"The Long Black Line"

… postulants, novices, brothers — it's all there, what you'd expect in a first-year Jesuit seminary including a "manuductor" (clue: not man-uductor) and more, or rather less, some things that don't happen — in John L'Heureux's short story in the May 21 issue of The New Yorker  (L'Heureux author of The Medici Boy  which we read almost two years ago and whom I continu- ally think I may have short-changed).

In the same issue a review of Jeffrey C. Stewart's new biography of Alain Locke The New Negro, whose life was so interesting and influential that I thought we must put it on our reading list until I came to reviewer Tobi Haslett's final conclusion of the book (not the man):

At more than nine hundred pages, it's a thudding, shapeless text, despotic in its pedantry and exhausting in its zeal, marked by excruciating attention to the most minuscule irrelevances.

Nine-hundred pages would pretty much have done it (doomed it) for me, but don't pass up the chance to learn about the dandy philosophe of the Harlem Renaissance and more.