Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls a temperamental autobiography, comprised of visceral, intimate fragments that fuse criticism and memoir.
Constructing a Nervous system is Jefferson\'s relentlessly galvanizing mise-en-sc�ne for unconventional storytelling as well as a platform for unexpected dramatis personae..
The fragments of this brilliant book, while not neglecting family, race, and class, are informed by a kind of aesthetic drive: longing, ecstasy, or even acute ambivalence. - The words of multiple others (writers, singers, film characters, friends, family) act as prompts and as dialogue.
DuBois and George Eliot meet illicitly, as he appropriates lines from her story The Lifted Veil to write his famous behind the veil passages in The Souls of Black Folk .
B.
E. - W. - Bing Crosby and Ike Turner become alter egos. - Harriet Beecher Stowe\'s Topsy finds her way into the art of Kara Walker and the songs of C�cile McLorin Salvant. - The muscles and movements of a ballerina, spliced with those of an Olympic runner: template for what a female body could be.
In this Nervous System: - The sounds of a black spinning disc of a 1950s jazz LP as intimate and instructive as a parent\'s voice.
The book\'s structure is determined by signal moments of her life, those that trouble her as well as those that thrill and restore.
Margo Jefferson constructs a Nervous system with pieces of different lengths and tone, conjoining arts writing (poem, song, performance) with life writing (history, psychology).
Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls a temperamental autobiography, comprised of visceral, intimate fragments that fuse criticism and memoir
