Words

In New York at multiple sites, the PEN World Voices Festival will take place from April 27 through May 3rd, with more than one-hundred and fifty writers from forty countries.


Late last year, the University of Chicago published Alain L. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher by Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth. Locke, a Harvard trained philosopher, was one of the movers behind the Harlem Renaissance.


Robert Bolano’s novel 2666, Dexter Filkins factual The Forever War, and Patrick French’s Naipaul biographer received awards from the National Book Critics Circle for excellence in 2008.


The March 2009 issue of Poetry Internatinal (Poetry International Web) has poetry from Australia, Ireland, Portugal and South Africa.


There is a free “Philosophy and/as Literature Conference” in London at the King’s College River Room on May 5th and 6th this year, beginning at 9.30am and ending at 5.30pm. The work of Adorno, Iris Murdoch, Plato, Proust, and Richard Rorty will be discussed as well as such questions as “What would be the significance of identifying features of reasoning intrinsic to philosophy but not to philosophical literature?” and the topic “Responding to Fiction as a Form of Self-Knowledge.” Coffee, tea and lunch will be served. If you want to attend please e-mail Christopher Hamilton, with reservation details (one or both days): Christopher.hamilton@kcl.ac.uk

Acadiana Film Festival

The Acadiana Film Festival taking place at different locations (Cite Des Arts, and Grand 14 Theater, Lite, and the Natural History Museum, among them) in Lafayette, Louisiana, scheduled for April 16th through 19th, is focused on the craft, content, and pleasure of films, present and future, with programs attractive to film professionals and the general audience. There are workshops for film and sound editors, for actors on developing characters, and discussions on music composition and marketing an idea for a film (pitching stories), and the festival provides a location tour, as well as music receptions, and, most importantly, film premieres and screenings, with the subjects of films including hurricane Katrina and Mardi Gras, writer Kate Chopin and singer Patti Smith, coastal land loss restoration and plate lunch restaurants.

A few days ago, I asked one of the organizers, Jana Godshall, about the Acadiana Film Festival, and the expected audience:
Who are the likely attendants of the film festival (artists, educators, students, others)?


Two days ago (Thursday), the festival director Jana Godshall answered, "All of the above. We have artists, educators, students, producers, musicians, composers, directors, actors, writers, city and state entertainment industry representatives and not only that,...simply film enthusiasts. Anyone who enjoys independent cinema, as we have tons of free screenings open to the public Thursday through Sunday, April 16-19th," and she added, "our line up is great this year. we have so many feature film, shorts, documentaries, panels, workshops, parties, networking opportunities."


Godshall works with festival coordinator Julie Bordelon, and can be reached at: Acadiana Film Festival, 101 W. Vermilion St., Lafayette, La 70501; and, more information about the festival is available online (search: Acadiana Film Festival).

Events in Louisiana Film Appreciation

In October 2008, I asked several persons involved in Louisiana culture questions about the impact of film, including, What are five important events in the development of film appreciation in Louisiana in the last five years?


Here is the response of film critic and journalist Alexandyr Kent (of the web log Louisiana Movies):

"For northwest Louisiana, the opening of the Robinson Film Center is a sign that film appreciation is, well, appreciated. The nonprofit’s challenge will be to sustain interest – or more bluntly put, sustain funding – as the entertainment dollar continues to be pulled in new, unpredictable directions.

Last year’s return of the New Orleans Film Festival, I think, can’t be underestimated.

The growth of the film industry – throughout La. – has probably drawn some La. viewers to look more critically at film.

We’re also seeing high schools and colleges add courses and programs in film study and filmmaking. That’s good.

Generally speaking, as cable/satellite TV continues to grow viewership, more people are being drawn to nonmainstream movies."

Shakespeare's King Lear

Children are born, educated, mature, and they go to work and have their own children, and in the midst of those basic activities are love and hate, ignorance and knowledge, possibility and disappointment; and our arts reflect those facts, those states. Our arts are embodiments of experience and reflection, and the extent to which they are honest and wise is a register of their integrity and use, their necessity.

I have often thought that it is a sign of respect to tell the truth about matters of importance, but some people receive the truth as an insult, preferring flattery, preferring false ideology. I was reminded of that while watching a televised production of Shakespeare's "King Lear," directed by Trevor Nunn with Chris Hunt and starring Ian McKellen as the king, in a play about a father who rewards daughters who fear and flatter him, a father who disinherits the daughter who loves him but tells him the truth without embellishment (Romola Garai plays well Cordelia, the daughter who loves her father despite his disapproving rage). Pride leads Lear astray, but it is also age that diminishes his mind, age that asks for a simple view and a simple response (in the early scenes McKellen's egocentric king reminded me of a grand baby). There is a parallel story in the play, focusing on an ambitious, bastard son (the seductive and lethal Edmund, played by Philip Winchester) who gets revenge on his father and brother--for a time. As the play is a tragedy, there are all kinds of betrayals and deaths. Shakespeare's ability to create situations that fully express the noble and the savage aspects of humanity is what keeps him current.

Miscellaneous Notes on Art, Society, Politics

Interesting: the presidents of the United States of America and of Israel have made appeals to Iran for a different kind of discourse and relationship, reports the New York Times, March 20, 2009. (However, there may be more comment now about Obama's incidental remarks regarding his bowling ability and its likeness to the Special Olympics. There is something questionable about taking every comment to task, even those said briefly, lightly, in humor by someone known to be sensitive.)


The European Union is troubled by the possibility of France’s protectionist policies regarding its car industry, according to the BBC.


Amnesty International has reported, March 18th 2009, that hundreds of people in the African country of Gambia have been accused of witchcraft, detained and forced to drink a strange mixture which has led to sickness. Apparently, the president of Gambia believes in witchcraft, and encouraged a witch hunt following the death of one of his relatives. Such a fact makes a publication such as African Studies Quarterly, or a film director such as the late Ousmane Sembene, or active musicians like Femi Kuti and Angelique Kidjoe, very important as symbolic representatives of African modernity and reason, and important as resources for alternative leadership.


Good news from Africa: “Somalia, long dogged by conflict, is ‘back from the brink’ following a peace pact, the top United Nations envoy to the Horn of Africa nation told the Security Council today, calling for a three-pronged approach targeting governance, security and development to ensure stability,” states a March 20th article from the United Nations News Centre, accessible online. The peace pact established is the "UN-facilitated Djibouti Agreement" between the Transitional Federal Government and the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia. The article calls for international aid for Somali, which has a rich coastline and promising business aspects.


“Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism,” states Clay Shirky, in a thoughtful piece (“Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”) on the web pages of Edge: The Third Culture (March 17).


Bobby Jindal has vowed to reject some of the federal funding provided by President Obama's recovery package; and a few other governors have declared the same intention. Would they react differently with a better grasp of history? “The hardened antipathy of today's Southern politicians to public investment is especially ironic given the South's history. I'm reading Roger Biles' interesting book The South and the New Deal, and he makes a compelling case that public works programs were critical to pulling the South out of the Great Depression and allowing it to catch up with the rest of the country economically,” says Chris Kromm of the Institute of Southern Studies (“Kromm Report,” Facing South, online March 18).


Harper's magazine featured a good article on John Cheever's significant work and sad life, recently. Lee Siegel's piece on critic George Steiner in the New York Times was honest and intriguing too.


A recent PopMatters.com article discussed the need for sharper criticism of video games and used film critic Pauline Kael as a model of criticism, citing qualities it considered strengths and weaknesses. It's a stimulating read and a nice tribute to Kael's ongoing relevance.


The new Julia Roberts-Clive Owen film, Duplicity, written and directed by Tony Gilroy, received a very warm, even excited review, from the New York Times’s A.O. Scott today; and other reviews (such as in the Los Angeles Times and Variety) seem as welcoming. There have been good reviews for I Love You, Man starring Paul Rudd, as well.


The saddest news recently has been the death of Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter, Liam Neeson’s wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, in a ski accident. The accidental death of a bright and talented person carries a special weight: it is easy to see the lost gifts and promise, easy for the loss to read as an inescapable sign of unpredictable destinies.

Sarah in "Music and Friends," from A Stranger on Earth (Fiction)

Sarah sat on a bench in the park, amused, curious, dismayed, and repelled by the people she saw. She watched nannies and the babies they cared for, and thought many of the children adorable, though when they began to cry or be demanding she wished she could make them disappear. She saw and heard a couple of young men enthusiastically engaged in a conversation about music—whether Devendra Banhart was a celebratory and satirical visionary or merely foolish, in which they talked about Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and the Beautiful South—that made her wonder about the other things they cared about. listened to the inane conversations some of the girls were having—loud, bragging, full of curses, the kind of conversations she used to think typical of boys. She had been reading a book of poems by Denise Levertov and a letter from her Uncle Thomas, one he had dictated to his friend Mark. She wished that she could visit him; she wished many things. What good was it to keep thinking about the matter, if she could not do anything differently? She read a few poems by Levertov, and returned to the letter, again and again, a torment that ended when Timothy walked toward her: his smile made her smile.

“Mind if I sit here?” he asked, as he was lowering himself onto the bench.

“No,” she said, with a mild laugh.

She stuck the letter into the back of the book, which he looked at.

“Mm, Levertov,” he said. “I haven’t read her in a while. Do you like her a lot?”

“Sometimes,” said Sarah.

“Why?” he asked.

“I like her assurance. She seems to know who she is, what she feels, what thinks, and what’s important in the world,” said Sarah. “She has a spiritual wholeness. It’s very calming, very healing, to read her work.”

Timothy smiled, and he looked thoughtful, sad, and then pleased before he said, “I always thought there was a lot of romance in her work, that she made things seem better and simpler than they were.”

Sarah looked at him. She looked hurt, and was silent, and she looked around and then back at Timothy, and she asked, “Do you think conflict and difficulty and lack of faith indicates depth, or confusion, lack of imagination and intellect?”

Timothy laughed, and said, “Wait, wait, I didn’t say I didn’t think she was good or that the opposite tact was right.”

“What do you think?” she asked.”

“It’s true that we often think that if something is complex, even difficult, that means that it is more crafted and more true to experience, to society and life,” he admitted, “and that’s partly an instinctive response to all the cliches, ideologies, platitudes, and spiritual stuff we are fed, and I do look for complexity in work, for some representation of the real conflicts that are in the world, but I also think that not everything is in doubt, that we have to believe something, that we have to have a mission.”

They looked at each other. Were they going to accept their friendship, their affection and respect for each other and assumption that each meant well, or were they going to fight?

“What’s your mission?” she asked.

Were they going to fight?

Timothy said, “I just want to write and teach.”

“It was good that you learned that early, and that you found the place for it—here, in the university, that you didn’t assume you could do that as easily or as well in the ordinary working world,” she said, ending in a tone that surprised her in its bitterness. Sarah looked away. What could she say now? What would explain that tone, or restore the usual spirit they shared?

“Yes, it was lucky, I guess, though it was what everyone expected,” said Timothy.

“Did they?” she asked, and she wanted suddenly to end this conversation. What was it like to move in a world in which people knew what was right for you—truly?

“Yes,” he said. “They knew I liked to learn and to talk and that to do something else would mean I’d be losing something that made me who I am,” he said.

I’m not furious with him, Sarah reminded herself. I don’t have to be nasty to him, she thought.

Timothy looked at her, and he wondered what he should say. They were talking but they did not seem to be having the same conversation. He took a chance and asked, “Did you not have anyone who believed in you?”

Sarah looked around. She wanted to lie, say something pleasant, something less damning than what she was inclined to say: she could not think of anyone. She said, “It’s not that no one thought I was intelligent or might do something useful.” She paused, and then said, “Use is not always value. No one seemed to think I was important or that anything I was likely to do was going to be important.”

“That’s sad,” he said.

Sarah could accept that, especially as he did not seem false or pitying.

“What do you want to do now?”

“I wish I could study,” said Sarah. “Being here reminds me of that,” she said. “I cannot accord it. I have been sending out resumes—and it seems I’ll be lucky to get a low-paying job. It’s strange. I couldn’t afford school and the usual bills.”

“It must be very frustrating,” he said. “Of course, you know, you’re much smarter than most of the students in my classes.” He smiled, and said, “Smarter than some of my professors.”

Sarah laughed.

“It’s an irony,” he said. “It makes me wonder about how we end up where we do.”

“I know,” said Sarah, looking away. She was afraid she was going to cry, or say something, make a confession, that she would regret. She did not want to be seen as needy, as wounded, but what else might she be? Foolish? Lost? There was no way of seeing where she was as ideal.


(c) DG

Poem

Talking to Myself

In any one of your moods,
you might denounce
seductions of the mind,
citing the cruelty
of the enlightened.

You might curse love
or praise hate
or deny feeling.

Like a true romantic
you intend to allow yourself
no illusions.

You do not know the root
of your torment
but everything mirrors
who you are: what you praise
and what you curse.
You are like a god.
You are like a madman.
You are like anyone of us.

If I could touch you,
I could tell you
but you are beyond reach.
Only the poem knows
where you live--not the poet.

I imagine that you pace
a circle of days
dreaming of tomorrow, trapped
on the straight line
your mind traces.
I want to tell you,
There is no progress,
only return and return,
but you have been told
and are yet faithless.
Either side of the road
is the same road
but it's yours, as you know
with pride and pain.
Will you believe in what
you cannot know?
and what might save you?

One day you will talk to me
and I might listen.


(c) DG

Fiction Excerpt, "Music and Friends"

In the chapter "Music and Friends," from the proposed novel A Stranger on Earth, a chapter focused on two old men, both musicians, Thomas and Mark: one is dying, and the other is his caregiver, and they prepare for death and its aftermath, including a possible inheritance for the dying man’s niece, Sarah. The chapter includes remembrance of the men's earlier days...


“One of the interesting things about jazz is that every phrase, every moment, can be delectable,” said Thomas, standing and rubbing a cloth over his saxophone and looking down into the face of an admiring woman.

“The music is that—it’s delicious,” she answered.

She had stopped him when he was returning from the rest room, during the band’s break. The club was half-empty, but the audience seemed to be with the band. It was a relaxed night. The men had things they were worried about—paying the rent, the next gig, but they were in a good mood.

Mark passed Thomas and the woman as he made his way out of the club. He wanted a few minutes away from everyone—he wanted to be outside. Mark wondered how Thomas had the energy for playing when he was so busy running his mouth, filling words with all that hot air. He wondered if Thomas would be having breakfast with the woman the next morning. He did not seem to have much discrimination about where he set his instrument down.

“Is the music just for a small group of people, or is it for everybody?” asked Thomas.

“It’s for whoever is willing to put the time into understanding it,” said Fred, a gregarious, and plump trumpet player.

“That’s right, that’s right,” said Nathan, the drummer.

Nathan’s affirmation was not one that Mark thought much of. Nathan was one of those people who agreed with whatever half-intelligent thing anybody said, even if it conflicted with what he had just agreed with five minutes before.

“Only some people are going to know what the music comes out of—the way of life, the relationships, the values, out of which the music comes,” said Kent, the trombonist, a lean and professorial man.

“Do I need to know that to enjoy Mozart? Do I really need to know that to enjoy Coltrane?” asked Mark.

“I’m surprised at you,” said Kent. “You’re always reading history.”

“It interests me—and it does give me a deeper understanding, but I would still like Mozart and Coltrane if I knew nothing about their lives and circumstances,” said Mark.

“You’ve got contradictions,” said Kent, disapproving.

Mark looked worried for a moment, then laughed. “Don’t we all,” he said. “Don’t we all.”

It seemed to Mark as if there was an attempt at some kind of artificial purity in Kent. He recognized it in him as he recognized it in himself. Was it fair to call it artificial, just because they had not been able to fulfill their ideals yet?

“People like what we do,” said Nathan.

“Now they do. What if we decide to do something else?” asked Kent. “Are they going to try to deal with it for what it is; or are they going to act like what don’t know what we’re doing?”

“You planning changes Kent?” asked Fred.

“Changes will happen. If we’re deep into the music,” said Kent.

“Why do they have to be difficult?” asked Fred.

“They don’t have to be, but if they’re really original they might be,” said Kent.


(c) DG

Monica Hairston of the Center for Black Music Research

Below is a query submitted to Monica Hairston of the Center for Black Music Research, from me. I am interested in a range of disciplines and fields, but few things give me the pleasure of music, all kinds of music, including jazz, independent rock, and music from other countries; and, of course, I am open to learning more about the things that interest me. I am aware, as well, that too frequently African-American music, as with much else, is thought of in terms of stereotypes. I wondered recently if a scholar could suggest new avenues of learning, for myself, for others; and, consequently, I asked the Center for Black Music Research's Monica Hairston, What have been some areas of black music that require more research and thought? The center is devoted to researching, preserving, and sharing black music, from wherever it emerges; and I thought the center's executive director Monica Hairston, who received a master's degree in music from the University of Georgia and is a doctoral candidate at New York University, and whose own interests include jazz and popular music (and feminism, ethnomusicology, etc.) would have an illuminating perspective. In February I sent her my query and I was grateful to receive the busy scholar's answer yesterday!


Daniel:
What have been some areas of black music that require more research and thought?


Monica Hairston of the Center for Black Music Research:
"A couple of areas that come to mind immediately include the following:
Historically: Any topics eighteenth century and earlier. Black musical history doesn’t begin with African American spirituals. From Vincente Lusitano to the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, black musicians and composers populate all historical eras and all corners of the globe.

Culturally: Issues of gender and sexuality. Men and women can have differently-gendered experiences of the same phenomena. These experiences often manifest in or are refracted through music and music-making."

Music Movements and Musings

I still remember Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Gordon Jeffries, Joan Armatrading, and Fishbone, as well as lesser known musicans such as Eye and I and Follow for Now, all part of the rock music tradition, a tradition that is more multicultural than usually thought: and, Ben Harper, Tricky, The Smyrk, and Janelle Monae are among the participants in the South by Southwest music conference in (Austin) Texas this week; and there’s going to be a discussion of “black rock” featuring Rob Fields of the site Bold as Love with Kandia Crazy Horse and Daphne Brooks.


Sometimes I've loved Bob Dylan; and sometimes I have been annoyed by how earnestly and indulgently other people love him. My favorite Bob Dylan albums are probably Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, and Time Out of Mind, albums I like for the songs and for Dylan's tone of voice, honest, intimate, wise. Bob Dylan has a new album coming out next month, in April: Together Through Life, reports PopMatters.com (Justin Brooks, March 17). I wonder how good it will be (I wasn't particularly fond of Modern Times, his previous album to this new one.) As well, the magazine Magnet announces that the remaining members of the band the New York Dolls (singer David Johansen, guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, with producer Todd Rundgren) are releasing a new album ‘Cause I Sez So, due in May.


I do not know or like the music group Coldplay as much as others do, though I was impressed by a recent televised music performance. Coldplay will begin a North American tour in mid-May, in Florida (West Palm Beach) and end it in Florida as well, August 6th, according to Billboard (David Prince, March 17, 2009), with stops in Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New York, among other American and Canadian locales.

Financial Data

“President Obama defended his proposed $3.6 trillion budget on Tuesday against critics who say it is too ambitious, declaring that American families cannot always choose which crises to tackle first and neither can he as president,” begins a March 17, 2009 New York Times article by David Stout (“Obama Defends Budget Proposal"). Obama's point is obvious—and should not have to be said. (Some of his critics have seemed ignorant to me, and some have seemed malicious, and some have seemed self-serving. It is also odd that he is expected to undo eight years of damage in less than two months.)


Time magazine has picked twenty-five people to blame for the American economy’s collapse and allowed readers to vote for each online, proportioning blame: and thus far Phil Gramm is first, Christopher Cox second, Angelo Mozilo third, Joe Cassano fourth, and Franklin Raines fifth. Bernard Madoff is eighth. Stan O’Neal is eleventh. George W. Bush is fifteenth, and “the American consumer” is sixteenth, Alan Greenspan seventeenth, and Hank Paulson eighteenth. Bill Clinton is twenty-third. Such a list is interesting, amusing; and, seriously, I certainly think those involved in the mess, now and in the past, should be identified, but it would be more useful to examine the workings of the financial system (to provide a history and analyses) and to compare it to alternatives.


U.S. Congressman Barney Frank, chairman of the house financial services committee, wants to better regulate the country’s financial system, and may begin writing legislation to do so as early as May, reports the New York Times.


Companies are beginning to suspend investment in 401 (k) retirement plans for their employees—because of the cost. As well, the value of these investments have diminished with the chaos in the stock markets. “The average 401(k) plan at the end of 2007 held about $65,000, but half of them held less than $19,000, according to a trade group, the Investment Companies Institute. They would hold much less today because of stock market falls. The suspensions mean that individuals can continue to contribute to their plans, but their companies will not,” reports Deborah Brewster, the Financial Times (March 10, 2009). Of course, I never trusted investment in stock as a main form of financial security (stock investment is gambling).


The Obama administration's economic stimulus package has had positive effects, already: “Before enactment of the recovery package, at least 34 states began closing their shortfalls by reducing services to their residents, including some of their most vulnerable families and individuals,” declares the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (“An Update on State Budget Cuts,” by Johnson, Oliff, and Koulish; updated March 13, 2009). Some states,now, are using stimulus/recovery package funds to reverse previously made budget cuts in public services. “Policymakers in at least 9 states, including Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Oregon, South Carolina and Virginia have already advanced or enacted plans to use these funds,” says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. There is a about a $350 billion shortfall, and the recovery package gives states about $140 billion, so states will still be making some budget cuts. However, I hope to see the results, which I expect to be significant, of the increased federally funded investment in education and infrastructure, etc.


Following a New Orleans Times-Picayune article about post-Katrina housing, and the failure of a program to provide housing following the devastating hurricane (the goal was for 18,000 living spaces, a partial replacement of the 81,000 lost—but only 1,073 were restored, the New Orleans paper reported). Harry Shearer in the online Huffington Post states, “So the contractor collected almost as much money for administration as it disbursed for actual repair of housing units. But the program's goal, ‘fallen well short of,’ was to restore less than a quarter of the housing units lost in the flooding. Blame, should one care to assign it, can fall almost equally on the state, on the private contractor, and on the Feds, for not realizing that the affordable housing crisis in New Orleans called for perhaps a more ambitious goal.”


How open is Louisiana state business to review? “While some of the budget categories allow expenditures to be tracked down to the private-sector vendor providing a service or product, not all of the categories contain this level of detail. Moreover, there is no indication what product or service was provided for the expenditures and there is very little salary information available beyond summary totals by budget unit,” states the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, regarding the Louisiana Transparency and Accountability (LaTrac) database; and the research council calls for more financial transparency in the hows and whys of official financial expenditures in the state (“PAR names Top Five Sunshine Solutions,” March 12, 2009). March 15 through 21 is “sunshine week,” a period affirming open government; and the Public Research Council of Louisiana is promoting focus on the public records law (minimizing, clarifying); reasonable costs for public records; pretrial mediation for disputes involving public records; and online access to meetings, as well as greater financial transparency.

Facts and Fictions: Distractions from Depression?

Sad news: the writer James Purdy has died at age 94. I love his strange, poetic and very funny books: Eustace Chisholm and the Works, In A Shallow Grave, Mourners Below, On Glory's Course, etc.


On a much lighter note: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has a new movie opening today, Race to Witch Mountain, a family film about well-intentioned space aliens who come in the form of children. The film has gotten some mixed reviews. I have seen some of Dwayne Johnson’s work and enjoyed it, and I liked him in the interviews I saw this week.


“The world’s best dealers bring their finest pieces to this most influential of art and antiques fairs and this attracts collectors and museum curators from around the globe who cannot risk staying away,” declares ArtDaily.org, of the Maastricht art fair, March 13 through 22nd, 2009, in the Netherlands (Limburg province)


The Bronx Council of the Arts is providing a tour, Saturday Culture Trolleys, to take interested persons to seventeen free cultural events, including artist studio visits, on March 14th, 12 noon to 5pm, beginning from Hostos College’s Longwood Art Gallery, at 450 Grand Concourse and 149th Street. (Riders will get Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and be able to participate in a trivia contest with literary prizes.) Sounds great!


Unfortunately, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a favorite of mine, is eliminating some of its staff, due to the current economic crisis which has diminished its large financial endowment, which pays some salaries.


The Conference on Southern Literature will be held April 2nd through 4th, 2009, in Chattanooga. Tennessee. Participants include poets Wendell Berry and Rita Dove and fiction writers Edward Jones and Barry Hannah (about one thousand writers and readers attend in all). Most of the events will be held at the Tivoli Theatre on Broad Street.


In Seattle, April 16th through 19th is the Experience Music Project’s conference, focused on dance music, and featuring Nona Hendryx and Diane Warren with a range of critics, scholars, and writers. It’s great that Hendryx, who made and released a new album with Patti Labelle and Sarah Dash, her long-ago partners, is getting some of the attention she deserves.


I have been enjoying Andrew Bird’s album Noble Beast. It seems a musician’s attempt to make the best music he can.


The American Religious Identification Survey says that more Americans are claiming to be disbelievers, about 15%, according to the Council for Secular Humanism's March 2009 online newsletter. Only 15%?


Rasmussen reports that only 34% of Americans believe the U.S. will be the most powerful nation in the world by the end of the twenty-first century. Is that pessimism or realism; and how will it affect the way Americans think of, and respond to, the rest of the world?

An Afternoon's Notes

In “Between Critical Rationalism and Eastern Wisdom,” an essay on the web pages of Qantara.de, Alessandro Topa considers Iranian philosophical tradition (March 5, 2009). There are articles at the online magazine there, as well, on Gaza, Iraq, and Turkey.


This past Wednesday in New York began a nineteen day “Celebration of the African American Cultural Legacy,” at Carnegie Hall and other sites, curated by opera singer Jessye Norman, featuring a wide range of African American music, from classical to hip-hop.


A spirited tribute to Stevie Wonder took place at the White House, and was broadcast by PBS recently, with the first lady introducing the program and the president presenting the performer with an award for his music. Performers such as Esperanza Spalding, Tony Bennett, India Arie, Martina McBride, Anita Johnson, and Paul Simon were there. Bennett's roughened voice was commanding and I didn't like Diana Krall's voice (too low and oddly accented), the duo of Mary, Mary did a funky version of "Higher Ground" and McBride's "You and I" was very good (she gave it jazz and country aspects), and I liked Paul Simon's singing and guitar playing. Stevie Wonder's performance of his own work was quite good.


Responding to Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s criticism of the Obama stimulus package allowing a $50 million funding increase for the National Endowment for the Arts, Jane Alexander, in an interview with CNN, argued that the NEA has been underfunded for years and that increased funding is going to people (artists) who are workers and family providers and consumers of various goods and services in the larger economy(March 4, 2009).


“In More Than Just Race, the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recaps his own important research over the past 20 years as well as some of the best urban sociology of his peers to make a convincing case that both institutional and systemic impediments and cultural deficiencies keep poor blacks from escaping poverty and the ghetto,” writes Richard Thompson Ford in a review of Wilson’s book More Than Just Race (the article is called “Why the Poor Stay Poor” in the New York Times Sunday book review section, in print March 8; online March 6). It is hard not to wonder why such an obvious point must be made again and again: is prejudice that resistant to fact?


On writer John Cheever's legacy: “Cheever’s novels, like his journals, belong to his lewdness and his pain, and it is easy to see why they have never been as popular as his stories. They are blunter instruments than the polished scalpels of his short fiction; they can be sloppy, challenging, even inscrutable, but they hit the reader with great force. In his stories, Cheever tried to make sense of the world and of other people; in his novels, he mostly tried to make sense of himself. Naturally, the world was more interested in reading about itself, but it would do well to revisit John Cheever’s patient, determined attempt to understand and make peace with John Cheever,” writes Stefan Beck near the end of his review-essay on the collected works of John Cheever and a new Cheever biography, appearing in The New Criterion, March 2009.


Performer Chris Brown has been charged with two felonies, involving an altercation with his girlfriend, the singer Rihanna. These two have had, before this terrible incident, the most innocent and glamorous images of today's performers. It is an irony that people who represented the sunniest aspects of human experience are now, in their own lives rather than in their work, associated with the darkest facts of life: aggression, conflict, pain, violence. It seems impossible to escape the more troubling inclinations of human nature and it seems better to be aware of those conflicting traits and to acknowledge them, as the repressed seems to return always.


There was a good profile of film critic Armond White by Marc Jacobson in New York magazine, February 15. (White is known for his odd and insistent responses to film and film culture, responses that are sometimes thought of as brilliant and other times thought of as perverse.) Armond White reviewed with praise Molly Haskell's book on the film Gone With the Wind, a book from Yale University Press, Frankly, My Dear, in the March 1 Sunday New York Times book review (online Feb. 26).


Scheduled: On March 7th, in New Iberia, Louisiana, is a Shadows-on-the-Teche arts and crafts festival; and there will be a Cinema on the Bayou Film Festival March 25 through March 29 in Lafayette, Louisiana.


Yesterday, I saw a snake in the backyard, near my mother's house, a black and gold snake. I prodded it with a long pole to dissuade it from coming nearer and that worked for a short time, but I suspect it may approach again...It was six months ago that I began this log, "City and Country, Boy and Man," documenting aspects of New York life and my planned travel to Louisiana; and since then it has included short fiction and excerpts from a proposed novel, poetry, film reviews, political comment, descriptions of Louisiana, observations about family, theatrical play excerpts, a glossary of values, notes on the election of Barack Obama, articles on African culture, music comment, book criticism, and questions and answers featuring a few excerpts such as film critic Alex Kent and historian Aram Goudsouzian on Sidney Poitier. The move south has helped me to survive a little longer, but it has involved an iteration of things I cannot get away from, certain facts: I prefer life in the city to life in the country; I am interested most in work involving intellect and culture; I am not inclined toward unconditional love of anyone (particular character and qualities engage me); and I am inclined to withdraw and be withholding when I am uncomfortable (when I cannot be my preferred self, I'd rather not be any self); and time is passing, passing, passing...

The Uses of Intelligence and Sense: News and Notes

In a web article for Filmmaker magazine (February 25, 2009), Nick Dawson writes about film director Astra Taylor, whose her first film was Žižek!, about Slavoj Žižek, following her sharing duties for other film productions: "With her sophomore feature, Examined Life, Taylor once again brings together her two main passions: film and philosophy. The title is derived from a quote by Socrates (who deemed that 'the unexamined life is not worth living'), and over the course of the film Taylor introduces us to eight contemporary philosophers who delve into the issues and problems of the modern world. Though Cornel West talks to Taylor as they drive around New York, the other seven participants – Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Judith Butler, Sunaura Taylor and Žižek – hold forth on foot, as Taylor conceived the film as 'philosophers on walks.' Going against the norm of 'serious' documentaries tending to be depressing, Taylor here creates a film of substance that is nevertheless light on its feet." I am pleased to see that the film director has included such a varied group of thinkers; and it is encouraging to have one more avenue for the introduction of significant contemplations. The Filmmaker piece includes an interview with director Astra Taylor, in which she says, "The thing that attracts me most about philosophy and filmmaking is that both those disciplines are concerned with shifting perception, shifting the way you see a problem when you have a new theory – it's illuminating, you suddenly see the world in a new way. And going to a really good documentary film can have the same effect: your whole sense of the world is different."


"A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility," announce David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton of Prospect magazine (March 2009).


I love to hear news that Americans are recognizing and responding to other cultures, as I think that is not only intellectually stimulating, but politically necessary: it is easy to despise what you do not understand and harder to hate what you do. And there is such good news from Washington: "From the Arabian Gulf to the Levant to North Africa—this region of the world is the birthplace of human civilization and features extraordinary diversity in geography, traditions, landscape, religion, and contemporary aesthetics," according to the web site of the Kennedy Center, which is presenting an Arab arts festival, "Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World," February 23 through March 15, 2009, in Washington, the District of Columbia. The notice continues, "In cooperation with the League of Arab States, the three-week festival brings together artists, many of whom are making their U.S. debut, in performances of music, dance, and theater, as well as exhibitions featuring art installations, fashion, a soundscape, cuisine, a marketplace, and much more." The literature portions of the program are scheduled to discuss audience, language use, fantasy, gender, and national politics.


It is especially important to remember the diversity and riches of the world in difficult times, and in places in which the culture most available may be too simple. I have been enjoying the beautiful, soothing music of Ancient Future (Planet Passion), Matthew Montfort (Seven Serenades), and Mariah Parker (Sangria), world music produced by Ancient-Future.com Records.


Christian John Wikane writes for PopMatters.com about Diana Ross’s early solo work: "Despite their historic significance, Everything Is Everything and Surrender have been widely unavailable for nearly 40 years, though each album made a very brief appearance on CD in the mid-’80s. Hip-O Select has lovingly dusted off the masters, dug through the vaults, and re-released the albums in stunning expanded and re-mastered editions. These albums offer a wealth of undiscovered gems in the sorely underappreciated Motown catalog of Diana Ross" (Feb. 26).


Carl Wilson at his blog Zoilus has declared, "I've put together a quick (well, not so quick) cultural history on how musicians have tried to transform human speech into music through the ages (but particularly, often thanks to technology, in the 20th century)," and that history is interesting reading (they are part of a February 19 posting).


There a great Picasso exhibit at London’s National Gallery, and an exhibit of Cezanne, whom Picasso and many others admired, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, reports ArtDaily.org. The Yves Saint-Laurent/Pierre Berge art and antiques auction has broken sales records, yielding a little more than $483 million, according to the Art Newspaper. Meanwhile, the High Museum of Art is cutting staff and salaries (Atlanta Business Chronicle), and the Walters Art Museum is eliminating staff as well (Baltimore Sun).


Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, worrying about the increase in federal spending and government size, claims there’s a gap between Obama’s rhetoric and policy, but the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' writers Iris Lav and Nicholas Johnson state that if states refuse the funds the federal budget is making available that refusal could undermine economic recovery. (Comments are available online, at the organizations' sites.)


Apparently even the well-known conservative David Brooks did not like Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s Tuesday night response to President Obama’s policies, reportedly calling it stale and insane. Others have piled on. "How many Americans know that Jindal boasted of participating in an exorcism that purged the spirit of Satan from a college girlfriend?" wonders Max Blumenthal of The Daily Beast, Feb. 25.


In an article on the New Orleans CityBusiness blog titled "Council Plan Seen as Racist," Deon Roberts writes about a mayor-council conflict involving Mayor Ray Nagin, "Nagin, early in his administration, created a panel that involved a public representative to award the contracts, which total $150,000 or more. On Feb 5, the council decided it wanted the awarding process to be totally open to the public, and it adopted an ordinance to make the process adhere to the state’s open meetings law. Nagin vetoed the ordinance. Now, the public is waiting to see what the council will do now"(Feb. 26). Some people think the council is trying to sabotage the mayor's authority.


Frank B. Wilderson, III, a professor of African American studies and drama at the University of California, Irvine, has received the 2008 American Book Award for Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, and has announced a forthcoming writing project, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms.


The stock of the New York Times is now considered junk by investors. The Washington Post fourth quarter profits plummeted 77 percent, reports Associated Press. These publications have been important, and are not now without their uses or influence, but how many of us care as much now about the fate of these elite institutions when there are so many exciting alternatives, as we cared before when many waited for their public recognition and support, these elite media institutions that for so long were indifferent to our ambitions, concerns, and needs? We are alive, feeling and thinking and working, in a world of changed possibilities, of new resources and unexpected obsolescence.

Film Comments: The Great Debaters & Notes for an African Orestes

Excerpt from "Once More, with Feeling: Denzel Washington’s film The Great Debaters and Robert Rosenstone’s book History on Film/Film on History"

“Like the shape of Africa,/ the raison d’etre of Art is a question mark,” poet Melvin B. Tolson wrote in the poem “Delta,” Harlem Gallery (Collier Books, 1969; 28). It may be impossible to reduce any art worth contemplating to a simple idea or explanation, but part of the value of The Great Debaters is its giving form and spirit to questions that have haunted too many of us concerning the place of African-Americans in the world. Are we to be discouraged by circumstances and expectations, or inspired to excel and exceed them? Are we to be whole or forever condemned to self-division—“a half-breed,/ a bastard of Barbarus and Cultura,” as Melvin Tolson described a character in “Upsilon,” Harlem Gallery (105). The principal characters in The Great Debaters choose excellence and are exhilarating and touching because of it (and their challenges and doubts are merely some of the dragons that every hero has to slay, but heroes they are); and the film pays tribute to them, and offers encouragement as well as pleasure to its viewers, something the actress Jurnee Smollett realized when she said to Movies Online: “it’s giving voice to the voiceless, putting lips to something, and that’s one thing that makes you so proud to be part of a film like this, because you’re giving a salute to everyone who has come before you.”


Excerpt from "Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Notes for an African Orestes"

In Notes for an African Orestes, we see Pasolini in Africa, mostly in Tanzania but also in Uganda, looking for casting and locations (he thought of using sites in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and Kampala in Uganda, as Athens). Pasolini has a severe handsomeness, and, attentive, he speaks quickly and smartly, as he explores the culture, commenting on how the transformation of the furies, the Erinyes, into the Eumenides, the benevolent, is a metaphor for African political experience. Tanzania, between Kenya and Mozambique in eastern Africa, near the Indian Ocean, and rich in iron, coal, diamonds, gold, and gas, was formed as a nation after Tanganyika and Zanzibar won their independence from England in the early 1960s, and Tanganyika and Zanzibar united in 1964. The country has more than one-hundred tribes, making up the Bantu people, who speak Swahili and English in addition to diverse Bantu languages. The Tanzania that Pasolini visits is poor; and it remains poor. It is an irony that many people farm (coffee, tea, cassava, corn, cotton, nuts, tobacco, wheat), but that less than ten percent of the land is conducive to farming. It might be easier to think of Tanzania as a probable place for a Greek play if one recalls that few Greeks participated in democracy—those who did were like a village within a town. If one thinks of democracy as a dynamic process involving consciousness and choice, one can see how promising this could be for Africa, which, following colonialism, has seen so many despots (such is the case for Uganda, which Pasolini considered for his proposed feature film).


All texts (c) DG: the texts were written in July and August of 2008.

Generational Purposes

Excerpt from "A review of Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy"

I know what some of the members of my generation are doing, and I know a little something about who they are: Paul Begala, Ralph Carter, Joan Chen, Thomas Haden Church, George Clooney, Nadia Comaneci, Douglas Coupland, Dinesh D’Souza, Kim Deal, El DeBarge, Melissa Etheridge, Laurence Fishburne, Wayne Gretzky, Woody Harrelson, Bonnie Hunt, Peter Jackson, K.D. Lang, David Leavitt, Carl Lewis, Wynton Marsalis, Chi McBride, Dylan McDermott, Christopher Meloni, Isaac Mizrahi, Rick Moody, Jeremy Northam, Barack Obama, Alexander Payne, Scott Ritter, Dennis Rodman, Henry Rollins, Tim Roth, Arundhati Roy, Douglas Rushkoff, Campbell Scott, George Stephanopoulos, Isiah Thomas, Steven Weber, Irvine Welsh, Forest Whitaker, and Michael Winterbottom. Many of us do: as people whose work has achieved some renown, they are allowed not only personal fame but individuality, a measure of freedom and fulfillment. Those of us whose efforts have been less well rewarded (thus far) might feel a certain indifference to the world’s glance and judgment—genuine or cultivated indifference. Of course, as with much else, money makes this indifference easier to achieve; without money, the world often still has the power to irritate and to irritate with little relief. What the world offers many, rather than the freedom of individuality, are socially recognized—if not always socially accepted—false selves: selves rooted in simple notions of purpose, place, and personality, with the responses to one’s public situation being all that is understood as one’s personality; selves that have little to do with one’s own perceptions, philosophy, or private personality. In a word, stereotypes. Think of class, skin, gender, religion, or national origin, accept these as existential facts, as elemental aspects of being, and you need not ever have another independent or honest thought again.


(c) DG, 2006

The President's Speech to Congress

“Volcano monitoring likely saved many lives - and significant money - in the case of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines (where the United States has military bases), according to the USGS,” the United States Geological Survey, writes senior writer Andrea Thompson of LiveScience.com, in an article following up on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal critique of government funding of volcano monitoring in the recently passed economic recovery package legislation. (Louisiana is not known for its educational successes and recently a science group objected to some of the state's policies regarding science, or, more precisely, anti-science.) Jindal’s comments, part of the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s speech to Congress last night, were a litany of Republican ideological points promoting wealth and ignoring the real needs and concerns of ordinary people in a time of crisis. Of course, Jindal plans to take a lot of government money for various state projects, though he is, reportedly, refusing money that will help the unemployed. It was an interesting choice having Jindal give the Republican response, as many well-informed people fault him for leaving Louisiana to travel around the country for Republican fundraisers and conferences while problems go untended in Louisiana. President Obama made his own motivation and policies as clear as anyone could; and an early poll suggests most viewers and listeners understood that and approved. I was fascinated by the ritual address, and the ovations the president received (how odd it must be to have one’s remarks continually saluted with a standing ovation).

Hollywood's Academy Awards, and More: Appreciations and Repudiations, Part Three

The film industry Academy Awards program, televised last night on ABC, has found a way of making each actor-nominee in the most prominent categories feel like a winner, by personally addressing and describing her (his) performance before the official winner is announced: it was very nice to see past winners in the best actor and actress and best supporting actor and actress categories introduce the nominees. I thought most of the program was entertaining, and I didn’t turn away from the show with the empty feeling I sometimes have after watching an awards program (I still thought the show was too long by about two hours). Hugh Jackman was an entertaining host; and it was good to witness the wins in the major categories, specifically that of Penelope Cruz, Kate Winslet, Sean Penn, and Heath Ledger, and I liked seeing Beyonce, Anne Hathaway, Nicole Kidman, Alicia Keys, Will Smith, Robert DeNiro, and Meryl Streep. The lovely Penelope Cruz, in an elegant vintage dress, gave a charmingly sentimental acceptance speech. Heath Ledger's family was dignified and (spiritually) healthy with its comments upon his posthumous award. Kate Winslet, who with age is becoming more handsome than beautiful (there is such strength and intelligence in her face), was obviously gratified to win, and Sean Penn seemed well-intentioned and was both sharply political, affirming equal rights, and sometimes obscure.


The New York Art Resources Consortium is providing material online from the libraries of three museums, The Frick, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, at an online site called Arcade. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., is showing federally-funded New Deal paintings, according to ArtDaily.org.


No Line on the Horizon: the music group U2 is making its new album available for listening on its MySpace page; and the band is planning a stadium tour for the summer.


Last Friday night, I saw Sarah McLachlan and Duffy on PBS’s “Austin City Limits,” and I thought Sarah McLachlan’s presence very strong—emotional, musical, sensual; and her voice was particularly impressive, as she played guitar and piano. I had listened to Duffy’s music in New York, liking some of it and not sure about the rest (was she too imitative of past music?), but I was disappointed watching her on Friday: I didn’t like the way she sounded, looked, or moved, finding her intonation and pitch frequently uncertain or unpleasant; and her gestures were busy, excessively choreographed.


The four-day, annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs was held recently in Chicago, February 11 through 14, 2009. There’s a Festival of New French Writing at Manhattan’s New York University, February 26 through 28, with the participation of E.L. Doctorow, Philip Gourevitch, Francine Prose, Bernard-Henry Levy, Emmanuel Carrere, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint.


“It’s not that Americans aren’t interested in the world at all. It’s just that we seem to want someone else to do the ­heavy ­lifting required to make a cultural connection. As the ­Peruvian-­born writ­er Daniel Alarcón ob­serves, Americans would rather read stories by an American about Peru than a Peruvian writer translated into English,” notes writer Aviya Kushner in the article “McCulture,” from Winter 2009 The Wilson Quarterly, available online.


There’s a new philosophy blog called Matters of Substance, focused on metaphysics, at Blogger.com (look for “substantial matters”); and, though not yet well-known, if it is as good as it promises to be, it will provide interesting reading.


Criticism can describe and evaluate the form and content of a work, theory, or experience, and criticism may be an art but is not a popular art; and criticism, which reveals the mind of the critic as much as the object of contemplation, is done both well and badly these days and sometimes it is hard to know the difference. As everyone is aware, there’s a lot of mutual masturbation involved within the communications media, both online and print, so that work that might not be distinguished still gets supported. For instance, media sites that are well-funded such as Slate and Salon received respect before they had done anything to deserve it; and, consequently, habits good and bad continued, without significant critique. One can read some of the self-important, unnecessary political musings of Joan Walsh at Salon, and clueless attempts to identify the cultural zeitgeist by Jody Rosen at Slate, and wonder if they have editors or even attentive readers.


Everyone is concerned about the American economy; and one notices that some journalists seem afraid to be optimistic despite the daily attempts by the new presidential administration to take decisive actions (journalists seem to both want something to be effective and to disbelieve in anything being effective). Now, Henry Blodget argues for the nationalization of American banks, at the Huffington Post.


President Barack Hussein Obama continues to make overtures to the Republic party, while its members play politics-as-usual. Obama and his administration attempt to address the important economic matters feeding the current crisis involving jobs, banks, housing, and health care; and the president has a small summit of leaders gathered today at the White House to discuss the economy and fiscal responsibility; and, among other things, one of his goals is to discuss how to cut the federal budget deficit.

"Music and Friends": A Stranger on Earth, fiction excerpt

Writer's Note: "Music and Friends" is a chapter in a proposed novel, A Stranger on Earth, a work-in-progress; and here is the beginning of that chapter.


Thomas had asked Mark to bring him his personal papers—banking records, insurance policies, pension records, mortgage papers, and other things, and though weak, Thomas read them, and read them, and read them again. Thomas made calls, he wrote notes, and he told Mark to remember certain things—Give people photocopies of this stuff, if they ask, and if they want to see an original, don’t let the original out of your sight. This is New Orleans—people will do what they can get away with. My father had a son with a woman other than my mother—I never knew the boy. If he or somebody connected to him comes ‘round, I have nothing for them. It’s in my will—they get nothing—no money, no thing, nothing. I have a niece in New York—there’s some money for her. She used to write me. She hasn’t written me in years, but I liked her letters. She was a smart girl—Sarah. I want her to have a little something. See that she gets it. It’s in my will. There’s a copy of the will in the courthouse. There’s a copy of my will in the bottom drawer here. There’s copy of it written on the back of a music sheet I sent to the congressional library—“The Blues Is Nothing but a Good Man Saying What He Saw.”

Mark heard what his friend had to say. He supposed he would not forget it, but he made notes when he left Thomas’s bedroom and went into his own. Mark did not know what he was going to do when Thomas died. There had been years to think about it—but he did not know, now, what he was going to do. Mark thought of their careers, of their lives. They were hardly more than boys, though each thought himself a man when they had met at the same audition. Mark had been the serious one, the one who thought that Armstrong and Gillespie were too much the entertainer and Parker and Coltrane bad examples for their use of drugs. He loved their music, but none was an icon for him—he was going to be his own hero. Thomas just wanted to play—he wasn’t about representing anything, and Thomas was the one who had the early success. Doors, wallets, and women’s legs opened for Thomas. Mark did the apprentice thing, learned under flawed masters, played in cheap clubs, and got small-time contracts—and that entire hard work ending up giving him some kind of legend he had not anticipated. By the time the big money started to come his way, he and Thomas had found each other again, weren’t so rude about each other’s differences, respected each other talents, and Thomas began to be sick—his body began to cave in on itself. Mark had come to help out a little until Thomas got better or until one of Thomas’s people came to take care of him—and Thomas never got better and the people who came wanted to help Thomas into the grave and Mark ending up staying for twenty years. Mark ended up saying no to the big gigs and big money and did small records for small labels that let him alone, or almost alone, to live his life—and he ended up taking care of the fun, shallow bastard who meant no real harm and had become his best friend.

Mark put the dishes in the sink. He let the water run. He poured liquid soap over the frying pan with its tiny grit of bacon stuck to the bottom, its slight brown fried foam of egg on the sides. He put his fingers under the flow of water, testing for heat. He thought about the hopes he had years ago for the music, the conversations about the music’s relation to folk, blues, and classical, literary and sculpture, to history and politics. He had wanted a high art that people would finding meaning and pleasure in. He wasn’t the only one—he thought of Abbey and Max, of Archie, of Anthony. He wondered if musicians weren’t the only people who really cared about the music, who really saw it as important. Weren’t the others just using it, using it for dancing, for easy fun, using it to justify a false idea of who they were, using it to intimidate people? It was a path to freedom, and they could not see it. Mark picked up the wash cloth and began to scrub the plates first. He went back and forth between using paper plates and regular dishes. The plates came clean easily. He scrubbed the forks, careful to remove the grease near the printing of the maker’s name. The music was for everybody, but who wanted it? Mark picked up a spatula and scrapped it against the bottom of the frying pan, then scrapped the sides of the pan, before washing the spatula. The children today were listening to another kind of music, simpler music, what somebody called music for morons. Why did things always have to begin at the bottom? Why did they often have to stay there? Why couldn’t you just hand the next generation the task as you had completed it, and let them go on and develop that? Mark looked up from his task and looked out of the kitchen window. He saw small garden of vegetables—potatoes, egg plant, string beans—and the few fruit trees (apple, plum, fig), and the garden chair next to the garden. He thought he might take a book and sit outside for an hour or two. Would Thomas be alright inside? Would he want to try to sit outside today? Mark wanted some fresh air. He opened the window. It was not enough. He looked down and scrubbed the frying pan. He reached below the sink and pulled out some powdered cleanser and sprinkled some into the pan. The scrubbing became easier. You had to have the right tools to make things come right.

(c) DG

Richard Wright, Author

Writer's Note: When I was very young, before I was 18, Richard Wright became an important writer for me, someone who wrote with honesty, intelligence, and passion about his life in the south and his own ambitions and conflicts as well as insightfully about the world... Here below are my comments on a biography of Richard Wright, and notes on Wright's career and reading interests.


Hazel Rowley. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt and Company. 2001. 626 pages. ISBN 0-8050-4776-X.

“Is this the dirt road,/Winding through windy trees,/That I must travel?” asked writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) in a haiku, #131, written near the end of his life. Wright’s haikus were not published in a book, Haiku: This Other World, until more than three decades after his death, and they are one more testament to what was not known about this famous writer while he lived. Wright’s lyrical and polemical autobiography Black Boy and his grim ideological urban drama Native Son may be well-known references in American literature courses but exclusive consideration of them have given us a narrow view of the author, who also wrote the comic, experimental fiction Lawd Today!, the existential novel The Outsider, and Savage Holiday, a novel featuring no African Americans, as well as books on Africa, Asia, and Europe—Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain.

Richard Wright, born to a sharecropper father and schoolteacher mother in Mississippi, endured a childhood of poverty, familial misunderstanding, religious dogmatism, and racial prejudice. He distinguished himself when young by writing a short story that was published, and being selected as a representative of his grade school class. Reading H.L. Mencken in the late 1920s introduced him to literary and social criticism, and to writers such as Dreiser, Lewis, and Anderson. Wright moved to Chicago, where he worked in the post office. He became a member of the John Reed Club and through it met other writers, and became also a member of the Communist Party—and then moved to New York, where he wrote for a party publication. Wright’s first book, the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children, was published in 1938 and received good reviews. Two years later, Native Son was published and thus Wright became an important American writer. Wright married the white Ellen Poplowitz in 1941, published Black Boy in 1945, and visited France the next year and moved there with Ellen in 1947, where he would live, work, and die.

Hazel Rowley’s biography of Wright may not be elegant or eloquent—it is rather plain and slow-moving—but it is the most factual and fair, the most intelligent, biography of Wright that I am aware of, and it allows future generations to inherit a Wright who is whole, at once man, thinker, and writer. Richard Wright was handsome, likable, and hardworking, with a voice that ranged from high to baritone, a man with the cool confidence of a jazz musician—he liked to talk and laugh and be with friends, who included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (One friend, Gertrude Stein, betrayed him by introducing him to a thief and then by refusing to acknowledge the theft of Wright’s property, which included penicillin for Wright’s daughter.) Wright was, surprisingly, a sexual swordsman who put his marriage to Ellen at risk. Rowley’s book is also interesting for addressing the rumors surrounding Wright’s death (CIA? Femme fatale?). Rowley investigates Wright’s medical treatment, which included the taking of bismuth for intestinal disorders, a prescription given by a doctor who made Wright’s friends uneasy. Oral bismuth was then popular in France, but would later be known to cause heavy-metal poisoning leading to kidney and liver failure.

Richard Wright’s legacy is a complex one—it is aesthetic, intellectual, and political. Intelligent interpretation is what Wright tried to provide in his own work, but not always what he received for his own efforts. Wright’s work was censored before publication—for instance the sexuality of Bigger Thomas was excised from Native Son, and after publication his work was sometimes misunderstood or misrepresented. A 1957 New York Times review of Wright’s White Man, Listen! called the book “argumentative, belligerent and often wrong-headed” and then went on to summarize how correct Wright was in many of his positions but reprimanded him for not understanding well-enough the threat of Communism (Wright, who joined then abandoned the Communist party). African-American novelist David Bradley in 1977’s Quest magazine said Wright seemed a “cold-blooded intellectual.” Feminists more recently have questioned his work’s treatment of women and his dismissal of Zora Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. However, Wright was for himself and for others a one-man university system. Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and other women writers acknowledged his active support of their early careers; and Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Gordon Parks admitted his influence, although Wright’s tying literature so closely to politics may have become a burden to subsequent writers.

“All of my life had shaped me to live by my own feelings and thoughts,” Wright wrote in Black Boy (p.298, HarperPerennial, 1993). Hazel Rowley’s necessary biography of Wright is preceded by other books on the life and work of Richard Wright, resources that can help to place the efforts of this controversial writer in the most comprehensive of contexts, such as The World of Richard Wright and Richard Wright: Books & Writers, both by Michel Fabre, and Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, Voices of A Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright by Eugene E. Miller, Richard Wright by Robert Felgar, and Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Arnold Rampersad. Wright brought not merely heat but light; he was, as in the words of one of his own haikus (#647), a fire: “Burning out its time,/And timing its own burning,/One lonely candle.”


Excerpt from "Iconography: Ideas, Images, and Individuals"

“Every time he thought he was going mad, he met somebody else who had already gone mad, but in a nice, sweet sort of way,” wrote Richard Wright about Cross Damon, faced with a woman allowing herself to become involved in a real estate scheme, in the novel The Outsider (HarperPerennial, 1993; 184). Wright was himself a man of intelligence and taste and, considering what he knew in the era in which he lived, his own sanity is nearly a miracle—except that we know his sanity was cultivated. Michel Fabre paid essayist, novelist, and poet Richard Wright significant respect by producing Richard Wright: Books and Writers (University Press of Mississippi, 1990), which provides an annotated bibliography of Wright’s library and also includes some of his sharp, quick-moving book reviews and other commentaries on literature. Richard Wright read the published (and sometimes unpublished) books of Peter Abrahams, James Agee, Sherwood Anderson, Hannah Arendt, Austen, Balzac, Djuana Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Rene Descartes, John Dewey, John Dos Passos, Dostoevsky, Dreiser, DuBois, T.S. Eliot, Emerson, Engels, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Forster, Freud, Gibbon, Gide, Goethe, Geoffrey Gorer, Gorky, Graham Greene, Knut Hamsun, Hardy, Hawthorne, Hegel, Heidegger, Hemingway, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Husserl, Ibsen, Joyce, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Kinsey, George Lamming, D.H. Lawrence, Camara Laye, Alain Locke, George Moore, John O’Hara, George Padmore, Edgar Allan Poe, Proust, Pushkin, Rabelais and many, many more, famous and obscure. The important events in a writer’s life—his perceptions, ideas, and discoveries of the uses of various forms—are identified not by considering the people he slept with, fights he had, contracts he broke, or alcohol he drank, but by identifying the books he read and wrote. It was famously said that Richard Wright could imagine a Bigger Thomas (Native Son), but Bigger Thomas could not imagine a Richard Wright. (Wright himself starred in a mid-century film of Native Son as Bigger Thomas, directed by Pierre Chenal; and a subsequent film version of the novel, directed by Jerrold Freedman and starring Victor Love as Bigger, was released in 1986.) Richard Wright could claim the broadest human inheritance for himself because he was aware of its full dimensions; and he was surprised to learn how rare this knowledge was, and where, other than in art, it might be found. In White Man, Listen! he wrote, “It has been almost only among Asians and Africans of an artistic stamp and whose background has consisted of wars, revolutions, and harsh colonial experience that I’ve found a sense of the earth belonging to, and being the natural home of, all the men inhabiting it, an attitude that went well beyond skin color, races, parties, classes, and nations” (HarperPerennial, 1995; 25-26).

All texts (c) DG, 2001 and 2006

Silence, Exile, and Cunning; or, Appreciations and Repudiations, Part Two

“The NEA will receive $50 million to distribute to non-profit arts organizations while the Smithsonian gets $25 million to repair its facilities,” reported The Art Newspaper, following President Obama’s signing of the stimulus package legislation, the recovery and reinvestment act (Helen Stoilas, February 19, 2009). There were worries, apparently, that the National Endowment for the Arts and Smithsonian might be cut from the legislation. There have been arguments, too, and elsewhere, for a cabinet post representing the arts, a secretary of the arts, the equivalent of a culture minister, an idea I’m sympathetic to, as culture connects with all aspects of American life, public and private; and having a culture secretary or minister could illuminate and support that: a culture representative and department could connect what is occurring across the country, in different states, and demonstrate how to incorporate culture in terms of education, the economy, and social projects.


“As President Obama begins to put his personal stamp on public debate, I think we can be hopeful that respect for the qualities that liberal education aims to foster — moral and aesthetic sensitivity — will rise. We can also be hopeful that academe, especially as an engine of opportunity and a site of scientific research, will find a friendlier partner in government. The provisional 'stimulus package' includes modest increases in federal support for low-income students and a good deal of money for 'shovel ready' construction projects on our campuses,” writes Andrew Delbanco in “A New Day for Intellectuals” in The Chronicle Review (February 13, 2009). Delbanco, after examining charges of anti-intellectualism in American culture and asserting that Americans are pragmatic regarding education and expertise, affirms the importance of self-criticism and social justice, as well.


The troubled economy continues to affect the world of culture and media: Borders Books is cutting twelve percent of its corporate workforce, according to Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly, February 19. The New York Times Company will not be paying dividends scheduled for this month, because of lower received newspaper revenues, the paper reports (Richard Perez-Pena, Feb. 19), the first suspension in four decades. Meanwhile Wall Street investors worry that American banks could be nationalized.


The singer and songwriter Santi White (Santogold) has generated interest and high regard among some music listeners, and she is scheduled to perform tonight at 7 p.m., for free, at the Apple Store in Manhattan, 103 Prince Street in Soho. I was disappointed last month to read an article titled “Janelle, Erykah, and Santogold Are the Afro-Techno Revolution, While Beyonce just struggles to keep up,” by Kandia Crazy Horse in New York’s Village Voice, available online (January 20, 2009), a piece in which the writer saw new music in relation to political context and found Beyonce’s work limited in emotional affect (“ice cold”) and complexity (“insufficient innervisions to triumph”). I have my own criticisms of aspects of Beyonce’s work, though I appreciate her beauty, talent, and success; and what worries me is that I suspect—following Village Voice writer Greg Tate’s comparison of Beyonce with Alicia Keys; and his contrasting supposed Eurocentric with Afrocentric artists—is that people are beginning to use Beyonce as a symbol, which may not be fair to her. (I recall how Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross used to be posed in certain arguments; and remember too that when Vanity Fair profiled Aretha Franklin in the 1990s, Ross gave her praise, and that when Ross was celebrated at the Kennedy Center recently, Franklin was there to praise her. Often, rivalries are in the minds of critics and lesser talents, rather than in the lives of major popular artists.) It is also true that the Village Voice has used ideas about "cool" and naked aggression as critical tools for years, under music editor Robert Christgau, and it’s unfortunate to see that tradition continued under editor Rob Harvilla. (Appreciating the serious exploration of culture, especially of literature and film, I have been a longtime reader of the Voice, even though its quality has diminished over the years, but I never liked Christgau's writing work, finding it abrasive, shallow, and desperately, all too desperately, self-promoting, the kind of relentless self-promotion rare for an established writer, suggesting a profound and possibly appropriate insecurity.) In discussing and evaluating artists, sometimes comparisons are useful; and sometimes harsh critiques are earned; however, it would make more sense for a critic to identify the qualities she or he finds of value in an artist, rather than to indulge in the construction of artistic demons to be vanquished. The other thing is that these comparisions sometimes rest, for their own effect, on the resentments that too many people have regarding successful people (so that success itself is seen as a form of wickedness: that is a petty and stupid kind of puritanism).


Sometimes late at night on south Louisiana television, sharing airtime with commercials offering health regimens, household equipment, and dating ads, is something called Jack Van Impe Presents, featuring Jack and his wife, featuring sheer lunacy: they discuss subjects such as whether Christ wanted to be a church leader or a king, whether the world will end in year 2012, when there is so much practical and social stuff that are problems for ordinary people that could be discussed. How does spiritual belief contribute to peace of mind and social well-being? The worst thing is that these concerns—the long-ago ambitions of Christ, and prospects for the end of the world—are only a little more weird than the deliberations that often go on in various religions. On Tuesday in Mardi Gras and soon after is the beginning of Lent; and neither event, one secular, one religious, is of positive interest to me. I am in a world in which so much of the dominant values are alien impositions. I recall now having a conversation with a friend last year in New York in which I said that I thought many of the interests of Americans involved business, family, religion, and sports and that those were not my principal concerns, which were more likely to involve culture, philosophy, or politics.


I have not seen as many of the past year’s films as I would like, but I do have some interest in the awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Oscars: I’m hoping that Sean Penn will win best actor, Kate Winslet best actress, Heath Ledger best supporting actor, and Penelope Cruz for best supporting actress (though I would be pleased as well if Viola Davis or Taraji Henson won for best supporting actress). Greencine Daily will host a live blog of the 81st Academy Awards presentation on Sunday, Feb. 22.

Music and Writing

Excerpt from "Revelations: Notes on Music, Criticism, and Society..."

The people who write about music sometimes champion the work of those whose ideas and images closely mirror their own, in terms of class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, but some writers are more imaginative, more intelligent, seeking out the widest possible range of music and musicians. Some of the commentators on music whose insights have enlightened and/or entertained me are James Baldwin, Playthell Benjamin, Delphine Blue, Nate Chinen, Kandia Crazy Horse, Stanley Crouch, Angela Davis, Jim DeRogatis, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Christopher John Farley, Nelson George, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Claudrena Harold, Pauline Kael, Greg Kot, Will Layman, Wynton Marsalis, Michelangelo Matos, Paul Nelson, Sarah Rodman, Kelefa Sanneh, Gene Seymour, Armond White, and Carl Wilson. I always recall Baldwin’s comments on Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, and Pauline Kael on Streisand and the Rolling Stones. One of the more interesting music writers now is Christian John Wikane. I encountered his work on the pages of the web magazine Pop Matters, which publishes great commentary on books, film, music, and other disciplines and issues. (My own commentary on Annie Lennox and the band The Smyrk appeared there.) In his writing, Christian John Wikane has featured the work and personalities of Ashford and Simpson, Gnarls Barkley, the Bee Gees, Tim Buckley, Don Byron, Paula Cole, Donnie, Feist, Aretha Franklin, Kevin (Ké) Grivois, Deborah Harry, Jamiroquai, Chaka Khan, K.D. Lang, Bettye LaVette, Amos Lee, Annie Lennox, Paul McCartney, Mika, Madonna, Stevie Nicks, Rahsaan Patterson, the Pointer Sisters, Corinne Bailey Rae, Nile Rodgers, Linda Ronstadt, and Diana Ross. Wikane called Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple “an emotionally and musically provocative album,” a recording that is an “alternately disturbing, comforting, and challenging exploration of the human mind” (PopMatters.com, March 25, 2008); and Wikane remarked of K.D. Lang’s first album of new songs in years, Watershed, that Lang demonstrates “a keen sense of how to record herself and lead her excellent unit of musicians” (PopMatters.com, Feb. 5, 2008), and he enthusiastically declared of the anthology Bee Gees Greatest that the word “‘greatest’ seems far too modest an adjective to describe this music” (PopMatters.com, October 8, 2007). Christian John Wikane’s love and respect for music and its makers are refreshing; and his commentaries—reviews of recordings and interviews with artists—are among the most complete responses to music available. His work is quite intelligent, but in light of his attention to emotion and sensuality in music, and the empathy and enjoyment he brings to encounters with musicians, I have thought that his work contains the beginnings of an erotics of art.

(c) DG, 2008

John Cheever's novel Falconer

I have begun reading Iris Murdoch's novel Under the Net, having just completed John Cheever's Falconer, published in the mid-1970s. I do not think that I've read Murdoch before, though I have thought of it and her many times. I have read Cheever's short stories, appreciating the variety of situations and characters he presents and the honesty and sensitivity he brings to their portrayal, the sympathy.

One wouldn't expect a man like John Cheever to know all the hard things in Falconer. The principal chracter in the novel is a privileged and lusty man who killed his own brother out of disgust as much as anger. Set in a prison, the writer keeps bringing into the story memories of the past and the larger world. The book has a truthful and irreducible vitality; and gives knowledge born of private experience and contemplation, not just social studies.

What is fascinating about a good novel, such as Falconer, is how a writer creates, enriches, disrupts, transgresses and reconciles his own story: a novel is a digression with digressions.

The musician Seal

I have liked the musician Seal for a very long time, since the early 1990s when he released the song “Crazy” and I have been impressed by the unique quality of his voice, music, and image. Seal, whose full name is Seal Henry Olusegun Kwassi Olumide Adelo Samuel, was born in Britain to Nigerian parents in the early 1960s, and he has performed different kinds of music, but is identified with “techno,” an electronic dance music. I especially liked “Newborn Friend” from his 1994 album, which was called Seal, as was his first. He did a greatest hits album, featuring work from 1991 through 2004, in 2004; and in 2007 put out the danceable album called System, and last year released Soul, a collection of well-known rhythm-and-blues and soul songs, produced by David Foster.

For PBS’s program “Soundstage,” produced and directed by Joe Thomas, the musician Seal performed, in a Chicago concert, songs from Soul, including: “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” “It’s A Man’s World,” “Knock on Wood,” “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” “Here I Am (Come and Take Me),” “People Get Ready,” “Stand by Me,” as well as his earlier songs “A Kiss From a Rose” and “Crazy.” (The concert was broadcast last Saturday morning on LPB at 2 a.m., and is being rebroadcast tonight.) Seal opened the concert wearing a black suit with a white shirt and dark tie, possibly brown if not black. With a distinctive voice and passion, the mature performer sounded very good and his audience enjoyed him as I did. He had a large band with him, including violins, horns, guitar, drums, and piano, the resources of Euro-classical, jazz, and rock music. Seal took off his jacket for the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s World” and danced with one of his background singers on “Here I Am,” though he didn’t quite take the song from Al Green. Seal spoke of being inspired by the spirit of the 1960s and of how he relished the opportunity to sing great songs. He said, however, that he resisted David Foster’s suggestion that he sing “People Get Ready” but that it became one of his favorite songs on the album. I don’t think the music had as much “blues” as the original versions of these songs: there’s a sensuality and sorrow to the original productions, and I suspect that fact, regarding the lack of blues, rests with producer David Foster, whom Seal thanked, before beginning his short techno set, returning to his own earlier work with “A Kiss from A Rose” and “Crazy,” songs that released even more energy in the performer. Seal changed clothes for the second set, wearing white, a white short sleeve T-shirt and white pants; and he performed with a much smaller band, featuring nice piano detail, with Seal's voice having a near-operatic sweep.

Scholar Aram Goudsouzian on Sidney Poitier

Professor Aram Goudsouzian teaches in the department of history at the University of Memphis, and he wrote a comprehensive book, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), which manages to be both inspiring and sad at the same time. He was recently kind enough, earlier today, to answer a question about Sidney Poitier and the actor's relationship to his own scholarship.

Daniel: What led you to write about Sidney Poitier and how do the issues raised by his life and work relate to yours?

Aram Goudsouzian: I am interested in how popular culture shapes our attitudes about race, and in how race shapes our perceptions of popular culture. African Americans have historically found voices in entertainment and sports that were suppressed in more formal political arenas, and Hollywood has such profound, if often unacknowledged, effects upon the broader culture. The arc of Sidney Poitier’s saga particularly appealed to me because it carries through this entire period of racial upheaval. His persona transcended black stereotypes as comic buffoons or faithful sidekicks, and his dignity resonated with an emerging generation of African Americans and liberal whites who challenged racial convention in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, he seemed to embody the principle of racial equality, winning worldwide fame while lending Hollywood its sole black icon. Yet Poitier’s onscreen characters had to be ultra-virtuous heroes who exhibited unique restraints, fettering suggestions of black anger or sexuality. So by the late 1960s, one decade after getting considered a cutting-edge progressive figure, Black Power radicals and college students had tabbed him an “Uncle Tom.” I think his life and work still shape our popular understanding of black public figures today, none more so than President Obama. He seems to fulfill the same white liberal fantasies as Poitier, only on the most visible stage in the world.

More Brief Notes

The Senate and House bills regarding the economic stimulus package supported by the new president have been reconciled by Senate and House members: the U.S. economic stimulus package now is budgeted at $789 billion, according to CBS News, the New York Times and other news sources (February 12, 2009). I suspect this legislation will form the foundation of Barack Obama's legacy. [Postscript: The Congressional Budget Office would revise the package's cost to $787 billion; and the president would sign the legislation into law on Monday, February 17, 2009.]

Politico.com (Feb. 12, 2009) has reported that Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius is being discussed to lead Health and Human Services for the president. She seems an interesting person and a strong candidate, smart and accessible, collaborative and independent, practical and progressive.

Finland is known as one of the best places to live on earth, but the Helsinki Times (Feb. 11) has disclosed that Finnish hate groups have made their presence known on Facebook, focusing on anti-Somali feeling, with the groups even suggesting that monies be raised to send immigrants back to their native Somali.

In his (Feb. 3) Butterflies and Wheels article “On Rights and Sexuality,” Alexander Park states, “The obsession with some on the left with the biological roots of homosexuality is, I think, a direct result of the Privacy Fallacy. Seeking to avoid a conflict over values, which are ‘private’ and ‘relative’ and therefore ‘uncontestable,’ the left has chosen to try to avoid the entire argument that must inevitably occur by hiding behind the possibility of removing homosexuality from a moral calculus via biological fate. But this move is merely delaying the inevitable, and avoiding important facts at hand.” I have found, often, that using nature to justify human behavior is questionable: it can be a justification for the lack of choice and freedom, and a support for prejudice, as much as an argument for individual rights and personal wholeness. What is unique about being human is the possibility of knowledge and choice.

The Notre Damn Philosophical Reviews site has new book reviews focused on texts exploring Kant, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein, as well as freedom, bioethics, and critical theory. San Francisco State University’s Tom Leddy discusses Yuriko Saito’s book Everyday Aesthetics, a 2007 Oxford University Press title: “One unique aspect of Saito's analysis is the stress she places on the moral dimension of everyday aesthetics. First, she stresses the social importance of everyday aesthetic choices. If people value the greenness of a lawn, there are environmental consequences. Second, she tells us about how aestheticization of certain phenomena can cause social harm: for example, the Japanese in the last century associated their native landscape with militarist nationalism. Third, she stresses the ways that people are judged both in moral and aesthetic terms. Only the last of these seems problematic to me. There are admirable people who are not committed to conventional middle-class values of neatness and order. Should they be judged aesthetically/morally in terms of those values? In this respect, it is surprising to find an avowed feminist sympathetic, as Saito seems to be, to Dickens' implicit criticism of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House as having allowed her house to become untidy because of her interest in social problems.”

Alexander Provan has an article on Kafka in The Nation, available online (Feb. 11).

In “Laughing Through the Tears: The Enduring Journey of Etta James,” PopMatters.com (Feb. 12) excerpts Iain Ellis’s book Rebels with Attitude. (The piece might give some insight into James, whose responses, such as to Beyonce, can be contradictory, volatile.)

Economic Stimulus Package Passes Senate

Yesterday, following a public event in which he spoke directly to ordinary Americans, Barack Obama gave his first press conference as president, answering the questions of a wide range of reporters, including those at National Public Radio and the Huffington Post. He spoke clearly, always intelligently, with intensity, and sometimes with wry humor. The principal subject was the economy, and he urged the Senate to pass a multi-billion dollar stimulus package, arguing that it is intended to create and maintain up to four million jobs and advance projects that are efficient and cost-saving over time. And, today, the Senate approved that $838-billion package with a 61 to 37 vote, mostly with Democrats approving and Republicans disapproving; and now the Senate and the House bills will go to conference for reconciliation of differences.

Grammy Awards, Reviewed

At last night's Grammy Awards, a small portion of the awards were broadcast on television (the remainder can be seen at the Grammy's official site at Grammy.com); and some of the awards were "Please Read the Letter," by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, for Record of the Year; Raising Sand by Plant/Krauss, for Album of the Year; "Viva la Vida" for Song of the Year; Adele as Best New Artist; Adele, "Chasing Pavements" for Best Female Pop Vocal; John Mayer, "Say" for Best Male Pop Vocal; Coldplay, "Viva La Vida" for Best Pop Performance by Duo or Group; and "Rich Woman" by Plant/Krauss for Best Pop Colloboration...Some of the awards we did not see on television included Duffy's Rockferry getting Best Pop Vocal Album, Alicia Keys getting Best Female R & B Vocal Performance for her song "Superwoman," and Al Green and John Legend getting a Grammy for the song "Stay with Me" (Best R & B Performance by a Duo/Group), and Al Green and Anthony Hamilton getting a Grammy for Best Traditional R & B Performance by a Duo/Group)....

The Grammy Awards television broadcast seems quite good when one considers it an industry award program: how many industry award shows could sustain interest and provide entertainment? The quality of the performances were probably better than could be predicted for a live program before millions; and I liked hearing U2, Kid Rock, Kenny Chesney, and the blues tribute featuring Keith Urban, B.B. King, and John Mayer. The u2 song captured different periods of rock history and was smartly presented with the lyrics as a backdrop. Whitney Houston received a warm welcome, a standing ovation, before she presented an award to Jennifer Hudson, for Best R & B album. (The audience may have been in a generous mood: others would get ovations--not only U2 and Houston but also Coldplay, Jennifer Hudson, Radiohead.) Justin Timberlake's performance with Al Green struck me as energetic but less good than Timberlake's later performance with T.I. (Green's voice seemed a little rough to me, though it smoothed a bit as he went on). I found the rock/rap colloboration between Coldplay and Jay-Z to be incongruous, though the song's third-part uptempo movement was an improvement. Carrie Underwood, performing in a short dress that showed her great legs, did some kind of noisy, soulful country thing that seemed both bad taste and very effective. Kid Rock, in dark glasses and a black suit, generated energy and interest with a song mixing rock, gospel, and rap and various contemporary references, before sequeing into two other songs; and it was a fun (and swaggering) performance, which ended with his taking his jacket off and walking off the stage. I thought the duet performance of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus was just bearable, though I sympathize with the subject of the song (a young woman's vulnerable years). Jennifer Hudson's appearance was dramatic in many ways; it was among her first performances following the death of several family members, and she began singing offstage; and she sang something that seemed a love song that could be interpreted as a spiritual, and she was helped by a choir. It was odd to hear Stevie Wonder perform with the Jonas Brothers and to hear them repeatedly call him Stevie (was Diana Ross in the house? She could have instructed: that's Mr. Stevie to you). Metrosexual late night talk show host Craig Ferguson introduced Katy Perry, who performed "I Kissed A Girl" with costumes, dancers, and props, the kind of performance that goes back through Madonna and Cher...all the way to Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus. Estelle has a good voice though her duet with Kanye West was lost on me (also, her dress was little more than a glittery bag), just as the Paul McCartney/Dave Grohl performance didn't mean much to me. The female rapper M.I.A, performing with famous rappers, was a sight for sore eyes--and might have caused the sore eyes (I don't think I want to see a nine months pregnant woman perform again in such a transparent and clinging outfit, though I recognize this might have been some kind of transgressive breakthrough: score one for women; score ten for bad taste). I'm not a fan of Radiohead but I liked their performance. I like Smokey Robinson and wished he had been a bigger part of the Four Tops tribute that he, Jamie Foxx, Ne-Yo, and Duke Fakir participated in. Neil Diamond's performance was oddly paced, and brought to mind the Jewish Elvis moniker I used to hear (Diamond seemed pleased by the audience's attention and they seemed glad to give it but there wasn't a lot of energy: there was mostly nostalgia). One of the oddest combinations wasn't bad at all: featuring Lil Wayne, Robin Thicke, Allen Toussaint, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and Terrence Blanchard. These award shows, such as the Grammys or Oscars, are interesting often for reasons that have nothing to do with art, but to do with business and popularity and social values; but last night there were some good musical performances and the presentation of some attractive performers repaid some of one's attention--but, at three and a half-hours, it is still hard not to argue that time could have been better spent.