kevinanthonybrown.bsky.social
Author | Essayist | Translator | Reviewer
«Countée Cullen's Harlem Renaissance: A Personal History» (2024)
Order Page: https://parlorpress.com/products/countee-cullens-harlem-renaissance
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Huck Finn (1884) and The Bostonians (1886) were published almost consecutively. The idiom of his fellow Americans alarmed Henry James.
The two dined. James mentions Twain only ONCE in 3000 pp. of essays. Still, the "redskin v. paleface" dichotomy in American lit. gets overdone, as HJ would say:-)
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Cheever's «Collected Stories & Other Writings» are waiting impatiently on my shelf. Maybe I read "The Swimmer."
Susan Cheever responded to my email about «Home Before Dark.» Said she wrote the memoir so fast she didn't have time to think what she was doing wrong. Said J.R. Ackerley's work helped.
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From the Spring/Summer 2025 NYRB Catalog:
"Nadja relates the chance meeting and brief, tumultuous relationship between Breton, the founder and primary theorist of surrealism, and the 'wandering soul' who called herself Nadja."
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I'd read Geoff Dyer's «The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays of D.H. Lawrence» back in 2019, but was on the fence.
Now, reading Geoff Dyer's 2013 "Art of Nonfiction" interview in The Paris Review, I'm a convert.
Dyer succeeds in doing the same kind of writing I'm just now figuring out how to do.
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Sound quality of BBC radio broadcasts here in the States has dropped off. Sharpish.
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From the Progoff Diaries:
Met Paul Auster in person, c. 1986. We also talked on the phone. Told him I admire his translation of Joubert's «Notebooks.»
He gave me advice:
"Either write whatever you want, and publish it wherever you can. Or write whatever they pay you to, take the money. And run."
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Recording=I Want You
Category=Proto-Neo Soul/Psychedelic Soul
Bandleader=Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (horns)
Label=Tamla
Date=1976
Track=Come Live with Me Angel
Cover Art=Ernie Barnes
Notes=I was a Junior at Southeast High School (KCMO) when this album dropped. Is «Right On» a greater concept album?
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From the Southern Review of Books:
southernreviewofbooks.com/2025/06/11/m...
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Great performances, flawed script:-(
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Du Bois did indeed fight for equality in Mass.
Henry James and William James, one of Du Bois's professors at Harvard, both championed «The Souls of Black Folk» when it was first published in 1903.
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Recording=Basie Jam
Category=jazz
Soloist(s)=J.J. Johnson; Harry Edison; Eddie Davis; Irving Ashby; Ray Brown; Louis Bellson
Leader=Count Basie
Label=Pablo
Date=1973
Track(s)=Hangin' Out
Notes=Zoot Sims worked this session right about the time Sims accompanied Phoebe Snow on "Harpo's Blues."
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Algonquin sent me this ARC for possible review on 17 June 2025. Have been a hockey fan since the mid-1970s. Novels about hockey stars aren't something I see every day. So, I'm spreadin' the news:-)
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Sorry to harp on this. Please understand, my Blue Sky posts are only pursuant to whatever I'm reading/writing on any given day for a commissioned piece.
40 years ago, I published a piece in The Threepenny Review about Carlos Saura's film adaptation of «Blood Wedding.»
Langton Hughes translated it.
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Nice to read EB's review as I prepare an essay pairing PB and HJ's «On Writers and Writing». Agree «The American Scene» "has plenty to make one wince, but enough of its writing is beautiful, enough of its analysis usable; and Brooks is to be thanked for bringing this complicated book closer . . . ."
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Die-hard NYR fan. 2024-2025 was hard:-(
On the bright side, I live in San Diego.
Ducks, the big club, play in another conference. Kreider is fine by me.
I've taken Amtrak up to Honda Center just to watch preseason games.
But 2025-2026 Ducks-Rangers games have probably sold out:-)
#FlyTogether
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The Performing Arts/Music/Solo Instrumental
New (to me):
Recording=Debussy: Complete Piano Music, Vo. II
Soloist(s)=Werner Haas; Noël Lee
Dates=1963; 1971; compilation 1993
Note=Found this for $0.50
classicalmusicguide.com/viewtopic.ph...
#ClaudeDebussy #WernerHaas #NowPlaying #BBC #Radio3
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Stand, you've been sitting much too long
There's a permanent crease in your right and wrong
Stand, there's a midget standing tall
And a giant beside him about to fall
Stand!
Song by Sly and the Family Stone ‧ 1969
Enough said:-)
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Also, it's tacky--ghetto--to request free review copies of books WAY out of your league you might can't even place on spec. There's a code:-) Or used to be. «The Complete Correspondence of Friedrich Hölderlin» $140. Reviewers like Virginia Woolf or Henry James weren't scafe of Tolosy or anybody else
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Sorry if I'd already said it. Beauford Deleany was a friend of Countée Cullen, who married my mother's grandmother. Just six degrees of separation, is all.
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Translation by Virginia Woolf, 1938.
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Wasn't (yet) on my reviewer radar.
But it's about time.
What are the best translatoins of the poetry collections?
KB
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Standby: Just snagged some classic 1970s albums for $1 each. . . . BRB
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I was the paper boy who delivered to his house in San Francis Woold, c. 1969. Sly would play the Haight, where I was living, attentind Twin Peaks Elementary, not called Rooftop.
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Bought a dozen vinyls at the San Diego Central Public Library for $1 each. Will catalog them and update interested listeners later.
Now I simply MUST be a turntable with .mp3 conversion capability. Audio Technica? $250? Which means I'd need an AV receiver with a phono input. Already got two subs.
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Randomly, . . .
Henry James is best understood as a critic in search of a novel.
He talks too much (like this), but is otherwise very straight-forward.
Just watch an episode or two of a tear-down/ground-up restoration reality TV show like «Overhauling».
HJ be just doing that
www.chipfoose.com
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From «Soliloquies: The Progoff Diaries, 1984-2024»
Journal entry dated 16 March, 2020.
Keywords=A Day in the Life; Body & Soul; Circumstances, Events, Situations
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Am a proud CUNY BA Program alum class of 2006. I transferred OUT of Columbia and into CUNY. Partly because an Ivy League education cost $900 per credit hour in 1990 US dollars.
128 credit hours would have cost or required scholarships amounting to $115,000. That figure has now doubled. Nonsensical.
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Reading Notes:
Title=When Movies Mattered
Topic=Literature
Subject=Criticism
Keyword=Cinema/Auteur Theory
Genre=Essay Collection
Date=2011
Publisher=University of Chicago Press
Page Count=220
Notes=See, also, «Movies that Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade»
#FilmSky #Moviesky
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Accepted for publication by the New English Review. Due out July 1, 2025. Will post live link when it becomes available. Thanks for your interest! A VERY worthwhile book.
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No hurries, no worries:-)
Between tidying up the ms. and reading/writing about Henry James and Stendhal's «Charterhouse of Parma» in connection with the forthcoming NYRB reissue of «Armance», I can't foresee taking on any other writing projects in 2025--and sincerely hope I don't get asked to!
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I had a grand total of two followers on Twitter😐 Because I never used it. When I got the nudge from Blue Sky, I signed on. I wish I'd done it sooner! That said, I'm 64 and grew up on legacy print media. Am happy to chip in on social media when editors/others ask. It's just never gonna be my focus.
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So, what's OUR excuse?
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W.E.B Du Bois was more complicated than that.
I wrote about it very frankly in Chapter 11 of my book «Countée Cullen's Harlem Renaissance: A Personal History».
My mother's grandmother, who married Countée Cullen, NEVER spoke about this scandal.
So, I did my own digging, and stand by what I wrote.
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I deleted the following in error.
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53982/...
My mother's grandmother married Countée, as we call him in our family. So, your observance of his birthday is great.
A Clemson professor published my book on CC.
parlorpress.com/products/cou...
#BOTD #HarlemRenaissance
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Letter From Gregory Rabassa, 6 September 2014
Thank you so much for me Efraín Bartolomé's «Ocosingo War Diary: Voices from Chiapas.»
I like to surmise my Spanish course had something to do with your translation. My memory has become a bit rusty. Words don't flow.
Hasta la vista,
Gregory Rabassa
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The 761st African-American Tank Battalion spearheaded General George S. Patton’s Third Army not because they were black but because they were simply the best.
When they helped liberate holocaust survivors from the concentration camps, 761 was utterly unprepared for the atrocities they witnessed.
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My mind's made up. I'm all in on this project. Will take me a few months. Will post link when live.
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1. «A Writer's Diary»
2. «Congenial Spirits: Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf»
3. «Granite & Rainbow»
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Very funny! Sound good ta me😁
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Wil 100% check this out. Many thanks. KB