This year, there are more Pride flags than American flags on our bock. (I counted.). I was amazed. When we first moved in — about 25 years ago — it was mostly American flags. And we were met by children telling us to go away. A few years later, rocks were hurled at our front window by an angry young man who eventually moved away.
This year, when I turned to my partner with amazement and reported my findings, she replied in a rather loud voice that they (the American flag wavers) could SUCK ON THAT!
Well, I thought, she did retire from the postal system. Then I thought we can’t all be Buddhists. Then I had a good laugh.
How wonderful that things have changed and how wonderful to see the change. I credit our healthy plant-based diet!
Happy Pride!
To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
I decided to launch my BookTube series with a review of Juneteenth, a novel by Ralph Ellison. To view the review on You Tube, click the above image. The text of the review is below. Each month — or longer, depending on my schedule — I will bring you a BookTube review of a book that I consider to be a classic.
Juneteenth
Ralph Ellison
Random House
I became aware of Juneteenth (a national holiday celebrated on June 19th) some years ago. The holiday marks the date that slavery was ended in the United States. On June 19th, 1865, federal agents arrived in Galveston, Texas to free all the enslaved people in the state.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued a few years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. Although the intention of the Proclamation was that enslaved people should be freed, the Proclamation was severely limited because it only addressed the seditious states that were opposing the Northern United States in the U.S. Civil War.
On June 17, 2021 (this year), Juneteenth (June 19th) was signed into law to officially become a federal holiday.
Juneteenth is also the title of a novel that was written by Ralph Ellison and published after the author’s death in 1999 by Random House. Ralph Waldo Ellison was a critical thinker and writer about race and history in the United States. He wrote many essays and criticism, but only published two novels. His important novel The Invisible Man was published in 1952. His novel Juneteenth was edited and published with his notes after his death in 1994.
In the introduction, Ellison’s colleague and the editor of Juneteenth, John F. Callahan,writes that “Juneteenth is a novel of liberation, literally a celebration of June 19, 1865, the day two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was decreed when Union troops landed in Galveston, Texas, and their commanding officer told the weeping, cheering slaves that they were free. The delay, of course, is symbolic acknowledgment that liberation is the never-ending task of self, group, and nation and that, to endure, liberation must be self-achieved and self-achieving. In his novel Ellison, who took part in more than one ‘Juneteenth ramble’ as a boy in Oklahoma, speaks of false as well as true liberation and of the courage required to tell the difference.”
Since this book is hard to read, I approached it like a mystery. When it opens, a white racist senator from the South experiences an event that renders him a dying man. As he lays dying, he reviews his childhood when he was an orphaned boy raised by a black community that he ran away from. The mystery to me was how did this man become an outspoken racist. If this fictional character were alive today, he would have been one of the few politicians who voted against making Juneteenth an official holiday.
In the book, Ellison delves into the heart of America where the main character (who as a boy was called Bliss) is seduced by the culture that teaches him that racism makes him more important and will be financially profitable for him.
Along the way, Ellison offers the reader such gems of wisdom as uttered by the older black man, a minister, who took him under his wing when the senator was a child: “…But you had a choice, Bliss. You had a chance to join up to be a witness for either side and you let yourself be fouled up. You tried to go with those who raise the failure of love above their heads like a flag and say, ‘See here, I am now a man.’ You wanted to be with those who turn coward before their strongest human need and then say, ‘Look here, I’m brave.’”
The relationship between the older black man, named Hickman, who visits the Senator on his deathbed is explained by Ralph Ellison’s notes which are published in the end of the book: “Hickman despises the man but loves the boy whom the man had been.”
As he sits with the dying man, Hickman ruminates, “Why can’t they face the simple fact that you simply can’t give one bunch of men the license to kill another bunch without punishment, without opening themselves up to being victims? The high as well as the low? Why can’t they realize that when they dull their senses to the killing of one group of men they dull themselves to the preciousness of all human life?”
Reading Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison gave me a deeper insight into the heart of America, the place where American racism, and the root of all oppression, is located.
This is Janet Mason with reviews for BookTube.
To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
Every now and then I read my reviews online particularly at Goodreads and NetGalley. In particular, I enjoyed these two and wanted to share them with you.
The story The unicorn the Mystery reminds me of the tales of the old. The tapestry of the maiden and the unicorn. In a way it is. You get the unicorns point of view which is really amazing, a novice monk, and some novice nuns.
It goes over how only the pure of heart can see a unicorn. Religious metaphors for what they stand for. What they do. The trials that it goes through, is it real or just a myth. Is it looking for a maiden pure?
I really enjoyed this book, it was well written, had good flow and narrative and well-developed characters with good world building. The story was one of the most unique things I have ever read and the characters grab you along with the story from the first few pages. I was gripped and would definitely recommend checking it out. I finished it in a few hours I could not put it down. I can’t go into the book without giving anything away. Please read it.
To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery (Adelaide Books) click here:
I was surprised and thrilled to learn that The Unicorn, The Mystery was featured in the Bay Area Reporter’s Pride 2021 Fiction Reading list by Gregg Shapiro.
Taking inspiration from the 16th-century European tapestries known as “The Hunt of the Unicorn,” on display at the Met Cloisters, lesbian writer Janet Mason has crafted the novel The Unicorn, The Mystery (Adelaide Books), told from the viewpoints of a monk and, of course, a unicorn.
About a year ago, I started learning modern Greek in earnest, using Greekpod101.com. I like the way the coursework is organized, and I like the fact that I can hear the words spoken aloud. I can’t say that I feel fluent in the language yet, but I have a system of learning that is helping me in more ways than I thought. I have long been fascinated with Greece (both ancient and modern). Twenty years ago, when I travelled to Greece, I bought of book of the fragments of Sappho that had modern Greek on one page that was translated from Sappho’s classical Greek words which are printed on the facing page.
“Sapfo? The Poetess?” The proprietor of a small bookstore in Athens asked me with arched eyebrows.
“Neh,” I responded affirmatively.
The proprietor disappeared into the backroom and came back with the slim volume of Sappho.
In those days, everything related to Sappho was kept in backrooms and spoken of in hushed tones. It was expected and it was the same way in the United States.
I had learned enough Greek to get around the country during my trip. I took the Greek island buses (which at that time were called the KTEL buses) and could read street signs on my long walks. So many of the Greek words that I began to learn again last year were familiar to me.
Since that day in the Athenian bookstore, my goal has been to learn both modern and classical Greek so I can read my volume of Sappho. As a working writer, wanting to learn Greek has long factored into my work. In my most recent novel The Unicorn, The Mystery (Adelaide Books – NY and Lisbon), one of my narrators who is a monk living in the Middle Ages aspires to learn Greek and to become a Priest which is a station above his humble background.
My novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (Adelaide Books) is set in the Hebrew Bible and (in Book Two) in the New Testament. The New Testament was translated into Koine Greek which is now close to modern Greek.
In my book Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters (Bella Books), I write about finding a spiral notebook that my mother had left for me where she linked my name with the ancient Greek lyric poet Korinna. Janet-Korinna, she wrote. I found a statue of Korinna in a small museum in the seaside city of Mytilini on the island of Lesvos when I travelled to Greece twenty years ago.
In a way, the Greek language has long been with me. As a working writer, I chose this language because it has been around so long and so many of the English words have their origin in Greek words. I chose to learn this language after going to a plant-based diet and I’m sure that both play a role in my improved brain power. It made perfect sense when I learned that learning a language can improve your memory.
I’m also sure that the learning of Greek (which I devote my morning hours too – about two hours a day – enters my writing in ways that are very deep and a mystery to me.
To learn more about my recently published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:
Janet Mason, author 