Voices Gone Living On

I have learned as a reader who happens to be a writer that you never know when you’re going to bump into something new and interesting to influence your work. As examples, in the past week or so I’ve read three different types of document that inspired new thoughts and ideas for the novel I’m working on. One was a Substack memoir series; another a book review; the third a hybrid history-mystery-biography about a blackface minstrel star in the first half of the 20th century.

Many Men Watching

Martha Nichols’ Substack is called “Inside Reader” where she often writes about personal essay journalism, artificial intelligence, and all sorts of new shenanigans in the media world. I’ve known Martha for many years now and have immense respect for her knowledge about writing and her skill in particular as an astute essayist. (She also happens to have been my editor at Talking Writing magazine as well as The Harvard Business Review, among other things).

Recently, Nichols ran an extended set of brief personal essays about her relationship with her mother the artist and a specific painting Elizabeth Nichols created called “Many Men Watching.” I’m not going to go into specifics here except to say that this very readable and erudite extended memoir points at a huge set of issues that are vital to many of us in this new and complex, fast-paced ultra-modern world including: the net of mysteries that memory creates for us; questions of artistic appropriation; the impact of parental mental health on who we become; parent-child relationships when both sides are devoted to the arts; family drift over time; and the need for closure and resolution that everyone has if they’re willing to conjure their childhood up late in life.

These essays are definitely worth tracking down for the issues above but also simply to get to know a bit about Elizabeth Nichols and to see some of her work that Martha has posted. Get started here: https://marthanichols.substack.com/p/my-shock-of-recognition

One Brief Shining Moment: The 2nd American Republic

Through this coming summer I will be deep at work finishing the last parts of my next novel, code named Notes on the Golden Country. Many of my projects connect questions of racial ambiguity and the special powers of being mixed-race with broader stories – from family dynamics to the cosmic power of music. Notes is the most explicit and direct tale I’ve come up with connected to racial identity. There is so much hidden, ignored, and forgotten history of people who are different in America, people who can teach the rest of the country that the idea is to be who we say we are, not what other people try to tell us they think we should be.

I was very taken, then, with Adam Hochschild’s review of The Rise and Fall of America’s 2nd Republic in the New York Review of Books. Many of us know bits and pieces of the Reconstruction story post-Civil War. The goals and plans of Reconstruction were astoundingly advanced. Southern states had to write new constitutions. That was a revelation to me! New concepts were codified such as taxpayer funding of education systems, the opening of public land to families recovering from historic enslavement, reform of punitive laws directed specifically at the poor (and minorities), and opening up the democratic process to those termed “Colored” in that era. The vision for our country as a whole was finally, for a few brief shining decades there, as deep and meaningful and empowering as anything we’ve attempted in the 150 years since. We know as well bits and pieces of what came to be called Jim Crow, the next phase of this country’s history once the south (mostly) squelched Reconstruction. As a nation, we didn’t just take a few steps in reverse, we allowed ourselves to steer down into the realm of anti-human cruelty as an institutional reality, codifying segregation and discrimination that we are still trying to overcome … well, at least some of us.

Rise and Fall made me wonder where our profoundly diverse fornicating nation is going to be one hundred years from now – even two hundred years. Mark my words: this shit we’re experiencing is going to end. That’s what Notes on the Golden Country is partially about. Stay tuned and think kind thoughts as I try to finish up a full working draft of what is going to wind up an 800-page manuscript by the end of August. (And if you know of an agent out there with some serious brass, point them in my direction).

Read the Hochschild review here (although deep apologies if it is behind a paywall): https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/05/29/one-brief-shining-moment-rise-and-fall-of-the-second-american-republic/

Where Dead Voices Gather

I make it my business to be a sucker for stories about music and musicians who wind up as blending pots for numerous styles and fashions. I’m a sucker, too, for full-hearted stories with transgressive cultural tendencies of all types, especially ones about gifted artists opening new cans of whoop-ass approaches to staid or stymied art forms. Nick Tosches’s Where Dead Voices Gather is a great version of those kinds of stories.

Emmett Miller performed a sort of comic vaudeville style of early jazz and country music in blackface, part of a pop trend that began in New York City in the ’20s, then spread nationwide. Lest you think this a trivial or outsider form of entertainment, Miller worked at times with the likes of Tommy Dorsey and Gene Krupa. Also Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, two great pioneers of early jazz who grew up together in South Philadelphia (I was so surprised to read about Venuti and Lang in this book, born and bread in the city that has been my home now for more than 40 years).

Interestingly, the ’20s and ’30s were heydays for Jim Crow mentality going mainstream in many “American” circles. But those were also the nascent days of what would become American popular entertainment, eventually a global driving force that now connects the entire planet. Racism aside, in many ways, blackface musical performance was all about the blending of ragtime, early blues, cajun, country, folk, mountain bluegrass, jazz, old-style minstrel, vaudeville comedy, and probably twenty other genres and stylings. It didn’t just link the ears and feet of Americans, it began a long, long era of blending new forms of shared emotion for all of us. We kind of want to ignore it nowadays, but this stew that we are all part of continues to be a tantalizing, scrumptuous slumgullion of beauty and joy and deep, vital meaning.

Also, who would ever think that Americans need disguised, pretend-personalities and fellow citizens in makeup and funny clothing to feel entertained?

Find this book here: https://bookshop.org/a/97167/9780316895378