Imani Perry photo: Sameer Khan.

Sons—

You have been running away from lies since you were born. But the truth is we do not simply run away from something; we run to something. I do not think you fully believe me, but I am not a mother who yearns for you to be a president or captain of industry. I will not brag about your famous friends or fancy cars, and I will not hang my head in shame if you possess neither. I am practical, to a certain extent. I want you to be able to eat, to keep a roof over your head, to have some leisure time, to not struggle to survive. I want you to be appreciated for your labors and gifts. But what I hope for you is nothing as small as prestige. I hope for a living passion, profound human intimacy and connection, beauty and excellence. The greatness that you achieve, the hope I have for it, for you, is a historic sort, not measured in prominence.

It is a kind rooted in the imagination. Imagination has always been our gift. That is what makes formulations like “Black people are naturally good at dancing” so offensive. Years of discipline that turn into improvisation, a mastery of grammar and an idea that turns into a movement that hadn’t been precisely like that before—that is imagination, not instinct. Imagination doesn’t erase nightmares, but it can repurpose them with an elaborate sense-making or troublemaking. This is what I take to be the point of the idea in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: “Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Flight is a way of transcending the material given in favor of the heretofore unseen.

Here is a confession: Recently, I have wondered if white people are irredeemable. Again, I have to issue a caveat for the sensitive. No, I do not mean individuals. Individuals are the precious bulwark against total desperation—in them we find the persistence of possibility. Of course a single person can be someone’s hell. But a single person can be a heaven, too. Or a friend. Read More

Omega chairs in the Dining Room at Charleston. © The Charleston Trust Penelope Fewster

In the summer of 1913, at 33 Fitzroy Square in London, the ornate Georgian house where the Pre-Raphaelites once gathered became the venue for another visionary artistic enterprise. Founded by the Bloomsbury painter and art critic Roger Fry, the Omega Workshops Ltd. was an interior decor and furniture company that sought to provide struggling artists with a regular income. “There is a certain social-class feeling, a vague idea that a man can still remain a gentleman if he paints bad pictures,” Fry observed, “but must forfeit the conventional right to his Esquire, if he makes good pots or serviceable furniture.” At the Omega, the distinction between fine and applied arts was dismissed. In the upstairs studio, fine artists designed colorful and original furniture, ceramics, textiles, and rugs, while downstairs two showrooms were open to the public, who could browse and purchase the wares. Fry, who coined the term post-Impressionism, wanted to energize fusty British homes with the French art movement’s vibrancy and brio. “It is time that the spirit of fun was introduced into furniture and into fabrics,” he declared. “We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious.”

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Here are some things that happen when you go viral on Twitter for pointing out that the first two lines of Stephen Sondheim’s “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” can be sung to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”:

Your notifications will blow up with hyperbolic expressions of anguish and hostility, Twitter’s preferred mode of praise. (“I hate this.” “This hurts me.” “This can’t be legal.” “Quick question, how dare you?” “A curse upon you.” “The mindfuck of this has given me a deeper appreciation for characters in Lovecraftian horror. It … should not be.”) The Classic FM website will run a story on you headlined “Someone is setting Sweeney Todd lyrics to the tune of ‘Hallelujah’ and it’s honestly fantastic,” misidentifying you as “a young writer from Connecticut, US.” Your mother will kvell over her viral daughter on Facebook and in a mass email to all her friends. You will wonder why this is all happening around this tweet, which is decidedly B material, while your A material languishes in obscurity.

Above all, though, you will be confronted by men who insist on being confidently, floridly wrong at you. I’m given to understand that this is common on Twitter in general, but up till this point, my anonymity and gender ambiguity had spared me. Once I went viral, though, the men-who-were-wrong came out in full force. One guy in particular—a partner at a law firm, according to his Twitter bio—retweeted me along with the enthusiastically incorrect remark, “Iambic pentameter FTW.” And with that, I realized why so many people were so disproportionately impressed by my Sweeney Todd/Hallelujah observation: a widespread misunderstanding of how meter works.

At the risk of giving away the secret to my success, I’d like to demystify meter for the good of the people.

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As of spring 2020, I will be stepping down as Chairman of the MacDowell Colony’s Board of Directors. It’s time for somebody else to sit in the chair. When I took this position, nine years ago, Barack Obama was the President of the United States, Donald Trump was facing the imminent collapse of his financial empire, and Prince, David Bowie, Leonard Nimoy, Nora Ephron, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip Roth, Gene Wilder, Muhammad Ali, Amy Winehouse, Elmore Leonard, Alan Rickman, and my father were still with us, just to mention the people who meant a lot to me. Along with BookCourt bookstore in Brooklyn, Saab automobiles, RadioShack, and, apparently, common decency.

So, you’re welcome.

These feel like such dire times, times of violence and dislocation, schism, paranoia, and the earth-scorching politics of fear. Babies have iPads, the ice caps are melting, and your smart refrigerator is eavesdropping on your lovemaking (and, frankly, it’s not impressed). Read More