Jerry Ward's Blogspot

TWO ENDINGS 4.30.2019 Prayer at Midnight Fire awaken. Roast, toast, and idiot burn. Season dreadful times. TRUMPATOPSIS At him who in disdain Humanity holds, language barks. Against his reptile musings Madness cavorts and steals away For climate's use quarks of abuse. Citizens, observe how treason Summons you to embrace oblivion, How a pimp of polis machines Your shrouds in executive ordered death, Murders a future for American dreams. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Rereading Minrose Gwin's The Queen of Palmyra        Part One Making an investment in rereading , a senior reader profits from the generosity of time.   He or she can suss out the limits of subjectivity and attend   thoughtfully to details.   There's no guarantee of achieving a more valid interpretation. There just a possibility that significance ---the dividends of signifying ----will be higher.   Unlike struggling younger readers, the seniors can enjoy what comes with antiquity of youth. In earlier commentary on Minrose Gwin's The Queen of Palmyra in The China Lectures (2014), I compared her achievement with the more commercially successful outcomes of Katheryn Stockett's The Help .   Stockett affirmed the white mythology of the South;   Gwin anatomized it.   In my opinion, it was worth noting "these first novels were written by women from Mississippi," by white females, and that the aesthetic integrity of ...

ON READING TONI MORRISON Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations .   New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.   354 pp. Fortunately, I had almost finished reading The Source of Self-Regard before Namwali   Serpell's "On Black Difficulty: Toni Morrison and the thrill of imperiousness" ( SLATE , March 26, 2019) came to my attention. The words "difficult" and "imperiousness" themselves possess a degree of difficulty, and they can enlighten and obscure in the same moment.   Serpell contends "…Toni Morrison is difficult.   She's difficult to read.   She's difficult to teach.   She's difficult to interview.   Notwithstanding, the voluminous train of profiles, reviews, and scholarly analysis that she drags behind her, she's difficult to write about.   But more to the point, she is our only truly canonical black, female writer and her work is complex. This, it seems, is difficult to sw...

SENIOR READERS AND AFRICAN AMERICAN NARRATIVES CLA   11 April 2019 People Program, a continuing education opportunity sponsored by the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in New Orleans, is a site where cultures of reading are practiced with alacrity.   Senior citizens who volunteer to share their expertise in skills and disciplines with senior citizens who hunger to learn and renew themselves model a civility that is rare in the academic world.   Blessed are the elderly, for they shall be elsewhere sooner rather than later, and they shall take with them a neat paradox: the unpleasant pleasure of the text, the African American narrative. The People Program directors stress that senior citizens should have fun, should discover or re-discover the joy of learning.   Since spring of 2018, I have volunteered to direct four classes that focus in whole or in part on African American narratives, displacing traditional student/teacher exchanges in a c...

OF NATIVE DAUGHTERS AND SONS   Since 2016, it is obvious that unbridled ego and fascist thirst for power has infected the United States of America.   Everywhere, in all sectors of our lives, one finds evidence.   Our once cherished longing for rule of law and reason has rapidly diminished.   American citizens distrust one another and luxuriate in hatreds which have brewed in the so-called New World since 1492.   We are trumped by confusion, vulgarity, and vicious contentions.   In old-school   slang , we are a hot mess.   We are sickened by physical, political, and psychological change.   The pathos of hope tantalizes us, as our language, our media madness,   and our abject doubts undermine belief in sanity, goodness, and civility. Have we become so civilized by technological advancements that we accept barbarity as our norm? The answer to such a question is a kaleidoscope, an unpredictable thing.   Yet, we trudge along a...

READING THE LONG DREAM: Exploration #1 Six decades after its publication, Richard Wright's novel The Long Dream (1958) has not lost its power to impart lessons about the commerce of the American Dream.   The narrative is a frozen speech act of interconnected themes   --     the ethics of living Jim Crow; the ambiguous , often cruel, and destructive relationships between fathers and sons; the function of race in the crucible of capitalism; sexism and objectification of women;   the defensive and deceptive postures of the African American middle class in the Cold War South;   homophobia and androgyny;   the oppressive tactics   in the practice of "whiteness."   Reading the narrative thaws the ice of American propaganda . It   allows the story to go fishing in a reader's   consciousness. Wright's artistry, his aesthetic, is uncanny in its relevance for our struggles to make sense of the intersectional nature of the actua...