The Baileyophile: Vol. 1

On Edutainment, Knowing Us Negroes & Black Literary Canons by Reggie Bailey

It’s 3:40 am EST as I begin this piece. I’ve been applying for jobs, reading; an essay from a book (more on that later), and various articles. It’s been a good time. I should be sleeping, but it’s looking like a nap is probably on the menu.

First thing’s first, I have to give Akili a round of applause for how he came out the gate going crazy with 400 Degreez of Reasonable Doubt. I knew The Days would pop, but damn, if he’s putting out one of those every week… Second thing’s second, I want to tell you what your Tuesday’s are about to look like. Essentially they are going to be, as I mentioned last week, the Monday episodes that we used to record, except they will only include my voice. If you read a lot of bookish articles, have a lot of bookish thoughts, follow a lot of bookish things, then you are in the place to be. It’s my goal to show you that I’m even more of a book nerd &/or bibliophile then you ever thought I was while working to see if I’m able to outdo my own expectations of book nerd-dom.

Consider this your introduction to the Baileyophile: This is Vol 1.

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Books Are a Form of Entertainment

When I got into books in 2015 my goal was to become more successful—at life. I  graduated college as a Super Senior (5 years of undergrad) in 2013, took a year off from school while running a shoe store in the city of my undergrad stomping grounds, and after that year I decided that I should go back to school and get an MBA (I really wish books and a bit of unconventional thinking caught up to me sooner). The fall of 2014 is when my MBA begins and I can’t even remember the name of the first course I took, but I do remember that I had a professor who impressed me simply because he possessed talking points on a wide range of topics while I, at the time & in my opinion, was pretty much limited to sports, music, tv, film, sneakers/my job, and women who I found attractive. Yes, my bar was low, but know better, lift the bar higher, right? Anyway, Because of his range, I was inspired to read books. I put two and two together and decided that if I wanted to be able to speak with some intellect on different topics outside of my norm then books, and articles outside of the sports and entertainment section, should become my best friends. Fortunately they did, so here I am.

Till this day I’m one who still follows my fair share of self-help accounts on Instagram, and I see the origins of my reading journey reflected in their posts all the time. Every now and again these accounts will create a post sharing  a list of things that you should do for an extended period of time, let's call it a year, to become unrecognizable. One of the anywhere between 6-10 things that they’ll usually include on one of these lists is to read for about 30 mins to an hour a day. They’ll say something along the lines of health being wealth, and they’ll speak to the currency of knowledge as another form of wealth. This is true, and it’s important for these accounts to say, but as more time adds up between this version of me and the old I wonder whether or not this is the best thing for book culture.

What’s been reiterated, and this is true across all of the genres and nuances that I have read within, is that books are a form of entertainment. They are no different from your favorite film, tv show, Spotify playlist, video game, or sports team, yet, I don’t see a whole bunch of self-help pages advising me to watch every episode of Shark Tank for a year, so that I can become unrecognizable. I have a theory that this constant association between reading and productivity, in these larger circles outside of those deemed literary, scare more readers away then they create. It’s good to read Atomic Habits, and the Subtle of Art of Not Giving a F*ck to better your financial, physical & mental health, but I also think those who have read those books should speak to their entertainment value a lot more. Balancing that mixture of education & entertainment a little better—creating space for these books to be classified as the edutainment that they are—is the difference between everyone at the next brunch you go to having a favorite book of the year, to accompany their favorite song from Renaissance.

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Zora Neale Hurston Knew Us Negroes

Today is a recording day, and recording days are a lot of fun, because research happens! Sometimes this research consists of reading articles outside of the text for the book we’ll be discussing and other times it’s listening to podcasts, sometimes it’s both. The author we will be talking to tonight is cool as hell, and when I was talking to her a couple of months back I was asked if I had read the essay “You Don’t Know Us Negroes” by Zora Neale Hurston. I said no at the time, because it was true, but I told her before we recorded I would read it. Thankfully, in this occurrence, I am a man of my word.

In 2022 Amistad published a collection of essays written by Zora Neale Hurston called You Don’t Know Us Negroes & Other Essays. It is lauded by Amistad as “the first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance,” and after that one essay this collection maintains a spot on my reading list. In You Don’t Know Us Negroes, Zora takes aim, especially at white writers for their hollow understanding of blackness. In one of the more quotable lines she says “If they have not seen a Negro show they have seen a minstrel or at least a black-face comedian and that is considered enough.” She didn’t reserve all the smoke for them though, she found room in this smoke session for those of us from the North when she said “Northern Negroes, unless they have spent years in residence & study, know no more about Negro life in the South than Northern white folks do. Thus a great deal of literary postures & distortion has come from Negro pens.” I could argue that the second evisceration is more important than the first, because of the monolithic perception of blackness that exists in the culture of books. Too many times the book industry thinks that because I share a hue with someone that I am a version of #OwnVoices, and that second quote, from a legend who arguably knew The Folks better than anyone, proves that I’ve always been walking down the right track with my thinking. Some have said that beauty is only skin deep, blackness ain’t.

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Black Literary Canon Conversations

There is a very specific piece of satisfaction that I felt reading Adam Bradley’s recent pieces in the New York Times about building a new black literary canon. A satisfaction that made me feel seen because it was an exercise in shining a light on those books, written by black authors, that essentially went back into hiding shortly after they were released. Some of the books mentioned in these articles were Lonely Crusade by Chester Himes, The Stone Face by William Gardner Smith, The Catacombs by William Demby (it was really good to see Demby in this article), the recently re released Francisco by Alison Mills-Newman, and Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson, the first work of a fiction, fittingly a short story collection, by a black author to win the Pulitzer Prize (1978). None of these are books that show up a lot in conversations, social media or anything, but it is nice for them to receive some of the best press that books can get which is in the New York Times.

The big takeaway I had from that article, is mostly a case of confirmation bias, and that is to simply read what interests you, vigorously. Haruki Murakami is attributed the quote “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking,” and ain’t that the truth. I know y’all, like me, are thinking of the amount of walking Twitter feeds you know in real life. Reading books that are underrated and/or underread, and to learn that they are good as hell, is like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s not something that you’ll do often, and it feels impossible, but there are few things better in the life of a reader.

I’m shouting out four people to close out this section: 1. Traci for her brief cameo in the article, that was fly. 2. Mateo, for his piece he wrote in LitHub, advocating for a new Black canon publicly some years before this piece. 3. The Zora Canon. 4. My Canon in my IG Highlights.

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What I’ve been Entertained by That I Can Talk About

This section is aptly titled, because I can’t talk to y’all about all of the things I’m entertained by or else that would compromise the integrity of the show. Nonetheless, I do a decent job staying entertained outside of books that I am reading for the show, so here are a few things I’ve been entertained by over the past few weeks:

Abbott Elementary: Mr. Johnson’s last minute moment showed us that they might be onto something when they say luck = preparation meeting opportunity. Talk about being in the right place at the right time.

Bamboozled: This Spike Lee film has been living rent free in my head ever since I saw it. Chantal V. Johnson joined us for an episode of Books Are Pop Culture last year to discuss her debut novel Post-traumatic and during the episode she mentioned that we should watch Bamboozled (2000). Nearly a year later I finally got around to doing it and wow. So much I could say about that film in terms of its imagery, Hollywood, executives, America’s racial imagination, or lack thereof, and much more. This movie reminded me of 1988’s Hollywood Shuffle, but even more aggressive in its approach since Spike isn’t exactly known for his sleight of hand.

Bel-Air: Shouts to this staff for joining something that appears to be the Banned Books conversation, at least from Episode 2 or 3 (I forget the most recent episode I’ve seen). I do, sometimes, wish these shows got people who could actually ball though. Jabari Banks does seem like he is ok at basketball, but those scenes are a comedic watch, if not a tough one.

The Difference Between Marketing & Publicity: I almost made these two pieces their own section, but I think leaving them here for you to read is the best. I’m glad pieces like this exist for us to read, because the tools to get a decent enough idea of how the publishing industry works from the outside looking in are available to us, it's on us to read them. It’s really to understand that what we do in BAPC Land is what the industry would call Publicity, as opposed to marketing. The big difference, although you should still read the pieces, is that publicity is what they call “earned promotion,” and marketing is what they call “paid promotion,” but there still is some crossover between the two, so I wouldn’t call it cut and dry.

The Literary Postseason: Shouts to my first longform piece for The Days, but we truly are in the midst of it. The longlist for the Carol Shields Prize, The Women’s Prize, the International Booker Prize were recently announced. The Finalists for the PEN Faulkner Award and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize were announced, and the Tournament of Books has started. Life genuinely doesn’t get too much better than this. 

Lover Man by Alston Anderson: This is a bit misleading, because I haven’t even started reading this once lost short story collection yet, but i am very interested in it, and I want you to be so here is the synopsis, Publishers Weekly’s starred review, and a cool article about it.

Snowfall: No shade to my shorter brethren and sistren, but please… Leon could not do that in real life. Snowfall tried to make Leon have his Craig and Deebo moment and I ain’t rollin.

Succession: Trying and more than likely going to fail at catching up before the Season 4 Premiere at the end of the month. I’m on maybe the 3rd episode of Season 2? I’ll have to double check. I want to watch season 4 with all of you since it's the last one. I might have to watch it and then just go back and see what I missed later. Is that blasphemous?

You: I’ll be vague so as not to spoil, the whole thing with Roald confuses me considering what we know. The whole burning basement thing.

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In Conclusion

I hope you had as much fun reading the first volume of The Baileyophile as I did writing it. I look forward to kicking it with y’all for Volume 2 next week. Make sure to leave a like, tell a friend and all that stuff. I also talk back, so take this as encouragement to leave a comment.