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.

On Beyond Stupid

I've been thinking over my own contacts with police officers over the years. One incident in particular comes to mind -- I'd been stopped on the street by a particularly aggressive officer who wanted me to go to the office with him. (This was one of those very hot D.C. summer days -- I still think he was just looking for an excuse to get back to the air conditioning.) When I asked if I was under arrest, he responded: "Would you like to be?"

That's the sort of abuse of police power that we're facing in the Cambridge incident.

There was something about the arresting officer's report that had me puzzled until I read David Savage's column in this morning's Los Angeles Times.

Sgt. Crowley's report lets us know that Prof. Gates was arrested outside his house. In that photograph you have all seen multiple times by now of Dr. Gates handcuffed (and by the way, the fact that his hands are cuffed in front of him, rather than behind his back, is the give-away that nobody on the scene thought he was any sort of threat), you will note that Gates is literally just a step outside his own doorway. There could be all sorts of explanations for that, but I think Savage is on to the real explanation.

In Crowley's report, he states that Gates had been "yelling very loud" and accusing him of "being a racist." The report then states that Crowley complained the "acoustics of the kitchen" made it difficult to communicate, and so, Crowley says, he "told Gates that I would speak with him outside." Do you begin to see what's going on here? I've never been in Dr. Gates's kitchen, but I seriously doubt that there's any problem hearing clearly in that room, at least not so much of a problem that stepping outside might be an improvement. Crowley's report makes much of the fact that Gates continued his loud talk outside, while his own report reveals that they were only outside at Crowley's insistence.

As Savage reports in his article on the latitude that "disorderly conduct" laws afford the police, Massachusetts courts, and those in several other states, have held that "disorderly acts or language" must take place in public where others can be disturbed in order for an arrest to be lawful.

And there you have the real explanation for the oddities of Crowley's report and the photograph. Savage quotes Boston University law professor Terry Maclin as saying: "I would not say it's constitutional to arrest someone in his home just for being loud and abusive to a police officer. That's why the cop asked him to come outside, where he could be arrested for being disorderly in public."

The Unbearable Stupidity

Like President Obama and Gov. Patrick, I am not in possession of all the facts surrounding the arrest of Dr. Henry Gates in Cambridge.

I am, however, in possession of Sgt. Crowley's report of the incident as it has been republished in the newspapers.

Even if you take Sgt. Crowley entirely at his word and believe everything he says, there is no defense for his arrest of Dr. Gates.

According to Sgt. Crowley's own report, he had already concluded that Dr. Gates was the owner of the house prior to placing him under arrest.

According to Sgt. Crowley, Dr. Gates was not engaging in any behavior that involved anyone other than Sgt. Crowley.

According to Sgt. Crowley's own report, Dr. Gates had at no time attempted to make any physical contact with Sgt. Crowley.

Even if you believe absolutely every word of Sgt. Crowley's report, it is clear that whatever tumultuous speech act Dr. Gates may have been conducting would have ended had Sgt. Crowley simply departed. There is nothing in the report that indicates that Dr. Gates was a danger or even an inconvenience to anyone else.

The inescapable conclusion is that that Henry Gates was arrested for mouthing off to an officer.

For seven years I was employed in law enforcement, as a guard at a hospital and as a campus police officer. During those years I had to deal with many unhappy and loud people. I never arrested any of them.

Obama had it right. This arrest was beyond stupid.

NEW BOOK ON BOB DYLAN

A couple years ago, Colleen Sheehy and others organized a major conference on the life and works of Bob Dylan, sponsored by the University of Minnesota in conjunciton with a traveling exhibit on Dylan that was on display in the university's gallery. Now Sheehy has co-edited with Thomas Swiss this new book, Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World. The press describes this volume as "the first cultural and historical geography of [Dylan's] dramatic rise, storied career, and unmatched iconic status." The editors' project is to map "the terrain of Bob Dylan's music in the world."

A large ambition, granted, and the scope of the contributors and topics is equally far-reaching. You will find here such established Dylan scholars as C.P. Lee (writing on the British reception of Dylan), Greil Marcu (on Dylan's home town) and poet Anne Waldman (who went on the road with the Rolling Thunder Review, and writes here on Dylan and the Beats). Other contributions include a chapter from Gayle Wald and Daphne Brooks on women's covers of Dylan songs, Mick Cochrane on Theme Time Radio, Thomas Crow on Dylan and Warhol, Alessandro Carrera and Mikiko Tachi on Dylan's recpetion in Italy and Japan respectively, Robert Reginio on minstrelsy and the cultural economy of race in late Dylan, Kevin Dettmar on Dylan in the classroom, and many others. This is by no means simply a record of the previous conference. My own chapter, for instance, is an entirely different paper from the one I presented in Minneapolis. (That presentation, on Dylan and video, will have to reappear in a different form that will make sense to readers who don't have access to all the videos I referenced.) "Crow Jane Approximately" is an essay in which I sketch out Dylan's lyric engagement with race, making connections to such conteporaries as Amiri Baraka.

Click here for the Minnesota page for this book. Highway 61 Revisited is available through Amazon as well.

Sotomayor Sessions

After watching two days of the confirmation hearings, I can only conclude that the Republican Senators have neglected to learn the lesson of the law of unintended consequences.

The more the likes of Sessions, Graham and Kyl have at her, the more they demonstrate that Sonia Sotomayor is, as it turns out, a wise Latina.

MODERATING RACISM

By now you've probably heard about the string of racist comments that were posted at the Free Republic web site when the editors posted this photo of Malia Obama and invited visitors to offer captions. What has proved more interesting to me than the string of insane, racist invective Free Republic unleashed among their posse, though, has been the site's defenses of its response.

The first line of defense seems to be attack.. You know, along the lines of briefly acknowledging that these racist comments may have been "over the line" but then immediately leading to a lengthy diatribe about leftists who supposedly remained silent as Sarah Palin's children were viciously attacked by other leftists. That's the drill and we can't expect anything more original from those quarters.

But some times the defense is more revealing than it may intend. I just saw an official spokesperson for Free Republic appearing on MSNBC. Predictably, he started out by claiming that the posted comments weren't as bad as has been represented (google it; I think you'll find it difficult to exaggerate just how vile these people are). Then, defending the web site's "system," the spokesperson stated that this is a moderated site.

In other words, one or more of the volunteer moderators at the site had eyeballed these racist rants before they went live, and had thought they were just fine.

Ain't it great to live in a postracial society?!

KINDLE DX

Since getting my first Amazon Kindle, I've advised the curious who have asked me that unless they were likely to use a Kindle on a daily basis, it would be wise to wait for a second iteration of the device, likely to be both improved and less expensive. I was thinking of the anger many early adopters of the iPhone felt at the way they'd been suckered by Apple.

Amazon turns out to have learned both the good and the bad of product improvement and release from Apple. A while back they offered the Kindle 2, which was indeed improved, but was no less expensive. I held off, quite pleased with my original Kindle. Then Amazon released the larger format DX, shortly thereafter dropping the price of the standard issue Kindle.

Take that, early adopters.

But I made a quick calculation, realized that my first Kindle had already more than paid for itself just in the savings its electronic versions of my newspaper and magazine subscriptions had brought me over the hard copy delivery price, and so I put my name on the list to get one of the first DX devices.

Like the Kindle 2, the DX has a slightly improved e-paper system. It didn't seem to me that the page-turn was significantly faster. On the other hand, the device proper is faster; in particular, the download time for my newspapers, magazines and books is markedly imrpoved.

I really like the larger format screen -- It has been advertised as being specially designed for newspaper and magazine reading, but what I like is that it makes the book reading experience more like a "real" book -- reading on the first Kindle was not as annoying as trying to read a book on my cell phone, but it was still a mild annoyance to have to do a page turn every paragraph or so. Having just finished reading the Michael Thomas novel Man Gone Down in its Kindle version (which now keeps tab at the bottom of the screen on what percentage of the total text you have read so far), I can report that the reading experience is even more comfortable than on the earlier model. Further, when I am giving a lecture somewhere, I like to use my Kindle as a sort of teleprompter. This bigger screen is ideal for the purpose. I much prefer this to reading from a laptop perched on the lectern.

Here are the cons, in my view: Amazon is all too Apple-like in its approach to marketing and pricing. The prices of many of the books are creeping upwards. Likewise, the small price Amazon charges for emailing your documents for conversion to your Kindle is creeping up. It's insulting to early adopters to drop the price of the Kindle after just a few months (though I suppose early adopting has to be seen as its own reward any more). Also like Apple, Amazon has now sealed off the battery so that you cannot replace it yourself. While the new battery lasts longer than the original, this is still entirely unacceptable. With the original Kindle, I could carry a spare battery to switch out when I didn't have an opportunity to recharge the device. Truly heavy users will miss this option. It's true that the battery will last a long time if all you do is read -- but if you are using the download function at all you will drain the battery much more quickly. Amazon has also eliminated the memory card slot that was on the original (and let me add that the "cons" I am listing were all introduced with the Kindle 2). The memory of the DX is impressive; this thing can hold an entire library. Still, I miss being able to carry odd things on the memory card and poping it in and out at will.

Neither pro nor con, the feature that will "read" a book out loud to you. If your text has any sort of specialized vocabulary, you will get a good laugh from listening to Kindle's pronunciation. This thing is not going to replace audio books any time soon. But this won't be a terribly important feature to many people anyway. Though I hasten to add that I look forward to the day when an improved Kindle will read BEING AND TIME to me as I drive to the beach.

But there are many "pros" in addition to the faster download speed and the larger screen. You can load PDFs directly to the device and read them "natively" now. (And you can still email document files to the device that will be converted to Amazon's peculiar format.) The new arrangement of the keys and buttons makes it far less likely that you will change pages accidentally. Some users have complained about the smaller buttons on the keyboard, but I find them easier to use than the earlier buttons. The highlighting function is much improved now. You can highlight exactly the passages you want, rather than the boxes you were stuck making on the old one. And one of the neatest tricks the DX does is that, like the newer cell phones, you can turn it on its side and use landscape view. That is good for reading many graphs, but also, as you can see in the illustration, makes this a great device for reading, of all things, music. The cover that came with the original Kindle was pathetic, so they started selling the Kindles without covers! I had purchased a really cool leather cover for my old Kindle from a British company. Amazon now sells its own leather cover for the DX -- it's pricey, but it's nice. I would advise getting one, though I'm sure somebody will start marketing an even more impressive cover shortly.

Things Amazon needs to do for us:

Rejigger the audio book function. At present it only works with one proprietary audio book company's product. Anything else you have to put on the device as an MP3 and listen to the same way you'd listen to music.

Go back to a removable battery and memory card.

AND MOST OF ALL, work with the publishers and convince them they should not follow the disastrous path of the recording industry. Unlike files you put on the Kindle yourself, books you buy from Amazon come in a ludicrous proprietary format, which means that you can't read them on any other device. E-books need to be like MP3 files, readable on ANY device, transportable from one machine to another. Yes, this means that someone can give a copy to someone else, but they are going to be able to do that anyway. Anything can and will be scanned and passed around in time. People who buy Kindles are people who already buy lots of books. They will buy even more if the experience is as easy and as portable as what we have had with the sturdy codex format all these generations.

WILSON HARRIS - HEARTLAND

It was Gregory Rigsby who first put the name of Wilson Harris in front of me. Rigsby was the professor for the first course in Caribbean Literature I ever took, as an undergraduate at Federal City College. All of the names on the syllabus were new to me; all were artists I am still reading and studying these many years later.

The problem, then as now, was getting the books. The syllabus called for us to read PALACE OF THE PEACOCK by Harris. Even though Harris was published by so esteemed a press as Faber and Faber, it turned out that the book couldn't be gotten in the U.S. in those days, and so we didn't read that novel after all . But, already a haunter of used book markets, I turned up a used copy at a store over in Georgetown. Within pages, I knew I had to talk to Dr. Rigsby about what I was reading, and I knew I wanted to read everything Harris had published.

Thanks to C.L.R. James, who loaned me his copies (including those that were autographed presentation copies given him by Harris himself), I was able to read through all of the novels published up to that date. And thanks to book dealer Barry Alpert, I was eventually able to get my own copies of many of those early Faber and Faber editions.

Then, for a period of about a decade, a fair amount of Harris suddenly was on the shelves of American book stores. You could get the paperback GUYANA QUARTET, for example, which reprinted his first four books, and the most recent novels were also available. But that ended soon enough. The last one that I saw in stores was the incomparable JONESTOWN, which I reviewed for Nate Mackey's journal HAMBONE.

And then again, no Harris in the States. The more recent books have not been circulated at all here. If you want to read anything other than his non-fiction collection from Routledge, you have to import the book through Amazon UK or something. Even then, some of the older books are no longer available, even on the used book market.

Which is why it is such spectacular news that Wilson Harris's HEARTLAND, which had long been unavailable (unless you wanted to spend a considerable amount of money to get it from a rare book dealer) has now been returned to print by PEEPAL PRESS.

This new edition is part of the press' CARIBBEAN MODERN CLASSICS series and comes with a brief note from the author and an introduction by Michael Mitchell. In much the way that Harris's first four novels formed a GUYANA QUARTET, HEARTLAND is seen by its author as part of a trilogy that includes TUMATUMARI and THE SLEEPERS OF RORAIMA, and so its return to print is a boon for those (like me) who have had to read the latter two novels without ever having clapped eyes on their namesake predecessor.

The peepal Tree Press website is well worth a visit, so follow this link. You'll find available there such luminaries as Jan Carew, Edgar Mittelholzer, Earl Lovelace, Marion Patrick Jones, V.S. Reid, and many others. You'll also find there the announcement of a rediscovery, to be published next year: Elma Napier's A FLYING FISH WHISPERED, which is a 1938 Dominican novel featuring what the press terms "one of the most delightfully feisty women characters in Caribbean fiction." Perhaps a cousin of C.L.R. James's Maisie?!

Public/Private Option Explained

Q. DEAR NIELSEN:

What's all this I'm hearing about Republicans and a "public/private option"?

--Confused in D.C.

A.

Dear CDC:

Always glad to help out with the confusion.

For many years, conservatives both in and out of government circles, including such think-tanks as Enterprise and Heritage, have been lobbying heavily (and spending millions of dollars on the effort) to bring about a public/private option. The argument they have made as consistently as conservatives have ever argued for anything is that only competition between a public option and the private sector can bring about the improvements that we so desperately need. Only a healthy competition between the public sector and the private sector can bring into being the sort of market efficiencies that lead to the best results and the greatest savings. So strongly have Republicans in particular felt about this crying need that they have been willing to divert billions of dollars in tax payer funding to support public/private option systems. The conservative position has been that nothing short of tax-supported competition between a public option and multiple private options can save us from the current unsatisfactory dispensation.

Despite numerous independent studies that have shown few demonstrable benefits from such systems when they have been tried, conservatives cling tenaciously (one might say almost bitterly) to their dream of competition between a public option and public-financing for private options in K-12 education.

Does that help, CDC?

Q. Hey -- I was talking about health care, not schools!

A. Oh . . . so sorry. That's completely different, isn't it.

1/2 a Poem for David Bromige

(San Jose to Louisville -- 1989)

No one can tell you

Not to listen

With half an eye to fate

Another

Half occluded

Any one had

Half a heart

Would hear

What snow amounts to

Above a city's profits

An attendant

Face angled into light as

She lifts into heaven

Ahead

[She loves to hear him

Whisper "solipsism" in her ear]

Pressure we share

Attendant upon

Arising

A mother draws

Four of each for

Her two children

Who persist

In saying "seven"

Sentences take more time

As our shadow

Across snow

Flying etches

AMERICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION 2009

well . . . literal minded in Boston, I'd thought I'd stumbled into a place that worshiped jazz; turns out they just used jazz in their worship . . . but still . . . 

That made a fine backdrop to the meeting of the ALA.

Each year at the conference, the African American Literature and Culture Society presents the Stephen Henderson Award for contributions to the literary arts.  This year's award went to Elizabeth Alexander, who had read at an ALA panel in San Diego many years ago alongside Sherley Anne Williams, with a critical response from Marcellus Blount.  Elizabeth read at the Obama Inauguration back in January and we had the bilingual edition of her poem on hand for the eager readers of the ALA.  Back in 1986, Elizabeth was a winner of the Larry Neal Award.  The first Larry Neal winner for poetry, in 1983, was one A.L. Nielsen.  It was a distinct pleasure to share a podium with her on this occasion.

Among the new features at this year's conference, new author societies devoted to the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Pauline Hopkins.




An exciting development this year for those of us in poetry studies in addition to a Dunbar Society, the appearance of a new society that takes as its object of study the work of the New York School of poets.

DIG

More than two decades after The Music, the last major collection of Amiri Baraka's writings on jazz, comes Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, from the University of California Press.  Taking its place on the shelf alongside Blues People and Black Music, this volume brings us Baraka's reflections, reviews and concert experiences from the late eighties to the late now.  In any such collection there is bound to be some repetition, and that is true here, but the book will introduce you to musicians you probably haven't heard before  (I had somehow missed Rodney Kendrick till reading of him in these pages), give you a new perspective on artists who have come to prominence more recently (Vijay Iyer) and offer surprising takes on music you thought you knew (check out Baraka's musings on the late music of Miles Davis).  And it is always rewarding to witness the evolution of Baraka's thoughts on these subjects.

The book also features a treasury of photographs, such as this cover illustration that shows Baraka at the front steps of the Black Arts Repertory Theater School in 1965. If you look closely, you'll see that the fellow at the top of the stairs wearing a white cap is Sun Ra.  

For all you bibliographers, here's an interesting twist.  Unlike so many of his books from the late 60s to just a few years ago, neither the cover nor the copyright page of this book makes any reference to Baraka's earlier name.  Where The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka splits his life around that act of renaming, this book is simply presented to us as written by Amiri Baraka.  (Though I note that he remains "Imamu" in the LOC catalogue data on the copyright page.)

Order the book here or pick up a copy at your local independent book store.  I got mine at Bridge Street Books in D.C. -- 

SIR PAUL

Another good colleague is on his way out of State College.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     One of the people I've been happiest to know since coming to Penn State is Paul Youngquist.  Long-time followers of this blog will remember seeing him playing with his jazz band in earlier scenes from around town.  Paul is a tremendous scholar and critic.  His essay on Amiri Baraka and Science Fiction in the special issue of African American Review dedicated to Baraka's work is a model of insight and instigation.  His two powerful books on Blake and on monstrosities (do I repeat myself?) are significant contributions to studies in Romanticism.  A few years ago Paul co-taught a graduate seminar on Free Jazz with Billy Joe Harris, which culminated in a performance of the reunited New York Art Quartet.  And his guitar playing was something I will miss almost as much as I'll miss talking to him every day around here.

Paul is off to another of my old stomping grounds, Boulder, Colorado, where he will join the English Department at U of Colorado, being a Romanticist under the Flat Irons, dropping by Naropa, enjoying the expanded opportunities for jazz that he will find in the Boulder/Denver region.

SEVERAL GRAVITIES

Clearly one of the most beautiful books of the year, Keith Waldrop's Several Gravities combines Waldrop's distinctive writings with a collection of the collage work he has been producing for years, mostly visible till now on the covers of a series of poetry volumes from Burning Deck Press.

            Perfection

demands images at

strategic intervals, something

steady on which to

map the random. My world

is in disorder. Like-

wise my schedule. I

live within 

acceptable 

tolerances. At the

intersection of innumerable

fantasies. Irreconcilables

point me to

my orient. Ambiguous

suns. A shower of

elementaries. Venus rising

from the nutrient broth.

Accidents of sensual

logic. Fringes of

interference. That

doorbell.

Browse your way over to Siglio Press for more information on this book.