Jerry Ward's Blogspot

A   House Ponders   "Death be not proud."   The formality of it, the style of bullets dancing in Ballroom A to warm a winter afternoon. Goodness disappears.   They told us this is the way a world turns, told us to define "acrimonious." Young and eager to learn, we did. We were loyal citizens.   They told us that a random day might be cerulean or grass green or beet purple. We denied our ears and put faith in our eyes.   On what summer door are sixty-five fragile retirements posted? When we come in old age to knowledge, we trust ourselves more to believe less of what the turning world creates.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 18, 2021    

  OUR DAILY SUFFERING   Television and Internet are complicit in eroding individual and collective mentalities. This is a global problem.    Stealthy and snarky, they enlarge the possibility for Americans to develop mental health issues, love of evil in the name of power, and maximum distrust of one's neighbors. These culprits have secret compacts with Nature to produce systemic disasters.   We fight back and try to retard such progress.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             November 11, 2021

  CODE GAMES   ax   by   cz wordsnomorenoless snow in Reno xa   yb zc green sleet in Cairo 1R 2S 3T duststarsnolessnomore   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             November 5, 2021

  Work of Abnormality: 4, 6,, and 5   Absolutely.   Nothing new in hauling words, in asking once and again "what genre is this"?   Questions cast no shadows. Nor   do pandemics. Return to workshop and drawing boards. Neologize until quitting time.   Wing-flappers   insert purpose in twittering. If they are butterflies in accord with the science, they modify a world.   Ever incomplete, living is an estate of mind as   bodies progress to ruin. When so much is obvious, laughter echoes everywhere.   Territorial assertions expand, efforts to map rivers of the shall-be. What's weary of duplication are cultivating agents. Brain blooms one eon to the next.   Happiness is a rash on the skin of misery, chronic or acute. No cure exists.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             October 31, 2021

 v AT THE MOMENT   Global pandemic abates slowly.   It abates in a slow hurry.   People find themselves (or what they vainly believe is their selves) incarcerated in what chaos, COVID-19(plus emerging variants), and chaos make possible. Absurdity is dominant.   Human being are vulnerable, sublimely vulnerable.   Whatever can go wrong does go wrong.   Goes wrong with alacrity. People are under surveillance 24/7. Digital algorithms know more about our purchasing habits, our faith or lack of faith, and our physical and mental conditions than we ourselves know.   Damn.   The color of law.   The color of office. MATRIX is an accurate metaphor for NOW.   Each day we fight back to ensure that struggle itself does not kill us.   Sometimes, we win the battle. Never, never, do we win the war.   We get decimated by invisible defeat.   Brave New World.   Fahrenheit 451. 1984. Animal Farm .   Read t...

 v   Lines for 9/27/2021   Blue wine skies COVID suns Pancake moons Amber stars   inhabit a calculus mathematical genius dislocates in perfected minds   Breaking News: twenty-fourth century arrived before now is marked by middle-age   Terrify a page with sub-atomic belief incarcerated for   inhaling and exhaling, for riots and revolts of pumping blood   Mathematicians follow the science native to the end of time.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.      

  Lines for the day   It is fashionable (how bespoke can you be) in the aftermath of disasters to say   Je suis un prisonnier politique   It is universally known (in your sector of duration) in the aftermath fashion is a birthplace of deceit.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.    9/20/2021  

  Lines for Monday Morning   Instant opinions zoom down West begging peace to be still   Unhappy with the fire they flap up East leaving   peace to be still   Instant opinions life fluids in grains of sand apologize for nothing   Discontent with the water they pivot North to find the South abandoning peace to be still   Devout makers of misery they follow the science, the sad snafu of broken minds birthing   peace to be still.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             August 23, 2021    

THE WORDS OF ST. RUFUS   I have fractal faceprints. All saints have fractal faceprints and footprints.   My father carried crosses; I carry words.   You can read my thin biographies   in the Catholic Encyclopedia .   It disappoints me that after more than a thousand years only a fistful of people have read my epistles, letters that the Roman Catholic Church have ostracized from the liturgy. I advise folks who are incarcerated by the black/white binary to read my letters.   The letters may save them from the oblivion of damnation.   If the letters do not, it ain't my fault.   I have walked in the valley of despair,   and my feet are intact and clean.   When, dear Lord, is this business about washing in the blood of a lamb?   As far as I know, people ought to wash in water not blood. It is all future-hype to me.   I have climbed   the mountains of equity and found cosmic discord   that is as ...

  SITUATION REPORT   The summer heat in New Orleans prompts me to sweat ideas.   As might be the case with many Americans and citizens around the world, I am weary of pandemic,   journalism that makes a travesty of what news ought to be, a growing moral depravity among millions of people, and the international   disorder that might provide firm grounds for WWIII. It seems "natural" to be annoyed by uninvited robot calls, by terrorism, by road rage, by the grief that must be carried when friends die, by sundry assaults which preclude harmony and peace. I DO NOT LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY.   Not liking the days of my life is not exactly a free choice. Yes,   I do have an option to tell myself beautiful lies.   I could tell myself that the enslavement of my ancestors in the State of Mississippi does not matter now. But the summer heat reminds me that enslavement before and after 1865 matters greatly. I cringe when I am reminded that historical sor...

 v Lines for August 18, 2021   Ultimately,   as if ultimatum is a flddle-footed   notion, people by habit account for obnoxious stuff----   the mysteries of a   planet, the sublime   debris   of essentials----   those   mini-testimonials   cancel aged beliefs in values, confidence in the what matters .   People by nature cannibalize patience the way Columbo   and trench coat ate tolerance,   the way the daily news cancers a human heart or a human thought.   People by custom insist that they are entitled to obliterate Creation.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

IN   APPRECIATION:   John Oliver Killens (1916-1987)   The Minister Primarily . New York: Amistad, 2021.   464 pp.   $27.99   As Ishmael Reed, a razor-sharp satirist, attests in his foreword for   The Minister Primarily , Killens   "proved that his satirical pen could cut individuals and institutions to ribbons" (xvi).   The twin targets in this novel are struggles against the deadly corruption that plagues many African nations and the deadlier political corruption in the deeply troubled   United States of America.   Good satire afflicts readers with discomfort, and only readers who are stalwart long-distance runners will appreciate what Killens achieves in prose that is exceptionally baroque or rococo   or a tantalizing mixture of extremes. It is easy to believe that Killens might have had Rabelais somewhere in his imagination as he wrote the novel, because his masterful and cognition-troubling satire is Menippean. ...

  TREES AND BRILLIANT FLOWERS ( in memory of Adella Gautier, 1948-2021)   "For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but here leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit." Jeremiah 17:8   The inevitable --- grief battering our hearts; hope preaching to our minds.   Time allows listening again to your stories, fetched from antiquity and burnished to be keys for another day.   Willing to know, we attended then and attend now your performances in the aroma of brilliant flowers.   You are even more now a tree dispensing lore. You are even more now those trees you planted on stage, on page, in films.   We behold those tall dimensions of being special, grateful for the fruits you even now yield.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.        ...

 v RANDOM SENSE AND NONSENSE   Pandemic compromises the fun of drinking either 1945 Chateau Mouton Rothschild 750 Ml or Macallan 60 Year Old whiskey in a plastic cup.   Snail-mail lives.   Some militant women have expressed concern that Black's Law Dictionary has not defined WOMANSLAUGHTER .   "Fragile Spreadnecks" is a stereotype of recent vintage.   Today the necessity of necessity is getting the best of   the worst of us.   The news is saturated with Northern penthouse trash. Good Southern trailer trash is off the radar.   Wright Thompson's "The Barn" ( The Atlantic , September 2021, pp. 68-79) provokes anxiety about the current status of August 28, 1955.   The NEH 'Dialogues on the Experience of War program supports the study and discussion of important humanities sources about war, in the belief these sources can help veterans and civilians think more deeply about the issues raised by war and militar...

  ITEMS FOR THIS DAY   Conversations with fellow writers are productive and painful.  Productive for the ideas that get born. Painful for the silence you put in your mouth so as not to offend.    August 29, 2005.  I hope New Orleans is not hit by a hurricane of any category this month.  The sixteen years of misery after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is enough punishment. I speak from the vantage of having survived the 1947 hurricane in the Crescent City.   I have recently heard curses that cause the King James Bible to blush.  I must listen to Roberta Flack's "Reverend Lee" this afternoon.   There is nothing innately wrong with CSPAN's broadcasting  a conversation between Eddie S. Glaude, jr. and Robin DiAngelo about the difficulty of a civil exchange of ideas among Black Americans and White Americans .  Nothing.  There is something systemically not right in CSPAN's failure to broadcast similar conversations ...

    CONSUMING FICTIONS   The fiction that old people are aged to perfection inspires belief in the inevitable cruelty, stress, and depression people endure day to day or year to year or in short or long spans in claims of humanity. 2020 cast a universal shroud. 2021 makes uninvited progress.   It maximizes raw fear, terrorism in many guises, decline of happiness. We respond by becoming shadow figures of what once we thought we were, the special creations of the Trinity.   It is possible to have lucid memory of the way we were, but the effort throws us into absurdity.   It is not possible to possess abundant bliss.   If we make super-human efforts ( enormous leaps of faith )   to enjoy bliss, we fail. We are left to feel we are raisins in the sun and rain. We are weather's collateral damage.   Aged to perfection, we suffer as we follow "the science."   And we eventually know "the science" is metafiction.   So much...

 v TO HELL WITH THE CORRECTNESS OF BEING DEFENSIVE   Within the past 30 years, sundry writers slide openly or secretively into the posture of begging. It is a good signal that some younger writers ( those under 60) are again having fearless conversations about the sorrows and joys of writing and publishing in the United States of America.   Writing has seldom been easy.   And in 2021, the difficulty of putting the Self on the page has intensified.   It is a good signal that some younger writers differentiate defending the Self against attacks from the Self's being defensive for the sake of fitting in, of being acceptable.   The signal harkens back to essays in The Black Seventies (Boston: Porter Sargent Publisher, 1970), edited by Floyd B. Barbour.   Of special interest is "The Death of the Defensive Posture: Towards Grandeur in Afro-American Letters" by Lance Jeffers.   The "relentless kind of honesty" Jeffers championed is becoming more...

  The 48th Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, July 18-21, 2021   Unless they are planned with exceptional care, traditional ZOOM conferences often assault participants with tanks, dogs, and fire-hoses of   "political correctness."   This year's virtual Faulkner conference was planned   and executed with exceptional care.   The reason is not far to seek.   The theme ---"Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence"---provided an opportunity to examine the spectrum of race in Mississippi   literary productions (including the conference itself as production and performance) without uttering the N-word that provokes fear, trembling, and linguistic/ psychological   guilt.   It is ironic, of course, that avoiding use of the N-word can magnify awareness that the word has been operative and continues to function in many sectors of American life.   One doesn't have to utter the word to know its location in America's powerful...

  On Stephen E. Henderson   "We as Black people don't have the luxury of abandoning interpretive criticism for the criticism of form."   From "Saturated Situations:   An Interview with Stephen Henderson. Obsidian 6.3 (Winter 1980: 82-92.     I interviewed Henderson on March 20, 1980 at Tougaloo College.   His comment about interpretive criticism is an integral part of my terms of engagement.   Henderson was speaking about practices in the academic world.   He knew, as he demonstrated in Understanding the   New Black Poetry, the importance of not slavishly following so-called mainstream   habits of analysis, especially dominated by varieties of Continental literary and cultural criticisms.   The interview revealed much about his scholarship, the remarkable power of his mind, and his commitment to making   criticism equipment for living.   It was crucial then that Black people should exercise indepen...

  TODAY   It was a day that ought to be remembered, though you will not remember much about it come July 18, 2022.   You will recall delivering a keynote address "Faulkner, Welty and Wright" The Tragicomic Histories of Mississippi" for the 47th Annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference and a few of the questions from the ZOOM audience about Faulkner's 1945 letter to Wright, the meaning of "authority" when one talks about writers, and how to identify the tragic and the comic in the State of Mississippi in 2021.   You will recall some points in the keynote that preceded yours, Susan V. Donaldson's "Witnessing Jim Crow; The Mississippi Writers and the Politics of Invisibility."   You believe politics is ever a matter of visibility. You will recall Jay Watson's eloquent words as he introduced you. You will recall Natasha Trethewey's giving The Inaugural Ann J. Abadie Lecture in Southern Studies.   You will not reme...