A MIND MEANDERS ON TUESDAY MORNING

 

It is possible to discover amazing grace if you let your mind wander as it wonders.  It works for me as I wait for the pandemic to recede.

 

Living in modernity has taught me that human beings are problematic grains of sand.

 

Read How to Lie With Statistics (1954) by Darrell Huff.  The book can help you to appreciate how saturated 2021 is with lies. I have never forgotten how enlightened I became after I read the book  in the Magnolia High School library in 1958 or 1959.  I had a crush on the very beautiful librarian.

 

"I think," Anne Moody said, "my book is my gun."  I concur.  Coming of Age in Mississippi continues to be an effective paper bullet.

 

I could not find Lifebuoy soap at the supermarket.  The supermarket reminds me of a book by Harryette Mullen.  You do know, do you not, who Harryette Mullen is?

 

Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual by Kenneth R. Janken is on my to-be-read list. I think I know a little about the crises and dilemmas of all intellectuals, but Mr. Janken may tell me something I do not know.

 

Soldat ohne Namen.

 

I doubt that I shall live long enough to see The Outsider, The Long Dream, and The Man Who Lived Underground transformed into films. No sweat.  I can create films inside my mind.

 

In 1941, Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers appeared in "Sun Valley Seranade."

 

Richard Wright arrived in Ghana (at that time the Gold Coast) on June 14, 1953 and returned to Paris on September 2, 1953.  During his visit he shot over 600 photographs.  Wright's remarks about photography in Black Power are clues about his generation of images in prose.

 

Gender-fluid things ought to stop manufacturing grief. The death of my friends has produced a surplus of grief.

 

When I was a teenager, working hard to succeed in school was a pleasure.  I am puzzled why many contemporary teenagers complain that hard work is responsible for their mental health issues.  Were they genuinely insane, they would not complain.

 

I am tempted to apply to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a summer job in Dismal Swamp State Park.  I can't run as fast as I once could, however, and I fear a Dismal Swamp bear or bobcat might kill me for trespassing while Black.

 

"By and large, the reactions to Scott demonstrate how many of us have internalized bourgeois paradigms as constitutive of knowledge  itself."  See Tony Bolden's blog "Chinua Achebe and Modern American Politics," May 3, 2021 at https://tonybolden.com   Bolden is referring to Senator Tim Scott, a paragon of treacherous minstrelsy.

 

One of my high school classmates has written a most engaging novel God, Send Sunday. I pray that she can get a contract from a major publisher for her contribution to American letters.  I must note that her son was my first UNCF/Mellon mentee.

 

I admire the spirit that informed the fiction of such departed writers as John Oliver Killens, Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West,  Ernest J. Gaines,   Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and John A. Williams.  Only a small number of contemporary fiction writers can measure up to them. I especially admire what John A. Williams once told his son Dennis:

"…I don't see fiction doing anything, at least not the way I think  fiction should do things…I am really disgusted with the whole who-struck-john that makes as far as I am concerned writing not ANYTHING I want to do anymore."  (See Forkroads: A Journal of Ethnic American Literature, Winter 1995)

Apparently, like his friend Ishmael Reed, Mr. Williams thought fiction should anger readers into critical thinking.

 

Apparently, in New Orleans, people love catfish and have seldom heard of turbot.  I have known turbot.  My taste is as rare as turbot.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 4, 2021

 

 

 

 

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