Requiem for a Blog

This is the last official post for Niggerati Manor. As of today, I am ending the niggeratimanor.com run.

I started this blog last year for several reasons: I wanted to explore issues of African American literature in an environment unlike the predominantly white one I was teaching the subject in, I wanted to explore the idea of an online community, I was on sabbatical and had the time. Since then, my life has changed rather dramatically: I no longer live in the isolated Hudson Valley, I'm teaching at one of the most vibrant MFA programs in the country, and my personal life needs more of my focus in this period of transition.

It was my hope to put myself out there online as a lure to talk about lit issues, not to use lit issues as a lure to talk about me. My posts have moved slowly away from literary concerns and more towards personal essay, and that tells me it's time to call it quits. I don't want to be one of those literary opportunists who spends more time promoting themselves than creating work worth talking about. So I'm off to write more books.

Overall, it's been a successful experiment. When I first started I was ecstatic to get 17 visits a day, and almost 100 in the first week. Now the site averages 273 hits a day, with over 31,000 unique hits to the blog alone this year.

I don't think blogs should be forever, rather that you come, you explore a theme, and then when you get what you need from it you move on. I did about as much writing and thinking about this blog as I would have on a novel, and that's about as much as I can give. I doubt this will be my last blog in the years ahead; I'm looking forward to coming back to the form as a veteran when the feeling hits. I wasn't kidding about my idea for a black lit fiction site, and hope to get that going with other people writing and editing that sometime in the future. I already have plans for another personal blog as well, a mulatto themed blog which I'll probably get up in 2009. I'll put a link for that here if it happens.

Thank you for coming along with me, for sharing your ideas and thoughts. I will put up a Book Tour section on the main site. I should have books out in 2008, 2009 and beyond and would love to meet you in person then.

I'm Out Like Jean Toomer.

Peace,

Mat Johnson
September 9, 2007
Old Sixth Ward
Houston, TX

Announcement Coming

Gorillas Love Phil Collins

Gorillas Love Phil Collins.

Mulatto Nation

Lezley Saar, my nomination for Secretary of State of Mulattopia.

I Need a Fucking Cigarette

When I was a kid I moved around a lot with my mother from apartment to apartment, but the most memorable one of these was one we spent about three years in, from my second to fourth grade. It was a basement apartment in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, about three blocks from where I went to school. It was a miserable little place with hard linoleum tiles intended to look like wood. Sometimes kids would break into the back alley behind our windows and you could see them, or at least from their feet to their waists, as they basically ran through our living room. It was dark, it was damp, all the wood in the house would bend from the moisture in the summer and straighten out in the winter once more. My mom was getting her grad degree in social work at Temple at the time, working a full shift at the Financial Aid office to pay for everything. She spent all night talking on the telephone, drinking Pepsi, and smoking True Greens. This was her social life. I sat next to her and watched TV till it was time to go to sleep. The windows were always closed (because otherwise someone might climb through them) and the room was engulfed in a menthol fog by 7:30pm. I usually didn't go to sleep until eleven. (Second-hand smoke hadn't been invented yet.)

For the most part I avoided smoking outside the house; to me there was no glamor in it. So I made it through high school and college without getting hooked. Even at the University of Wales-Swansea, where all my friends smoked, I made it without the slightest temptation. Smoking was just something that other people did and I didn't.

After college I was a Watson Fellow, jumping around Europe and Africa. Mostly though, I was jumping around London, and it was while I was there that I started hanging with "K." K worked the graveyard shift at a video warehouse, a boring, undemanding job that could only be made bearable by being stoned out of his head. The thing is, spliff was expensive in London, and usually came in the form of hash bricks, so it had to be sprinkled into a tobacco cigarette and re-rolled. I spent months like this, going over to K's at 6pm when he woke up, shooting the shit with him as we passed the joint until it was 11:30pm and he was off to work and I was off to a club or bed.

When this era was over, and I was back in Philly and on the verge of a massive depression, I found that to top everything off I was going through, I was going through withdrawal too. Not from the cannabis, which is what I had been conscious that I'd been smoking, but from the nicotine I hadn't given two thoughts to.

Without even realizing I was joining the hellbound club, I had become a smoker.


I never fully gave in to the urge, or at least accepted my reality. Usually, while in grad school, I would buy a pack, or two, or three, or damn all the way up to five, and I would smoke them obsessively, smoking till I was sick, all the while telling myself that I was getting my fill and that this would allow me to stop. And I would stop, for a month or two, maybe even three. And then I would have one more and then I would be back puffing again. Trying to quit after this pack, or trying to quit after the next one. I have never been good at moderation with anything in my life. If I were one of my own fictional characters, that would be my tragic flaw. This over the top obsessive behavior is what makes me good at writing novels, and not good at life itself. I tried cold turkey, and it didn't work (it never does). I tried acupuncture, which kind of turned me on in a kinky way but that was about it. So I smoked and stopped and smoked and stopped, for a decade. Squashing it at home and binging on the road. Hating myself for it but doing it anyway.




When I went back to London last spring, I didn't see K., but I did see "B.," his ex and my friend. When she saw me light up at a little cafe in Brixton, she was shocked that I was smoking, something I actually didn't do when I lived there. When I told her how K. had hooked me, she told me that K. had quit a decade ago, right after I left for the States and was just getting started on my habit. The fucking bastard.

Worse yet, all of London was going smoke free. The gray city itself, the place where people smoke everywhere and cancer seemed like a nasty rumor started by the Germans, even London was moving on without me.

So Vic and I went to a pub, and we drank our pints, and then I left my pack of Nat Sherman MCDs on the table there. Left them to disappear into the nicotine cloud behind me.

And I haven't smoked since.

THE END[ing is not here]

Wouldn't it be great if that's where the story really did end? Well it would but it didn't because you can't turn desire off and on like that. It's not that I've smoked since: I haven't, I really fucking haven't. But shit I want to. I want to bad. I want to so bad that an improved chance at an extended life means little to me. Be around to see my grandkids? Shit, I don't even know them. Live a better life? What good is a life where you can't have what you want? Life is overrated to beginning with, with all of its loss and disappointments. Give me a fucking cigarette.


But still, I'm not smoking.

You know what's keeping me from smoking? I'll tell you. It's not love, it's not responsibility, it's not all the little mortality facts that assholes tell you when you've got a fag in your hand, it's not having to stand out in front of bars and restaurants on cold days to get my embarrassingly little nicotine fix. It's that first cigarette back. That first cigarette back after you've quit for a while tastes like pickled cat shit. And not only does it taste horrible, reminding you of what a crap addiction cigarettes are in the first place, but on top of that you get hit with the crushing wave of guilt because once again you fucked up, you couldn't hang, you couldn't hold out, and even though that first cigarette tastes absolutely awful you know you're going to smoke another one right after. Because that's how it works. And then, no matter how long you stopped or how bad you tortured yourself, you're right the fuck back again.

That's what keeps me from smoking. Because without the crutch of a cigarette to lean on, I don't think I could handle that shit.


(Smoke'em if you got'em.)

Through the Walls

When I was doing my MFA thing I lived in a shitty little tenement apartment in Harlem with Victor Lavalle, there we both finished the first books that would get our careers off the ground. The place was mouse infested, falling apart, and loud, but for a while it was home and a place to hide from the rest of the city in. At night though, usually at about 10pm or so, I would hear this sound through the living room walls. Somewhere in the next building over, at full volume an old record player would drop its needle down and after a few loops of scratches a melancholy song would come on that would start out sorrowful and then slowly build to agony. Even through the walls it was clearly the most beautiful thing, and the most heartbreaking. And then at the end of the song, the needle would pick up, and there would be silence for about two seconds, and then the needle would drop back at the beginning, and the song would play all over again. This audio cycle would continue until 6:30 in the following morning.

Some older man came home and drank his sorry black ass to the point where he could wallow in his own loss and misery, and then he put on that song so he could wallow some more. And then he passed out, I assume, the sound of his ruin repeating endlessly beyond him. This is what I decided. When the music stopped a few months later, I decided as well that the man (and I assumed it to be a man) had either been gentrified out of Harlem or had finally died. But I didn't know. Part of me didn't want to know. Whatever his loss, whatever wrong turn he had taken in his life, it seemed like if you knew of it the weight it would crush you as well. It was enough to imagine him reeking of Colt 45 and English Leather in his 1960s polyester thrift shop clothes, his hair dyed and greasy and showing its grey roots against too black ends, waking up to his urine stained pants in the morning in a room decorated in stained photos of flair suited men and woman with big glasses, both standing besides Lincolns and Cadillacs. But what I did wonder was, What the hell is that song?

After that, I forgot about it for a while. One time, years later, I was watching a documentary about the Stax record label, and instantly I recognized the basic sound of the band and knew my mystery song had to be a Stax song. There is a line in Drop about the music through the wall, where I cannibalized this experience for some ambient description. But besides that, there seemed nothing more to learn about it.

Then one day about two years ago I was traveling through an airport for some literati thing, just trying to make my connection, and I heard the song. I hadn't heard or thought about the thing in years but I heard that bop-bop-bop-bop beat and instantly it all came back to me. I stopped what I was doing and headed into the Starbucks it was coming out of. The woman behind the counter looked at me like I was nuts when I asked desperately for the song's name pointing me towards the cd basket. The song still playing, going into its last screaming throws, I searched through their pre-packaged compilation trying to find it, but nothing there was even close. In desperation, I turned to the long line and said loudly over the airport bustle, "Does anybody know what song this is?" Most people seemed to have another answer on their minds, specifically to the question "Is this dude crazy?" One guy in the back, seeing that I was standing there waiting for an answer, said, "I think it's Otis Redding." Others agreed, although I think they would have agreed to anything to keep the line moving.

After that I went through iTunes entire Otis Redding catalog trying to find the song. I figured it was an obscure b-side, so went through everything but the greatest hits album to find it. I'm glad I did this, not because it was faster (it turned out the song was #1 of the "Best of" album), but because I fell in love with Otis Redding's music utterly and completely in that brief time.

This is the song, Otis Redding's "These Arms of Mine":



If this was a fair universe, all men would be able to sing like Otis Redding when they wanted to, when they needed to. Not to diss Marvin Gaye, or Teddy Pendergrass or whatever brother is your favorite crooner, but Otis Redding sang like a man. Utterly strong but completely vulnerable, smooth without affectation, without restraint but still like he could carry the world in his big brown hands. Sensitive and heartfelt and masculine all at the same time.



Fuck Elvis, I want to impersonate this man.

Penguin- Official Bird of Mulattopia

For a version that's actually readable, head to Salon: http://www.salon.com/comics/opus/2007/07/22/opus/

[Sitting through a quick ad for a daypass may be required]