Jerry Ward's Blogspot

LEGACY AND PRAGMATIC APPLICATION "The youth of old age ordains finality/ the judicious   dessert of living." Rumor is most dangerous in the Age of Trumposity.   "If the leaders of the industry that presides over our information and hopes to shape our future can't even concede the existence of reality," Franklin Foer wrote with razor-clean irony in the May 2018 issue of The Atlantic , "then we have little hope of salvaging it."   Irony notwithstanding, Foer is on point is arguing that in a future that is always a present "few individuals will have the time or perhaps the capacity to sort elaborate fabulation from truth" (18). Just listen to how American citizens talk at one another, using technologies that enable us to delude ourselves that we are well-informed about everything.   The surplus of information, especially in social media, stymies genuine thinking.   Perhaps our best option is to use our ancestral legacies to retard s...

(RE)SOUNDING RELEVANCE OF MARGARET WALKER'S IDEAS Creative Arts Festival Jackson State University Friday, April 13, 2018 When I was invited in January   2018 to participate in this festival,   I vowed to speak briefly   about Dr. Margaret Walker's ideas regarding history, life, and culture.   I remember her insights about the necessity of incorporating Black Studies in the academy; her achievement in organizing the now legendary Phillis Wheatley Festival;   her prophetic vision in establishing a viable research institute at Jackson State University.   Her poetry ----the best of it ---is but one manifestation of how a creative mind works, of how it submits itself to a discipline of form as it pushes back against the trite, the trivial and the tragic which inhabit the domain of content.   The best of her poetic legacy may not be left to us as verse and verse forms; it may be ours to (re)cover and (re)sound from her journal entries, he...

Special blog for BKNation 1968 / TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT That's anthropology for you, ever casting buckets of mercy into water thrice threatened, pulling up ice cubes that sizzle under the heat of the unknown, knowing the answer before the advent of the question .                 1968 is not the only year in twentieth-century American history about which we can say "everything changed."   From diverse perspectives, 1909, 1929, 1941, 1945, and   1954 are exceptional   moments.   If we focus exclusively on the multi-leveled   histories of the Sixties, however, 1968 is the strongest candidate. A very short list of books published in that year invites us to construct a field or matrix for recalling what we must not forget in 2018: N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn ---the implications of being at once outside and inside one's native ...