Jerry Ward's Blogspot

THROUGH A GLASS OF NO RETURN Each of us is in possession of the wisdom and the stupidity all of our ancestors created over many centuries.   However much we lie to ourselves, we can't live without imperfections aplenty.   God, Nature, and the abstractions we have named Humanity ordain that we shall be who and what we are until we are freed by death violent   or peaceful.   Whether we get our philosophy from a pig sty or an academic cloister, we suffer our humanity and struggle to "love" it. LOVE requires more than a small amount of work.   That is one of several primal messages in the new film Queen and Slim , which delivers one aesthetic jolt after another without apology. If Beale Street Could Talk danced itself into a fine compromise regarding black love.   HBO Native Son takes black love out to [you fill in the blank].   For the moment at least we have the let us keep it real, please , about what love is and what love is not.   The ...

GENDERS & GENRES (law's labor loses love) Middle passages of hurricanes--- death borne by birth in a poem elusive inconclusive --- enigma eternal. Retell, retail a lie into reliability. Muddle passages of hurricanes--- birth borne by death in a romance complicates duplicates--- enslavements internal. Fornicate a fib into a fable. "The theory of America let freedom prove no man's inalienable right!   Every one who can tyrannize, let her tyrannize to his satisfaction!" Distract distraction into denial. Muddle middle passages of hurricanes--- future drama of ancient rain trauma incarcerate a lie in perfect deniability. "The theory of America--- hurricanes let nothing remain upon the earth except the ashes." Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                     ...

Preface to a second viewing of HBO Native Son   "If you look at Wright, or if you look at me, we are not begging the question of black humanity.   We accept it." Margaret Walker, "My Idol Was Langston Hughes." Southern Cultures (Summer 2010): 70 Given my aesthetic prejudices, it is necessary to preface   a second viewing of HBO Native Son by re-reading   Richard Wright, "How 'Bigger' Was Born" ----What can we reasonably conclude about Wright's purpose and intentions? as well as chapters from ·          Elaine Scarry. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World .   New York: Oxford University Press 1985 ---How might one talk about the rhythms and diversity of pain from   theoretical and practical angles?   What is the probable impact of pain?   How is the visual and verbal representation of pain in a film significantly different from the repr...

DOES BLACK COMMUNITY THEATER HAVE A FUTURE IN THE NEW NEW ORLEANS? One of the outstanding features of the WORDS & MUSIC FESTIVAL 2019 (November 21-24) was a panel on the history of black community theater in New Orleans.   Long before the Free Southern Theater   (FST) migrated from Mississippi to New Orleans in 1964, black citizens embraced drama as a part of their cultural expressiveness.   Public schools, churches and colleges sponsored plays and theatre pieces to showcase the innate talents of young people and to delight and instruct audiences.   What FST added to the mix were writing and acting   workshops as well as some training in production skills and emphasis on fund-raising.   In short, FST provoked greater curiosity about the communal functions of theater.   It was out of community theater that such a masterpiece as Tom Dent's Ritual Murder emerged. Kalamu ya Salaam makes a point I have in mind succinctly in "Tom Dent and...

ADem/Adam The strong among us dwell, graze, or gaze upon the festering ego; each flap of its blind hands applauds a lurid actuality --- advent of the dust-person, dry from the luminous swamp where liquid embers make a holocaust no god nor God   gives notice. Impeach. Re-preach.   Un-scripture   things. In the surface of the text fire contends with fire. The ends of a rainbow must be finality I assume, must propagate dangers in Eden never known. And yet again the strong presume a reward for being human, dumbly tolerant of faith-absent realities strutting in the metaphor of a stage. Why women, men, children do you enact over and moreover political masques of damnation, fruits that ripen to negate Creation. Impeach infinitude.   Impeach oblivion. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             ...

LETTER TO CANDICE   AND MAXIMUS November 19, 2019 Dear Candice and Maximus, I had planned to write a joint review of your novels, but my guardian angel intervened.   "No, they deserve better than that.   Write a letter of constructive criticism."   I asked if I should itemize flaws in Deserving Grace and Soul Damage regarding plot, character development, sense   of place and sense of time, focalization, diction, beginning and ending, telling and showing, imagery, and so forth.   "No," the angel thundered. "Do not insult their intelligence."   Can I recommend that in the future they read David Lodge, The Art of Fiction Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write   Them Lajs Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Henry James, The Art of the Novel Donald Maass, The Emotion...

SAVING   AND   IMPROVING   DEMOCRACY Louisiana voters created their own rainbow sign (with help from the supreme spirits of the cosmos) and re-elected Governor John Bel Edwards.   Good.   Listen to George Frederick Handel's "THE MESSIAH" and arm yourselves with weapons of intelligence for protracted battles in 2020.    Organize and educate from January to October 2020; demand that elected officials do the right thing, create robust policies to restore belief in democracy, and renounce the corruption that brings them great comfort. Democrats must work 24/7/365 to reclaim common sense, and perhaps it is not too late for more Republicans to liberate themselves from designer blindness and vulgarity.   It is obvious that Democrats will not defeat Trump and his tribe in 2020 and reduce the mockery of American neo-fascism with a noisy wagon of promises they can't ever keep   and no comprehensive plan of political actions.   The w...

HBO NATIVE SON ---on the first viewing, November 11, 2019 HBO Native Son brings a hard question to the Western conference table:   why does a nation's culture industry appropriate works of art from time past or present, shift them from one genre to another,   dazzle potential consumers with promises, and gamble to make a profit?   The industry's   economic motives are plain; its aesthetic, historical, ideological, and political motives are foggy.   The traditional movement was from print to non-print; in our brave new digital environments, uncertainty is dominant, and the idea of genre is a matter for endless debate.   Consumer response flow along a spectrum from uncritical approval to embittered condemnation.   Rigorous studies of the industry might reveal that manipulation of forms and displacement of values boil down to an unstable variable" TASTE. Who is selling whose taste to whom?   Which new artists, with or without anxi...

LIKING WITH A PURPOSE Harjo, Joy.   Crazy Brave: A Memoir .   New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. *I like Harjo's memoir.   It emits complex simplicity and simple complexity in equal measures. Those are qualities possessed by the writing of spirit renewal.   That is an achievement to be admired and to yearn for.   few of us have reached that level of achievement.   I truly haven't; my writing is allusion-laden, dense, and demanding.   Harjo uses her artistry to swerve away from my limitations. **I like the book, but I don't like the title.   The title holds no charm for me.   It tempts me to think a finger of color is pointed like a gun at someone's face or back.   At any moment, passion or fear or hatred might squeeze the trigger and order the gun to kill an innocent person.   I doubt that the title was a random choice.   I imagine Harjo was fully aware of how the title issues a challenge   I imag...

v OF NATIVE DAUGHTERS AND NATIVE SONS, Number 2 "Voice does not seem to be the source of Native Son's power.   We find that source, rather,   in the novel's scene-making capacity….Bigger is delivered to us not orally so much as visually or viscerally; the novel is cinematic rather than voiced." Laura L. Quinn, "Native Son as Project" in Approaches to Teaching Wright's Native Son , pp. 45-46. Expose your conservatism born out of cultural and political nationalism. To frame items on my blogspot in the coming weeks, five or six   viewings of the third film version of Native Son ,   I have appended a blog from April 10, 2019.   The pre-future blogs will be salty comments on American capitalism and post-AfroFuture creativity, on native daughter and sons who are most often black but not exclusively so.   Focus on the death-bound male is primary.   And Bigger Thomas as a prototype and allegorical character in as much of ...

PEOPLE PROGRAM ADVENTURES, SPRING 2020 "To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of knowing.   It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird." Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir (2012), p. 164 In slantwise tribute to indigenous peoples of the Americas, a few People Program senior citizens and I shall begin ADVENTURES IN ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE in Spring 2020.   It is an exercise in making a culture of reading, an experiment in seeing, hearing, and learning from the representative voices of five ethnic groups.   Old age is defiant.   We shall have joy of reading, reading truly, reading through the lens of our life histories.   Ishmael Reed's efforts to promote pragmatic multiculturalism are foundational; they are hidden dimensions in our civic discourses as we refer but sparingly to theory and maximize practice. ...

FICTION IN THE KEY OF TOUGALOO After reading Johnson, Charles. The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling . New York: Scribner, 2016. I came to a tentative conclusion:   MFA programs are sexy and   dandy, but they waste money and talent that is   going nowhere.   Imagine   what would happen if a person of modest talent that could go somewhere   did give   time, while working a salary-bearing   job, to sustained study of David Lodge, The Art of Fiction Lance Jeffers, "The Death of the Defensive Posture" Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings John Gardner, The Art of Fiction and On Moral Fiction Richard Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Writing" Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? Henry James, The Art of the Novel Said person has an equal...

IS GRIEF NECESSARY? Yes.   When a relative dies, it is a natural   priority.   When a friend with whom one has shared a mutually caring relationship dies, a lesser degree of grief is appropriate.   Water is not thicker than blood.   An even lesser degree of grief is in order when an acquaintance dies.   Sadness is a surrogate for grief.   In all cases, the emotion should be clean, honest, and genuine, and it should be followed by a return to the business of living.   The time required for return can't be predicted. In all cases, one ought to strive to have a humble ceremony of the spirit, an epiphany of mortality. Grief is an ember.   Sadness is a flash.   If tears are needed to minimize distress or stress, cry! Ernest J. Gaines   (1933-2019) was a giant, a Southern, African American writer from Louisiana, and John Oliver Killens, himself a giant from Georgia , listed him as a figure the American literary establishment...

FOURTEEN SLAPSHOTS OF THE U.S.A. 1.        Racism and Prejudice ---the dog whistles are code words that signal hatreds 2.        Our nation adores fifty shades of cultural narcissism and abject insanity 3.        White supremacy is enchanted by Social Dominance Orientation;   red supremacy is guided by Nature; yellow supremacy is yellow supremacy is yellow supremacy; brown supremacy is the ultimate fiction; black supremacy is in love with Love. 4.        Authoritarian personality is shamelessly nude 5.        Everywhere the collective ego of the nation murders ethics and morality   in the magic matrix of a holocaust 6.        Science and imperfect application of Terror Management Theory oil the pathway to Oblivion 7.        John Milton's sed...

ON DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS "Double consciousness " is a trope to be used sparingly as when one is quoting famous sentences   from The Souls of Black Folk ----- "It is a peculiar sensation; this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.   One ever feels his twoness, ---an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." or making a sardonic quip --- "You see my friend, the horse trampled double consciousness when the world went blind." or suggesting that "Vietnamese Americans possess more double consciousness than Hungarian Americans." or being as raunchy as the leader of the free world --- "It is perfect that the genitals of the...

TRIUMPHANT   DECLINE Morrison, Toni. The Origin of Others .   Cambridge: Harvard University Press , 2017. The qualitative difference between Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and The Origin of Others (2017) is slightly jolting.   The former is rich, original, and   bracing; it remains a seminal contribution to American literary theory and criticism.   The latter is fairly commonplace, derivative , thin as translucent cheese and ham in what it donates to discourse on the Other.   It is important mainly for what Morrison chose to drop about "theatrical exploration in Paradise , about the genesis of Beloved , the destructive force of The Bluest Eye , the curse and blessing awaiting discovery in God Help the Child , the thirty-watt light cast upon Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King , the erasing of color in Home and A Mercy .   It is evidence of triumphant decline, the bane of age. Had Morrison not b...