Daphne A. Brooks, the author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, looks at the Grammy award for best liner notes, and at the three women who have won since its inception in 1964: playwright, essayist, and poet Thulani Davis, who won in 1993 for her essay accompanying Aretha Franklin’s Queen of Soul—the Atlantic Recordings; Lynell George (A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky) who won in 2018 for her liner notes to Live at the Whisky A Go Go: The Complete Recordings, Performed by Otis Redding; and Joni Mitchell, who provided the essay accompanying her own 2014 collection Love Has Many Faces. Brooks writes: “Like Davis and George’s work, Mitchell’s contribution to the genre is a reminder of how writing about records from the vantage point of the marginalized provides fresh ways of hearing the sounds. These are projects that break the ‘old boys network’ of liner notes writing, as the jazz historian Maxine Gordon calls it, by asserting the authority of the woman listener.”
In anticipation of the Calabash Literary Festival, which is tentatively scheduled to take place May 28 through May 30, Isis Semaj-Hall pays tribute to Jamaica’s literary past and present.
At the Evergreen Review, Karin Roffman writes about John Ashbery’s deep connection to music, as a poet, a reader, and a fan. “Unusual for a non-musician, Ashbery talked about pieces of music from the inside out, as though he had also played them,” Roffman writes. Roffman goes on to quote some Ashbery’s descriptions of musical compositions, detail the role music plays in particular poems, and offer up a playlist, featuring John Cage, William Byrd, and Francis Poulenc.
At the Times, Jessica Winter, author of the new novel The Fourth Child, writes an essay about autobiography and fiction, wondering why readers assume that a novel is based on the author’s experience. “The expectation that fiction is autobiographical is understandable for the simple reason that so much of it is. When that expectation becomes prescriptive, however, critical reading can devolve into a tiresome kind of fact-checking.”
Knopf will publish tennis star Billie Jean King’s autobiography in August. According to a statement, “The book marks the first time King has told her story in full, detailing how her private journey to be what she calls her ‘authentic self’ played out alongside her groundbreaking activism and career in tennis—that included seven years as the top-ranked woman in the world, a record twenty Wimbledon championships, thirty-nine Grand Slam titles, and her watershed victory over Bobby Riggs in the famous ‘Battle of the Sexes.’” In addition to reflecting the challenges she faced and the victories she achieved, King will also write about her “commitment to equality and social justice” and her participation in the civil rights and LGBTQ+ movements.
Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 8 PM EST, the New York Public Library will host a virtual event featuring Vivian Gornick, who will discuss her new essay collection, Taking a Long Look, with author and Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Margo Jefferson. You can register here.
