Jerry Ward's Blogspot

Cinematic Interrogation Accidents of opportunity have made this a week of self-interrogation. Monday, October 22 ---"Cane River" (1982) forced you to meditate on your color and blood-talk documented Creole ancestry Friday, October 26 --"Dry" (2014) invited you to think about vesicovaginal fistula in Nigeria and what many African Americans quite too easily trivialize and romanticize about their print-documented ancestry Accidents of chance have made this a week of reflection and refraction. Do you want to holler, to make sounds no one shall hear?   Do you want to take a vow of silence, to expose uncertainty to the multi-angled,   ironic gazes of the disinterested world in which you live? Triage isn't exactly an easy task, is it? ii It is enough ( necessary and sufficient )   to say that cinema is a tool for witnessing.   For awkward confession.   What follows the visual ending of a film is the advent of torment....

Rereading Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye When you are past sixty-five, the radicalism of your youth may turn into regret . One advantage of age, however, is being able to remember what were crucial issues in the USA fifty or more years ago. Of course, you can   tell convincing lies about "the good old days."   You can prevaricate with gusto and count at the end of the day how many red herrings you were able to sell.   If those who listen to you are very young and have not developed the skills needed to segregate fact from fiction, they quite likely believe your tales are true.   They may be too preoccupied with the troubles of now to fact-check your statements about a better time in America's history. They are little aware that you are lying with a purpose in a tradition that novelists cherish, a tradition quite easily co-opted and imitated in sinister discourses. When societies and cultures hold fict...

HUMBLY APPROACHING                 (for Asili Ya Nadhiri) We journey humbly   in ostracized day and discarded night, in space/time where Dedekind cuts   preclude truth as you say you know it. We know how death condemns a spendthrift spirit. We keep company with humility. Humbly, we keep it real, alive, perhaps overmuch aware when necessity   questions quintessential answers. Humbly, we deploy fibs to murder ignorance, lies being the tools we have yet to master. We entertain the minimal. We fellowship with the rebuked, the scorned. Humbly, we are taught by the tried and sentenced, the incarcerated and condemned. Theirs are prescient minds they are not entitled to waste. We taste their bitter sweetness. Humbly, we prey to be made small by stone, by light, by what is worthy...

VIEWING CANE RIVER Monday, October 22, 2018, was a special day in the year-long celebration of three hundred years of history in New Orleans, because we had the privilege of seeing a remarkable instance of black film in the history of cinema in the United States of America.   We saw Horace Jenkins's Cane River (1982), a major feature of the 29th New Orleans Film Festival (NOFF) at   the Contemporary Arts Center.   There is nothing unique in the fact that African Americans have written, directed, and produced film. We need only remember the pioneering work in independent film of   Oscar Devereaux   Micheaux (1884-1951), who wrote, produced , and/or directed more than 44 films, classics in the visual reproduction of race, or of William Greaves (1926-2014) who produced more than 200 documentaries and whose Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) illuminated post-modernity before the post-modern was born.   The contemporary filmmakers we applaud-...

Mr. Ramcat's Vulgar-flavored   Verse Dump all the trumps on the table. Roger them until they are able to come to their diverse senses of their moral/mortal consequences. J. W. Ward, Jr.    October 14, 2018.

What did the Jesus parrot say when the West wandered in (by the way)? October 13, 2018

A PENTAGON                 (for Rudolph Lewis) Five years your senior, I pause to ask why despair seems so just, so right most days, each night, to be dread, dearth, or advent of birth. Jerry W. Ward, Jr. October 11, 2018

Second Epistle to the Wretched and the Damned If it is the mission of Candace Owens, Communications Director of Turning Point USA, "to help minority groups escape the Left's victim narrative," she fails brilliantly.   She is not an idiot, a mentally challenged human being.   She is an actress just as President Trump is an actor, a person who plays a role for an audience by playing the auditors and viewers as if they have booked passage on a ship of fools.   To a degree that ought to give us pause, she may be more innately intelligent than Trump.   Let us give her credit for her ability to deceive, to misinform listeners with fractional "truths" that crumble under scrutiny, to give voice to amoral lies.   She authenticates belief that BLACK LIES MATTER. Owens was the invited speaker in the Brain Food series at Dillard University on October 8, 2018.   Irony of ironies.   If one is paid to deliver brain food ----what in antiquity was known as...

An Epistle to the Wretched and the Damned Dear Citizens, In the Age of Trump (2018), under the rule of fiction, we have license to commit heresy and treason and other acts of uncertainty with impunity. A fiction can be censored, but it can't be forced to testify against itself.   It is protected by a theory of justice.   We have excellent warrants in the context of imagination to annoy one another with sense and nonsense.   Consider that 21st century heretics are rarely burned at the stake , no matter how many witch hunts are conducted; that the Trump administration, unable to come up with proof positive, will not demand that Russia extradite Edward Snowden; that many of our most brilliant scientists use the principle of uncertainty to make noteworthy discoveries. In the realm of imagination, we are blessed. When we set imagination aside to dwell in the territory of Realpolitik , we must admit that we are wretched in the sense that David Walker u...

THE NECESSITY OF LOCAL POLITICS HEXIS :      "a state of character or of mind that disposes us to deliberately choose to act or to think in a certain way" ( The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy ) "You and I have a divine responsibility to transform America." James Meredith, A Mission From God (New York: Atria Books, 2012) On Saturday, October 6, 2018,   blinded and paralyzed by the magic of the Tribe of Trump and thirst for power,   Republicans confirmed that the USA is destined to be a vicious circus for many years to come.   Divisiveness, poisonous hatreds, implacable violence, disregard for the possible sanctity of human life, and moral vices shall flourish.    By virtue of conservative deconstruction of the U.S. Constitution, we shall have the freedom to descend into neo-fascism.   We shall see our faces in a mirror one morning   and not be shocked that a civilized barbarian smiles back at us. Traveling o...

ART AND NARRATIVES Relief from the assaults of American politics, from progressive erosion of integrity, and from the infantile appeals of American commerce ---designed to capture people who are in their second or third recycling of childhood ---is rare in the Age of Trump.   Trump has signed an odd contract with an unknown Supreme Being to ensure that his tribe and his detractors shall   suffer.    One can, however, momentarily escape the noose , the inevitable suffering, by turning to Marxist or liberal arguments regarding the necessity of art.   This action provides a modicum of relief, but a more powerful relief can be gained from real-time contemplation of art, a pondering that inserts one into a series of narratives.   One has to view exhibitions in a museum or an allied site of memory and remembering.   If one is lucky, as I was on October 5, 2018, one can hear the artist explain methods and motives. A rare calm, a near catharsis...

M402 --FIVE AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITERS For discussion on 8 October 2018 Q & A on James Baldwin Q1:   Was Baldwin's intent   of the threshing floor scenario to be considered more of a religious experience or a spiritual one or both? Religion and spirituality are not mutually exclusive; they are interrelated and can't be threshed one from the other as easily as grain can be threshed from chaff.   It is reasonable to believe that Baldwin intended for readers of Go Tell It on the Mountain   to consider that John Grimes'   experiences on the floor in the temple were simultaneously religious and spiritual.   The saints are witnessing John's demonstration of a religious experience in a form that is consonant with their beliefs.   John is having a profoundly spiritual experience, his soul or spirit being acted upon by "the lash, the fire, and the depthless water." Although the primary focus is on John's experience, the omniscient...

Alexander Pope at the White House Visiting the House with a Congressional mouse and a whip, the infamous poet was moved to quip: "I am Her Majesty's dog at Kew, but, pray tell, Mrs. Sanders, whose bitch are you?" October 4, 2018

Sound poem #3 in Early Modern Urixiza aluxzi atbratum iglit ufacoxsa. urjaja iddiddumsorroi imhohoy, urjaja chalchicha umra, urjaja obeobes tomaulti   umra, umra kisazim endum gafuromag. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             October 3, 2018