Katarina Bivald in Oakland

Katarina Bivald

One other highlight of the trip to Oakland was catching a presentation by Swedish author Katarina Bivald at Laurel Bookstore. I was unfamiliar with her work, but my dear friend and former colleague Jennifer DeVere Brody, who lives and teaches now in the Bay Area, had read Bivald's brand new novel Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2016), and suggested we check it out. I imagined the standard reading followed by Q&A scenario, but Bivald instead spoke to the audience, taking many questions, for an hour or so, and did so with aplomb. She unfortunately did not read from Readers, though many present at the event already had done so and were quite familiar with the characters and plot.

A few doors down from Laurel Bookstore

Though she writes in Swedish, Bivald is fluent enough in English to be able to walk all of us through many aspects of her writing life, including her experience with repeated rejections followed by eventual purchase of her manuscript; the differences between Swedish and US publishing (think scale, no agents until you are already famous and seek to sell foreign rights, and the comparative lack of diversity of voices there); her interest in 20th and 21st century American literature; her fascination with US small towns, including the eponymous Iowa hamlet "Broken Wheel," where her novel is set; and the absence of anything like US MFA programs and the institutionalization of creative writing in Sweden.

Oakland

Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is set in a small Iowa town, but it turns out Bivald was writing more from her imagination than any real time spent in the state, and one of the errors she got wrong, she laughingly shared, was having the characters wear cowboy hats (!), instead of the more likely baseball caps. When her book was translated into English and published in the UK, the British editor and readers had no problems with this factual solecism, since they were as unfamiliar with this sartorial peculiarity of the American Midwest as Bivald, but when the book was to be published in the US, Bivald shared, the headwear had to change. She has subsequently had the opportunity to tour in Iowa, and, it turns out, readers there are quite taken with the book.

No caption needed

Some of Bivald's most illuminating comments came when she was discussing her pre-publication view of how writers should create versus her changed perspective. As a beginning writer she had the idea that you should issue a book on a yearly basis, and not dither around, yet having made it onto bookshelves as a published author she now believed that authors should take their time and aim to produce the best book possible, however long it required. What she also emphasized was that authors should writer for themselves as opposed to the market, and challenge themselves in terms of their work. For obvious reasons, I appreciated all these comments.

Laurel Bookshop, on the right,
City Hall on the left

I asked her about how she saw herself bridging Swedish and US, recalling as I did so Tim Parks' eloquent discussion of non-US writers aiming for an American readership and the global (Anglophone) literary market. We discussed the differences in translation between Sweden (which, as a small country with a vibrant literary culture undertakes a sizable number of translations, particularly from the US) and the United States (whose publishers, as I've argued elsewhere and as Bowker's surveys point out, issue only a tiny fraction of non-English titles every year). Bivald pointed out that in Swedish, even the nomenclature was different; it was rare to hear "translated" work or "translation" there, whereas in the US, despite the frequent elision of translators in reviews and discussions of writing, publishers must highlight, sometimes to the detriment of a book's marketing and sales, its "translated" status.

A cathedral near the restaurant

Afterwards Jennifer, Katarina, and several others friends (Tanya, Maceo, and Emily) went out for drinks and a meal at Plum Bar, just down the street from Laurel, and I had some of the best cocktails I've drunk in a while. Their Boulevardier, which included barrel aged liquor, was so smooth you could have skated a figure eight across it! Thank you, Jennifer and Tanya, for a delicious meal, and thanks to Sean Hoskin and his friend Alex for the dinner fun at Duende the following night)!

Although it isn't the sort of novel I tend to read, I enjoyed Katarina's presentation so much I am looking forward to her book, and wishes her the best as she continues work on a new one, set in...Oregon!

Oakland Book Festival

This weekend I traveled to Oakland, California to participate in its second annual Oakland Book Festival, on Sunday, May 22. Though I have traveled a number of times to the Bay Area over the last few years, I hadn't ventured to Oakland in over a decade and a half or more, so it was a treat to have a reason to return to the East Bay metropolis. The Oakland Book Festival, which convened a wide array of authors, publishers, booksellers, and Bay Area residents, is, I learned, a one-day non-corporate sponsored ideas fest, held in around Oakland's majestic City Hall, and the diversity and political salience of the panels and screenings, which ranged from the FBI's pursuit of African American writers to utopian thought today and the future of the family to the experiences of porn stars and sex workers, bore this out.

L-R: Manuel "Manolo" Callahan, Stefano Harney,
Fred Moten, Linda Norton, and two unknown attendees
at the Convivial Research panel

Author and radio host Justin Desmangles, who heads the Before Columbus Foundation, organized and moderated the panel on which I participated, on the theme of multiraciality in 21st CenturyAmerican literature. The other panelists were two highly acclaimed writers I know and admire so much, the married couple fiction and nonfiction Emily Raboteau and fiction and comics writer Victor LaValle. Our public conversation, of the afternoon's first, ranged widely, with explorations of capitalism's and slavery's influence on American literature today, the challenges writers of color, including President Barack Obama faced, of public racial representation, and the current political climate, including one of its most horrifying emanations, Donald J. Trump. I personally thought the exchanges, including the audience's comments and questions, were informative, and I loved the differing approaches Victor and Emily took. It was an honor to be in conversation with them, and Justin. Many thanks to everyone who came to hear us, including Tan Khanh Cao and D. Scott Miller, as well as Elmaz Abinader, whom I had the chance finally to meet, among many others. 

Rochelle and her colleague at Prison Lit Project

After our panel and a short stint signing copies of the newly issued paperback version of Counternarratives, I moseyed to some of the other panels, only to learn that festival organizers were very strict about adhering to occupancy code requirements, so I could not get into a number of panels I wanted to attend. In the interim I did run into a number of writers and publishers I admire, including Aaron Bady, Adam Levy and his partner Ashley Nelson Levy at Transit Books, Mauro Javier Cárdenas, and Caille Milner. (Because of the booksigning I missed Mauro's and Caille's panel). I did manage, however, to slip into the "Working With Others: On Convivial Research" panel, featuring Manuel (Manolo) Callahan, Stefano Harney, and my friend and hero Fred Moten. Linda Norton, whom I had the pleasure of chatting with a little earlier, and whose shared a copy of her exquisite book Public Gardens: Poems and History with me, served as moderator. I had never heard of convivial research, but by the time Callahan, Harney and Fred had finished defining and walking us through examples of it, I certainly did.

At McSweeney's table

I relished also having the opportunity to check out the booksellers' tables. One serendipitous encounter came when I happened upon writer, editor and critic Rochelle Spencer, who is doing great work with the Prisoners Literature Project. So great to see you! I keep vowing when attending book festivals that I will not buy any books, but the serendipity of new enchanting titles or the availability of ones I intended to buy once again overcame my willpower, and I bought enough books to fill a tote bag, which I mailed back to my university office rather than paying an extra bag fee to the airline bringing me home. I also got to chat with Brad Johnson, bookseller extraordinaire. Thanks so much to Diesel Books, which had copies of Counternarratives for sale (and whose pile of many was a pile of just a few by the time I returned later in the day--thank you, Diesel and readers!), and to Small Press Distributors, which had a trove of goodies I could not resist. Now I will have even more reading to catch up on this summer!

A few more photos from the festival:

Hip Hop for Change

Some of the booths

Booksellers and other vendors

At Diesel Books

Author signing

A familiar book at the center of
this photo

More books

Loviosa, advertising the
Harry Potter conference in
Las Vegas

LitQuake's booth

Nomadic Press's Open Mic

Marc Bamuthi Joseph's & Theaster Gates's rbGB @ Chicago MoCA

I am not a dance critic nor a dance scholar, let me make that clear. I point this lest I incur the sort of situation that allegedly occurred a few years ago when some kind person cited this blog in a dissertation on dance. It startled my (very generous) colleague who's a leader in that field and happened to be participating in the dissertation defense. So please, dear reader, read these remarks as those of a fan and nothing more.  I do love dance, I love to dance and I love going to see dance performances. I don't do this enough, I'll admit it. Fortunately, last week, I got my tail into gear and headed down to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art to see red black and Green: a blues, the collaboration between Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living World Project and local artist and urban planner Theaster Gates.  This was only one of several events that Joseph/The Living World Project held at MoCA, from April 12-14. Others included a conversation with former Obama administration official and environmental and jobs activist Van Jones; and SHareOUT, which turned the stage over to a number of young Chicago poets and activists, including Young Chicago Authors, Kuumba Lynx, YOUmedia, FilmLAB@1512 and AgLAB@1512 of the Better Boys Foundation, and The MCA Creative Agency. 

Marc Bamuthi Joseph (foreground) dancing, Theaster Gates through door

For red black and Green: a blues, Joseph conducted field research, including interviews and community-based events, for several years, in the four cities--Chicago, New York (Harlem), Houston, and Oakland--that formed the compass points for the performance, which he and collaborators Gates, Chicago native Traci Tolmaire and Tommy Shepherd a.k.a. Emcee Soulati also structured according to the four seasons, four cycles of life, and four rooms of a shotgun-style house (porch, kitchen, bedroom, front/living room).  With Gates, he realized the house metaphor through an interactive and versatile stage installation, a mobile house/set seemingly built out of scraps (an organic, green set), titled The Colored Museum, playing off the title of George C. Wolfe's famous play, that the public could view during museum hours, and which provided the setting and backdrops for each part of the performance. One of the exciting aspects of red black and Green: a blues, was being able to join Joseph, Gates, Tolmaire, and Shepherd down on the stage at the beginning of the performance. Everyone attending, as well as the ushers, were invited to mill about, observe them, find a spot, engage. They not only interacted with the audience, singing and speaking directly to us, handing out watermelon slices, gently ushering us about as the installation-house-set underwent its initial reformulations, but our presence, I think, probably shaped how this first part of the event unfolded, provoking some improvisation. The space itself, then, became embodied, not just by the performers, but by the audience.

Tommy Shepherd, making music

Let me say that Joseph can dance his behind off, as can Tolmaire; Gates can sing; and Shepherd can create any beat you might envision. But they all sang, and danced, and made music. They sang and danced and made music out of seemingly nothing, out of anything, out of everything.  They all also embodied the various people--characters--Joseph had interviewed, harmoniously fitting together the documentary material, Joseph's stirring spoken word poetry (I mean, this man can write and perform some poetry!), the dancing in multiple styles, from ballet to hip hop, the singing (which included Gates's and the others' performances of standards, blues songs, and original pieces), to create an embodied whole that suggested a larger vision.

The audience heading back to seats after the first part of the show

With each shift to a new season and city, a new cycle of life, came a new configuration of The Colored Museum, and at every point, even during the transitions, Joseph or his collaborators kept things going and flowing, though they also were not afraid to show the seams. Other elements of the multimedia performance included still and video projections on the back walls, judicious use of materials like seeds and bowls and water, lights and darkness, and taped music.  At one point, after the Harlem scenes, I was convinced that everyone had danced and sung themselves out, and if Joseph just decided to lie on the stage and Gates went silent but for a blues hum, I wouldn't have faulted them. But they kept moving towards the finale, and by the end, their aims had become clear. A reporter sitting next to me remarked at the end of the event that she would be reflecting on this performance for some time to come, and I had to agree.

red, black and Green: a blues

The red black and green subtext of the performance, i.e., blackness, as well as the blues, I think, were clear from the beginning, but I was curious to see how they would tackle the Green. The complexity of black--and brown, and working-class--people's relationship to the environment, natural, built, always constructed in social, economic and political terms, was complex. red black and Green: a blues made clear that any blanket pronouncements about a green approach that did not take into account historical and material conditions, the diverse and sometimes divergent perspectives of people who were often living in a state of multiple displacements, the rich connections between and across cultural circuits, was bound to fail. Joseph himself is Haitian-American, the son of an immigrant; in one scene, he portrayed himself talking to his son about the Black Panthers, and his and the landscape's relationship to them. His working through of their legacy for him and for his son, and for those who'd come after and might not know how they effected change and yet were not able to accomplish some of their goals, but left traces on those who came after, left traces in the landscape itself, marked it, was quite moving. His son, he suggested, was able to pick up the threads.

A scene from red, black and Green: a blues

The deft weaving of global and regional traditions, alongside critical and intellectual engagement, in embodied practice, was the highlight of this performance. Yet it never felt like a critique turned into art, or intellectualism for its own sake. The embodying of concepts, words, movements, gestures, voices, practices, of the space itself, occurred in a thrilling, unforgettable way. If red black Green: a blues comes through your city, don't miss it. I am looking forward to whatever these amazing artists come up with next.

Theaster Gates, after the show

Tommy Shepherd, after the show

Traci Tolmaire (on right), chatting with fans

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, at show's end