Reading list update -23

Two books that have taken me over three weeks to read, one a popular book on cooking and food and the other the Langston Hughes poems – 600 pages long  – which proved that when a poet leaves behind proper witness poetry, his work becomes a history book, telling of the politics, society and conditions of his time. Gripping.

Here’s my updated 2024 reading list and the last reading update. Now for my 13-point review.

1. A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain is the book version of Season 1 of his TV series. Obviously, there is travel and there is food. And there is the sardonic, irreverent writing, about as derisive and reflective as one can get on a paid trip around the world, culture-tripping and tasting exotic food. “What is love? Love is eating twenty-four ounces of raw fish at four o’clock in the morning.”
2. Bourdain is on the hunt for the ‘perfect meal’, trying everything he can find: tree grubs, natto, durian, the still-beating heart of a cobra, lamb testicles, iguana, fugu, bird’s nest…in Napa and San Sebastian and Tokyo but also in the Sahara and Tlapanala and the Mekong Delta.
3. While it seems like a gigantic wild ride, there are moments of introspection, even pangs of regret and wistfulness: questioning his skill (“Would such advantages (culture, place, ethnoculinary tradition) have, in my time, changed my own trajectory? Made me a better chef? A better cook?”), and passion (“I yearned for whatever it was he had that I didn’t, imagining it could only be peace of mind.”), missing his father (“I hadn’t, I realized, returned to France…to find a perfect meal. I’d come to find my father. And he wasn’t there.”) and angst over the wasted wars and the devasted lives left behind in countries like Vietnam and Cambodia (“Everything I eat will taste like ashes now. Fuck writing books. Fuck making television…What am I doing in Vietnam?”).
4. There is still the agonizing detail of slaughters: of pigs and lambs, turkeys and snakes – all perhaps making for compelling(?) television. There are the details of some places Bourdain visits: Angkor Wat, the Merzouga dunes, the streets of Vietnam, the Fez Medina that keep the pages turning, there are the usual third-world tropes (sigh) about eating with fingers, overtaking on one-lane roads, language barriers and markets and spices (“In the Medina, just to look around is to feel how far you are from everything, you know.”), even some near perfect meals, but in the end it is up to the reader to decide if perfection comes from the strangeness of cuisine, from the distance travelled or from comfort food in the perfect company.
5. “Perfect is something you never actually attain. It is something you search for. Once you reach it, it’s not perfect.” – Thomas Keller, Chef.
6. “I was wondering how a miserable, manic-depressive, overage, undeserving hustler like myself – a utility chef from New York City with no particular distinction to be found in his long and egregiously checkered career – on the strength of one inexplicably large score, could find himself here, seeing this, living the dream.” – Bourdain, in the Sahara desert.
7. The collected poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad. Hughes (1902-1967) was a “people’s poet”, credited with promoting the musical style of ‘Jazz Poetry’, writing simple, approachable poems about African-American identity, the lived experiences of the working class and the evolving condition of racial segregation. His poetry is a mixture of random doggerel and sharp, incisive commentary on the society and politics of his time, asking pointedly about Jim Crow laws, about the conditions of his people and what freedom really meant.
8. The book presents the poems by decade, the first set, written in the 1920s, Hughes still a very young man, opens with his famous poem: “The negro speaks of rivers“. There is a cadence to his poems (Jungle lover / Night black boy. / Two against the moon / And the moon was joy. -To Midnight Nan at Leroy’s) as if they are written to be sung in a Jazz bar.
• There are poems about dreams (Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly. – Dreams)
• poems about the harsh life (Her dark brown face / Is like a withered flower / On a broken stem. / Those kind come cheap in Harlem / So they say. – Young Prostitute)
• poems about death (My old man died in a fine big house. / My ma died in a shack. / I wonder where I’m gonna die, / Being neither white nor black – Cross)
• poems about love (You never knew. / Nor did I. / Now you take the Harlem train uptown; / I take a local down – Subway Face) and
• poems about segregation (Tomorrow, / I’ll be at the table / When company comes. / Nobody’ll dare / Say to me, / “Eat in the kitchen,” / Then. / Besides, / They’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed — / I, too, am America – I, too.)
9. Throughout the book, there are references to oppression not just against blacks in America but to people across the world. Several talk about India and the work of Gandhi, particularly resonating with me:
• (Clutching at trees and clawing rocks / And panting and climbing / Until he reached the top / A tiger in India / Surmounted a cliff one day / When the hunters were behind him / And his lair was far away. / A black and golden tiger / Climbed a red cliffs side / And men in black and golden gowns / Sought the tiger’s hide. – For an Indian Screen)
• (Merry Christmas, India, / To Gandhi in his cell, / From righteous Christian England, / Ring out, bright Christmas bell! – Merry Christmas)
• and this one probably during the war: (I see by the papers / What seems mighty funny to me. / The British are fighting for freedom / But India ain’t free. – Explain it, please)
10. The 1930s section opens with this wonder: (I am so tired of waiting, / Aren’t you, / For the world to become good / And beautiful and kind? / Let us take a knife / And cut the world in two— / And see what worms are eating / At the rind. – Tired). There are wondrous poems
• about God (God slumbers in a back alley / With a gin bottle in His hand. / Come on, God, get up and fight / Like a man. – A Christian country)
• about the life of ordinary black people (I watched them moving, moving, / Like water down the street, / And this is what moved in my heart: / Their far-too-humble feet. – Harlem Ghetto)
• stronger poems about the racial divide and the need for a workers revolution (Put one more S in the U.S.A. / To make it Soviet), the communist ideology seeming to him as a solution to racism (It’s a lie! It’s a lie! Every word they said. / And it’s better a thousand times you’re in France dead. / For here in the South there’s no votes and no right. / And I’m still just a negro in America tonight. – The colored soldier) or  (am the child they stole from the sand / Three hundred years ago in Africa’s land. / I am the dark girl who crossed the wide sea / Carrying in my body the seed of the free. – The Negro Mother)
• poetry about world events and personalities (The death birds wheel East / To their lairs again / Leaving iron eggs / In the streets of Spain./ With wings like black cubes / Against the far dawn, / The stench of their passage / Remains when they’re gone / In what was a courtyard / A child weeps alone. / Men uncover bodies / From ruins of stone. – Air Raid: Barcelona)
11. The 1940s poems while talking of the war, still rail against segregation, stories of lynching and crime and loneliness:
• (The Jim Crow car’s still dirty. / The color line’s still drawn. / Yet up there in Washington / They’re blowing freedom’s horn! – NAACP) or (Where is the Jim Crow section / On this merry-go-round, / Mister, cause I want to ride? / Down South where I come from / White and colored / Can’t sit side by side. – Merry-go-round)
• a long poem on the history of liberation of slaves (An enslaved people heading toward freedom / Made up a song: / keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On! – Freedom’s plow)
• against fascism during WWII: (I ask you this question / Cause I want to know / How long I got to fight / BOTH HITLER-AND JIM CROW. – Beaumont to Detroit, 1943) or (Give us a peace equal to the war / Or else our souls will be unsatisfied, / And we will wonder what we have fought for /And why the many died – Give us our peace)
12. The 1950s poems talk about his famous “Dream Deferred”
• (Why should it be my loneliness, / Why should it be my song, / Why should it be my dream / deferred /overlong? – Tell me)
• (What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore — And then run? / Does it stink like rotten meat? / Or crust and sugar over— / like a syrupy sweet? / Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load. / Or does it explode? – Harlem 2)
• (A certain /amount of nothing / in a dream deferred – Same in blues)
• On religion, he writes – It would be too bad if Jesus / Were to come back black. / There are so many churches /Where he could not pray – Bible belt)
• and on race (Mr. White Man, White Man, /How can it be, /You sleep with my sister, /Yet you won’t shake hands with me? – Do you reckon?)
13. The 1960s set has a bunch of jazz poetry and in the liner notes to “Shades of pigmeat” he says, “Oppression by any other name is just about the same, casts a long shadow, adds a dash of bitters to each song, makes of almost every answer a question, and of men of every race or religion questioners.” It is both sad and telling that this is still relevant and important in the present time.