How to Be Good: Ferentz Lafargue on Writing
A few months ago, writer Ferentz Lafargue blogged a teenage obsession with basketball. The Queens-bred New School Professor described suffering a hot humid summer on unyielding asphalt courts with the hope of getting better, of stepping up his game, of tightening up his handle in order to make his high school's varsity squad. It's not an unfamiliar image; I've seen quite a few young men dribble down sidewalks and onto subway platforms, their devotion to the rock so solid. Lafargue, however, taking cue from writer and lifetime hoopster John Edgar Wideman invoked "toss[ing] around the ol' leather pumpkin" as a metaphor for commitment to craft and, yes, follow through.
I spent the summer before my senior year in high school playing as much as basketball as possible. Having dedicated the previous two summers to shooting, building strength and endurance, and adapting to the nuances of organized basketball, I felt that this was going to be a make or break year for me at school. I was determined to make the varsity team that fall and knew that one of the last stumbling blocks was to improve my handle, or so I thought.You would have been hard pressed to find me without a basketball that summer. I dribble up the hill on Homelawn and along the winding crescents along Highland and 87th avenue that transported my friends and I to the basketball courts behind Thomas A Edison high school in Queens. When my friend Calvin couldn't oblige, I'd marshal my brother Randy out with me in the searing afternoon heat to try stealing the ball from me. At times is was so hot outside that the synthetic leather seemed on the verge of melting. If I had to spend too much time calming him down once Randy became upset at being an involuntary participant in my cruel and unusual game, neither of us was able to pick up the ball that had been idling in the sun without some sort of shield on our hands.
Sitting down to watch Martin or The Wonder Years did not proclude me from doing drills. As the trials and tribulations of Kevin and Winnie unfolded on screen, flicked my basketball from the fingertips of one hand to another, seeking for that transcendent moment that coach Thomson always spoke of when one's hands become one with the rock.
It resonated immediately. I want to be good, better, best at this writing thing and I am not opposed to laying out of public intellectual life on occasion to get there. Sometimes, it is a question of muzzling an impulsive response to a current event. Sometimes, I just don't feel informed enough to comment. But I am always compelled to listen, draft, think, and, gasp, plod through a book or two, to hone my skills and better understand the moment. That so many commentators are undaunted by their unfamiliarity with a subject, with their own pockets of ignorance, with their own lack of dexterity is discouraging and detrimental to our national dialogue but my thoughtfulness can often devolve into tentativeness, a tendency, Lafargue wrote, that once thwarted his hoop dreams.
Sad to say, after all of that work, I ended up never trying out for the team. It's one of the few things in life that I look back on over and over. Not necessarily with regret, in fact, I'd prefer regret, but serious concern over whether there have been other moments in life where I had put in the work, but did not go through with the tryouts?
There are few artists I admire more than Sonny Rollins, the jazz saxophonist who intermittently sequestered himself atop the Williamsburg Bridge to perfect his sound, but it would have been all for naught if he hadn't descended, returned to the city's jazz haunts, dipped his shoulder and blown. Naught. Lafargue understands this and blogged it brightly enough to bring it into focus for me. His memoir, Songs in the Key of My Life, released almost a year ago is just as insightful. Lafargue traverses his unique biography through its soundtrack and allows the reader to eavesdrop even at his most vulnerable moments. It is an excellent read and tonight Lafargue, whose traveled the country engaging readers with his memoir, hits the west side of Manhattan for a reading and discussion. I'll see you there!
For more information on tonight's event, see the Brecht Forum's web site.
To keep abreast of Ferentz Lafargue's writing and appearances, see his web site.
Image source: Sonny Rollins FAQ
Tags: Events, Ferentz Lafargue, Writing
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