April 29, 2021 At Work Everything Writes Itself: An Interview with Black Thought By David Ma Black Thought. Photo: Erica Génécé. In 2016, wearing a white shirt with tiny embroidered roses, Black Thought centered himself in front of a whispering audience at the Harvard Innovation Labs. He had just finished a conversation with host Michael Keohane about the hand-painted clothing he’d made as a young artist, his rise within rap music, and his eventual aspirations as an actor. To the delight of the campus crowd, he asked, “I can kick a rhyme?” Nudging up his glasses, he then unleashed five minutes of complex stanzas, double entendres, and expository verses. Somewhere within the burst of sentences, he veered into the biographical. “I got to see how gangstas played at such an early age. What my father was into sent him to his early grave. Then mom started chasing that base like Willie Mays … Trouble was my ball and chain.” And then, after a pregnant pause—“Black Thought is what that all became.” Despite almost three decades of recorded material and myriad rhymes, Black Thought has remained low-key about his life offstage. Black Thought, a.k.a. Tariq Luqmaan Trotter, grew up alongside hip-hop itself. His first purchase at a record store was Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock. His early love of rap music gave way to an enduring interest in the written word. “I remember thinking how much I just loved writing,” he says. “I’d write all kinds of things down all day long. I was around nine years old when I tried to write my first rhymes.” He spent his formative years at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts. During this time, a chance encounter with a young drummer, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, would change the trajectory of both their lives. The two, along with the rapper Malik B., formed the Square Roots, a name shortened to just the Roots by the time their first release, Organix, arrived in 1993. Running counter to hip-hop’s celebrated history with sampling, the Roots became known for their use of live instruments and a rotating lineup of band members. They experimented with sampling more in their later work, but live instruments were foundational to their ascent, and word spread about their exuberant stage show. Their 1995 album, Do You Want More?!!!??!, and its 1996 follow-up, Illadelph Halflife, were springboards that took them around the globe for the next fourteen years—world tours, Woodstock, television, film, their very own music festival, even the White House—all of it halting somewhat when they became the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2009 (and eventually The Tonight Show). Collectively, the Roots have amassed more than twenty studio projects, live works, compilations, collaborations, and more. They’ve been nominated for fourteen Grammy Awards and won three, including one in 1999 for their juggernaut single “You Got Me.” Throughout the Roots’ expansive catalogue, we’ve witnessed Black Thought’s maturation as an artist, his gravelly, aging voice and renewed boldness on recent material, all of it quite fitting of his sage persona and increasingly sermonic verbiage. There’d long been attempts made at solo projects over the years, but a perfect storm of industry semantics and gridlock deadened many would-be albums. The Roots’ Phrenology in 2002 was in fact a project whose entire framework was built around sketches intended for Black Thought’s solo debut. Phrenology signaled that Black Thought was undeniably emerging into his own, and his peers were taking notice. In 2018, he released Streams of Thought, Vol. 1, the start of what has become a series of solo projects, each recorded with different producers. As expected, the Streams of Thought series represents a deviation from the material Black Thought has recorded with the Roots. Here, he’s more inward, more confessional, touching on topics like his family and his anxieties as an artist. To date, there have been three volumes, but a fourth is afoot—it seems to be ongoing, a living document that he’s committed to for the longterm. “Am I a journal or journalist? Olympic tournament–level genius author? Affirmative,” he rapped in a 2020 NPR Tiny Desk performance, sitting stoically in house slippers and dark glasses. He’s also been working on a Broadway adaptation of George Schuyler’s 1931 Afrofuturist satire Black No More, which he’s producing, writing music and lyrics for, and costarring in. From our respective corners of the country, Black Thought and I spoke a couple of times over the past year, discussing watershed moments of his artistic growth, important Roots history, and the nucleus of his whole enterprise: his use of language and the written word. INTERVIEWER What are your earliest memories of rap music? BLACK THOUGHT I’m about the same age as hip-hop itself. Kool Herc and those guys started going back and forth on disco breaks in July or August of 1973, and I was born in October of that year. I was invented just a couple months after the breakbeat was invented. Some of my earliest memories are of breaks being spun at disco parties in the neighborhood. Music-wise, record-wise, though, it would be “Rapper’s Delight,” whenever that hit. INTERVIEWER When did your interest in writing begin? What sparked it? BLACK THOUGHT I was nine years old when I started writing. A rapper named RC LaRock got popular and really made an impression on me. He made me want to write actual rhymes. In 1980 he had a song called “Micstro” that was a huge influence in regards to my style. Then “Superrappin’,” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, came out, and they did a particular style that was comparable to what the girl group JJ Fad popularized on the song “Supersonic.” Then Kool Moe Dee and the Treacherous Three came out and influenced me a lot, too. But I remember “Superrappin’ ” in particular because it’s a serious record that starts out at a moderate pace. By the end of it, the verses are lightning fast. I wanted to write my first song in that same cadence. Read More
April 22, 2021 At Work At Home among the Birds: An Interview with Jonathan Meiburg By John Jeremiah Sullivan Photo: Jenna Moore. Jonathan Meiburg was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1976 and grew up in the southeastern United States. In 1997, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel to remote communities around the world, a year-long journey that sparked an enduring fascination with islands, birds, and the deep history of the living world. Meiburg explores these passions in his new book, A Most Remarkable Creature, which traces the evolution of the wildlife and landscapes of South America through the lives of the unusual falcons called caracaras. Like the omnivorous birds at the heart of his book, Meiburg is more generalist than specialist. He’s written reviews, features, and interviews for publications including The Believer, Talkhouse, and The Appendix, on subjects ranging from the music of Brian Eno to a hidden exhibition hall at the American Museum of Natural History. He also conducted one of the last interviews with Peter Matthiessen. But he’s best known as a musician—albums and performances by his bands Loma and Shearwater have earned critical acclaim for many years, often winning praise from NPR, the New York Times, the Guardian, and Pitchfork. In 2018, Meiburg organized and performed in a three-night live reconstruction of David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy for WNYC’s New Sounds program. He lives in central Texas. This interview was conducted electronically between there and Wilmington, North Carolina. INTERVIEWER Recently an anhinga started roosting by the tidal creek that runs through my backyard. It’s fun to watch—the long snaky neck and the way it hangs its wings out to dry like laundry. Once, when the creek was clear, I watched it hunt, and it flew along underwater like a fish. I’ve been told that anhingas aren’t really supposed to be here, or that this is north of their range, which is shifting due to climate change. MEIBURG To me anhingas are among the most beautiful birds, and maybe the most like their dinosaurian ancestors of any birds. A lot of people think they’re sort of goofy, and I can see that, too—the tiny heads, the absurdly long necks and flight feathers, the overall sense that they’re a prototype someone meant to refine later. They have wonderful nicknames like “snakebird” and “water turkey.” I love how you can see them soaring way up in the sky for no apparent reason, like ravens with long, skinny necks, even though they make their living wading around on the bottoms of rivers. They need to stay underwater for a long time, so they have very little oil on their feathers. This helps them sink and stay down. But it means they have to spend a lot of time standing on perches and holding their wings out to dry, which is usually how you see them, and it locks them out of places that get really cold. I was used to seeing them in the southeastern U.S., especially along that elevated stretch of I-10 that crosses the Atchafalaya Basin—but they were thick along the river in southern Guyana when I visited, and they seemed completely at home among colorful, feathered weirdos like parrots, toucans, and capuchin birds. Read More
April 13, 2021 At Work On Memory and Motorcycles: An Interview with Rachel Kushner By Cornelia Channing Photo: Gabby Laurent. One morning last week, while sitting at my desk attempting to make headway on various writing assignments, I went on Craigslist and bought a motorcycle—a banana-yellow 1969 Honda CT90 Trail. It was something I had been thinking about doing for a while. I’ve been interested in motorcycles since I was a kid, and a few years ago, I took a course and got my license. But if I’m being honest, the decision to finally bite the bullet and get a bike was at least partially influenced by the opening essay of Rachel Kushner’s new collection, The Hard Crowd. Kushner, the author of the novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018), wrote the essay in question, “Girl on a Motorcycle,” in 2001 for an anthology titled She’s a Bad Motorcycle: Writers on Riding. Describing her first bike, a 500cc Moto Guzzi, Kushner’s voice has all the confidence, wisdom, and cool of her later work. “Motorcycles didn’t enter my own life as gifts from men or ways to travel to men,” Kushner asserts, “but as machines to be ridden.” The piece goes on to describe something called the Cabo 1000, an illegal and dangerous thousand-mile motorcycle race on the Baja California peninsula, much of which takes place on dirt roads that weave precipitously through desert mountains. Kushner participated in the race when she was twenty-four, the age I am now. The parallels between Kushner and me end here. Next to the bikes she and her friends rode, my motorcycle would look like a tricycle. At one point during the Cabo 1000, Kushner clocked 142 miles an hour. At its very fastest, my bike won’t go much over 50. Still, something about the self-possession and sheer high-octane energy of Kushner’s writing—and her descriptions of the pleasures of the road, where she feels “kinetic and unfettered and alone”—took hold of my imagination and propelled me to pursue my own, albeit more modest, thrills. Not all the essays in The Hard Crowd are automotive in nature. Kushner also writes elegantly about Italian film, prison reform, sea captains, and Marguerite Duras. There is a remarkable and heartbreaking piece about a crowded refugee camp for Palestinians inside Jerusalem. There are sensitive and expansive considerations of Denis Johnson, Clarice Lispector, Cormac McCarthy, and Jeff Koons, among others. The critic James Wood uses the term “serious noticing” to describe the kind of looking that great novelists do, the revelatory and incisive attention to detail that “rescues the life of things.” Kushner does a lot of serious noticing in this book, of people, places, images, and texts. She also reflects on the various “hard crowds” she has been a part of, conjuring the San Francisco of her youth—a grungy haven populated by bikers, skaters, punk rockers, poets, and dropouts—with vivid, transporting detail. She recalls the friends she had in those years, when she was waitressing and hanging around in bars in the Tenderloin, as some of “the most brightly alive people” she ever knew. Many parts of this book read like a love letter to them, as well as to her younger self and to the places and experiences that shaped her. This interview was conducted via email in late March. Throughout our exchange, Kushner was funny, thoughtful, and generous with her responses. And while I will not, of course, divulge the author’s email address, I can report that it is among the cleverest I have encountered. INTERVIEWER The Hard Crowd is a collection of essays from 2000 through 2020. What was it like to revisit your past work? Have any of the essays taken on new meaning for you as they’ve aged? KUSHNER For years I’ve toyed with the idea of putting together a collection of essays, as they’ve piled up—I’ve been writing them since before I published any fiction—but I wasn’t in a hurry. I needed to find the right through line, an organizing principle that would seem appealing and deliberate. It was only when this phrase “the hard crowd” came to me as a title that I sat down and looked at everything and started pulling out pieces I thought could sit next to one another in a sequence. I excluded most of my writing on contemporary art, because the discourse of visual art is somewhat specialized—maybe someday I’ll make a book of those pieces. For The Hard Crowd, I was looking for a certain kind of resonance. The idea was to make a proper book that is meant to be read in order, from beginning to end, each essay “passing the torch.” When I got to the end, I wrote the title essay and realized this book was some kind of statement about who I am and what I value. This took me by surprise. I thought this was a side project, but the book has as much to do with who I am as my novels do. Read More
March 31, 2021 At Work What Is There to Celebrate? An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib By Langa Chinyoka Hanif Abdurraqib. Photo: Megan Leigh Barnard. Hanif Abdurraqib spent the winter shoveling. In Columbus, Ohio, his hometown, he often found himself spending hours clearing the snow from his driveway, only for it to start back up again as soon as he was done. Sometimes, his neighbor would be out there, too, and as they braced themselves for the cold and the work ahead of them, they’d exchange a smirk, a raised eyebrow, and a nod, as if to say, Ain’t this some shit. Abdurraqib laughs as he offers this anecdote, not just because it’s funny but because of the simple, effervescent joy that bubbles up from beneath interactions like this—when you’re with your people, and things do not have to be explained, or even spoken, to be understood. But how do you put these moments into language? In part, this is the project of A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib’s new collection of essays on the history of Black performance in the U.S. It’s Whitney and Michael, minstrelsy and blackface, school dances and sports games, Soul Train and a spades table, and so many other cultural artifacts held beneath a loving microscope for Abdurraqib’s careful examination. A practiced author, poet, and critic with books such as Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019) and They Can’t Kill Us until They Kill Us (2017) under his belt, Abdurraqib is in complete control here, balancing the personal and the public as he explores the legacy, the nuance, and sometimes, yes, the shame of Black performance while surrendering even himself to scrutiny—the limits of his past self, the limits of all this loving. When we spoke on the phone earlier this year, we discussed optimism, gratitude, and grace, I was reminded of the Lucille Clifton poem that goes, “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” I thought of it again as I reread the book’s final essay, in which Abdurraqib writes, “Isn’t that the entire point of gratitude? To have a relentless understanding of all the ways you could have vanished, but haven’t?” Although Abdurraqib admits to feeling cynical sometimes, A Little Devil in America is a testament to still being here, still finding moments to celebrate despite everything else. If you were to transform a head nod into something that could be held within the pages of a book, it would look like this. If you were to tell someone you loved them, you missed them, and you were happy to know them, you would hope it sounded like this. There is no exaggerated sentimentality, but there is—even in the middle of mourning—music, and even dancing. INTERVIEWER In A Little Devil in America, you celebrate the joy of Black performance, but you don’t shy away from its difficult history. Can you talk a little about that? ABDURRAQIB When I was first writing the book, I spent a lot of time in the midst of minstrelsy and blackface. Much of that is still in the finished book, but the original drafts were anchored by it. I don’t want to disparage my past books, obviously, but I do think it was a different type of thrill to spend time deep in the archives of performances that I perhaps would have once seen as only shameful or only frustrating to witness. To add humanity and illuminate some corners of those felt really good. In the accounts I read, minstrel performers often talked about how the stage, in a way, was pulling them closer to a type of freedom they otherwise would not have been able to access. And that kind of reframed my thinking around shame and survival—making something out of what they had at the time in order to ascend to heights that they were denied at every other turn. Which doesn’t mean that I’m, like, coming out in favor of minstrel shows, but it was important to recontextualize, to think about what it was like to be a person who had been enslaved, or had a relative who had been enslaved, and possessed very few resources to perform in a way that provided power to the people. Read More
March 24, 2021 At Work The B Side of War: An Interview with Agustín Fernández Mallo By Jorge Carrión Agustín Fernández Mallo. Photo: Aina Lorente Solivellas. By “injecting the novel with a large dose of Robert Smithson, and Situationism, and Dadaism, and poetry, and science, and appropriation (collage and quotes and cut-and-paste), and technology (often anachronistic), and images (almost always pixelated), and comic books,” as Jorge Carrión has written, and perhaps above all because he simply presented compelling new possibilities for the form, Agustín Fernández Mallo is considered to have revolutionized the Spanish novel. Mallo was born in Galicia in 1967 and started working as a radiation physicist in 1992, designing X-ray systems and developing cancer-radiation therapies. Nocilla Dream, his debut novel, took the Spanish literary scene by storm in 2006, and bears all the hallmarks of his output since—an interest in form, a desire to highlight the connections between art and science, and an attempt to put his self-styled “post-poetry” into practice. The following conversation, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, was organized by Fitzcarraldo Editions ahead of its publication of Mallo’s The Things We’ve Seen, also translated by Bunstead. The book, his fourth to appear in English, is out this week in the UK and will be released in the U.S. on June 15. Originally published in Spanish by Seix Barral as Trilogía de la Guerra in 2018, it won the prestigious Biblioteca Breve Prize. INTERVIEWER Does any one principal idea run through The Things We’ve Seen? MALLO There is a recurring idea in the novel, the thesis that the dead are never entirely dead, that in fact we cohabit a kind of hybrid space, us and them, as well as that the largest social network ever is not that of the internet but the one that joins the living with the dead. This leads us additionally to the idea that we are all socially connected with somebody who died in war. Read More
March 16, 2021 At Work Poems Are Spiritual Suitcases: An Interview with Spencer Reece By Jonathan Farmer Photo: Pete Duval. Spencer Reece’s memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark, feels like what it is—a product of remarkable time and care. It took Reece seventeen years to write the book, and however much he wanted it to be done earlier, he kept waiting for and working toward a rightness that eluded him. I can’t remember anymore how I stumbled into that process. I’d occasionally written to him over the years to tell him how much I admire his poems and to share what I’d written about them, and somehow, at some point, that resulted in him sending me a draft of the book. By then, Reece had already discovered the structure he credits with unlocking the book—one in which he defines and shapes each part of his life through the life and work of a poet who was important to him at that time. But he still wanted help, which, as Reece presents it, is one of the defining features of his life. For all of the ways in which he once struggled to make a life for himself outside of—and then, eventually, inside—the social structures that refused him and his queerness, he has also inspired a remarkable number of people to help and shelter him. Just as salient, though, is the abundance Reece offers those who enter his life. Little communities pop up around him like mushrooms. Working through edits and revisions with him felt like being admitted into a sacred space. Sacredness is fundamental to the story Reece tells. After years of suffering from alcoholism and rebuilding himself in recovery, unable to find the literary recognition he longed for, and confined by self-loathing, Reece in short order found himself singled out for publication by Louise Glück and the subject of attention from publications like the New York Times—whose profile spurred him to begin working on the memoir, hoping to correct for the sense that he had worked and lived in isolation, without help or love. He then began his journey toward the priesthood. In his telling, poetry and Christianity seem inextricable, which is also the case in his writing, where his audible love of accuracy abides in an equally audible humility—a willingness to move in mystery and honor the sometimes-slow-to-manifest potential for beauty and love. For all Reece’s patience, though, he isn’t still. Since 2004, he has published two books of poems—The Clerk’s Tale and The Road to Emmaus—and a third, Acts, is due out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2024. He edited an anthology of poems from Our Little Roses Home for Girls in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where he taught for two years, and he founded and ran the Unamuno Author Series during his years as a priest in Madrid. He now leads a church in Jackson Heights, Queens. The Secret Gospel of Mark has just been published, and All the Beauty Still Left—a collection of his watercolors combined with quotations into a small, tender book of hours—comes out next month. We discussed his memoir through a flurry of emails over two days in January, as hatred and disease continued to flare up all around us. INTERVIEWER The Secret Gospel of Mark is doing a lot of things—it’s a writer’s memoir, a book of religious devotion, a record of the lives of poets you’ve cherished, a portrait of your parents’ complicated love, a story of healing into queerness and of the wounds that preceded it, a narrative of addiction and recovery, and quite a bit more—and yet it all feels unified. In the book, you describe the moment of its inception seventeen years earlier, a need to fill in a story that “talked about how I had jettisoned out of oblivion,” and a desire to recognize all the people who had shepherded you. How did you get from that original impulse to an understanding of how all these elements could work together? REECE I’m a slow creator—I’ve begun to think I’m on the Bishop plan, or equally the Larkin plan, of about a thing every decade, or a thing every two decades. This prose took a long arc of seventeen to eighteen years from that first impulse to what went to print. I don’t plan for this to happen—I just can’t seem to pull it all together quickly. Some inspirations come quick, surely, but the final product, no. Regarding the emotions, I’m notorious among those who know me best for not understanding something in real time, and only in hindsight can I seem to sort something out. Maybe that’s why I’ve turned to poetry, as a way to make sense of real time. I am a poet. I walk, talk, and think like one. I think I finally accept that. I ended up writing a prose book dedicated to poetry. What “unified” it, to use your word, took a long time to see and was actually something very simple. Structure unified the book. My goal was to take all this complexity and make it a fluid read. While what I was attempting was complicated, I wanted it not to read as “complicated,” maybe like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. When you explain that book, it gets complicated, but it doesn’t feel that way when you read it. You flow right along with all those references. The structure of my book came when I assigned poets to periods of my life—Plath and my early life, Herbert and my first turn to faith, et cetera. The poets needed to enter the narrative organically, which meant I needed to think back to when the poets entered my life and recall what was happening then. The whole thing kind of fell into place after that, which happened about seven years ago. Then there were seven more years of editing and honing. The final chapter is a swirl of contemporary poetry, poets in real time, friends, along with the decline of my mother’s health. But only in the last year of editing did I see the figure under which these things swirled—Jesus. Thus the final chapter is called “Follow me” and concerns my past ten years as an ordained man. So it goes! Read More