Jerry Ward's Blogspot

ON TIME For centuries, writers and readers have claimed that writing and those special forms of writing named "literature" have power.   Writers exploit languages and the art of writing.   Readers decode variously arranged words; they succeed or fail to make sense of the arrangements.   Readers who believe words have gravity and authority often become writers.   They also   often become critics, warning other writers and readers and themselves about gains and losses in the uses of languages, about the impact of words   on everyday life. The recurring   quests for sense and meaning seem to be normal, and it is normal too that these cycles enable us to construct knowledge.   Knowledge and the desire for truth which knowledge sponsors have fleeting existence in time, and our being aware that such is the case in the 21st century fills many of us with pessimism and dread and wild speculations that time is conspiring with chaos to torment us.   There is nothing a

Lebron, Christopher J.   The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea .   New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Lebron's eloquent meditation on how to locate #BlackLivesMatter in narratives of African American intellectual history illuminates a number of problems.   First, it is no easy matter to explain how writers and their works play sundry roles in #BlackLivesMatter as well as in multiple transnational movements. In the 21st century, political and social movements are unstable, and they encourage us to be skeptical with regard to efforts to explain them.   Consider also that literary works are indeterminate, and placing them in the contexts of time-bound movements only increases our sense of uncertainty   and baffling entanglements. The placement activates interdisciplinarity.   There's no formula for choices among analytic methods and competing methodologies, for how one might arrive at precise descriptions of relationships between the motions of

JUST PLAIN ART Into the world came a green widow spider named Ida. She baptized our town with the blues. Zaftig, pumpkin   ample was Ida, the green widow spider, donating vision to the blind. She brought down-low news, killing the town with the blues. Until she learned us better, we guessed she was a movie ad question: "Have you ever been kissed by a woman like this?" She blew our minds, our town with the blues. Miss Ida, a bold kisser of women and men, owned the streets like a magic hen. She blistered cognition, our town with the blues. The men suffered most, so Miss Ida could boast, of conquests above the dignity of sound. She martyred our town with the blues. Miss Ida is ancient but powerful yet in turning people into marble and jet. She canonized our town with the blues. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             July 16, 2019

IMBALANCE: a situation report A casual glance at recent commentary, criticism, and scholarship on Richard Wright encourages us to think that imbalance marks attention to Wright's legacy.   Consider the overwhelming "buzz" before and after the Sundance   2019 premiere of "Native Son," a cinematic   reimagining of the 1940 novel (directed by Rashid Johnson based on a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks ).   Buzz here, there, and everywhere----contemporary dislocation of what   many thinkers of my generation believe were Wright's original intentions: awakening his nation to the horrors of systemic racism in the United States of America.   Much to my dismay, this reification of attention to Native Son undermines what younger generations should know about the continuing relevance of Wright's works.   They should know that Wright was always asking questions that a Bigger Thomas with green hair and painted fingernails is incapable of addressing.   The ease

MR. DOUGLASS AND I HAD A COLLOQUY   We agreed we had no quarrel with American   patriotism, but we felt some urgency in the need to interrogate it.   Its origins in loving a land are noble, and its origins in genocide and theft are not.   Time and again women and men who bray each July 4th that they are willing to sacrifice their lives for the land of the brave and the home of the free must be reminded of those facts.   And we asked those men and women   this year why they are not yet dead.   And they were paralyzed for an answer. As Mr. Douglass and I re-read "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?," the address he delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852, we complimented his wisdom in not imitating Caliban, his directness in calling reason and rule of law into question, and his charity in acknowledging that people in his audience were his fellow citizens.   After all, as Mr. Douglass put it, Mr. David Walker did know what he was talking about.