Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  REAL FRIENDS   Pandemic is a microscope for examining imperfections, some items to which our minds seldom bother to attend.  Defiled and emptied of genuine meaning by Facebook , the word "friend"  meanders in digital spaces.  It pretends.  It seeks a home the current century forbids it to have. I do not permit fakes to live in the neighborhood of my heart.   The shameless abuse of "friendship" wounds us.  It necessitates our treasuring the real friends with whom we commune as we comfort one another.  Many of our real friends no longer have material properties.  They exist in the bliss and purity of spirit.   Pandemic increases my love for real friends, especially those who have who have sought to heal me  ( or I have tried to heal) for thirty years or more.  Those who have been real friends for less than six years also matter.  The goodness  of friends is beyond price.   Thank God, for the microscope and for my real friends who know who they are! 

  A PEOPLE OF TIME   The children of the children of Time, do not traffic with Caucasian/blue faces in the cave/ malice-inflected   quicksand clocks/   other devices of depraved cognitions.   Time says   nothing is new.   A zillion years beyond the birth of ashen   Adam the rake and the death of obsidian Eve the hoe, children project and   protect, conserve and preserve umbilical threads beyond counting of spirit thunder-flashings and   acts of mind-culture demanded   in the vortex of life.   Nothing is new says Time.   Children do not play.   They   work. Pray they never play with damaged gods and damaged goods.     Jerry W. Ward , Jr. November 20, 2020

    FOR AN UNKNOWN PERSON   You, a passport's birth, supply what you despise: proof of your worth and agency what forbids you to arise.   Jerry  W. Ward, Jr.       11/17/2020 3:39:14 PM  

  ON   THE   TIME IT IS November 11, 2020 The Project on the History of Black Writing's 9th Annual Black Literary Suite---"Black Writing in Reel Time"---was an exceptional conversation on film/streaming time.   Stefon Bristol, Darren Canady, Danyelle Greene, Josalynn Jennings, Kevin Wilmot, and Malcolm Wright talked us through the current state of black cinema, the status quo of what Kalamu ya Salaam has called "writing with light."   They cast provocative   light on the film wherein we live.   Our mass media frame and photograph how we act daily.   It is quite difficult in the 21st century   our to confront   the future, present, and past of NOW with integrity.   In the midst of   pandemic   (COVID-19 on its way to COVID-20/21),   it is inevitable that we deal with crises that infect the qualities of our lives.   We grow weary of doing so, but we really are condemned by existential choice predicated by government policies, the antics of our fellow citizen

  Time's consequences/ wine drink and obese burnt flesh/ knowledge of summer   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             November 10, 2029  

  AKERUE   Chromium diamond eyes discern the marrow of concern takere akerue luos cardinal coffles migrating, swooping, zigzagging,   pain-planning the perpetual reigning among dead star comets ni elo worromot. Your universe sings   fluent reversals of time: takere luos akerue ni elo worromot. Your universe burns eternally; its amoeba fire works obscenely for the brutality, the brittle pleasure of damnation. Sleep in the COVID-peace of your coffin, in perfected neurocognition.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             November 10, 2020

      ON AFROFUTURISM/AFRICANFUTURISM   The thinkers of the world are   indebted to Dr. Kim McMillon for conceptualizing and sponsoring "Afrofuturism Sunday, October 11, November 8, December 3, 2 PM (PST).     The presence of Samuel Delany and Eugene B. Redmond made the November session especially valuable.   Delany was charmingly forthcoming about his pioneering contributions to science fiction and speculative formations, providing unique insights about the literary politics of science fiction and the consequences of D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" (1914/15), the cinematic romance version of Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman .   This iconic tribute to the Caucasian mammies of the KKK put a butt-whipping on the myth of the American Dream, and the USA has not yet recovered from it.   Indeed, there is little reason to believe it ever shall recover after we have witnessed   the expanding dystopia of Trump fascism and the calcification of evil

  THE BURDEN OF RE-READING THE KATRINA PAPERS   4 Nov 20   Re-reading THE KATRINA PAPERS reminds me that more anger than pity energized the writing of the book.   Prior to the Flood's causing unfiltered feelings about the mind in pain ----I go back to 1968-1970 ( my Army/Vietnam years) when anger, irony, pain, and academic paralysis associated with writing incarcerated me.   When trauma bloomed most fully in my life, liberation happened.   I broke out of jail to become the writer I am today.   Fifteen years after the Flood in New Orleans, the ending of THE KATRINA PAPERS   assumes new significance as the entire world has commerce with the unholy trinity (COVID -19, climate change, chaos).   The words on page 233 are apt assertions for 2020   "Post-Katrina contradictions breed in my soul and body and in the contexts my selves inhabit.   I give mystery permission to celebrate me.                                                                   STOP &am

  KWANSABA FOR COVID   How can you, Mr. Death, like those lurid images COVID draws day after day? Images on cosmic skin, drilled on bones? Why did you elect your death, Mr. Death, your too soon, unwise too soon, demise? In my mind that was not smart. Death you are trash in men's eyes.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             November 4, 2020

 v READING A PLAY BY ISHMAEL REED   Our schools taught us to read plays in a traditional Western manner. It was assumed that the West had all the answers.   My generation was not trained to deal well with challenges of genre classification and empirical aesthetics presented in contemporary drama, especially in works that have investments in local knowledge.     Kelley Griffith's Writing Essays about Literature (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011) is one of many books that provide concise descriptions   of what one was expected to know about length, audience, plot, characterization and dialogue, performance, setting, theme, irony and subgenres.   Description is not praxis.   My generation learned that not in a classroom but by way of trial and error.   We confronted   the necessity of   devising   our own strategies for making sense of a play in the absence of performance. A few books and articles did address "the theatre in the mind," but we were not urged to study them.