Print being a bit like real estate or land in the publishing world, it’s rare to find a book that is playful through-and-through and if you do, it often becomes a rare book. The exceptions are notebooks, letters, and journals, usually published invasively after the author is dead and the estate is rogue. We have Dostoyevsky’s, Kurt Cobain’s, Kafka’s. I don’t see this happening to black writers as often. I can’t imagine Toni Morrison’s estate turning her personal notes into a monument, but maybe if we give it a hundred years or maybe this is already in the works. She haunts us either way so they might risk it someday. Usually you have to dig in archives to find someone’s notes and journals and letters, even in the age of the endless scroll and open AI they won’t tell me what Miles Davis said to James Baldwin word for word, I have to dig it up from boxes in a famous library in Harlem, which means I have to get to Harlem, which means I have to quit playing, find an assignment, get in line. And when you finally do, much of what you find there feels like epitaph, morbid and listless grit to ward off the impending tunnel of light that would alleviate it, private superstitions made public, trust betrayed as if everyone involved wanted it thus. Did we? For attention to clear the cosmic conscience?
© 2024 Harmony Holiday
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