Book Archives - Jan to Apr 2023

This month is an experimental play script in place of a short story. 

During my days of formal literature studies, I heard an anecdote about William Faulkner. He opined having his great novel, The Sound and the Fury, printed using 14 different ink colors for the type when it first appeared as a novel in 1929. The publishing economics and technology of that time made such a printing infeasible. It appeared in traditional black and white. 

(Only 50 years after his death did the Folio Society issue a limited edition of 1,480 copies with that reconstructed color text, in 2012).
 

In the early 1990s I began a writing project that reminded me of Faulkner and his idea to mark different time periods — and the resurfaced memory of them — in various colors in his book.  
 

I was working on a play script that dealt with the power of the spoken word, specifically its capability to inflict harm and injury. Particularly, harm and injury to women. This was years prior to the use of our current term of “hate speech.”
 

So, I stripped the script of traditional stage directions and placement of the speaker’s name before the character’s spoken lines. 

I challenged myself to create a script wherein the spoken word would have to have the power to: 

(a) identify the character, 

(b) describe the location of the scene, (c) convey character interactions, and (d) give the reader insights into the character’s temperament and 

(e) even appearance. 

Since the script was not recorded but was to appear solely in print, the typefaces (like Faulkner’s forsaken colors) would have to carry some of the weight. 

I assigned each character a typeface resembling what I imagined they looked like physically and that reflected their interior personality, and even their voices.
 

Edited by Lawrence Harbison

This is a collection of short plays that can be read privately, read aloud in multiple speaker parts, or acted out on stage (all within the proper limits of permissions listed in the book). 

The volume title derives from the experience of these creators—all who were shunned by the theater community because they were women and whose work was ignored and left unperformed within the male-dominated producer-director-playwright society of professional stagecraft for decades. 

This book only exists because they persisted and continued to imagine and write plays and refused to be forgotten. 

For International Women’s Month I picked this book and this milieu to honor their struggle and to place before you the issues, concerns, and characters embodying their view of the world and women’s “place” in the world—which these plays demonstrate is every place.

In addition to the plays themselves, this volume is a treasury. 

The preface portrays the history of theater chauvinism the book strikes out against de facto. Its lesson can no longer be ignored and the past it models can no longer be allowed to perpetuate. 

Before each play there is a biography and dramagraphy of each playwright. These thirty data capsules provide a stunning array of accomplishments and artistic achievements. 

Lastly, there is an index of venues of ten-minute play producers, encouraging to playwrights in the wings and playgoers in the seats.

© 2021 The Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Company

Here are the women who have a play represented in this collection 

Sheri Wilner

Cynthia L Cooper

Susan Cinoman

Michael Angel Johnson

Denby Swanson

Audrey Webb

Karen Malpede

Lynn Rosen

Jennifer Maisel

Rita Anderson

Judith Leora

C S Hanson

Laura Rohrman

Jacquelyn Reingold

Jenny Lyn Bader

Julie Weinberg

Yvette Heyliger

Liz Amberly

Royal Shirée

Betty Shamieh

Bridgette A Wimberly

Lucy Wang

Victoria Z Daly

Christine Toy Johnson

Susan Kim

A D Williams

Thalia Cunningham

Inda Craig-Galván

Donna Latham

Donna Hoke

Performing comedic or tragic drama creates provocative statements that can not be ignored. Theatrics engage participants and audiences emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Participants bond deeply in the experience, whether stagehand or actor, director or producer. Each of these dynamics has the power to offer men and women occasions in this dedicated month to transform visions and relationships, to reconsider just how genuine they are in their respect for a particular woman and for all women. 

Community groups, reading clubs, library associations, campus frats or sororities, and employees in the workplace can instigate reflection and change by experiencing these plays in a manner practical and suitable to their situation. In short, these are opportunities “to act out” and not “act up.” 

February's Theme - GAMBLING 

By   

Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, Graham White 

This book is written by four Australian historians whose area of study is primarily the experience of the Black community living in New York City. Don’t be put off by the irony that half the team has the last name of White. 

While this book is rich in content and information, the team-writing seems to be missing a smooth and unifying narrative voice. Nevertheless, this book is certainly worth your patience and time.

 [And it brings along with it an added multi-media bonus. But more on that later]. 

First, let’s move on to the book and its story …

… The 1920s were the heyday of the Black-run-and-operated numbers and policy games that accounted for the richest and culture-dominant, non-governmental economy of America between World War I and World War II. Multi-millions of dollars a year were wagered—a nickel and a dime at a time—by the citizens of Harlem and the Tenderloin

(the latter neighborhood occupied the current-day site of Lincoln Center). 

Over the first three years of the 1930s, White gangsters grappled away this lucrative business and brokered it into yet another tragic sucking-away of Harlemites’s financial resources and destiny—into the hands and coffers of other-than-people-of-color outside the Black Metropolis. 

In 1933 there was street war between the white outsider, Dutch Schultz, and the black queen of numbers, Stephanie St Clair, for control of money and the promise of self-determination and dignity. Playing the Numbers recounts this epic struggle, which deserves remembrance a century later and reflective understanding—to stand boldly as an object lesson in our tumultuous decade of racial, economic, and political strife. 

In an interesting intersection of themes, Playing the Numbers documents how "Black Bankers" (those who operated the earlier numbers and policy games in Harlem) bankrolled the financial and promotional advancement of Blacks in amateur and professional sports, especially in boxing and the Negro and Cuban/Caribbean baseball leagues (New York Black Yankees and New York Cubans) prior to their integration into the mainstream Major League game nationally. 

While reading this book, I felt at times that the Australian authors were too “distanced” from the New York experience. But I came to appreciate that these historians doggedly researched in places a native New Yorker would perhaps not think to look, or interrelate, to draw an integrated picture. The authors’ reputations and literary stature gained them access to, and assistance from, repositories I imagine would not be sought out, nor readily obtained, by general or casual readers. 

The authors’ research is expansive, with primary sources from the Black press of the day, police reports and court records, as well as oral or written memoirs of the participants and their minions. These troves yield the stories and glories, the games and the shames, of the two decades of power brokers in and outside of Harlem’s Black Metropolis. 

But rest assured, you will discover as I did that Playing the Numbers does begin with, and does return to, the men and women of color who called Harlem and the Tenderloin home, and who strove every day to do the best they could to survive and thrive. 

It is their lives we can learn from mostly—in our troubled twentieth-first century times.

© 2010 Harvard University Press

Digital Harlem: 

Everyday Life from 1915-1930

The book authors and their collaborators have created an associated and more extensive interactive website you can easily use. It provides visitors with an experience of Harlem in the early 20th century. It is based on working with an interactive street map (above). By choosing what you want to examine from its heuristically-responsive menu, bursting with cultural and historical facts and figures, you can see where people owned and operated their businesses, lived and played, shopped and went to school, brought children for daycare, went to church and met in social organizations, held parades, played cricket and basketball, and baseball; went to theaters and night clubs and had run-ins with the law. And each topic has explanatory notes to fill in the history and the “people’s story” of life in Harlem, including a dedicated segment to the Harlem Renaissance. 

As an example close to the book’s theme, the website features an expanding and contracting timeline that populates with data on pop-up menus from actual police reports and court records detailing arrests dates, infractions, and penalties ascribed to individuals, described by name, birth date, age, family origin/heritage, and plotting locations where the arrests were made for playing numbers. 

Digital Harlem is designed for easy and engaging use by historians, bloggers, students, teachers, community leaders, family archivists and the simply curious. https://drstephenrobertson.com/digitalharlemblog/teaching-digital-harlem/#Black The site also provides an extensive bibliography of other works by the authors and references employed to create the website. 

“Hitting the numbers usually resulted in a payoff of a few score dollars, at most a few hundred. This made an enormous difference to a person’s life for the next few weeks, but it did not mean the individual never had to work again. In this context, regularly investing spare nickels and dimes on a number, and every few months receiving a windfall that allowed debts to be paid off, made sense. Gambling on the numbers played an important role in the economic lives of ordinary African American men and women.”

“Almost to a man or woman, Harlem bankers … [those who controlled the numbers game] …were what was then known as “race men,” champions of black enterprise and fervent believers in the importance of the black community in northern cities. They also had deep pockets. That is why the white takeover of numbers in Harlem during some of the worst years of the Depression was a disaster for the Black Metropolis.” 

“Gangsters and the mob moved into Harlem in the early 1930s, and there they would stay until numbers was eventually made redundant by the state-run lotteries in the 1970s.  

Reading about Harlem numbers in the 20s and 30s made me think immediately of 2020s sportsbook operations a century later. There’s a big difference. At their inception, the numbers and policy games of the last century used winning numbers based on objective daily performance of the financial markets. For a while, these gave way to horse racing parimutuels. To the contrary, human athletic performance lights the sportsbook fuse exploding in the 2020s fandom population. 

My primary thoughts were about the sports book focus on the NFL and what I see there as an objectification and depersonalization of the athletes and the devaluation of team camaraderie. In short, sportsbook has monetized the efforts of NFL player athletes (a little more than 70% of whom are non-whites) to the detriment of their recognition 

and appreciation as persons. These sports figures are no longer emulated as potential role models. Instead, they are dehumanized chattel worth only the money they can provide for those who control the economy--the vendors--who also victimize those bettors who become addicted to chasing the promise of riches, often to the wreck-and-ruin of their lives and that of their families. 

Sports book syndication popularized in operations such as DraftKings and FanDuel have taken over professional athletics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the NFL. (And that lengthening shadow is darkening collegiate sports as well). 

This viewpoint appears to many, I know, to be far-fetched and, seemingly, an hysterical overreach — rather than a possible valid insight to consider. But all I heard over and over again last month in the days after Damar Hamlin’s Monday Night Football horrific on-field collapse was how fans, commentators, and sportscasters were stunned into realizing the player was being thought of as a human being, a person, with a mother (in attendance), and teammates, and friends, and a community benefitting from his activism.

 

I wrote later in that first week of January: “So now thankfully Mr. Hamlin begins to recover. Yet games will be played this weekend again and the monetization of effort and victimization—of athletes and fans alike—will resume with the whistling of the opening kickoffs.”

The personal excellence of the individual athlete and the achievement of team excellence, once heroic and held up as a civics lesson and for modeling to aspiring youths, have been subjugated to nothing more than a transactional pseudo-relationship. The player has become an avatar—stripped of personality and devoid of competitive camaraderie and team identity. And a fandom’s lusting desire to monetize that performance, in real time or in a fantasy, contorts and seeks to control it for profit and gain. This collective body of surrogating onlookers and dreamers is equally victimized on most weekends by that syndication of wealth transfer. 

Most sadly, those treasure-tempted avatars themselves retire after a short career of labor in the fields, bearing their scars for life, not on their welted backs and thighs, but in their broken bones and torn sinew and in CTE’s confusion and darkness of spirit; with none of those gambled dimes and nickels, and more, set aside for their care.