Jerry Ward's Blogspot

Toward Critique of Impure Ignorance** SNAFU.     Since January 2017, confidence in a future for capitalism and American democracy has diminished at home and abroad.   Do many Americans approve of lack of dignity in the Office of the President?   Yes, and they equate irrational behavior with a redemptive rule of   white power   and denigrate the somberness of a still legitimate rule of law.   Contradiction abounds.   Do a number of Americans cling to the slender hope that imperfect order shall yet triumph over political chaos?   Yes. Confusion flourishes. We can expect to hear sad tales from embattled Kurds regarding how casually the PLOTUS   betrayed them with a smirk, moving forward to find the telos of his agenda. SNAFU indeed, SNAFU that inspires existential fear and pragmatic trembling. The hubris of my distance from my fellow citizens allows me to imagine a dreadful scenario of impure ignorance.   The Medusa o...

IMITATION OF DEATH Swear.   Take the knee on rural prayer rugs and bets that deliverance will not come as genteel rain from a head that wears violent-colored yarn for hair or fingers decked out with the not-beauty of paste-on black/yellow/red claws or hands calculating efficiency and actuality's last resort with guns, drones , dread drums, bombs bursting in acid air, mushrooms that blind and burn earth with ashes and embers. Beware what you curse. Beware when your ancient eye does see bodies and blood in Jesuit joints of immortality. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             October 7, 2019

A Crisis in Fiction's Evolving   Coates, Ta-Nehisi.   The Water Dancer .   New York: One World, 2019. Cultural critics who have more than casual expertise in history as process and narratives of process will, as a matter of habit, pay attention to Coates' debut novel.   The attention may be lukewarm among those critics who are less than charmed by the selling of authors in contemporary literary politics, the branding and selling of Coates as the heir to James Baldwin.   The linking of Baldwin and Coates is a tantalizing move, a strategy of managing a literary canon which can serve   the purposes of the state and commerce more effectively than the purposes of artistic autonomy.   The bottom line for American publishing is profit not aesthetic   quality. As a talented writer, Coates is caught in the funky vortex of the publishing industry , and commentary about that fact is not an attack on his person.   It is a l...

Blog10.4.2019 My appetite for thought-provoking, dangerous books is growing swiftly of late. We need relief, particularly in the Age of Trump insanity, from re-fried discourses which pretend to be sources of enlightenment.   Yes, we should continue to read and study the rhetorical moves which characterize works from traditional conservative and liberal thinkers, if only to confirm how rich and robust   is American commerce in deception, delusion, and rigorous disinformation.   It is prudent to do so.   Nevertheless,   I admit that my distrust of verbal games (print and non-print) which reify the murky interests of the state (USA) is a bit over the top.   Being over the top, however, precludes my being crushed, tamed, made wretched and silent at the bottom.   Better to be paranoid than to consent to "enslavements" as usual in one's native land. Better to think outside-the-box with alacrity   than to suffer with patriotic glee inside the ...

  A NOVEL IN 2019 Whitehead, Colson.   The Nickel Boys .   New York: Doubleday, 2019. Multiple tragedies occur without warning , but people who are not directly injured by them   get on fairly well with their lives.   They do ordinary things.   They call   no special attention to themselves and trudge   along the paths of happiness and suffering that mark off   life from death.   They believe themselves to be normal.   They are puzzled by the not-quite-normal people they know who kill time with reading. Why can't these readers behave themselves and conform like everyone else?   The minds of normal people have never been violated by such lines of poetry as About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along W. H. Auden, "Mus é e des Bea...