Notes on the week of January 12th, 2020.
On the Simpsons, the voice actor of Apu will no longer perform the role.
My father banned my brother and I from watching the show growing up. After the divorce, I made sure to make up for lost time and caught every rerun. The Simpsons was must-see TV for me every Sunday, with my viewership petering off after they released the movie.
Until my personhood fully developed, I simply considered Apu a funny character with a hilarious accent. His “Thank you, come again!” was a teenaged catchphrase that made its way into my verbal repertoire; I used it to end insults, battle rap cyphers, and mischievous dialogues with boring teachers alike. I also remember the episode when his citizenship status was in questions and built a cover as a cowboy hat wearing Mets fan. Doomed sports fandoms are easily one of the truly American behaviors.
I am at a different place of my Black personhood, now, and am better able to question the racial politics of the show. Rainer Wolfcastle was an Arnold Schwarzenegger pastiche who still has one of the most quotable lines ever in Simpson fandom. Despite, however, his accent, Wolfcastle enjoyed a trajectory that gave him wealth and prominence, rather than Apu’s hardworking and humble profession as a convenience story manager. The humor comparison between the both of them now hits me different—with Wolfecastle’s built in whiteness, implicit in his wealth and profession, and Apu’s in the “otherness” and him wanting to fit into a culture that would never truly have him.
I took the winter break to read through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest, the Water Dancer. Brief review—I liked it, and recommend you read it. It’s a powerful tale of slavery and freedom and agency, and I could not have predicted the ending, despite Coates telegraphing it throughout the entire narrative.
I’m struggling with regarding the book. The first is its lack of enduring thematic resonance. I think of recent books I have read that have refused to leave my imagination—any fiction Jesmyn Ward has written, Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones—and I feel that all of those possessed a thematic coherence that The Water Dancer lacked.
Coates, however, is producing a work that informs so much of my writing and idle thoughts—his run on Marvel’s Black Panther. I’ve written a few posts on it under my Under the Eyes of Bast series of posts (go read and give me some extra traffic, y’all!). Perhaps because of the serialized nature of comics, Coates has been able to go deep and examine how war and violence shapes the political memory of Wakanda, whether it be in the present or in a spaced filled far future. Coates is best when exposing the baseness of all our structures, of how they are veneers for power, and what it would take to build a better world.
Perhaps that is the ontological limit of The Water Dancer that I’m struggling with. Because it is set in antebellum America, there really is no hope for a better future. Coates knows what happens next. The theme ultimately leaves me with some despair, as despite the protagonist’s striving, the better day is not going to come. Perhaps the lack of resonance I am feeling is actually a lack of optimism that, maybe, makes a work enduring for me.
I’ve been eating a lot of animal fat recently. I was aimlessly wandering through Kroger a few weeks ago and saw that pork lard, duck fat, and beef tallow were on sale. I copped them and haven’t looked back since. They generally replace olive and peanut oils as my frying agents, and I often let meat brine in them if I’m going to grill and roast. They add savory flavor to any protein, veggie, or carb you cook with, and I recommend you all give cooking with them a shot—hit me up in the comments for some recipes!
My wife and I are also in the late stages of finishing Horizon Zero Dawn. I won’t give away the story because it demands to be experienced. But I love that the primary mechanic of the game is hunting. We’ve spent many hours finding vicious mechanical monsters and debating the best way to bring them down. Do we shoot off a component first, or do we need to lay some traps? Is there enough coverage to hide in, or do I need to take some high ground and slowly snipe it into submission? Endless fun that punishes my instinct to Leeroy Jenkins and down every enemy in sight.
And, please—if you drink, you need to drink this. Preferably with a cigar or some pipe tobacco.
I announced in an earlier post that I would be using editorial focuses to hone my writing over an extended period of time. My first series is on Sade—the “What is the Empress?” series. I’m having a hard time finding press from the Diamond Life era. I would expect to find old reviews and articles behind paywalls, but I can’t even find that.
One of the literary ethos for Established in 1865 is that it represents social science finally catching up to our folklore. Sade is a legend to me and many in the black community. The primary source is her voice and her albums. I struggle, however, with finding the raw data that informs her Black personhood. The most I can go on are secondary sources from the 1980s are retrospectives, truncated reviews, and some old performances on YouTube.
She has two stories. The first is set far back, in those halcyon days where she was a beautiful brown face performing in London nightclubs. This tale has been told. It’s of her beauty, how she and her bandmates defected from Pride to coalesce their musical ambitions around her. Her childhood in rural England. The Europeanness of her early life. But that’s not the story I want to tell.
I want the story about her Blackness. And if I can’t find it, I’m going to create it.
Till next time, y’all.