Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  meditation on dread (first installment) Seeking clarification, a friend asked "Why do you call what you are saying about dread a meditation?"   I tell him I'm trying to express my reflections in contemplation on a critical issue that is at the core of my subjectivity.   The Latinate words may obscure more than they reveal.   In 2019, many Americans distrust words that are not Anglo-Saxon or Germanic   in origin. They can, should they so choose,   trust the   word "dread." My dread is grounded in my gut responses to "Native Son Sundance 2019 World Premiere Q&Q"---https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pChHoyaWRo --to the comments on the film   "Native Son" (2019)   by Rashid Johnson (the director), Suzan-Lori Parks (the screenwriter) and Ashton Sanders   who plays the role of   the 21st century Bigger Thomas.   This is my partial summary of comments----- ·          Adapting a classic novel is complicated ·          Richard W

Comrade Ben Stein, Do You Remember? Based on bogus tweets from the thing in the White House, Americans are asked to believe Hebrews, Italians, and other ethnicities are locked in common cause to lead our nation into the fascist terrain of Hell.   Irony.   Ben Stein utters irony of irony in his recent suggestion that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York 14th Congressional District) makes policy recommendations that are socialist, recommendations that invariably lead to bad things: dictatorship and genocide, Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.   Ah, who will buy such an Old Testament-flavored utterance? We are not brain dead, Mr. Stein.   We have memory. We remember the Yiddish daily newspaper.   We remember, even if you choose not to, that in 1921 the Jewish Socialist Federation united with Communists.   We remember who promoted socialism, communism, and capitalism ---all at once ---in the United States of America.   Representative Ocasio-Cortez's

POSITION STATEMENT ON THE FILM NATIVE SON (2019) I am extremely   grateful to Richard Wright's daughter Julia for setting into motion my current research and writing project, Richard Wright: An Unending Hunger for Life ,   a book for Polity Press' BLACK LIVES series, and her sharing links to the "buzz" in advance of the premiere on January 24 at the Sundance Film Festival of Rashid Johnson's reimagining of Wright's seminal 1940 novel Native Son , based on a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks.   In the spiritual plane I inhabit in this Sankofa year, it Wright's eternal presence, however,    that whispers in my ears " Beware of buzz that frames thought. It may take you to a place that you should not go ."   Given my uncanny affinity with Wright, he needs but whisper once. The buzz articulated in such online sources as Rotten Tomatoes, First Showing, The Atlantic, The Guardian , Harper's Bazaar, the Los Angeles Times, The Salt Lake

Landscapes/Mindscapes:   Brief Reflection on Utah, 2009-05-01 Wasatch, snow-blessed mountains, remote for remaining on retinas in the South You remember everything until the forgetting begins in 2019. Remoteness is not about geography.   A retarded peacock knows the West is not the South, especially if the West demands to have snow three days before the end of April, the cruelest month according to. Eliot.   But Eliot got it wrong. Christ is not a tiger nor is John the Baptist a polar bear. The mountains are gray-white and purple and lovely at 7:12 a.m. when you have your daily aesthetic experience. Fresh.   The air is fresh , very remote and very   distinct   from the   smell of life in New Orleans.   This is Utah, much younger and much cleaner than Louisiana. Vision is not insulted by jazz-drunk aliens gawking at the Superdome of Saints. This is Utah, the property of Ute people. First-people property. This is Ut

DAWN & JAZZ DESIRE                 (for those who contemplate the bird and the word) we woke death this morning, lady                 Lady Day and day                 day say day say                 the sun's too loud we heard the warm, lady the cric-crac of dawn and heard the unheard                                                 hearable in the Fielder drums                                                 of burning instructions for angel wings wings, wings, wings, wings blushing the parchment                        the drums at the windows in our ears                 drums   --   boom, boom, b-o-o-m                 bebop boom                 slipping under                 do-wah boom                 swinging under                 Jitterbug Waltz boom                 sliding under                 Max Roach boom                 seething under                 boom of   Blue Monk boom

Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Film in 2019 When the world premiere of Native Son (2019) occurs at Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2019, how spectators respond to what Rashid Johnson has made of Suzan-Lori Parks' screenplay will expose significant critical questions. How do diverse readers process the implications of narrative as literature?   How do those same people, as spectators, make sense of the more complex materiality of narrative as film?   Does film as a prior interpretation of what might obtain in a solitary reading of print lead to better or worse behavior in the conduct of everyday   social life?   Does film occasion anything more than temporary examination of ethical options? Those who have read Richard Wright's 1940 novel and have seen the 1951 and 1986 film versions of it bring to their viewing of the 2019 version a body of knowledge that enables nice discriminations about options.   They will be able to produce commentary which makes us aw

NEGATION (for C. Liegh McInnis) Everywhere somewhere nowhere duration yet to come, present, and past is damnation even now as even now is even now negation Disaster is in the mouth of ape or angel or a mighty god as Disaster is systemic   castration/ is lynching cognition/ is dismembering   and dis(re)membering is phoenix swan songs of the primal   absurd even now as even now is even now negation Everywhere somewhere nowhere duration yet to come, present, and past is damnation: Chaos breeding hope diamonds in a black whole/hole when even now as even now is even negation now. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                             January 3, 2019