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the Caribbean

                     Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2020 Edition

                     World Literature: the Caribbean

                     History

     Empire’s Crossroads, Carrie Gibson

     Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Laurent Dubois

     Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life, Philippe Girard

     The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wade Davis

     Bob Marley; the untold story, Chris Salewicz

                          Literature

     The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Beyond a Boundary, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, C.L.R. James

C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, Paget Henry & Paul M. Buhle (Editors)

     My Life; a spoken autobiography, Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro Handbook, George Calloway

     Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, Maya Deren

     Tell My Horse: voodoo and life in Haiti and Jamaica, Zora Neal Hurston

     Kaya Abaniah and the Father of the Forest, Wayne Gerard Trottman

     Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia

          The Kingdom of This World, The Chase,  Alejo Carpentier

     The Fanon Reader, Frantz Fanon, Azzedine Haddour (Editor and Introduction)

     After the Dance; a walk through Carnival in Jacmel Haiti, The Dew Breaker, Claire of the Sea Light, Edwidge Danticat

     Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, Edwidge Danticat introduction

     A View of the Empire at Sunset, The Lost Child, Dancing in the Dark, The Atlantic Sound, Caryl Phillips

     Love Anger Madness: a Haitian Trilogy, Marie Vieux-Chauvet

     The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas-Llosa

     Island Beneath the Sea, Isabel Allende

     The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

     The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid

     Three Trapped Tigers, Holy Smoke,  Guillermo Cabrera Infante,

     In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez

     A Bend in the River, Miquel Street, A House for Mr Biswas,  The Middle Passage, The Writer and the Word; essays, V. S. Naipaul

    Crossing the Mangrove, Windward Heights, Celine, Segu, Children of Segu, Tree of Life, The Last of the African Kings, What is Africa to Me?, Maryse Conde

     John Crow’s Devil, The Book of Night Women, A Brief History of Seven Killings, Black Leopard Red Wolf  Marlon James

    Eccentric Neighborhoods, The House on the Lagoon, Rosario Ferré

    The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013  Glyn Maxwell (Editor), Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, What the Twilight Says: Essays, Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, Bruce Alvin King

    Prospero’s Daughter, Even in Paradise, Bruised Hibiscus, Elizabeth Nunez

    The Carnival Trilogy: (Carnival, the Infinite Rehearsal, the Four Banks of the River of Space), The Guyana Quartet: (Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour, The Secret Ladder), The Ghost of Memory, Wilson Harris

    Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, Sister Mine, Skin Folk, The Chaos, Report from Planet Midnight, The New Moon’s Arms, Falling in Love with Hominids, Nalo Hopkinson

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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