Jerry Ward's Blogspot

ACT   AND   SHADOW I am in 75th birthday mode and predisposed to write dangerously. A novel scheduled to be published on January 29, 2019 by PenguinRandom House may be an omen about what some of us may feel obligated to do in remembering 1919 and the race riots that bloodied that year.   I refer, of course, to We Cast A Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, a book for which I have great expectations.   My expectations exceed those of the in-house promoters who guessed Ruffin's novel will appeal to "fans of Get Out and Paul Beatty's The Sellout ."   I would have been more pleased had the promoters said the debut novel will appeal to serious readers of fiction who have not allowed   George Schuyler's Black No More (1931) and Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929) to hibernate in the dustbin of oblivion.   That would indeed have been a smart gesture of advertising and contemporary American literary politics, a foil for the claim that Ruff...

THE TROJAN HORSE IS VERY WHITE The Trojan horse is very white when Cassandra sings, and the Tribe of Trump sweats to clip your intellectual wings. You may regret, sooner rather than later, the deadly effects and affects of so-called news, the flooding of our minds with spectacles, conservative and liberal cursing, and a spectrum of pure nonsense.   Do not say I did not warn you if you awake in what you believed was the bed of democracy only to discover you have been sleeping in the cage of fascism.   The signs are clear, but you must know how to read and how to read critically. Do not dismiss Kathryn Paige Harden's New York Times op-ed "Why Progressives Should Embrace the Genetics of Education" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/opinion/dna-nature-education.html).   Harden, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas-Austin, may be a Cassandra despite herself, a Cassandra speaking in tongues.   Consider her pause-insp...

ARMING OUR MINDS : a special message to the VICs (very important citizens) of New Orleans, Louisiana Representative Cedric Richmond is scheduled to have a conversation with Senator Elizabeth Warren at Dillard University on August 3, 2018.   That conversation may produce some insights we can use in deciding how to vote on November 6. In addition to listening to that conversation, a few of us might want to study the recent in-depth analysis " America the Trumped: 10 Ways the Administration Attacked Civil Rights in Year One " (2018) from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).   In the Age of Trump, Terror,   and Treason, critical thinking about politics is not a luxury.   It is as necessary as water. The SPLC report addresses ten topics ---- 1.        promoting white nationalism 2.        slashing civil rights enforcement 3.        revving up the deport...

The Joy of Scholarship It is good that finding joy in scholarship can provide respite from the depression that national insecurity, the death-bound antics of Trump and his tribe, the drift from democracy into neo-fascism,   and a surplus of natural disasters (the revenge of Nature) bring into our daily lives. I have begun to work on a book to be titled Richard Wright: The Unending Hunger for Life .   I need to identify and assess recent commentary on Wright's legacy being produced by non-academic and academic readers.   Curiosity told me to check on what is being said about Wright and Leon Trotsky. I had the "good fortune" of discovering Adrian Chan-Wyles' article "Richard Wright: Black Empowerment and the Delirium of Trotskyism" on a Buddhist-Marxism Alliance (UK) site.   The article inspires cautious skepticism.     Adrian Chan-Wyles is a writer, translator, founder of the Sangha Kommune, and Spiritual Director of the Chan Buddhism Institute. ...

PRINCE (1958-2016)/FIVE TAKES ON GENIUS IN A DIFFERENT KEY 1.    By the time Prince Rogers Nelson got the attention of my ears and eyes, I was thirty-something.   I only heard music through the filter of blues/jazz/soul and thought mainly of visual presentations of the self as one stereotype challenging another.   Age was more than a number.   It was a prejudicial wall constructed by the ideologies associated with the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movement.   My initial impression of Prince was "This dude is androgyny personified, a   quaint shock of recognition."   I heard his musical genius but severely questioned his motives and commitments.   Age ensured that   I would   never be attuned to   Prince the way I was to Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye, James Brown and Etta James. The Berlin Wall of suspicion was never breached or dismantled. 2.   Prince was never one of...

EVAPORATING WHITENESS AND DEMOCRACY, PART TWO The dystopian dream is potent.   It authorizes D. H. Lawrence to pour old British wine in new American bottles. Neither the logic of national security   nor Faustian mea culpa and recanting shall hinder the progress of the dream.   Roger the thought. As Lawrence famously noted in "Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter" (Chapter 7 of Studies in Classic American Literature), "[t]he blood must be shed , says Jesus. / Shed on the cross of our own divided psyche. / Shed the blood, and you become mind-conscious.   Eat the body and drink the blood, self-cannibalizing, and you become extremely conscious, like Americans and some Hindus.   Devour yourself, and God knows what a lot you'll know, what a lot you'll be conscious of. / Mind you don't choke yourself." Pour the truth, Lawrence. Pour.   "The black, vengeful soul of the crippled, masterful male, still dark in his authority: and the white ...

Sound poems in Early Modern Urixiza I. oiyu itshum iglit.   vicci quaca furoo. didoneg. oiyum chocikus yotba. didonag. Lumolomuussfa obeobes. urje. issidisposi. ardarkum.   idibdondos.   furo ibidondosorroi. cunliligu, fasus.   cunliligu,ufacsa. II. erves pichepius. umpluudpro.yetna. oritum. raveg. otfla. urje vicci artqu. amjajo. rondiestosum. itshoshi. unshiczos. ifiatha. seve ahumhew. arasva, arasva ginstu iglit. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             July 15, 2018

EVAPORATING WHITENESS AND DEMOCRACY, PART ONE Reading the historian Carl Lotus Becker's Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life (1944) uncovers tiny grains of insight about the nature of chaos. "The method of electing the president," in Becker's opinion," has been by common consent so far changed that the procedure now followed is, in spirit if not in form, a violation of the Constitution.   But in its structure and operation the American system of federated governments is essentially what the founding fathers made it…..Nevertheless, admirable as the American system of government is, and partly because it is so admirable, we need to be reminded that a system of government designed to meet the problems of the eighteenth century is not necessarily in all respects suited to meet the problems of the twentieth" (Vintage, pp. 83-84). Right, Dr. Becker.   Were you alive in 2018, you'd probably claim the system fails to meet the m...

MORRISON'S BELOVED : Prelude for a Reading It is a phenomenon in search of a name that mothers, fleeing from inhuman abuse in Central and South America,   do not know the story of Margaret Garner ( b.__? --d.   1858 ).   Garner, her husband Robert, and their four children fled with other enslaved persons from Boone County, Kentucky to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1856.   The news got spellbinding coverage in the article "Stampede of Slaves: A Tale of Horror," The Cincinnati Enquirer , January 29, 1856. The phenomenon might acquire a name and habitation in our readings of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and in some 21st century equivalent of catharsis . Stress "might."   We might be following James Mustich's recommendation in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die (Workman 2018) to negotiate Morrison's novel.   We might be admitting, finally, that narratives of slavery, enslavement, and choice are essential for making sense of the histories of the United ...

THE WHITE HOLE OF AMERICAN EDUCATION Were   some American humanists as clever as they pretend to be, they would minimize their chanting about the crisis of crisis, begin "theorizing"   what is METHS OR THEMS ,   and devote 70% of their annual conventions to formulating praxis which can be transformed into commendable and   fund-worthy pedagogy .   No one has to pity   the victim when the victim (in this case the lamenting humanist) has created necessary and sufficient conditions for blame. Endless white lies about   beauty and truth may generate decent poetry and a splinter of morality, but they have severely   limited value in efforts to lessen the barbarous acts, which in the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), erode "the inalienable rights to which all human beings regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status are i...

·          Blueprint Notes for a Reading of Invisible Man (1952) *In "Blueprint for Negro Writing," (1937) Richard   Wright noted the Negro writer's "vision need not be simple or rendered in primer-like terms; for the life of the Negro people is not simple.   The presentation of their lives should be simple, yes; but   all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence, should be there. To borrow a phrase from the Russians, it should have a complex simplicity . Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo, and Jack London no less than the folklore of the Negro himself should form the heritage of the Negro writer."   1937. Wright's mind had already pondered what is stated plainly in Kluger, Jeffrey. Simplexity . New York: Hyperion, 2008. "Complexity, as any scientist will tell you, is a slippery idea, one t...

EPILOGUE Fifty years ago, expository, argumentative, and persuasive writing   depended   on the effective/affective   use of   clarity, tone, grammar, decorum,   structure,   logic, and diction.   The writing evidenced   a sense of history, purpose and audience.   Style and cultural literacy mattered.   In 2018, writings that try to be more than " infotainment " are slowly vanishing .   They matter little except in some testing situations (Advanced Placement, HiSet Exam, and so forth) or in publications that target very discriminating readers.   What matters for readers in general is the promiscuity of social media, the eroticism   of   texting, the worship and photographing   of the ego, and rejection, imaginary or real,   of virtue, morality, and good manners.   In the global community of writers, the ignorant armies referenced in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" clash with alacrity. ...

TWAIN'S MACROAGGRESSIONS The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) continues in 2018 to be evidence and example that African American impact is a powerful determinant in definitions of what is an American. The novel exposes the vanity of invoking "the universal" when the local or vernacular will suffice.   This point is focused in one "civilizing" response to the novel, namely a 1948 introduction by Lionel Trilling.   Trilling concluded that (1) the greatness of the novel lies in "its power of telling the truth" and that (2) the novel possesses the truth of honesty and "also the truth of moral passion; it deals directly with the virtue and depravity of man's heart."   When the word "heart" (a mere organ of the body in pain) is replaced with the more elevated   word "soul," it is possible to have significant awakenings (if and only if one wills to have them). The concept of truth bedevils our lives.   W...