AMERICAN STUDIES 2009

The first panel I got to at this year's ASA presented me with a pleasant surprise. I walked into the room to find poets Brenda Marie Osbey and Kalamu ya Salaam taking their positions at the podium. Admittedly this would have been less of a surprise had I inspected the conference program before leaving home. (It's no longer mailed out in hard copy, and frankly, I hadn't thought to donwload it to my Kindle.)

The poetic occasion was a special session on post-Katrina arts in New Orleans. A post-Katrina baby was on hand to add his verse. Later I was talking with Meta Jones about the paucity of poetry at ASA. Meta was there as part of a panel on Hip Hop Poetics. I went off to dinner with that group after their session, asserting my position as senior citizen who had in fact been listening to the radio when the first raps came across the air waves.

Other panels I got to this year included a superb session on the Canadian/Caribbean axis. Having just come from Ottawa, where I spent much time in conversation with David Austin, it was good to see scholars in the USA taking up the important history of Caribbean activism in Canada and the multitude of connections to US social and arts movements. That panel also featured Carter Mathes on Peter Tosh, and Jeremy Glick speaking on C.L.R. James's play featuring a performance by Paul Robeson. There was a quite good session on Soul, in the course of which Gayle Wald gave a talk on the television show "Soul" that aired for several years on PBS back in the years when the system featured lots of exciting original programs and had not yet resorted to 26 part adaptations of Trollope novels. At the panel chaired by Wahneema Lubianao, Evie Shockley, who had just been at Penn State's novel conference, spoke on the subject of Anne Spencer's poetry. That was also the panel where I learned of Sam Milai's work as an editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Courier. Visit this link for an overview of Milai's work.

At the dawn session on Sunday I joined an avid band of bitter enders for a discussion of developments in digital humanities.

It was just as well I was in a news-free zone and didn't hear what the Democrats were doing to our health care reform.

CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE - Day 3

[image by Nadia Wilson]




The final day of the conference on the contemporary African American novel began at 0-dark-hundred, as we used to say, with a very early morning lecture on pedagogical issues offered up by Maryemma Graham, whose talk was itself a model of good teaching technique. That lecture was paired up with a panel later in the morning that furthered the work done in the "post-soul" issue of African American Review. The morning also saw novelist Mat Johnson reading selections from his riotous forthcoming novel Pym.

Professorial supertrio Lovalerie King, Linda Selzer and Shirley Moody put all this together, with considerable help from Penn State's talented grad students and staff. Our visiting scholars were excitedly talking about having more such conferences. Our plans at Penn State are, if all goes well, that we will in future host a repeating conference on African American literature.

Thanks to all our guest speakers -- we look forward to seeing you again soon.

CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE - DAY 2

The second day of Penn State's conference on the African American Novel since 1988 began with the first keynote speaker, Houston A. Baker, Jr. Here is the introduction I provided for the address:

Language

An abstract overcoat

Concealing laws

Which (in themselves)

Are abstractions.

The word seeking finitude,

The spirit loving space –

And we spin and spin and spin to catch

The outsider/ourselves.

“Where to begin; where to begin?” so asked Houston A. Baker, Jr., about a third of the way into a talk at the Modern language Association many years ago. I’ve chosen to begin with these words from his 1982 volume Spirit Run because they seem to me a sort of spirit catcher, a mode of traversing space and finitude I think characteristic of his life’s work, and because, characteristically for me, I suspect he has never before heard these words read back to him in an introduction to one of his lectures.

Another place to begin might be Louisville, Kentucky, where his writing life commenced, he reports, with his “inscribing melodramatic vignettes on the back of church programs during Sunday services.” That conjoining of the sacred and the secular, the vernacular and the liturgical, the melodramatic and the analytic has been, in my reading, at the heart of all his work ever since.

Another place to begin might be Howard University, a place that very nearly became a Baker family enterprise at one point, a place he seemed guided to by his life in Louisville. There was the father, who told his sons he had simply found the desire for college, as though sipping it from the air, and whose departure for college Baker describes as “a willed act of resistance to white America’s expectations . . . “ There was Louisville Western Public Branch Library, which set him on his course of study in English at Howard and Graduate school at UCLA.

Baker has written that “No matter where you travel, You still be black.” No matter where you begin in his narrative, you come to the same remarkable list of field-altering books. Following his brief detour into British Literature, Baker published Long Black Song, Singers of Daybreak, The Journey Back, Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature, Afro-American Poetics, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Workings of the Spirit, Black Studies, Rap and the Academy, I Don’t Hate the South and Betrayal. In his academic career he has traveled to the University of Virginia, Yale, The University of Pennsylvania, Duke University and Vanderbilt. His work has garnered the more familiar awards, Guggenheim, Whitney, Rockefeller, but he has also been recognized by his peers in writing, most recently with the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation, an award also presented in recent years to two members of our Penn State Faculty.

Baker begins Black Studies, Rap and the Academy with the impish suggestion that while nobody can ever be certain what is happening at Duke, everyone knows the familiar story of Black Studies. Readers of his poetry will catch that nuance at once. It is the familiar story of Black Studies that everyone knows, and therein lies the problem, the problem that led in the closing years of the twentieth century to the discipline’s “relegation . . . to the briefest possible space in the encyclopedia of postmodern American academics,” as Baker tells us. That this familiar and wholly apocryphal story has proved so appealing to the encyclopedists of American literary studies was all too predictable. But thanks to the efforts of poet/scholars such as Houston A. Baker, Jr., there is an ever elongating print trail we can follow to set the record straight, to make a way out our shocked response to that apocryphal tale of Black Studies’ evolution, “no way.”

This is a new century and new volumes of the encyclopedia are being written as we gather. Houston A. Baker is nothing if not voluminous. Years ago at the Georgetown University conference on Theory, Baker, one of the keynote speakers, approached the podium brandishing a manuscript encyclopedic in girth, if not in subject. Noting the looks on the faces of his audience, Baker flipped through the pages, smiled, and reported what his family had said when looking at his “paper.” “It’s got chapters and everything.”

We are fortunate to hear the next chapter this morning. Please join me in welcoming to Penn State, professor Houston A. Baker, Jr.

Another feature of Day 2 was the presentation of the Stephen Henderson Award to Loretta G. Woodard, the immediate past President of the African American Literature and Culture Society.

CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE - DAY 1

Penn State's conference on the African American Novel after 1988 kicked off the evening of October 22 (a date of some significance for this blog) with a reading and book launch by Alice Randall. Randall, perhaps best known for her controversial first novel, Wind Done Gone, presented her newly published volume, Rebel Yell.

Folks looking for continuity here may take note of the fact that Randall attended Georgetown Day School as a child with classmate Elizabeth Alexander, whose reading we featured earlier in the year.

Randall's reading was introduced by fiction writer Charlotte Holmes. It was only later that I learned, from Randall, that our colleague Lovalerie King had been among that select group of first readers who offered comments on the manuscript of the new book.

C.L.R. JAMES IN CANADA

There were a number of unusual aspects to the recent conference on C.L.R. James held at the University of Ottawa. It was probably the first James conference ever supported by a law firm, and was organized and hosted by the Faculty of Law. The occasion for the conference, titled "Re-imagining Western Civilization: On the 60th Anniversary of the Writing of C.L.R. James's American Civilization," was a book few people knew existed until it was posthumously published decades later.

The conference also honored the long-standing connections James and his political comrades had with activists in Canada. As David Austin outlined in his talk (and you can read more about this in the book he has just edited of James's Montreal lectures), Bobby Hill was a Jamaican college student in Canada when he first wrote to Detroit to make contact with James's group.

Soon there was a James study group in Canada involving many student activists who would go on to play a major role in the political evolution of the West Indies and in the intellectual development of black political philosophy.

This conference brought me back together with other James scholars I've met over the years, such as Selwyn Cudjoe, Kent Worcester, Christian Hogsbjerg, Lindsey Swindall, Frank Rosengarten and others. It also introduced me to many new people, including the wonderfuul conference organizers, Joanne St. Lewis and Ravi Malhotra.

My own contribution was a continuation of my work on the James group's engagements with Melville and the U.S. Government's detention of James in the early 1950s.

There is talk of a book project. Stay tuned . . .

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN AT PENN STATE

Poet Dawn Lundy Martin visited Penn State this past week to read from her wonderful book a gathering of matter / a matter of gathering and newer works. Martin, in addition to teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, is a member of The Black Took Collective and was just coming off a performance by the collective at the conference held the week before at the Poetics Program of SUNY Buffalo.

Go to Amazon for information on ordering Dawn's book.

Now available from AK Press, this new collection makes available for the first time transcriptions of speeches and talks James gave while visiting Canada in the 1960s, most at a time when he still wasn't allowed in the United States. A few of these offer variations on other talks James gave through the years (though most of those are currently not available in book form), but others are new even to long time readers of James. Additionally, the new collection, edited ably by David Austin (producer of that wonderful CBC Radio documentary on James a few years ago), makes public important correspondence between James, members of his political group, and Caribbean activists then working in Canada.

Find the book here at the AK Press web site.

with TOM RAWORTH

Poet Tom Raworth recently made one of his periodic swings through southern California and we spent an afternoon with him and other friends at the home of Marjorie and Joe Perloff. I hadn't seen Tom since the last American Poetry conference at the University of Maine in Orono, where the two of us had taken turns photographing Fred Wah as he posed in the clutch of the stuffed bear that stalked the lobby of the motel where we were staying. Just two weeks later I was in Ghana, sitting by the ocean and reading Tom's collected poems.

I had to book it back to Penn State before I could go to any of Tom's stateside readings, but I'm sure they were as quick and well-aimed as ever.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER AT PENN STATE

I first heard Elizabeth Alexander read nearly a quarter of a century ago, and we've run into each other often in the years since. (Though somehow never in our mutual home town, D.C.) -- We were on a great panel together at the Paul Laurence Dunbar conference at Stanford.

This year Elizabeth was the honoree of Penn State's annual Emily Dickinson lecture/reading. My students paid her the highest compliment. They told me they would have gone to the reading even if I hadn't required them to.

T.J. Anderson III

from The Backwaters press, a new book by T.J. Anderson III, author of At Last Roundup [which some guy on Amazon is trying to sell for $115; can you believe that, T.J.?] and Notes to Make the Sound Come Right.

Present no flowers

but when possible

substitute history

Came man to paper

came destiny to believe

stolen gods shape change

Jayne Cortez says this is a book "filled with blood octaves, flaming pomegranate trees, visitations and dedications . . . "

WALKS WITH PAUL CELAN

Now available from Burning Deck Press.

"No matter whom, no matter what, Paul Celan needs no matter where because the word drives him to memory and is the imaginary space where the legibility of the world is acted out."

Joe Amato's ONCE AN ENGINEER

another one of those fine moments of convergence . . . .

One of my best memories of my first trip to Louisville was a couple of long evenings spent getting to know Fred Gardaphe over drinks, talking together about our work. Fred amused me with tales of trying to get Italianists to admit there was such a thing as Italian/American Literature. Fred was there with his friend Anthony Tamburri. I got a copy of the anthology they edited with Paolo Giordano, From the Margins: Writings in Italian Americana, and taught from it in several courses through the following years.

And was still teaching from it when, one night in Boulder, I met Joe Amato, who I had gotten to know through the Poetics List. Joe and Kass and I have been good friends ever since, meeting up at conferences, reading each other's books, generally looking out for one another.

And here in today's mail these two streams become one. Fred Gardaphe has undertaken a publishing series through SUNY Press, The SUNY Series in Italian/American Culture. Joe Amato's beautiful volume Once an Engineer appears in Fred's series. I told Joe I'd teach this alongside Christ in Concrete. Michael Joyce, in keeping with the construction motif, says that Joe's book is "riveting from beginning to end."

Get riveted. Order a copy of Once an Engineer here. Or here.

A.L. Nielsen on Penn Sound

The two recordings I made in Philadelphia with Charles Bernstein earlier this month are now available on the new A.L. Nielsen page at the Penn Sound web site. Soon to come will be the panel discussion of Vachel Lindsay hosted by Al Filreis.

This new page will be a site hosting, in addition to recordings of my own work, selections from my large collection of recordings of literary artists. Visit from time to time to see what's new.

You can find the page at Penn Sound.

Carl Senna

It was only when I read a Los Angeles Times review of Danzy Senna's recent memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night? that I realized Senna is the daughter of one of my favorite writers, Fanny Howe. It was only as I was reading the memoir that I realized Senna's father was someone I had known of much longer.

In my early twenties I got hold of a then new book from Joseph Okpaku Press titled The Fallacy of I.Q. It was addressed to a subject in which I had been keenly interested for years. While still in high school I'd read a little book titled The Tyranny of Testing. That volume, originally published in 1962, had been one of the first to eviscerate the claims widely made for standardized testing and to call into question the growing power of such entities as the Educational Testing Service, widely known among students as the child of the infamous College Board. In the years following my high school graduation, many of the criticisms made in The Tyranny of Testing found support in the scientific community, and eventually the ETS itself had to acknowledge that this thing they were administering was not actually a test of aptitude at all.

The attraction of The Fallacy of I.Q. was that it offered a collection of essays in response to then circulating theories about race and intelligence promulgated by Arthur Jensen. Then as now, such already long-discredited speculations were given tremendous play in the press (Jensen credited with bravely raising questions "liberals" were supposedly loath to engage) and the White House even convened a cabinet level meeting on the subject. As if to show just how little we learned from the criticisms of Jensen contained in such books as The Fallacy of I.Q., decades later the whole charade was played out again around a book by Herrnstein and Murray and their "bell curve" theories, the authors once more prominently featured in such places as the NY TIMES magazine and credited with bravely confronting the minions of political correctness. Those of us who had been following the debates in my youth, of course, immediately recognized Herrnstein as the same idiot who had filled the pages of Atlantic Monthly with this racist pseudo science back during the Jensen age.

Well, the editor of The Fallacy of I.Q., which I read a good eight years before ever hearing of Fanny Howe, was that same Carl Senna who is the father recollected in Danzy Senna's new book.

But the name of Carl Senna had a way of reappearing unexpectedly. Years later I was listening to a radio call-in program featuring an interview with Edward Said. One of the people who called in with questions for Edward was none other than Carl Senna. You can find a transcript of that interview in the volume Conversations with Edward Said.

Senna's foreword to The Fallacy of I.Q. shows occasional glimmers of his poetic interests: "our world is our way of expressing it," he writes at one point.

CONFERENCE ON C.L.R. JAMES

A great conference coming up in Ottawa next month to observe the 60th anniversary of C.L.R. James's American Civilization.See announcement here.

NEW BOOK FROM ED ROBERSON

This wonderful new book from Ed Roberson is now available.

get it here!

Penn Sound Sessions

Last Friday I drove over to Philadelphia for a recording session at Kelly Writers House, up in that belfry where Penn Sound bats around phonemes.

The afternoon started out with two programs recorded with Charles Bernstein: a half hour of my poetry followed by a second program in which Bernstein, short of water boarding me, attempted to get at the ticking time bomb of my poetics.

Prior to heading over there, I'd pulled from the shelf that review of Bernstein's Controlling Interests I'd published back in 1981 in the journal Gargoyle. It was a matter of some relief to find that the review could stand rereading all these years later.

After those sessions, I participated in one of Al Filreis's POEM TALK episodes as part of a panel discussing Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo."

When the recordings are posted at Penn Sound I'll provide the links in this space.

Had a great afternoon -- thanks to all the good folk at Kelly Writers House.

[Charles views Aldon askance.]

Adults Talking

thanks to Hilton Obenzinger for this image.

President Obama at my Alma Mater

So today was the day -- Our President was there, in that same gym where my band mates and I once played "Respect" for our dancing fellow students, speaking to the nation's students from Wakefield High School.

A lot is different these days at Wakefield. It's got a much smaller student body than in my day. It's also ranked in the top one half of one percent among the nation's high schools. We didn't have a ranking quite like that when I was there, but we had a lot of smarts. Our band, for example, had more National Merit semifinalists than any other rock/soul aggregation of the time, and produced two PhDs.

Today we had the spectacle of yahoos on the lawn carrying signs telling the president to go home. The students, however, were if anything exemplary of the virtues Obama was there to promote.

Speaking of which . . . . For years upon years writers on the Right from George Will to Shelby Steele have been going on about how black leaders needed to talk tough to young people and speak up for the traditional virtues of hard work and dedication to learning. Of course, in making those arguments they invariably overlooked the host of black leaders, from Sunday morning's preachers to, yes, the teachers in our schools, who were doing exactly that.

But let a black American President show up on a public high school campus to make that case and, lo and behold, it's derided as fasco-socialist agit-prop.

PYNCHON'S PRESCIENCE

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, " replied Jefferson. "It is its natural manure."

"Yeah, and what about when patriots and tyrants turn out to be the same people," said Doc, "like we got this president now . . . "

"As long as they bleed," explained Jefferson, "is the thing."

page 294 of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. No sooner does Pynchon set it in type than the actual madness appears screaming and armed at our town halls . . . Though the president Doc is speaking of is Nixon . . . .

THE WORD FROM ON HIGH

For reasons incomprehensible to me, the print news media often refer to Helen Vendler as America's leading poetry critic.

This morning's NEW YORK TIMES features a review of the new Wallace Stevens Selected Poems by Professor Vendler.

Speaking of the poems in Stevens's first volume, Vendler has this to say:

"Harmonium contains one of the saddest of Stevens's poems, 'The Snow Man,' in which a man realizes that he must make something of a permanently wintry world of ice, snow, evergreens and wind, attempting to see 'nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.'"

To which I can only respond, "have you read the poem?!"

Griffith Park - Los Angeles - UCSB Film and Media Studies Alums' Picnic

WHITE MEN WITH GUNS

It was a public place. Politicians came and went doing the business of government. Citizens milled about, waiting their turn to put questions to the powerful.

Then they showed up; men carrying guns. Such a thing had never before been seen here, even though it was THE WEST.

No, I'm not talking about President Obama's recent address in Arizona, attended by a dozen men displaying their high-powered weaponry. I'm recalling an incident four decades back, when the Black Panthers appeared carrying guns at the capital of California.

Robert Williams had already published his book, Negroes with Guns, making the fairly straightfoward argument for self defense, and now the Panthers had taken his call to heart, and had taken their guns to lobby their law makers.

You know what happened in the wake of that photo op. The legislature quick, fast and in a hurry changed California's laws to prohibit the Panthers from showing up in public with guns in hand. The FBI kicked into action, got Cointelpro on the case, and the death toll among the Panthers began to climb precipitously. When black Americans showed up to make the argument that "free men own guns; slaves don't," the political structure of America did everything in its power to put a stop to the spread of that thought, 2nd amendment be damned.

I think we all know what likely would have been the response had a dozen or so black men carrying semi-automatic weapons shown up at any of President Bush's town hall meetings. For that matter, I think we know what the reaction would be if MOVEON.ORG started using its web site to encourage people to show up at Republican congressmen's town halls packing heat.

IN CONTRAST what was the response of Republican senators and congressmen when asked about these events on last Sunday's talk shows? Mostly along the lines of, "well, we have to respect their second amendment rights."

LES PAUL

The great Les Paul is gone at 94 -- Seems like only yesterday we were all listening to the crowd of brilliant musicians who gathered for his 90th birthday tribute --

I'm going to crank up my Paulverizer and give a listen to Les Paul and Mary Ford doing HOW HIGH THE MOON --

more e-book news

Sony has announced plans to begin selling their ebooks in the "ePub" format, an open format created by a coalition of publishers. They will also, following one of the few good examples set by Apple, stop attaching their propietary anticopying software to their ebooks.

This will bring true portability to books purchased from the Sony ebook store.

I haven't had a chance to test the ePub format, so can't predict if it will become the MP3 of reading. And since we already had some pretty good open source text formats anyway, I remain suspicious of the whole thing. Still, I can hope this move will pressure Amazon and others away from the suicidal path they have set ebooks on. There has never been anything about the codex that prevents you from passing one along to a friend, xeroxing it, or even scanning it into your computer and translating it to some super-portable format like PDF or Open Office. Book sales may not be what publishers would like, but it doesn't seem that my ability to scan my book and then read it on my Kindle is doing substantive damage to publishers' profits.

If publishers and sellers will agree upon a truly open, standard format, I will purchase far more ebooks in addition to the large number of hard copies I will continue to buy every year. They need customers like me. I can be readily replicated.

Racism and the Town Hall Disruptions

Yesterday I noted the gunman who showed up at the New Hampshire town hall meeting on health care. He was carrying a sign that bore the same quotation Timothy McVeigh had on his shirt when he was arrested for the Oklahoma City bombing. As if that weren't sufficiently scary, another gunman turned up at a forum in Arizona.

Meanwhile, back in the heartland, more evidence of just how post-racial America has become.

You probably saw the news footage that was all over the networks last night of an angry black woman being taken away from the health care forum hosted by Senator McCaskill. If, like me, you'd been watching the event when it happened live you would also have seen a white person being led away in the opposite direction. None of the news services I checked in with last night provided any context for the footage they were showing, and none seemed willing to show enough of the footage so that viewers would see that there was also a white person being escorted away by the guards. And so, the context-free imagery most of the nation was left with was simply that of an angry black woman who had to be led away from the meeting.

Not till today did any of the news services bother to tell the whole story.

If you follow this link you can see the entire video of what happened.

You will see an African American woman sitting down and placing a rolled-up poster on the chair in front of her. A photographer comes over taking pictures, and the woman starts to unroll her sign so that he can get a picture of it. At that point, a white person comes from across the aisle, snatches the sign away and starts to rip it up. The owner of the sign rises and confronts her, and gets taken away by the cops.

So what was this all about?

The rolled up poster was a picture of Rosa Parks.

The reason it was rolled up was that the woman had been greeted with jeers and insults when she held the sign up on her way in.

THE LOADED RIGHT

Many of us have been taken to task by commentators on the right for calling those who have been taking over health care reform town halls "thugs."

I don't know what else to call this guy. He showed up outside President Obama's town hall this morning carrying a 9mm -- a legal thing to do in New Hampshire, but an odd comment on health care reform.

It only took minutes for one conservative blogger to claim that this guy must be a federal agent (because he had an ear piece), though that claim didn't survive long in the face of televised interviews with the gunman.

There are those of us who want to have reasoned debate about competing models of health care reform. There are others among us who bring guns to the scene.

I thank god and the secret service that this man did not shoot anybody. I worry that someone with unconcealed ideology and a concealed weapon may appear at one of these events.

SANTA BARBARA FIESTA

Here are the photos from this year's Santa Barbara Fiesta days -- Each year the community comes together to, er, break confetti eggs on each other's heads -- ya gotta love tradition - -

MORE E-BOOK NEWS

This week Sony rolled out a new version of their e-book reader. This one is a "pocket" edition, comes in three colors (blue, rose & silver) and has enough memory capacity to hold approximately 350 books. [This business of advertising how many "books" a reader can hold is about as sensible as the way the MP3 player industry always brags about how many "songs" their devices can hold. This measure means nothing whatsoever to those of us whose collections include shorter and longer musical or literary selections. But since the iPod buisness has brought us to this pass, we'll probably be stuck with it for a time.]

Sony also has plans to produce a decive with a six inch display with slots for memory sticks and cards.

Meanwhile over at Barnes & Noble, there are plans to market a reader from Plastic Logic that I understand will be button-free.

All this is to the good. But it will make little difference until these companies and the publishing industry wake up to the lessons of the music industry. Readers want to be able to read the texts they've purchased (like those they produce themselves or get from their friends) on any available platform: a variety of dedicated readers, their home computers and laptops, their smart phones.

If the industry doesn't abandon proprietary formats and digital rights management software, they are quite likely to kill the nascent e-book market as effectively as Beta Max was snuffed out by VHS.

THE ERA OF POST-RACIAL POLICING

On the same day that Glenn Beck was allowed to broadcast to the nation his assertions that our President hates white people and white culture, and is a racist, this news from Boston:

"(CNN) -- A Boston police officer who sent a mass e-mail referring to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a 'banana-eating jungle monkey' has apologized, saying he's not a racist."

A rousing chorus of the signifying monkey may be in order here . . . .

What are we learning from our media's coverage of this teachable moment?

It would seem that people who make racist remarks are not racists, but someone who says that a particular white person behaved "stupidly" is.

The power to determine definitions still rests where it always has . . . .

BECCCKKKKHHHHH

Earlier today Glenn Beck, speaking on the Fox News Network, said that our President is a racist, that he hates white people.

This would not only be a real surprise to the thousands of folks who stood with me on the campus of Penn State last year to listen to then-candidate Obama, but I'm pretty sure it would be a grave disappointment to the president's dear departed mother and grandmother.

But look; during the campaign it was not enough for Obama to disagree in public with remarks made by Pastor Wright; Obama had to denounce the Reverend in public and drop his church membership. It wasn't enough for Obama to disagree with Minister Farakhan (and will I ever live long enough to see the day when all black public figures are no longer required to express an opinion on Farakhan?), but he had to denounce and renounce the Minister using the precise words dictated by his white interlocutors.

So, here's what I propose (go ahead, call me a strategic essentialist). For the next two weeks, any white person who appears on television must be required to denounce Glenn Beck, renounce Beck's statement, and promise not to watch Fox News until Beck has been fired. A Republican congressman must introduce legislation denouncing Beck (and requiring him to produce his long-form, original birth certificate while we're at it.)

A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER

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Ran down to Sherri Barnes's place in Ventura recently for a book celebration to honor publication of A Change in the Weather, the first critical book from poet Geoffrey Jacques.

I first met Geoffrey years ago when we attended an outdoor jazz concert together in L.A. In 2005, his great book of poetry Just for a Thrill came out from Wayne State University Press.

James Smethurst says of the new book: "This is the most exciting work on the development of literary and artistic modernism in the United States that I have read in a long time. Unlike many other scholars who see African American modernism as either distinct from or on the margins of high modernism, Jacques takes a leaf from Mary Helen Washington s famous question about American Studies and investigates what happens when we put African American expressive culture at the center of modernism. . . . The breadth of the author s interdisciplinary knowledge is stunning. . . . Much of this study is groundbreaking."

Here's the Amazon link for A Change in the Weather.

GATES ARREST RADIO TRAFFIC RECORDINGS

CLICK ON TITLE FOR RECORDING OF RADIO TRAFFIC

RECORDINGS OF GATES ARREST 911 call

I am posting the complete recordings from the police side of the Gates incident -- You can hear the original 911 call, and the radio traffic between Sgt. Crowley and the dispatchers. This should significantly shift the discussions we're hearing!

CLICK THE TITLE OF THIS POST TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD.

THIS JUST IN -- The 911 call that led to the Gates arrest

I've just listened to the recording of the original 911 call that set in motion the chain of events leading to Prof. Gates's arrest in Cambridge, and it is revealing.

Remember those reports in the press that the police had been notified of two youngish black men with backpacks? Give the call recording a listen. Gates's neighbor refers to "gentlemen" with what looks like suitcases. She raises the prospect that the men seen at the door might live there. She makes no reference to their race.

Now, we have not yet been given recordings of the dispatcher's call that Sgt. Crowley was responding to, but this makes it abundantly clear that the Cambridge Police went into this situation with the knowledge that they might be dealing with the lawful residents of the property.

Also of great interest, at least to me. This passage from Sgt. Crowley's report:

"As I reached the door, a female voice called out to me. I turned and looked in the direction of the voice and observed a white female, later identified as Lucia Whalen. Whalen, who was standing on the sidewalk in front of the residence, held a wireless telephone in her hand and told me it was she who called. She went on to tell me that she observed what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the porch of ___ Ware Street."

How do we account for the apparent difference between what we hear Ms. Whalen say on the 911 call and what Sgt. Crowley reports she told him?

Well, CNN reports that Whalen's attorney has contradicted Crowley's report absolutely. Here's the link. And here's the take-away quote: "Let me be clear. She never had a conversation with Sgt. Crowley at the scene."

The Trouble with E-Books

Today's WASHINGTON POST carries a piece by Rob Pegoraro, titled :"Barnes & Noble Repeats Amazon.Com's Errors on E-Books."

It starts out, "Stop me if you've read this before . . ."

Along with other good points, Pegoraro joins me in arguing that the publishing industry is following the pathetic lead of the music industry in the migration to new media markets. Though they have not yet stooped to suing 13-year-olds for downloading pirated copies of the Potter novels, they have been aping all the music industry's major errors, and are endangering the development of a market that could be good for them and for readers. Anyone who has had the frustration of dealing with e-books that are tied to propietary platforms knows what needs to be done. We can only hope that the publishers will wake up before it is too late.