Showing posts with label Jesmyn Ward. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jesmyn Ward. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

walk, Jesmyn, unwanted baby, crab leg, AFTERNOON UPDATE


I'm going to do my best to start the day with a walk now that the heat is gone.
I wilt in the heat.


So I started the new Jesmyn Ward book last night -- Men We Reaped.  It's really good.
It's American History.  I'll find the Langston Hughes poem it made me think of later and add that in here.
White and Black made this country.  And it's all a little whacked ... like it is everywhere.
Most of my family came straight from Ireland, except one grandfather was born and raised in Denmark.  The Irish Catholics are overly familiar to me.  
I want to read about Inuit life way up where Janet lives.  I want to read about black Mississippi.  And the roof of the world in Tibet.  

On my walk this morning I stopped in at the far corner of the cemetery.  
Someone threw this boy into the quarry.  Nobody really knows why and nobody really knows that he was unwanted.  Someone wanted him,  I'm sure.

And that was my walk.  
I promise to come back later with the Langston Hughes poem and a link about Janet up north.

(Done and done.  Links are in place.)

One more thing about the Inuit:  I love this book.  It's about the Irish-American adventurer, Robert Flaherty, who made Nanook of the North.   Well, it's really about the Inuit woman he got pregnant and then left behind.  It's the story of her family, their dislocation and Inuit culture.  Sometimes they had to eat feathers and boot liners to survive.  And husbands would loan their wives to uncles.  Everything was for the sake of the group.  And old people would be pushed out to sea in kayaks without paddles.  So long grandpa....

The Long Exile

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Jesmyn Ward

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/15/222105712/new-memoir-recounts-black-lives-reaped-too-young



A blog by Jesmyn Ward (not updated since last year):
http://jesmimi.blogspot.com/

More about Jesmyn Ward:
http://hbw.ku.edu/jesmyn_ward.html


I read her second book, Salvage The Bones, which I LOVED.  Fiona gave the audio book to me for Christmas a couple of years ago.  I listened to it over and over again while I painted for a show I had to do that year.  http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Salvage-the-Bones-Audiobook/B006YD8HIE?source_code=GO1GB907ESH060513&bp_ua=yes&mk

I read her first book too but loved the second one (Salvage The Bones) best.
I remember pit bulls and drugs, poor boys without hope, black boys in Mississippi, a girl with a dead mother and very few role models, boys and sex and pregnancy ... and the hurricane and flood that washed over New Orleans and Mississippi.  Jesmyn Ward is from Mississippi.   Her mother still lives in a trailer there.  The NPR interview at the top of this page is from this week.  I just heard it.  I bought the new book, a memoir, which I will start tonight.

I've been waiting for it to come out.
I'll have to take a short break from Thoreau to spend some time reading Jesmyn Ward.

Wicked.