BARACK OBAMA VISITS PENN STATE

Last Thursday, Bill Clinton appeared on our campus for an indoor rally with an impressive and enthusiastic crowd estimated at 6,000. This would not ordinarily have been any real concern to me had it not been for the fact that I knew Penn State was also scheduled to receive a visit this week from Ann Coulter, who had vowed, should John McCain emerge as the Republicans' presidential nominee, to campaign for Hillary Clinton.

So, with two such powerful advocates slotted to appear at University Park in support of the Clinton candidacy, I was naturally concerned that Penn State somehow maintain its scrupulous nonpartisan stance. It was clear to me that we needed a good spokesperson for the Barack Obama campaign.

Yesterday, such a spokesperson came to town, Senator Bob Casey -- he who did us all the very great favor of displacing the dread Rick Santorum. And for good measure, Senator Casey brought Senator Obama along with him.

The clouds and rain finally broke, and Sunday morning was beautifully sunny. It was a great family day, and it looked as though the entire extended Penn State family, Paternos and babies included, had turned out.

You may by now have seen the video of Barack bowling in Altoona, feeding a calf at our Ag school, etc. What has not been seen, apparently unfilmed, was his morning pickup game on the basketball court.

Obama was in great form by the time of the afternoon rally, and he couldn't have asked for a more receptive audience.

Said audience has been estimated at 22,000 -- more than twice the size of any audience for any earlier presidential candidate.

Today it was back to business as usual. Later in the week, we'll hear what Ann Couilter has to say on behalf of her sister Hillary Clinton, though I may miss that one in favor of a poetry reading on the calendar for that same evening.

A.B. Spellman coming to L.A.

One of my favorite East Coast poets is coming to the West Coast next month. A.B. Spellman, whose last book, THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS, appeared many years ago with a preface by Frank O'Hara, has at long last brought out a new book, THINGS I MUST HAVE KNOWN (available from Coffee House Press). Here's a brief passage:

refuse this cold scripture of the commonplace

at your risk, tight little man, you gotta turn & turn

& turn again from those dismal arrivals

your nature insists upon & lighten up. this foaming

fake ebullience that you advertise doesn't sell &

you need a new hook.

Spellman was also the author of FOUR LIVES IN THE BE BOP BUSINESS. He will read at Cal State Los Angeles, as the poster indicates, on April 17 at 6:30. Be there for a timely new hook.

WORLD GONE WRONG

Only three days after Barack Obama's landmark speech on race in American culture, I'm driving home from work. Defensive driver that I am, I scan the driveway to my left that enters the road from my local shopping center. That's when I see him -- a man affixing two Confederate flags to his car. This in Pennsylvania, not all that far from the Gettysburg battlefield, not all that far from a station of the underground railroad, an earlier Pennsylvanian response to the traumas of American race.

On Tuesday, Obama held up two options for America in the remaining campaign season. We can continue to roil in the politics of race as spectacle, or we can begin to have the long overdue adult conversation about race that seems to have been held in abeyance ever since the highpoint of Lincoln's second inaugural address.

From what I see on my television, we have opted for the politics of race as spectacle.

In the continuing odd marriage between the inane right and the Clintonistas, the likes of Joe Scarborough, Patrick Buchanan and Lanny Davis have come completely unhinged in their shrieking and shredding attacks on Obama.

Lanny Davis asks hysterically, "If a white minister preached sermons to his congregation and had used the "N" word and used rhetoric and words similar to members of the KKK, would you support a Democratic presidential candidate who decided to continue to be a member of that congregation?"

I'm always amazed when prominent spokespersons so profoundly misconstrue things that are even at that moment widely circulating, and thus easily consulted, and yet, given the frequency with which this occurs in politics today, it must have shown itself to be a technique with real efficacy. What anybody who has seen any of the endless replays of Wirght's sermons knows is that the Reverend's use of the "N" word was centered in the claim that nobody had ever applied it to Hillary Clinton.

Now, I don't know anything about the truth value of Rev. Wright's comment. For all I know, given the frequency with which Bill Clinton is called our first black president, and given the rabid hatred of Hillary Clinton on the right, it could well be the case that somebody somehwere has called Clinton by the "N" word.

But what I do know for a certainty is that nobody would fault any white minister for using the "N" word in a way identical to Wright's rhetorical gesture. Would Lanny Davis have us believe that somebody would be called a racist for claiming that Hillary had not been called by the "N" word?

But Davis is simply playing on the well worn practice on the right of portraying black peopple as the real racists, and his ploy appears to be working even with many people who have seen the clips of Rev. Wright and know what he in fact said.

Similarly, Scarborough and Buchanan have been on program after program asserting that Wright's comments were anti-white racism. Scarborough simultaneously praises Obama's speech and says, "I'm not buying it." Alongside Buchanan, he argues endlessly that it is simply unthinkable that Obama wouldn't have immediately severed all ties to both the minister who made these remarks and the church in which he made them.

Which raises, at least in my mind, the question of how Scarborough and Buchanan might have handled similar situations in their own past. We don't have far to look.

Joe Scarborough represented Michael F. Griffin in pretrial court apperances. Griffin, you may recall, was the "Christian" terrorist who shot and killed a medical doctor as a means of advancing his "pro-life" agenda. As reported in the NEW YORK TIMES at the time, Scarborough's explanation was that the Griffins were family friends.

Got that? Barack Obama should have left the church family he had found in Chicago in protest of remarks that Rev. Wright made in his sermons. But family friendship meant that Scarborough should appear as the legal representative of a man who had murdered a doctor for ideological motives.

Buchanan, of course, neither denounced nor rejected Richard Nixon even after tapes were released documenting Nixon's routine statements of racism far beyond even what Buchanan and company accuse Obama of having countenanced in Wright. Buchanan neither denounced nor rejected Ronald Reagan after Reagan fabricated stories about welfare cadillac queens. Buchanan, so far as I have been able to determine, never denounced or rejected any who had practiced segregation in Washington as he was growing up there.

And, to nobody's surprise, neither Scarborough nor Buchanan has applied the same strict renunciation standard to any Republican candidates. Jerry Falwell, who for years preached from the pulpit to his Virginia congregation that racial segregation was God's will, joined Pat Robertson just days after 9/11 to insist that God had in fact damned America for its sinful ways. Davis, Scarborough and Buchanan condemn Obama for not cutting off all contact with Rev. Wright after he had "damned" America, but they have been loath to make the same call upon those Republicans who have repeatedly sought the embrace of Falwell and Robertson. A stop at Bob Jones University, which till recently practiced racist division of its students' social lives, has been a virtual requirement of all Republican candidates during the South Carolina primaries, again without meeting anything like the level of outrage Scarborough and Buchanan have unleashed on Obama.

It will little avail you to bring any of this up with these masters of communication, though. On the evidence of their recent television appearances, Scarborough will pronounce you "silly" and Buchanan will tell you to "shut up" [both happened on MSNBC within a week].

If we are to leave the spectacle of race behind and reclaim the moral high ground of Lincoln's second inaugural, we will first have to find some way to wrest the reins of discourse away from these media elites. We must, as the Pennsylvania Abolitionists of years past, take the reins in our own hands and steer a different course.

cognitive dissonance

THE AMUSING OF MICHELLE

[we had a request for this early lyric -- the requestor should contact us at: aln10@psu.edu]

I am thinking the better part
Is this that I know always
Where everything of you is

Even when the brotherhood of breath lies still
On the slab and sleeping disarray reorients
Mine with regard to yours

The little idea that can chugs up
An inclined arm exerts itself
The nipple of night slips from my teeth

And the better part of you
Is musing
Mine

MORE FROM LOUISVILLE

Nathaniel Mackey was one of the invited writers at this year's University of Louisville Conference on Literatures after 1900 and so I seized upon his presence for the introduction to my own plenary presentation. I began by showing a short video clip of the National Book Award ceremony last year when Mackey accepted the award for his volume of poetry SPLAY ANTHEM. The first thing Mackey had said upon arriving at the microphone that evening was, "Now We Know," which was also the title of my lecture. Here is the opening:


But what did we know, and when did we know it?


Along with the audience in New York, we knew in this moment that Nathaniel Mackey had just been awarded the National Book Award for poetry. Those of us who track such matters knew in this moment that this was only the third time in the history of the National Book Awards that a black poet had been so honored. There were no African American artists selected for the prize in the forty-nine years from its inception in 1950 to 1999, when the poet Ai was honored for her New and Selected Poems. The following year, Lucille Clifton was presented with the award, again for a volume of New and Selected Poems, and then there were no more black winners until Mackey took the stage in 2006 to receive the award for Splay Anthem, marking the first time ever that an African American poet was honored for something that was not a selection from his life’s work. And some of us noted that possessive pronoun as well; "his." It made a difference. This was the first time that any black man had ever received the National Book Award for poetry. For that matter, we’d have to look back to 1990's award in fiction to Charles Johnson to find any National Book Award in any category to any black man. Before that, there had only been the 1953 award to Ralph Ellison. There were other African Americans honored. Both Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor won in fiction, and the foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters has gone to Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and the redoubtable Oprah Winfrey.


We knew something else as well, in that moment of the award. Despite the fact that the National Book Award for poetry had in its early years gone to William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, despite the appearance among the lists of honorees of a John Ashbery, for the most part the judging panels have gone straight for America’s middle brow jugular. Though it would be hard to argue against the quality of the winners over the years, it would be equally difficult to justify the continued neglect of the poets who were most insistently exploring the territories outlined by Williams, Stevens and Moore, let alone Sterling Brown and Melvin B. Tolson. Mackey’s award was, then, a perfect storm of the unexpected and the overdue. It is not hard to point to various factors that lent themselves to this felicitous outcome: Splay Anthem was, unlike most of Mackey’s work, published by a venerable New York press. The judging panel for 2006 included other poets more likely than many to be conversant with and sympathetic to the adventurous and demanding aesthetic of Mackey’s serial lyric inventions. But, should we allow ourselves to admit it, there is something else we knew immediately about the rarity of Mackey’s 2006 honor.


In Paracritical Hinge, Mackey comments that "the relevance of experimentalism to African American writing and of African American writing to experimentalism needs to be insisted on and accorded its place in the discourse attending African American literature and in the discourse attending experimental writing" (243). Suffice it to say that neither the National Book Awards nor America’s literary/critical apparatus at large has shown itself to be in any hurry to meet with Mackey’s imperatives. We haven’t far to look for explanations for this phenomenon. In a year that has seen such an enthusiastic response to the candidacy of Barak Obama, our national tendency to congratulate ourselves must be leavened by the memory of the moment in which fellow Senator Joseph Biden felt obliged at the beginning of the campaign trail to point out for us that Obama is, as Biden would know, "articulate." (Robert Novak, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, felt obliged to repeat and underscore another of Biden’s observations, that regarding the cleanliness of the honorable Mr. Obama). Even a year that closed with the truly remarkable event of the release of a major feature film with Melvin B. Tolson as its subject, under the auspices of National Book Foundation honoree Oprah Winfrey, left an odd taste in the mouth. There appeared to be a strange skittishness among all those involved with the film about Tolson’s sheer intellectual force, particularly as evidenced in his poetry, which is completely absent from the film. There is a long-standing problem in America, stretching back to the day of Phillis Wheatley, to whom Thomas Jefferson refused the honorific of "poet", contending with the fact of black intelligence. In a short essay on the large subject of "black interiority," Mackey comments that American audiences have been haunted by "a fearful, grudging acknowledgment of black intelligence (the ‘hive of subtleties’ that Babo’s head is said to be in Herman Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’) (Paracritcal 202). Of course, another thing that we know is the fate of Babo. Nathaniel Mackey’s presence on the New York stage as recipient of the National Book Award for so deeply thoughtful and inventive a book as Splay Anthem was, then, belated, let’s hope not grudging, acknowledgment of something that had only rarely been apprehended, let alone celebrated, by the National Book Foundation, the figure of the black intellectual. It was, we might say, a moment of discrepant engagement on the national stage, one which threw into sharp relief a history of denials and deferrals. Mackey has written of discrepant engagement as a mode of critical action that "dislodges or seeks to dislodge homogeneous models of identity, assumption of monolithic form, purist expectation . . . " (Discrepant 189). In my time here today, I hope to perform an exercise in discrepant engagement by telling a story, one that does not share a stage with Nathaniel Mackey but participates in a certain staging of intellectual history and race.







From there, my paper launched into an itinerary that included Ornette Coleman, Jacques Derrida, and Russell Atkins's 1950s work on concepts of deconstruction.

The paper engaged in a brief fantasy built around the possibility that Derrida could have seen Atkins's essays during his first trip to the United States, some years before Derrida himself began to write of deconstruction. In the end, my paper was not really so much about Derrida's history and race as it was about us, about how we read intellectual history, about how we fail to read black participation in crucial developments in theory and philosophy, about how our understanding of ourselves and of the past might alter were we to read more fully . . . .

ORANGERIE

While in Louisville, I acquired this eponymously colored chapbook by Tom Orange, poet, late of D.C. now of Nashville. The book is volume 16 in the Slack Buddha Press series from Bill Howe's La Perruque Editions. You can contact the slack Buddha under his wilting bodhi tree at:

La Perruque Editions
4724 Bonham Road
Oxford, OH 45056













I had an armload (which did not make my balance any easier
to maintain.) You served my friends and I at the corner table.
You said that the nachos were the best thing there. You were
at the Kennedy Center with an older woman. I was there with
my family. We exchanged glances at intermission and a hello in the foyer. You came to the rescue in fine Mentos commercial fashion, helping to lug my Ikea bed indoors. We were both on the balcony and on the floor. You said my glasses were the coolest, and I stammered. Crazy eye contact. You kept looking
over. Wished one of us would've spoken! Should've bought
you more coffee... You called out "Happy Holidays!" My heart
went pitter-pat! You were nice enough to give me a second
chance, but I still let you slip through my fingers again. We
exchanged glances as we were both coming and going. You were
cold and I offered you my jacket to keep you warm. You were
visiting a "friend" in New Hampshire so I hesitated to ask for
your number. We talked about the cold, and I wish we could
have talked more. I hoped that you would sit next to me. You
were with a large, diverse group, sitting at 2 reserved tables to
the left of the stage. You sat next to what appeared to be your
parents and across from your sister, I think, and down the table
from a man with a cane and his significant other. We chatted
about century rides, marathons and commuting to work. You
went on to Tysons and I veered off in East Falls Church. We
talked about politics, Princeton, and the perils of holiday travel
until we were cruelly separated at Woodley Park. Got off at
Courthouse Metro wishing I lived farther west so I had time to
say "hi." You asked me if I was wearing Doc Martens, I tried to
explain where Smash was located in Georgetown. We boarded
together, you to the airport, me to Crystal City. You on way to
NYC meeting, work in D.C., home in Atlanta. Our encounter
and chat, and your amazing brown eyes left me smitten. We
held eye contact as you walked by, then we both turned around
to smile at each other.

Upcoming Symposium at Georgetown

I'm going to be at Georgetown University in April as part of this great three day symposium -- Hope some of you can make it:

APRIL 15 - 17 Amiri Baraka & Nikki Giovanni"Let Freedom Ring": Art and Democracy in the King Years, 1954-1968Lannan Symposium & Festival 2008
On the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s passing, Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni join other distinguished poets, scholars and activists to celebrate role of the arts in the Civil Rights Movement. Symposium discussions, poetry readings, and lectures will take place over three days at Georgetown.

By sweeping away legal segregation in the public sphere, and especially bysecuring the right to participate in the democratic franchise for people ofcolor, the Civil Rights Movement fundamentally changed American life. Thisstruggle for social justice has been well documented and justly honored. Lesswell-documented is how the arts helped sustain the Movement and were essentialto its successes. On the fortieth anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin LutherKing, the Lannan Literary Symposium seeks to acknowledge this legacy whilepaying special attention to the contributions of poets, writers, and artists tothe public discourse of the Movement, especially during the period TaylorBranch has called "the King Years," 1954 -1968.Readings, performances, lectures, and discussions will take place on April 15,16, & 17 at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC.

__________Amiri Baraka Sonia Sanchez Haki Madhubuti Vincent HardingMichael Eric Dyson Lawrence Guyot E. Ethelbert Miller Charles CobbEugene Redmond Askia Touré Walter Fauntroy Jabari AsimValerie Smith Eleanor Traylor Barbara Teer Joanne GabbinThulani Davis Aldon Nielsen Dorie Ladner Sandra ShannonMaurice Jackson Ivanhoe Donaldson Ruth Harris Soyica DiggsRobert Patterson Randall Kenan Angelyn Mitchell Jayne Cortez__________

S p o n s o r sLannan Literary Programs African American Studies Program Department of English Office of the College Dean Diversity Action Council

____________________ S C H E D U L E TUESDAY, APRIL 15

5:00 – 6:00 p.m. WELCOME AND PLENARY LECTURE (Copley) Title of lecture to be announced. Vincent Harding.

6:00 – 7:00 p.m. OPENING RECEPTION (Copley)

8:00 – 9:30 p.m. POETRY READING (ICC Auditorium) Reading by Amiri Baraka, Eugene Redmond, and Haki Madhubuti

9:30 – 10:00 p.m. RECEPTION AND BOOK SIGNING (ICC Auditorium)

10:00 – 11:00 p.m. OPEN MIC (Bull Dog Alley)

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16

9:30 – 11:45 a.m. SYMPOSIUM I: Art and Democracy in the King Years and Beyond: Scholarly Assessments (Copley) Joanne Gabbin, Aldon Nielson, Sandra Shannon, Valerie Smith, EleanorTraylor. Facilitator: Jabari Asim

1:00 - 3:15p.m. SYMPOSIUM II: Creativity, Resistance, Liberation: Forms of PoliticalEngagement in the Arts of the 1960s (Copley) Sonia Sanchez, E. Ethelbert Miller, Amiri Baraka, Barbara Teer, HakiMadhubuti. Facilitator: Soyica Diggs

3:45 – 5:00 p.m. PLENARY LECTURE (Gonda) "Art as a Form of Politics." Amiri Baraka. How artists are political, andhow politics is used in art.

5:15 – 6:00 p.m. RECEPTION (Old North 205)

8:00 – 10:00 p.m. POETRY READING (Old North 205) Reading by Sonia Sanchez, E. Ethelbert Miller, Askia Toure

10:00 – 10:30 p.m. RECEPTION & BOOKSIGNING (Old North 205)

10:00 – 11:00 p.m. OPEN MIC (Bulldog Alley)

THURSDAY, APRIL 17

9:30 a.m.– 12:00 p.m. SYMPOSIUM III: Living History: Activists on Art and Social Justice Lawrence Guyot, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Charles Cobb, Walter Fauntroy, DorieLadner, Ruth Harris. Facilitator: Maurice Jackson

12:30 – 2:00 p.m. LUNCHEON AND PLENARY LECTURE (Copley) "Music of Struggle." Ruth Harris. Turning crowds into community by getting people to sing.

2:15 – 4:30 p.m. SYMPOSIUM IV: Advancing American Ideals: Democracy as a Goal for the Arts(Copley) Randall Kenan, Askia Toure, Thulani Davis, Eugene Redmond, Jayne Cortez. Facilitator: Robert Patterson

5:00 – 6:15 p.m. PLENARY LECTURE (Copley)"'A Change is Gonna Come'?" Michael Eric Dyson. Art and the politics of the black possible.

8:00 – 10:00 p.m. READING (ICC Auditorium) Reading by Randall Kenan, Thulani Davis, Barbara Teer, Jayne Cortez

10:00 – 10:30 p.m. RECEPTION AND BOOKSIGNING (ICC Auditorium)

10:00 – 11:00 p.m. OPEN MIC (Bulldog Alley)--

Mark McMorrisAssociate Professor, EnglishDirector, Lannan Literary ProgramsGeorgetown University

The Icing on the Louisville Cake

The conference formerly known as the Twentieth Century Literature Conference wound down just this past Saturday, but several returning participants have already begun posting photos and reports. Among them, I'd advise you make a call at Tom Orange's blog site, a link to which you can find over there on the lower right of this site if you just scroll down to the "persons of interest" category.

This is a conference I've found to be really useful over the years, and so it was particularly gratifying when I received an invitation to be one of the plenary speakers at this year's sessions. At first I was a bit worried about being the last thing on the conference program, but as things turned out I was in the end not just the final plenary speaker on the critical side of things, but the only plenary speaker giving a critical talk.

I flew down Wednesday so that I would be sure to make the opening session, a reading by novelist Maryse Conde. Weather, as weather would, intervened, wiping out Conde's reading, the other scheduled plenary critical talks, and an entire day of panels. As the last person left the bus from the hotel that first morning, a campus security guard poked her head out of her gazebo to tell us not to let our bus leave. The campus was closing down tight in the face of an approaching ice storm, and everything was off. This was a resourceful group, though, and on the bus ride back to the hotel one of the presenters suggested that we try to organize ourselves into a spontaneous conference in exile, a sort of tennis court oath of critics and authors. And so we did. For the rest of that day, people came and went as we took up residence on the mezzanine level of the hotel, whose staff were never quite sure what to make of us -- it was far more fun than any of us could have expected and heartening to see that many scholars from wide-ranging disciplines actually cooperating with one another.

By the next day things were relatively back to normal at the University of Louisville campus (and one of the organizers made sure I got to meet Conde, which more than made up for missing her reading). I did regret not getting the promised first night pizza party, but I especially enjoyed the conference dinner, where I sat at a table with some of the presenters I'd met during the long day of iced-in conferencing.

Alan Golding has for years been hosting a sort of closing party for this conference, to which this year he added an open reading. I had neither my poems nor my glasses with me, so didn't throw in with the others. I also didn't have my camera with me -- but I did, of course, have a cell phone, hence these few records of the evening. More and better photos will emerge elsewhere on the web, but this will give you a sense of how poets, lovers, and lovers of poetry broke the ice one year in Kentucky.

CHARLIE THE TUNA SAYS, "READ THIS BOOK!"

here's a new chapbook from New York poet Laura Hinton. The title makes reference to a literary work that some of my younger readers may not recognize. Here's the complete classic verse, which appears as a sort of refrain in Hinton's piece: "Ask any mermaid you happen to see, / "what's the best tuna?" "Chicken of the Sea."

and here's a passage from the chapbook:



She has the head of a woman and the body of a bird. A fish, the tail of a fish. She does not wear a mask


I am watching her swim and I am five years old. I have decided to call her Gloria. Gloria is gorgeous in
her tail and fins. A man on a loud speaker asks her to do something under the water. He does not call her
by name


Ask any mermaid you happen to see


I am reading while she's swimming. I am crouched down deep in the back floor of a 1960 Oldsmobile. We are driving around Lake Okeechobee on the way to Miami -I am five years old. We're driving around the lake in this 1960 Oldsmobile and I'm deep down in the pocket of the floor facing the back seat. The road winds around the lake, steep and slanting down towards the lake. I always think we're falling into the water. I think my whole family will drown. Somehow we always manage to get to Miami without drowning. My family is going to Miami to visit my distant cousin's family. My distant cousin is only three and has long black tresses her mother combs back into a pony tail. Every time I visit my distant cousin, I like to watch her mother comb my cousin's long tresses. My mother makes me cut my hair short. So I stick a nylon stocking on my head and pretend to have long tresses like my distant cousin. It feels right but looks ridiculous. Every morning the mother of my distant cousin combs her
long tangled hair back into a smooth wave


We never slide into Lake Okeechobee while driving around it in the Oldsmobile. But when I am eight and living in Rapid City, I read a Reader's Digest article about a woman who drives off the road around Lake Okeechobee and falls into the lake. She remains in the car with the windows rolled up. The water pressure holds the window panes tight. The woman can't get out. I read that she dies -not of drowning, but of suffocation


I learn to swim early. But I never learn to swim well. I only make the Minnow's Club at the downtown YMCA in Rapid City. I never pass the test for Fish. . . .


Laura Hinton's Ask Any mermaid is published by Tout Court Editions, Tenement Press. For more information, contact: tenementpress@gmail.com

ADAM AND EVE IN MACARTHUR PARK

SOMEONE LEFT

THE SNAKE OUT

IN THE RAIN

THE INHUMAN TRAFFIC

. . . Just back from a quick trip to London for a conference, about which more later . . . My first day was reserved for a visit to the British Museum. The UK has been mounting a series of events and exhibits to commemorate the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade -- Having just reread a number of contemporary American sermons and speeches on that event by early African American activists and intellectuals, I was curious to see how the subject was being treated in England. One of my more skeptical hosts told me that it had largely become a celebration of Britishness. That may not be entirely fair, judging from accounts I've read, but I wanted to see how the subject had been treated at the British Museum. Which is how I came to seek out the exhibit titled "THE INHUMAN TRAFFIC." I knew such an exhibit had been mounted, because I saw a poster for it as I entered the building. Still, it took the helpful museum staff quite a few minutes of staring at a muesum map and scratching their heads before they could direct me to the very small room dedicated to this large event. Turns out it was just off a grand hall filled with Greek antiquities.

I was, despite all that, gratified by the number of people who had also sought out this small exhibit, and by the conversations I heard among the visitors. Here are just a few quick shots from the exhibit.

Caroline Dubois - YOU ARE THE BUSINESS

For many years now, Burning Deck Press has been publishing SERIES D' ECRITURE, an annual volume of contemporary French writing in English translation. This year brings us number 20 in the series, YOU ARE THE BUSINESS, by Paris-based poet Caroline Dubois.

The book has been translated by Cole Swenson and is available in the USA from Small Press Distribution.













talala

I wonder what the difference is between what you
catch and what you create and what it rums into
and where.

What it turns into I wonder -mamma oh la la
mamma I wonder what it turns into oh I wonder
into what into what.

How does it turn into what you catch or those you
catch and then those you create and if you create
them then with what mamma with what.

OBAMA'S POETRY PLATFORM

Speaking last night in Richmond, Barack Obama became the first candidate in this year's presidential race to assert that learning how to read poetry should be a part of every child's education in the United States.

One trusts that this will be taken up in the next round of debates.

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN - GATHERING MATTERS

Newly out from the University of Georgia Press is the first full length book from poet Dawn Lundy Martin. A GATHERING OF MATTER, A MATTER OF GATHERING is described by Nathaniel Mackey as "a long song of bodily bereavement . . . an always agile colloquy of image and assertion . . ."

Dawn is part of the BLACK TOOK COLLECTIVE and is a cofounder of the Third Wave Foundation. I first heard her poetry in Iowa City some years ago and was taken, as one would expect in the presence of the Black Took Collective. She's now teaching in Pittsburgh. Here's a short selection from the book:

THE SYMBOLIC NATURE OF CHAOS

There were robberies and thieves, deft cutting into and savaging,

portents like a yelling and a tree. What would come now

that the drifting had begun? Now that the swinging, inconsistent

with landscapes (what cyclones left) in the darkness of this bereft body.

A thing ungroomed.

"AMERICA'S FOREMOST BLACK INTELLECTUAL"

I'd meant to post this some time ago, but delayed out of sheer disbelief.

Sunday morning, December 30, I was sitting in a hotel having breakfast before another round of MLA panels and meetings. As usual, I was ranging freely through my morning newspapers.

Then, I came to this sentence:

"America's foremost black intellectual has published a slender book about the most interesting presidential candidacy since 1980."

Now, as someone who generally keeps up with publications in African American thought and culture, I felt badly that I must have missed something. Had Tommy Lott, Charles Mills, Anita Allen, Lucius Outlaw, Naomi Zack, Kwame Anthony Appiah or any of the dozens of other possible contenders for this honorific (depending on what areas of discourse you're contemplating in trying to determine a "foremost black intellectual" -- my short list here is just some of the philosophers, for a start) published a book on such a timely subject that I had completely overlooked?

And just who was it, writing on the Op Ed pages of the WASHINGTON POST, who felt qualified to make such an encompassing and definitive judgment?

Well . . . it was George Will.

And, and least in his view (and lord knows how many books by leading black intellectuals he must have carefully attended to before making such a measured determination), America's foremost black intellectual is . . . .

(envelope please)

Shelby Steele.

Somewhat redundant, no?, to tell us that a book by Steele is slender.

"So fecund is Steele's mind," Will assures readers, "he illuminates the racial landscape that Obama might transform."

Having had some experience of the mind of Dr. Steele, I'm not sure "fecund" is the first term I might apply, but it is certainly true that something regarding our racial landscape is illuminated in Will's sweeping declaration.

Err-Residence - Jennifer Scappetone

I've just come back from another quick trip to Chicago for a lecture and while there I had a brief visit with poet Jennifer Scappettone. I came away bearing a copy of her new chapbook, Err-Residence, (whose title had my brain doing all sorts of strange things involving Neruda's RESIDENCIA EN LA TIERRA).



among the many delights to be found here, the sudden appearance of the neologism "hackquiescent." Look out, OED.








The book is from Bronze Skull Press, and you can reach them at:

2542 N. Bremen, #2
Milwaukeee, WI 53212

and by the way, this art work is by Roberto Harrison.

More from the Modern Language Association 2007

Haven't been able to get back to this space to finish this year's MLA posting till after I got back to Penn State and got the new semester off the ground, but here we go, starting out in the lounge at the Los Angeles airport.

In addition to various bits of business, I was on two panels at the Chicago conference. The first was a session reconsidering the Black Arts Movement, organized by Margo Crawford. Along with Margo, the presenters included Jim Smethurst, Carter Mathes and me, ably chaired by Mae Henderson. In many ways this panel was a continuation of the work we had done at the Larry Neal Conference in Brooklyn, subject of an earlier blog. I was also asked to serve as respondent on a panel organized by Small Press Distributing. That panel, titled BREAKING INTO PRINT: MULTICULTURAL AUTHORS AND INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS, gave me my first chance to meet the remarkable poets Tisa Bryant and Renee Gladman, whose work I have been following for years. Old friend Susan Schultz spoke, along with Eric Keenaghan, a scholar whose work is new to me, who addressed the work of another of my favorites, Jose Lezama Lima. I wasn't able to get to as many panels as I usually like to, but I did make it to a film division session along with my usual round of poetry sessions.

Here are the opening paragraphs of my presentation for the Black Arts panel:

"The Cry of My People"


"What time is it?" Still a good question more than three decades after composer / saxophonist Joe McPhee shouted it into a room at Vassar College’s Urban Center for Black Studies as a kickoff to a burning performance of his composition "Nation Time." McPhee was timely; it was, to borrow a phrase out of that time, "right on" time, though his performance was, in a sense, before its time. Recorded live, this concert was hardly heard in its time, circulated as an LP from CJR Records, and only became more widely known when it was rereleased three decades further on by the appropriately named Atavistic Records in their still more appropriately named "Unheard Music" series. This particular unheard music comprised a nineteen minute instrumental extravaganza built around the simple opening riff but rapidly gathering impetus and fire from the improvisational co-authorship of McPhee’s small band of jazz giants, including Mike Kull on keyboard, Tyrone Crabb on bass and two percussionists, Bruce Thompson and Ernest Bostic. A review of the later rerelease published in the Alternative Press reports that McPhee "takes his sax to places Maceo Parker never dreamt of," a judgment that is in no way a negative comment on James Brown’s great collaborator, but is, rather, a reminder for any who may need it that the "Out" Jazz of the Black Arts and Black Power years could be every bit as funky, every bit as danceable, every bit as "relevant," to use another term of the time, as anything Soul had on offer. And this is important to recall only because seemingly so many seem in need of just such a reminder. At a conference some years ago, when a presenter played a segment from Amiri Baraka’s Motown LP Nation Time titled "Who Will Survive America?" Askia Muhammed Touré could be heard to comment from his seat in the front row, "we used to boogaloo to that." In retrospect, many have forgotten the purchase that the most avant garde music had on an energized youth audience in those years. We have been told so often since that Free Jazz somehow turned away from the audience and killed the genre that it requires a certain amount of rerelease to overcome the negative commentaries about this music circulated since mostly (with always the exception of the exceptionally dour Stanley Crouch) by people who had not been there.

An urban center for Black Studies is not the sort of thing most now associate with Vassar, but it was there and it provided time for McPhee’s unfolding of his music. The recording of "Nation Time" happened during concerts in December of 1970, only months after Amiri Baraka had published his chapbook It’s Nation Time through his own small press, Jihad. It was work that had quite deliberately not been included in Baraka’s last significant collection of poetry from a major commercial press, Black Magic, work that he was to perform incandescently at the climax of the Black National Political Convention in Gary, Indiana in March of 1972, an enactment of the poem so effective with the massive audience there gathered that even so mainstream a figure as the Reverend Jessie Jackson immediately took up the call and its response: "What time is it? It’s Nation Time." Baraka had explained the origins of his poem as coming directly out of the greetings black people offered to each other in the streets back in the day, a way of calling one another to the time. Both Baraka’s poem and McPhee’s music underscore something too easily and too often forgotten in the intervening years; that while it is true that any amount of essentialism could be sensed floating in the air like incense at any such gathering in the late 1960s and early 1970s, nation was not a given. Nation was, to put it mildly, a social construction, in time. Like what happened at Vassar in December of 1970, Nation was a constant improvisation within the parameters of the day.

A few years earlier, when I was still a high school student, one of the local television stations in Washington, D.C., sent a camera crew and reporter to cover the activities of the recently established New School for Afro American Thought. Its founding director, Gaston Neal, explained the aims and aspirations of the new (and too short-lived) institution while standing next to a table obviously organized to give the camera a view of the intellectual equipment for the cultural revolution in progress. There were heaps of books displayed against an African themed fabric, and in their midst, centered in the camera’s shot, was the posthumously released last recording session of John Coltrane. The New School, located on Fern Place, NW, grew out of the activities around the Cardozo Area Art Committee and had links back across the continent to the young activists who had formed the proto-Panther organizing around Merritt College in Oakland. I couldn’t have known it at that young age, but Gaston Neal had been a friend of Amiri Baraka’s since the two met during the then LeRoi Jones’s return visit to D.C. on a reading trip in the company of Beat poets Allen Ginsburg and Ray Bremser, a visit memorialized in Baraka’s poem "One Night Stand." Neal had been part of D.C’s own black Beat scene and, along with Baraka, A. B. Spellman and others, had made the political move to a cultural nationalism that found its most efficacious expressions in the music, poetry and drama. Coltrane had already in 1967 come to serve as a synechdoche for all that was summed up in the characterization of the new institution’s educative goals. Here was an essential, if one were required. Clearly Coltrane was central to any curriculum in the new consciousness, to any syllabus of new Afro American thought.


That confluence of the black Beat with the emergent New Thing in jazz and the new consciousness called for in the seemingly unending series of manifestoes of the day was the key to a remarkable phenomenon that has yet to be fully acknowledged (though it has often been fully questioned), a genuinely popular and populist avant garde. It was a structure of innovation and collaboration that had been building for many years. While it was certainly the case that Harlem Renaissance era poets had made much of jazz, and that some among the musicians befriended the poets and politicians of their day, there was then nothing quite like what was later to be undertaken by the Black Arts Repertory Theater School and its innumerable progeny. Composers such as Ellington had often made racial politics a core thematic in their work and poets, including Sterling Brown, had seen in jazz an embodiment of black aspiration and accomplishment. By mid-century, a new constellation of mutual influence was becoming visible. In a soon-to-be-published posthumous work, titled Don’t Deny My Name, Lorenzo Thomas, observes that : "The militant attitude of writers such as [Larry] Neal was reflected–and perhaps instigated–by jazz musicians, whose playing matched the intensity of an entire generation of African American intellectuals who were too young to know much about Jim Crow but old enough to see that integration was, at best, a barely hatched chicken if not a bird in the bush" (116). By the time that Baraka was publishing his first collection of poetry, Charles Mingus had already composed the searing "Fable of Faubus." Shortly thereafter, Max Roach had gone into the studio with Abbey Lincoln, Walter Benton, Julian Priester, Booker Little and even Olatunji to record his monumental We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite. Nearly contemporaneous with the advent of what can truly be termed "Free Jazz," Roach’s work signaled a rising sense of political commitment among jazz artists following on the radical heels of the Bop generation, of which Roach had himself been a featured player (though Roach was an early resister of the Free Jazz assault upon harmony). Much as there was clearly a new political spirit abroad in the land as the resurgent Civil Rights movement gathered force, there was an evolving sense among the artists that their own creativity was moving in parallel to the creativity of the movement. In his volume This Is Our Music, which takes its title from a landmark Ornette Coleman album, Iain Anderson argues that jazz musicians were more and more coming to view their work in much the same way as Beats, abstract expressionists and San Francisco Renaissance poets, "not as self expression but as self alteration" (54). And, as Roach’s composition "Tears for Johannesburg" demonstrated, tracking closely with the demonstrations of the poets themselves (one thinks here of Baraka meeting Touré for the first time at a demonstration outside the United Nations), black musicians, poets and political activists all saw their work as part of a growing internationalist development. This was a progressive globalization in the wake of decolonization and the world-wide struggles for liberation

LEARNING RACE AND ETHNICITY

This week's mail brings a new volume in an ambitious study sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, a series of volumes examining issues in new media and education, published by MIT Press.

The volume seen here takes as its focus Race, Ethnicity and Youth, and is edited by Anna Everett, well known to long time readers of this blog, and indeed to me.

Here's the volume description from the press and a link to its Amazon listing:







Book Description
It may have been true once that (as the famous cartoon of the 1990s put it) "Nobody knows you're a dog on the Internet," and that (as an MCI commercial of that era declared) on the Internet there is no race, gender, or infirmity, but today, with the development of web cams, digital photography, cell phone cameras, streaming video, and social networking sites, this notion seems quaintly idealistic. This volume takes up issues of race and ethnicity in the new digital media landscape. The contributors address this topic--still difficult to engage honestly, clearly, empathetically, and with informed understanding in twenty-first century America--with the goal of pushing consideration of a vexing but important subject from margin to center.

Learning Race and Ethnicity explores the intersection of race and ethnicity with post 9/11 politics, online hate-speech practices, and digital youth and media cultures. It examines universal access and the racial and ethnic digital divide from the perspective of digital media learning and youth. The chapters treat such subjects as racial identity in the computer-mediated public sphere, minority technology innovators, new methods of music distribution, digital artist Judy Baca's work with youth, Native American digital media literacy, and minority youth technology access and the pervasiveness of online health information.

Contributors:
Ambar Basu, Graham D. Bodie, Dara N. Byrne, Jessie Daniels, Mohan J. Dutta, Raiford Guins, Guisela Latorre, Antonio López, Chela Sandoval, Tyrone D. Taborn, Douglas Thomas.

About the Author
Anna Everett is Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

LEARNING RACE AND ETHNICITY: YOUTH AND DIGITAL MEDIA

MLA Off-Site Reading - Dec. 28, 2007

"A Nation of Nothing but Poetry" - On Fire

This year the tradition of poets gathering around the meeting of the Modern Language Association, begun in Washington D.C. in 1989, continued in the grand quarters of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The announcment read "More than 50 Poets!," and so it was, the poetics of more. There were also tables featuring Chicago journals and presses, everything from Hotel Amerika to Third World Press.

Here's what it loooked like from my vantage point --

E-Readers: Ready for their Closeup?

I still remember with great clarity a conference panel some ten years ago on technology and pedagogy, in the course of which an all too smug colleague from another campus brandished his prized early-adopter electronic book at us and allowed as how those of us who still used WordPerfect and/or read actual- physical -codex books were almost hopelessly retrograde.The gadget he so lovingly waved at us was unwieldy, had a bad screen and, far more important, had no content on it that I could imagine myself caring about. (By the way, I continue to use WordPerfect.)

Still. I watched the development of the e-book from a safe distance, hoping all the while that the consumer electronics industry would one day pay attention to how people use their books. The situation was analogous to what I saw happening in the area of field recording. Throughout the era of tape, nearly all consumer electronics stores such as Good Guys and Circuit City stocked high end (but still affordable) portable tape recorders, the best and most popular being the Marantz deck and the Sony Walkman Pro. Either of these was capable of producing broadcast quality recordings in even the most challenging sound environments. But for some reason the industry paid no attention to this segment of the market during the long march to digital. Sure, profesisonals could get very pricey equipment from their specialist suppliers, but the rest of us were left staring dumbly at those racks of hideous "digital voice recorders" that all the stores display, most of which are really only good for recording a reminder to yourself to get bread on the way home from work. They are the digital equivalent of those once ubiquitous tape recorders with the row of big buttons and the pop-up cassette that produced sound just this side of unbearable. But finally, in the past two years, the industry has brought forward several really good flash memory recorders that make professional standard results available at prices the ordinary recordist can manage. The best of these are the Edirol R09 and the Zoom H2. Sony makes a great one as well, but theirs costs $2,000, so few of us will be using that device to record poetry readings.



Meanwhile, back in book world, little was happening. There were two major problems. (1) The electronic book industry for the most part did not make texts I cared about available. (2) The devices and their software sucked.



So it was with real interest that I read news reports of the advent of new readers based on electronic paper technology. I bought the Sony e-reader after reading several positive reviews and seeing one in a store. It was not known then that the Amazon Kindle would be available for Christmas this year. I now have both, and here's the lowdown.



There still isn't a lot of material I care about available, though there is much more than there had been. BUT, and this is what moved me to purchase these things, you can now place your own content on them. As someone who has been lugging manuscripts that I review for university presses around on airplanes, this alone makes these devices a godsend. I can now get that 900 page manuscript they want me to look at in electronic form and carry it in my briefcase or even in my coat pocket. And I can load the thing up with my own manuscripts, or any text that anybody can give me in a usable format.



Both devices are easy to set up and a delight to use. I'd give the edge to the Amazon Kindle, but here's my comparison:



The Sony e-reader doesn't have as many books in its on-line store, but is much easier to use with files you don't buy from Sony. As long as the file is in DOC, RTF or PDF format, you just drag the file into the Sony library software and drop it. That's it. Books you do buy from Sony download almost instantly and I have never once encountered any problems with the store or the software.



The downside (and this is one of the reasons I had never bought any earlier electronic books): while you can bookmark the text, you can't highlight or annotate it. I have been looking longingly at a similar device marketed in Europe that does permit highlighting and annotating, but that sucker costs $700 US, way too much for one of these things.



But that is also why I got so excited when I saw the list of features for the Amazon Kindle. You can highlight any text (and when you highlight it the selection is also automatically added to your "clippings" file, which means that you can pop it onto your computer and paste it into that essay you're writing as a quotation, or email it to someone you're having discussions with.) Some early-adopters have complained about the small keyboard that the Kindle has beneath its screen to enable all this note-making, but I haven't had any trouble with it at all. (There are also early complaints about the Kindle's button layout -- True enough, you will accidentally turn the page and curse it several times in your first day of use -- but once you get used to it, you probably will forget you ever had that problem.)



AND, the kindle has wireless technology. With your purchase, you're signed into a Sprint account that comes with no additional charges. This means that you can download books while sitting in the airport without having to pay for internet access. It also means that you can have subscriptions to participating papers and magazines delivered straight to your reader. This is a blessing beyond belief for people like me who have never been comfortable reading for long periods from my laptop. As someone who travels a great deal, and who lives part of the year in a town where I can't get any good newspaper delivered to my door on a daily basis, I would have bought the Kindle just for this feature. Every morning when I wake up, my New York Times and Washington Post are already waiting for me on my Kindle; at home, at the airport, in hotels. I've also subscribed to The Nation and the Atlantic, which can be had in this format for a pittance. It's true you don't get all the graphics of the hard copy (and I do miss the editorial cartoons), but that's a truly minor annoyance.



You can still put your own documents on the device, but you have to email them to yourself so that they can be converted to Kindle documents. And that's why I'll still be using my Sony e-reader quite a bit.

Both Sony and Amazon should provide better covers for these things. The one that comes with the Sony is awkward, but there's a much better one you can buy that I'm quite happpy with. The cover that comes with the kindle is cheap looking on the inside, but it turns out to hold the device far more securely than it looks like it will.

One odd thing Amazon's designers did was to put the power and wireless buttons on the back of the thing. This means that you have to take it out of its cover any time you need to turn it off. Most of us who have subscriptions will probably just leave it on all the time, but we still have to access these buttons when flying etc. I hope the next model will move these to the front or side. The Sony's power switch is conveniently located on the side.



There are two general drawbacks remaining with both devices, drawbacks I hope will be addressed soon. There is still, even at Amazon, not enough content beyond the usual run of best sellers. Amazon does get the edge here, as you can find work by Derrida and Wittgenstein, poetry by Ashbery, collections of literary criticism, etc. But then the pricing issue comes to the fore. You're in great shape if you want a copy of something like Tuesdays with Morrie or The DaVinci Code. Most books sell for just under ten bucks, or about what you'd pay in a normal used book store. The big issue for me is that many of the more specialized books, especially from university presses, cost a lot more. If I have to pay $29.95 and up for a book, I damn well want the physical object to shelve in my library. I suspect (heck, I know) the problem here is with the publishers, not with Amazon. Publishers will kill this potential revenue stream if they don't wake up. I would purchase MOST of my books of criticism, philosophy etc. in electronic format if the pricing was similar to that of commercial presses (roughly half price). Very few people will pay nearly the same price for the virtual book as they would pay for the hard copy book. If the publishers will give an inch on pricing, I think they will find an eager market waiting for them.



The other general drawback has to do with the amount of trust we have to place in the industry to use this technology. When I buy a book, I can read it forever no matter what happens to the publisher. When I buy the electronic book, I have to pray that the company will stay in business and will continue to support the software. Given recent history, that's not a very comforting proposition.

That's also a reason to hope that Amazon will get right and handle files the same way that Sony permits. There is no reason that a user should have to go through any conversion or emailing at all. The Kindle needs to allow users simply to drag and drop any file in common formats like DOC, RTF or PDF and stop this nonsense about conversion. If Amazon makes that change soon, then Sony will be foreced to play catch-up.

Bottom line: the Amazon Kindle's wireless feature makes it the hands down winner. It's a beautiful machine. I just finished reading DECONSTRUCTION AND PRAGMATISM on it and am eagerly awaiting the next issue of THE NATION.

I'll still use my SONY, primarily for carrying and reading texts not purchased from their store. But if Amazon would just make that one alteration, I'd be selling my Sony e-reader on ebay. Publishers and the content providing industry need to wake up to the realities of today's community of users. They cannot afford to make the same horrific mistakes the music industry has made. Make the texts easy to use and certain to remain readable no matter what, and most of us will happily increase our purchases. Someone who loves reading enough to buy one of these machines is already buying lots of books. A sensible approach to pricing and file management will lead to more purchases. I just bought Claire Colebrook's IRONY -- and there's the new NATION showing up now --

MODERNISM STUDIES (and so can you!)

For years I've been wanting to attend the annual meeting of the Modernism Studies Association, but had always been prevented by schedule conflicts. This year, the claendar free at last, I headed for Long Beach and the convening of the Modernists. One highlight, of which I have no photos, was the gala reception on the Queen Mary, docked there at Long Beach and shown in suitably abstract form in the above illustration.

The panel I spoke on was organized by Michael Bibby to address questions of the racial formation of modernist studies. My own paper, titled "White Mischief," examined efforts by white scholars to recuperate the racism of major modernist poets. Grant Jenkins spoke from his work in progress on ethics and and innovative African American poets, with a careful study of Nathaniel Mackey and the ethical formation of modernism. Michael Bibby's own talk, "An Aristocracy of Culture: The Disciplinarity of Modernist Whiteness," was a long overdue anatomy of the field. We were ably chaired by Tenley Gwen, who I was meeting for the first time.



On the final morning of the conference, I took my turn chairing, on a session that musician/scholar Rob Wallace put together, "Journeys through Modernist Geography in Jazz, Poetry and Architecture," featuring papers by Robert Bennett, Derek Katz, Evan Willner and Rob Wallace.

The keynotes were a great success this year: one by Marjorie Perloff featuring her work and friendships with Brazil's major concrete poets, and another by Thadious Davis, who spoke on technologies of representing the black body in modernism, a talk that included rare footage filmed by Zora Neale Hurston as part of her anthropology field work.

NIELS HAV

In recent months I've enjoyed an internet correspondence with Danish poet Niels Hav. Seeing my name on-line, Hav immediately spotted a kinship. (Meanwhile here in the states, I continue to be plagued by people who must think I'm a Swede or Norwegian who doesn't know how to spell his own name.) Hav recently made a brief reading tour in the U.S., which I was sad to miss. Reports indicate that he met with a warm reception when reading in New York. We've done what all poets do, exchange books. I'm sorry to report that none of my work has ever been translated into Danish, but there is a new selection of Hav's poetry in English, WE ARE HERE, available from Book Thug in Toronto. The poems were translated by Patrick Friesen and P.K. Brask. Hav notes, in thanking his translators, that "Danish is a small language spoken by only 5-6 million people." I suspect at least 4 million of those people are Nielsens.

Here, from WE ARE HERE, is "Epigram":

You can spend an entire life

in the company of words

not ever finding

the right one.

Just like a wretched fish

wrapped in Hungarian newspapers.

For one thing it is dead,

for another it doesn't understand

Hungarian.