Jamel Brinkley via MATRIX

IMPORTANT STUFF →

Why a "Matrix"?

I was explaining the ideas behind this nascent network to (João) Teoria (trumpet player above) over cervejas at Xique Xique (a bar named for a town in Bahia) in the Salvador neighborhood of Barris...

Like this (but in Portuguese): "It's kind of like Facebook if it didn't spy on you, but reversed... more about who you don't know than who you do know. And who doesn't know you but would be glad if they did. It's kind of like old Myspace Music but instead of having "friends" it has a list on your page of people you recommend. Not just musicians but writers, painters, filmmakers, dancers, chefs... anybody in the creative economy. It has a list of people who recommend you, or through whom you are recommended. It deals with arts which aren't recommendable by algorithm but need human intelligence behind recommendations. And the people who are recommended can recommend, creating a network of recommendations wherein by the small world phenomenon most people in the creative economy are within several steps of everybody else in the creative economy, no matter where they are in the world..."

And João said (in Portuguese): "A matrix where you can move from one artist to another..."

A matrix! That was it! The ORIGINAL meaning of matrix is "source", from "mater", Latin for "mother". So the term would help congeal the concept in the minds of people the network was being introduced to, while giving us a motto: "We're a real mother for ya!" (you know, Johnny "Guitar" Watson?)

The original idea was that musicians would recommend musicians, the network thus formed being "small world" (commonly called "six degrees of separation"). In the real world, the number of degrees of separation in such a network can vary, but while a given network might have billions of nodes (people, for example), the average number of steps between any two nodes will usually be minuscule.

Thus somebody unaware of the magnificent music of Bahia, Brazil will be able to conceivably move from almost any musician in this matrix to Bahia in just a few steps...

By the same logic that might move one from Bahia or anywhere else to any musician anywhere.

And there's no reason to limit this system to musicians. To the contrary, while there are algorithms written to recommend music (which, although they are limited, can be useful), there are no algorithms capable of recommending journalism, novels & short stories, painting, dance, film, chefery...

...a vast chasm that this network — or as Teoria put it, "matrix" — is capable of filling.

If You Can't Stand the Heat

Image above is from the base of the cross in front of the church of São Francisco do Paraguaçu in the Bahian Recôncavo

Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes, stoked and steamed and sensual in the widest sense of the word, limned in cadenced song, Brazil is a conundrum wrapped in a smile inside an irony...

It is not a European nation. It is not a North American nation. It is not an East Asian nation. It straddles — jungle and desert and dense urban centers — both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin. It was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people). Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David. Three cultures — from three continents — running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Pandeirista on the roof. Nowhere else but here.

Oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption — elements of these are still strongly entrenched — have defined, delineated, and limited Brazil.

But strictured & bound as it has been and is, Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of — or perhaps because of — the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.

For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...

Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.

"Onde tem miséria, tem música!"* - Raymundo Sodré

And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.

Welcome to the kitchen!

* "Where there is misery, there is music!" Remarked during a conversation arcing from Bahia to Haiti and Cuba to New Orleans and the south side of Chicago and Harlem to the villages of Ireland and the gypsy camps and shtetls of Eastern Europe...

Jamel Brinkley I RECOMMEND

CURATION

from this node by: Sparrow/Pardal

This is the Universe of

Name: Jamel Brinkley
City/Place: California
Country: United States
Hometown: Bronx, New York

Life & Work

Bio: Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories.

His work has received support from Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Lannan Foundation. He was the 2016-2017 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Contact Information

Management/Booking: Jin Auh, Literary Agent
[email protected]
The Wylie Agency
250 West 57th St, Ste. 2114
New York, NY 10107
Tel. 212-246-0069

Media | Markets

▶ Twitter: jamelbrinkley
▶ Website: http://www.jamelbrinkley.com
▶ Stories: http://www.jamelbrinkley.com/writing

Quotes, Notes & Etc. "Among A Lucky Man’s many wonderful accomplishments — the way the length of each story affords its characters room to move; the use of linear, progressive time to knit the individual stories into a social fabric, à la Alice Munro or Wideman — one in particular is genuinely path-clearing. Brinkley offers visions of manhood and masculinity that demonstrate candor without false intensity, desire without ownership. His male characters have fictional experiences that, in the hands of the right reader, can become equipment for living."
- LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Set mostly in Brooklyn, the nine stories in this debut collection are full of subtle poignancy... Each story is a trenchant exploration of race and class, vividly conveying the tension between social codes of masculinity and the vulnerable, volatile self."
- THE NEW YORKER

"With this observant book, Brinkley demonstrates an enviable capacity for narrative compression. In the space of 25 pages, he’s capable of creating complex and memorable emotional worlds. This is a very hard thing to do, but in A Lucky Man, he pulls it off in one story after the next."
- MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

"[A] singular collection... Brinkley's portrait of New York and its edges are full of people who feel contained pushing at the boundaries of their lives... Through pages of peerless prose and startlingly sharp sentences, what ultimately emerges is a constantly reframed argument about the role and power of masculinity."
- L.A. TIMES

"[A Lucky Man] is intent on recognizing what masculinity looks like, questioning our expectations of it, and criticizing its toxicity — and somehow managing to do all of that with love. . . . And while it's clearly a topic that concerns him, Brinkley's book isn't only about masculinity. It also deals in family relationships, love, aging, loss, and disappointment — the universal themes that keep us coming back to literature — while also conveying versions of black male experience. In fact, the collection may include only nine stories, but in each of them, Brinkley gives us an entire world."
- NPR BOOKS

"With equal parts precision and poetry, these nine audacious stories step into the minefields awaiting boys of color as they approach manhood in Brooklyn and the Bronx—testing the limits of relationships, social norms, and their own definitions of masculinity."

- O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
"One of the many striking qualities in Brinkley’s stories is how precarious his male characters tend to be, so uncertain, deep down, of their cocky masculinity. He observes his characters from a small distance, watching patiently as their swagger, their anger, their love and lust deflate like a leaky balloon. It’s an extraordinary process to witness... Brinkley’s stories ... together become a series of small tragedies."
- THE PARIS REVIEW (STAFF PICKS)

"In Brinkley’s work, no character is left untended, no aspect of identity is overlooked, and the results are well-inhabited worlds that feel infinite. A lot of short stories exist in a snow globe, but the nine stories presented here are each a big bang. They burst forth through space and time. They are larger than the sum of their components... A Lucky Man is not only a standout debut for the year, but also a testament to what can be achieved in a short story."
- CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Brinkley’s commitment to creating complex characters and allowing them to exist as they are, regardless of the consequences, is one of his many strengths. . . . The precision through which Brinkley employs detail gives his stories such a rich and singular feel that it’s hard to compare him to anybody."
- THE ADROIT JOURNAL

"There’s something magical about a great story collection... In A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley’s stunning debut collection, the stories are not formally linked, and yet they are, implicitly, by their beautiful prose, by their intimate gaze at character, by their focus on black men, by their setting in New York City. These are stories that can be read again and again... A collection as fine as this, of fiction that is reflecting our world and searching for the truth, is one to be treasured, read and reread, admired, and loved."
- PLOUGHSHARES

"In this tight, polished story collection, Brinkley tackles issues related to masculinity, fatherhood (including the impact of absentee fathers), and the multi-faceted ugly beast of racism and the lives it has marred... This is an assured and important collection that could not be more timely."
- KENYON REVIEW

"A Lucky Man ... is an urgent collection that compels us to reconsider the ways we understand manhood... This collection gives a deeply human and deeply affecting account of living in the world, of searching for connection and longing for love. A Lucky Man demands our attention. Few works in the frenetic energy of the modern moment are capable of capturing us as fully. Brinkley’s prose, the ferocity and authenticity of his narratives do; they astound and wound."
- THE MASTERS REVIEW

"Brinkley explores black men under both the pressurized violence and bottled up tenderness that undoes them at every turn. This is a book that acknowledges male stereotypes while subverting them and exploring the psychic damage they leave in their wake... A Lucky Man is as compulsive to read as an addictive novel."
- KQED ARTS - THE SPINE

"Told in nine vivid short stories, Jamel Brinkley’s debut collection, A Lucky Man, tugs sharply at the tender threads of intimacy, race, and masculinity. Brinkley’s prose, as fierce in its vigilance as it is in its empathy, casts new light on the delicate and heartbreaking truisms of American manhood... Each of Brinkley’s true-to-life stories offers the reader marvelous depth and insight..."
- DUENDE

"Brinkley’s first collection portrays young African American men struggling with fathers, brothers, and friends, present or absent. What impresses first is the length and strength, the sheer weightiness of each detailed and meditative story. Brinkley doesn’t flick off moments but shows how each contains multitudes... Fully developed stories that readers will savor."
- LIBRARY JOURNAL

"A Lucky Man will be introduced to syllabi across the country and beyond upon its release, that much is certain. The fact that it is a debut is astonishing. Brinkley innately understands the pulses and rhythms of the English language. Every short story could only have been written sentence by limpid sentence, weighed in the mouth before set to the page."
- THE WILDS

"An assured debut collection of stories about men and women, young and old, living and loving along the margins in Brooklyn and the Bronx... It’s difficult to single out any story as most outstanding since they are each distinguished by Brinkley’s lyrical invention, precise descriptions of both emotional and physical terrain, and a prevailing compassion toward people as bemused by travail as they are taken aback by whatever epiphanies blossom before them. A major talent."
- KIRKUS (STARRED REVIEW)

"In nine perceptive stories about broken families, loners, and social outcasts in search of redemption, Brinkley’s stunning debut depicts urban life in all its lonely, wearying detail. Set in Brooklyn and the Bronx, in poor neighborhoods and on school campuses, these tales are imbued with pathos, sexuality, and moments of violence and tenderness. With this memorable collection, Brinkley emerges as a gifted and empathetic new writer."
- BOOKLIST (STARRED REVIEW)

"A Lucky Man is just one of those collections that takes your breath away: the voices we hear, the people we meet, they scratch and pull and ache and rage, revealing secrets we usually keep hidden. Every line is pitch perfect. Jamel Brinkley is a writer of extraordinary talent."
—Daniel Alarcón, author of The King is Always Above the People

"Jamel Brinkley writes the kind of fiction that reads like the whole truth. As his characters —from estranged siblings in Virginia to surrogate families inBrooklyn—love, hurt, challenge, and sometimes save each other, their stories vividly expose our ideas of masculinity and the fumes of racism and injustice in the American air we breathe. A Lucky Man is full of insight and music—a bold, urgent debut."
—Mia Alvar, author of In the Country

"I loved this book. From sentence to sentence, these stories are beautifully written, and they are wonderfully moving and smart about the connections—firm, broken, or mended—between siblings, and parents and their children, and couples who profess to love each other. Jamel Brinkley writes like an angel, but he also knows how low human beings can sometimes go, despite their own best intentions. How does luck, or its absence, visit our lives? Read these stories and find out."
—Charles Baxter, author of There’s Something I Want You To Do

"There’s just no way to overstate this: A Lucky Man is a stunning debut. Richer than most novels, this collection calls a whole world into being, and the names and fates of these people will follow you into your life and never leave. Ambitious themes arc across the entire book—troubled masculinity, family in all its broken forms—but on a lower frequency these are love stories, intimately told. And they could come from no other than Jamel Brinkley, so there’s the pleasure of that encounter too, of hearing a new voice for the first time, and taking a deep plunge into the allegory of an artist’s soul."
—Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering

"The stories in A Lucky Man have a necessary urgency—their characters need to confess or seek comfort, to tell the reader how they’ve been wounded or whose hurt they carry. These stories do not shy away from heartbreak and brutal consequences, but they always remember how much of the way to despair was beautiful and full of tenderness and joy. An unforgettable collection by an important new voice."
—Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

"This is the rare debut that introduces not a promising talent but a major writer, fully formed. The psychological penetration of these stories astonishes me, as do the grace and emotional scope of their sentences. Jamel Brinkley is brilliant, the real thing, a revelation."
—Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

"A Lucky Man is subtle yet loud, heartbreaking yet utterly unsentimental, uncompromising yet a damn good read. These breathtaking stories find energy in the friction of humanity’s contradictions. In this masterfully written debut, Jamel Brinkley proves he’s got next."
—Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day

"Jamel Brinkley’s stories tell of absence and abandonment, sometimes confronted and sometimes met with resignation, but always edged with pain and beauty. In vibrant yet restrained prose, Brinkley illuminates the longing for home, which lurks in all of us. A magnificent debut."
—Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account

"There’s true magic in Jamel Brinkley’s stories. He finds the subtle and humane lurking within the drama of our lives. Brinkley writes with great insight and honesty about people you’ll recognize, flawed but still worthwhile. By using all his formidable talents, he’s shown us a vision of ourselves."
—Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

"A Lucky Man is filled with characters who long to become better sons, better fathers, better friends, better lovers. Often they have no words for their complicated feelings. Happily they are the creations of an author who has all the words. Jamel Brinkley is a wonderful writer and these richly imagined stories will stay with the lucky reader long after the last page."
—Margot Livesey, author of Mercury

"The lucky men of Brinkley’s debut are haunted: by the past, by family, by love, and ultimately by masculinity itself. These sober and elegant stories delve deep. A debut of subtlety and power."
—Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

"Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man captures so perfectly the myriad ways in which we struggle daily not only for connection but to be heard and understood. At once covert and exuberant, ferocious and tender, heartbreaking and hilarious, these are the stories we always needed. A marvelous debut, glowing with life, and a major new voice in American fiction."
—Paul Yoon, author of The Mountain

My Writing

Publications: In nine powerful stories set in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, A Lucky Man announces the arrival of a significant new voice in fiction. Jamel Brinkley, with incisive and nuanced prose, explores the charged, complex ties between men whose mistakes threaten their relationships with friends, lovers, and family members.

An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his day camp group at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man at the all-night revel of J’ouvert is preoccupied by watching out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history.

A striking and indelible debut, A Lucky Man reflects the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.