#composing a life

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"Before you can have a revision, you have to have a vision," Kiese tells me. "[We're] talking about the things we don't want to be replicated, but a vision is equally interested in what we do want to be replicated. Part of revision for me is just actually sitting in some of the harm I've done. But also you can drown in that, too. So that's why it's really important to think about who you want to be, as opposed to, like, who you don't want to be. I don't want to be harmful, but the harder question for me, Rodney, is who do I want to be out in the world?"

Kiese Laymon quoted in an adaptation of a podcast episode at Louder Than A Riot by Rodney Carmichael at NPR. 'He gon' get these beats 'n' rhymes'

A 'Louder' host reflects on hip-hop masculinity after fatherhood

There's so much wisdom in Carmichael's essay I went to listen to the Podcast episode and it's really very beautiful. If I understand things right the next episode with be the final one for the year. The whole season of episodes looks great:

Season 2 of Louder Than A Riot examines who hip-hop marginalizes, and how misogynoir — the specific racist misogyny against Black women — is embedded into the fabric of the culture that we love.

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I finally came to realise that my grandmother, after all, also believed in dreams. There could have been no other reason why, sitting one evening at the door of her cottage where she now lived alone, staring at the biggest and smallest stars overhead, she said these words: “The world is so beautiful and it is such a pity that I have to die”. She didn’t say she was afraid of dying, but that it was a pity to die, as if her hard life of unrelenting work was, in that almost final moment, receiving the grace of a supreme and last farewell, the consolation of beauty revealed. She was sitting at the door of a house like none other I can imagine in all the world, because in it lived people who could sleep with piglets as if they were their own children, people who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn’t see them again.

José Saramago in his Nobel Lecture (Translated from the Portuguese: Tim Crosfield and Fernando Rodrigues).  How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice

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I think of Robert Frost and his poem 'Two Roads Diverge,' and for queer folk, it's just one road. It's about trying to think how to really cut through the grass and the trees to make the other road and what you've learned on the way, what you discover in making that road, it enriches your life. And so I do believe that queerness saved me. It made me a better person because I had to find different angles to the world. I couldn't just accept what was there.

Ocean Vuong quoted in an article by Alyssa Newcomb at Today. Author Ocean Vuong on how 'queerness' made him a better person

"It seems like I'm in a parallel universe, and so I just felt that right now, I am trying to live slowly with it."

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People felt that I had done something brave by sharing this on a platform so large. Reading these responses, I realized I wanted my future roles to speak to them. I am them. They might look up to me because of my profession. But really, I stand among them. I stand on the shoulders of the community of people who look like me and love like me who have come before me. I’m advocating for the future generations, for them to live in a more inclusive, tolerating space, through my work.

Nicholas Ashe as told to Rebecca Theodore-Vachon at Oprah Daily. Nicholas Ashe on Queen Sugar, Queer Art, and Coming Out in an Instagram Post

“I haven’t lived my full life to see how the decision to come out will inform the rest of my career, but I know that karma will kiss me for it.”

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Over time it became apparent for those who were inclined to notice such things, that someone blessed with a long life would come to know seven generations. They would know their: Great-grandparents Grandparents Parents Siblings Children Grandchildren Great-grandchildren It was noticed that regardless of the time described in their stories (history) there were always Seven Generations Alive and Walking Through Time. Seven Generations who are responsible for the creation of The Stories That Are The People.

Ken Homer in Collaborative Conversations. The Seven Generations vs the Seventh Generation

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Children of Jazz - Cavana Hazelton and Ruomi Lee-Hampel — Human/Ordinary

What’s it like being the children of two international jazz musicians? In this episode of Human/Ordinary we meet Ruomi Lee-Hampel and his sister Cavana Hazelton who are divided by the Atlantic Ocean and united by jazz.

edwordsmyth posted a photo of Jeanne Lee and it reminded me of a picture I’d seen on a couple of Youtube videos of Lee with a young child on her back. That photo always made me ponder what it would be like to grow up with music like that. So I stumbled upon this wonderful podcast of Cavana and Ruomi telling stories of what it’s been like 

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The narratives we concoct and the causal relationships we want to impose where meaning is absent or difficult to find—I love that stuff. I’m finding myself writing about narrative again, and I can now see the role of narrative in my first book. I hadn’t been thinking of My Body Is a Book of Rules as a book about narrative, really, but it absolutely is, in that it’s about how I articulated the story of my life to myself, and how it was determined for me in some areas. I used to think the story I was going to tell over and over for the length of my career was about trauma, but now I think that story I’ll never give up is simply about narrative itself. My old conception of my relationship with narrative no longer serves me: I thought I was anti-narrative, but that’s simply not true; I just had language to describe my aesthetic that made it seem that way.

Elissa Washuta in interview with Greg Mania in The Rumpus. FINDING MEANING AT THE EDGE OF REALITY: TALKING WITH ELISSA WASHUTA

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Right. I mean it’s as simple as, you’re in a relationship and you say “I love you” to your girlfriend and your girlfriend says nothing. How different is that from your girlfriend saying “thank you” or “I love you” or “I like you” or “I hate you.” What our choices leave out, I don’t know if people think about it as much in real life. But I do, often, because a large part of adoptive families is what is left out of the story. I’ve been thinking a lot about Moses recently, because he’s one of the first adoptees I ever heard about. He’s sent down the river in the basket and he’s pulled out of the river by the daughter of the pharaoh, and he’s raised there, but his mom is still in the court, too, as his nursemaid. Then when he comes of age he ends up killing an Egyptian who’s been beating up a Hebrew. And because of this he has to flee his home, because even at that point he’s still a Hebrew who has killed an Egyptian. He would be tried and sentenced because of the law, even though he comes from part of the pharaoh’s family. And so he goes out into the desert and he lives there for forty years or something, and he sees this burning bush and it’s God talking to him. But there’s so many things left out of that story. If you read it through a different lens, if you project your own life onto that, there could be a completely different reason for him to kill the Egyptian. I could imagine—I spent a while rejecting my Korean self—and I could imagine him doing the same thing with himself and that moment as kind of like this switch being turned, where he kills the man because he recognizes something in himself being beaten. Then suddenly, even though he probably hadn’t come to that realization, and I can’t imagine that he would’ve, maybe it’s just a feeling in the moment—suddenly he just does it. And then, by law, he is delineated as a Jew and not as an Egyptian, even though he has grown up his whole life as the pharaoh’s grandson. There’s so much you could read into it either way, and we just have these really huge plot points, and a lot of the things that I would be interested in are left out.

Matthew Salesses in interview with Drew Arnold at The Rumpus. THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW SALESSES