most of them don't know a damn thing about writing itself, but they do know who they're writing for. The result is we have vastly different topics discussed in African American literary versus contemporary fiction. Instead of countless stories about slavery and racism, black commercial fiction is concerned with relationship issues, the pursuit of the middle-class dream, and inner city violence. In other words, what the majority of black Americans actually care about. It could be argued then, from a nationalist standpoint, that African American commercial fiction is the true African American Literature. (Although I myself wouldn't go that far.)

So what is literary fiction to do about the distorting effects of the white normative gaze? Simple. That is why the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards are so important. In contrast to the big white awards, here are the Legacy picks for the fiction prize for the past five years:

2006 My Jim by Nancy Rawles
2005 Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? by Maryse Conde
2004 Hunting in Harlem by Mat Johnson [editor's note: I heard this one is really good]
2003 The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda
2002 Erasure by Percival Everett

What is the percentage of books dealing centrally with slavery and/or set primarily in our a racially charged past? One out of five, or 20%. Now, doesn't that sound more like right?

For African American Literature to realize its potential we need more black critics, black awards, and black grants. Ironically, that will ensure that we will be judged not by our race, but solely on the quality of our work. Only then will able to choose our own black literary heroes.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

PS-
A note on those non-slavery books that won the Pulitzer, PEN/Faulkner, and National Book awards, so as not to exclude them from this critique. A Lesson Before Dying dealt in part with white racism as well, just not during slavery. The Color Purple was initially made a bestseller by a white feminist audience (Alice Walker wrote for Ms. Magazine at the time), finding a black audience after white folks made it famous. And only John Edgar Wideman's work neither catered to a predominantly white audience nor dealt with racism as its central topic. How then, you ask, did Wideman manage to win not only one but three major prizes by breaking the mold? Simple: he is that fucking good.

Go to My Wife's Site

For years, my wife has been my in-house editor, reading my manuscripts before my agent and publisher to offer the criticism I so desperately need.

Now, it's her turn to put some ink on the page (or rather text on the hmtl). Check out Our Kind of Parenting for some smart, funny riffs on pop culture, parenting, and all things related to the black bourgeois boho experience.

"Move On, Black Man Move On"

If there was a platonic ideal of what a real African American Man was in my mind, it was Ed Bradley. Smart, intellectually honest, sophisticated and smooth as all get out. Here was a man who worked right within corporate America and amazingly seemed in no way diminished by that.

How many sixty-year-old men do you know that can rock a gold earring?

During the time I wrote about in Drop, I used to loiter in 30th Street Station on my lunch breaks from the electric company, in our shared hometown of Philly. One time I saw the man, with his perfectly trimmed white beard, waiting to get on the Metroliner to New York City. I remember thinking, "If he could get out of this town and make something of himself, then there's hope for me."

My only wish is that we could have said all this to the man last month, when he was still listening.

MF Grimm, MF Doom, and the Aftermath of Hip Hop

My boy Victor LaValle sent me this rather amazing piece on MF Grimm:

Voice Article Here

We both met Grimm at NYC Comicon '06. Grimm is also doing a graphic novel at Vertigo, illustrated by the amazing Ron Wimberly who did my covers for Papa Midnite. I found Grimm to be very polite, humble, but also a clearly weighted soul—and I'm not just saying that because of his wheelchair.

The Voice essay is about his life, but in Grimm's life you can also see a clear metaphor for the aftermath of hip-hop culture. The normalization of the inner-city drug epidemic, the acceptance of sociopathic violence, the immorality of the music industry: all of the ills of the hip hop era are visible here in the experiences MF Grimm has endured.

And in his more famous friend, MF Doom, we see the continuing damages pop culture success can have on African American mental health. Although I really enjoy Doom's music, it seems from his interview that the brother has lost his mind.

When future generations look back on us, will we be revered for the creative brilliance of hip hop culture? Or will be judged for our general inaction against the mysogyny, violence, materialism and minstrel shows the hip hop movement has produced so much of? I really don't know.

There are some among us who still dismiss the latest wave of criticism of hip hop from the generation of the New Black Aesthetic as proof that the old heads have really gotten old. But perhaps it's something else. Perhaps it is just that we, the first descendents of hip hop, are the first generation fully qualified to be critical of it. Our problem, therefor, is not that we oldheads "don't get it." Rather, our problem is that we do.

2006 Hurston Wright Legacy Award

Fiction:
Nancy Rawles, My Jim- Winner
Tayari Jones, The Untelling- - Finalist
David Anthony Durham, Pride of Carthage- - Finalist

Nonfiction:
John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America- Winner
Lisa E. Farrington, Creating Their Own Image- - Finalists
Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevard, Bold Dreams- - Finalists

Debut Fiction:
Denise Nicholas, Freshwater Road

Contemporary Fiction:
Clyde W. Ford, The Long Mile

Congratulations, Lords of the Niggerati!

Tayari Jones has a lovely recap on her blog.

Niggerati Power Rankings

Here is the number of Google page hits per member of the current niggerati. Not that it's a contest or anything (fogive the title of this entry, I couldn't resist), but it is interesting.

How big is any writer? How is that defined, by sales, or readers, or critical praise? Or is it something even more elusive: artistic merit? If something cannot acurately be quantified, can it truly be used as a measure? Google has become the portal through which we funnel the information of the world. In that regard, its measure is probably as valid as any.

1,560,000 for "toni morrison"
1,130,000 for "alice walker"
490,000 for "walter mosley"
297,000 for "samuel r. delany"
286,000 for "edward p. jones"
229,000 for "nalo hopkinson"
227,000 for "edwidge danticat"
193,000 for "ishmael reed"
183,000 for "colson whitehead"
152,000 for "ntozake shange"
134,000 for "gloria naylor"
128,000 for "derrick bell"
127,000 for "ernest gaines"
120,000 for "john edgar wideman"
84,000 for "zz packer"
81,500 for "paule marshall"
73,200 for "albert murray"
67,900 for "percival everett"
61,400 for "paul beatty"
52,500 for "tayari jones"
48,500 for "wanda coleman"
46,100 for "colin channer"
42,200 for "j. california cooper"
41,200 for "danzy senna"
40,700 for "gayl jones"
38,200 for "martha southgate"
38,000 for "marlon james"
37,500 for "marita golden"
34,900 for "mat johnson"
27,800 for "david anthony durham"
27,100 for "elizabeth nunez"
22,100 for "trey ellis"
17,700 for "kenji jasper"
14,300 for "darryl pinckney"
14,000 for "brian keith jackson"
12,800 for "victor lavalle"
12,700 for "michael datcher"
11,600 for "reginald mcknight"
10,200 for "alexs pate"

I limited this to living writers known for their literary fiction (it's what I do and also this list is all I have time to do right now). Some writers (David Bradley, Calvin Baker, Andrea Lee, Charles Johnson, Toure, etc.) could not be included because their names were too generic to properly google. I included only writers of the Americas for the sake of economy: the Africans, Afro-brits, and Afropeans are so numerous I would never be done. I also excluded those writers with less than 10,000 hits: I don't want anyone to feel personally belittled.

Thoughts? Additions?

Oh Lordy: Should I put up a MySpace site?

Dear God, I feel as if I've soiled myself just by asking that question.

Please tell me, should I, or shouldn't I?

The pages take forever to load. It appears to be just a bunch of people perpetually saying hi to each other. It seems to do for internet discourse what the mobile did to phone conversations (hi, where are you, I am here, bye). And from what I can tell, it's largely populated by assholes hoping to extend the clique stage of their adolescence.

Of course, I want to just say hi to people too. Hi! Hi! Hi! How embarrassing.

Anyone?

News from Manhattan

I went into NYC today. Back in the day, going to Manhattan seemed such a big deal to me. There was so much to discover there: music, food, clothes, magazines, books. So many things you couldn't find anywhere else. I remember I used to see King Britt at Market East taking the R7 train from Philly up to New York to shop for clothes and records; this was back when we were both in our teens. King was always a cool dude, but the fact that he would go up on his lonesome to the big city just blew me away.

Now, with the internet and the rise of the big boxes, it's not like that anymore. While the rural areas are suddenly more livible, the downside is that our cities have lost their monopoly on the world's treasures. Walking around town, I was struck by that, depressed by it too. But then I remembered one thing they have that you can't find anywhere else: all those people. Where else can you walk around and watch so many different kinds of human beings? When I figured that out, it put me back.

The reason for my trip was largely to meet with the publicity folks at Bloomsbury to discuss their promotional plan for Great Negro Plot. To be honest, I was surprised that there was one: I was expecting them to just flick it out there and see if it floats. I was pleasantly surprised that they were investing more than that. They even had a galley made up of the thing, much to my surprise. (A galley is a soft cover version of the uncorrected manuscript printed cheaply for the purpose of print reviews, bookstore buyer sales and blurbs.) I don't know why all this should surprise me, but it did.

I sold my first novel to Bloomsbury eight years ago. I remember walking to their office in the Flat Iron Building, elated because it seemed my dreams were about to come true. That it was in this historic NYC landmark just made my years of New York starvation more poetic. When I arrived at the actual office, I found it to be a dirty-ass, dusty mess that looked like it had been empty for years. The main room had some Apple IIe computers forgotten in one corner and a dead hibiscus plant in the other.

For a second, I thought it was a scam. But Karen Rinaldi, the editor, was real, and she liked the same things about Drop that I did, so I went with her. Later that week, there was a generous offer from another house for $15,000 more, but I had a good feeling about this upstart British press built on Harry Potter money, so I gave my book to Karen and the two other employees that comprised Bloomsbury USA.

Today, the Bloomsbury I visited takes up three floors in the building and has 80 employees. And me? I've sold at least 80 books. Thank god they don't ask for the advance money back.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com