HUGH WALTHALL, POET 1948-2015

"Hugh Walthall is our most recent version to Han Shan, the whickering divine of early days. From his mountain as taxi dispatcher in Washington, D.C., Walthall diespenses what he has found, the sounds of frying wires and wireless, the crisp, crinkling metal-burns that reduce to ash any wire that can't flood with reality and resistance to reality. The wires that survive and reveal reality Walthall moves over into the quickness of his lines which tingle, fry, burn with the voltages of perception, wit and word." 
             -- A.R. Ammons

Years ago I found myself sitting next to Hugh Walthall at a Richard Howard poetry reading. As Howard walked to the front of the room to begin, he paused at our row, laid a hand on Hugh's shouler, and with a warm smile asked why he hadn't seen more of Hugh's poetry in print just lately. "I don't want to risk losing my amateur standing," Hugh replied. Laughing, Howard told Hugh he was no amateur. 

How was it that Richard Howard knew of this poet you've probably never heard of? A very young Hugh Walthall burst into print (after first publishing letters to Downbeat magazine as a precocious teen critic) with poems in places like American Review, a lit journal you could buy at a drug store magazine rack.  From "Mr. Grover Greens Defines Two Trains and Rides One."

the way the thing work
they got two trains runnin
the one run at midnight
the other run just before day--
you got to listen to what kind
of noise you got in the dark
before you get on the train--
                                              cause
once you on that train all
you gonna hear is the train
noise--

When he was published in American Review 18, Walthall was in the company of such writers as Gunter Grass, Susan Sontag, Muriel Rukeyser, Heather McHugh, Marilyn Hacker, Phillip Roth and Hayden Carruth, not a one of whom worte anything like the way Hugh did.

So by 1978, Hugh was able to get his first book, ladidah, out from Ithaca House, a press that counts among its poets Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Tom Mandel, William J. Harris, C.S. Giscombe, David McAleavey, and so many more. Us D.C. folk especially liked that snow-capped gargoyle on the cover -- made us feel right at row house home.

 from "Breaking up Is Hard to Do"

it was a gingerbread house all right and

the doorknobs were ice cream

what good was it to anyone except

the fat dog whose pleasure

it was to slurp it all up

I hope you will be very happy

I hope your father dies

I know he loves you very much

In addition to the Journal of Pomposity and Shoddy Thinking, Hugh was the publisher editor of Sex with Frankenstein. Each only lasted one issue; the latter has the advantage of having contents. (The JPST was only a cover.) 

More to the point, Hugh was, along with the still very lively Richard Flynn, the founding publisher/editor of SOS Books (Sultan of Swat), who published my first book of any kind, Heat Strings. The first SOS book was Beth Joselow's April Wars, the second was Joan Retallack's Circumstantial Evidence. The latter title always struck me as more than usually appropriate for the press. SOS got its first backing from the U.S. Government. It wasn't grant money. Hugh, along with several others, got a small settlement for having been the subject of a false arrest during anti-war protests.

SOS pretty much ground to a halt, as is the way with so many small presses.  We couldn't really expect Hugh to go get himself arrested again to replenish the coffers.

 He never stopped writing. I was happy to include his "Proposed Renovations to Paradise" in the first issue of my long ago zine, lower limit speech. I thought Hugh's plans just heavenly. 

Speaking of the after life, when we all saw the tumult around the funeral for the Ayatollah Khomeini, around his body for that matter, Hugh opined that the Ayatollah's funeral arrangements had been the recently deceased Lucille Ball's first assignment as an angel. I'm waiting to see what angel Hugh's first task will be.

I've tried a few times to interest small press publishers in Hugh's later work, but no luck so far.  Still, I'll keep at it; one day we'll have a Hugh Walthall book -- Then we can all put on Greek masks and read it together.

Why Arthur C. Brooks Is Afraid of Research

Today's New York Times carries an Op Ed by Arthur C. Brooks titled "Academia's Rejection of Diversity." Brooks is the President of the American Enterprise Institute and, as the NYT puts it, a contributing opinion writer. Must be nice to be a contributing opinion writer.

If, like me, you have concerns about academia's faltering efforts in the area of diversity, you would probably make a point of reading this op ed. If, like me, you've read Brooks in the past, you might expect that this op ed would be yet another attack on the supposed liberal bias of the university. The argument is, once again, that academia has no interest in diversity of ideas. Somehow this argument is always constructed around partisan identifications rather than around arguments that truly address diversity of ideas.

But here's the real issue -- Like so many others who have advanced this argument over the decades, Brooks plays fast and loose with his examples. Take this paragraph, for instance:

" In one classic experiment from 1975, a group of scholars was asked to evaluate one of two research papers that used the same statistical methodology to reach opposite conclusions. One version “found” that liberal political activists were mentally healthier than the general population; the other paper, otherwise identical, was set up to “prove” the opposite conclusion. The liberal reviewers rated the first version significantly more publishable than its less flattering twin."

In the preceding discussion, Brooks had named a particular researcher in the Netherlands who had faked data. Brooks offers no evidence that this fraud had anything at all to do with the subject Brooks is discussing. He concedes that ideologically motivated fraud (like voter ID fraud at the polling place?) is rare, so why is this example offered?

To set up his argument regarding "unconscious bias that creeps in when everyone thinks the same way."

That would be a problem, but the paragraph I quote here doesn't really make the case.  Where he had identified the specific research in the previous example, here he tells us nothing other than the claim that he is discussing a "classic experiment from 1975."  This experiment is such a classic that in several efforts at googling I can't find any sign of it. I am not suggesting that the experiment didn't happen, I'm suggesting that without knowing more than what Brooks is willing to reveal, we have no way of judging the  validity of the experiment or of the conclusions Brooks would have us draw.

But look at what he says in describing the experiment. He tells us nothing about how "conservative reviewers" in this experiment performed. He tells us nothing about the researchers, about their selection criteria for subjects, about the way that "liberal" or "conservative" was defined either in the grouping of reviewers or in the "paper" itself.  AND, there is no mention here about any sort of control group. In the absence of such information, it is impossible to make any judgments whatsoever about his example.

For that matter, there is something deeply wrong in what he tells us of this classic experiment. If the same data were used to support opposite conclusions, then one version of the "paper" should in truth be more convincing than the other. (They could be equally unconvincing, but how are we to know in the absence of any access to the experiment?)

But in the end, Brooks is driving his audience to exactly the phenomenon he is arguing against. Without even the most minimal information required to make a valid judgment regarding this experiment, readers will most likely judge it based upon their own ideological leanings.

Pot, meet kettle.

COUNTING THE MILES UNTIL WE GET IT RIGHT - E. Ethlbert Miller - The Aldon Nielsen Project #15

Q. There have been movies about James Brown, Jimi Hendrix – a film on Miles Davis in the works. Do these movies make it difficult to teach their music to a new generation? Are there any African American writers whose lives should be placed on the big screen?

I have to say, I’m worried . . . again.

The trailer for Miles Ahead is beautiful. Some of the scenes are clearly designed from extant photos of Miles at work in the studio. We see him leaning over the piano, working through the composition with Gil Evans. We see the iconic image of Miles, seated on his stool amidst the many musicians on the sessions, leading the company towards what was going to turn out to be one of the most genre defying and form defining performances in the history of the music. Cheadle manages, at least in the trailer, to use his own voice in a way that suggests Davis’s hoarse whisper without tripping into caricature.

Cheadle is a tested and brilliant actor. What we see in the trailer is inspiring. So why am I worried? Because I’ve seen those other films, and so many like them.

If all you’d seen of the Hendrix film had been a trailer, you might have felt good about that one. Andre Benjamin didn’t seem a bad choice for the lead, despite earlier film fiascos, despite not knowing how to play a guitar (in a film that calls upon him to fake it left handed). When word came that the Hendrix estate wasn’t cooperating, I began to think the script might not be what I would hope for. My bigger worry in that regard was that the screenplay was coming from John Ridley.

If you’ve seen 12 Years a Slave, you might know why I wouldn’t have chosen Ridley for the Hendrix project. For one thing, too many people forget that there was an earlier film of 12 Years a Slave, released in 1984 under the title Solomon Northup’s Oddyssey. That earlier film, which aired on public television’s American Playhouse series, was directed by no less than Gordon Parks. The script, based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 book, was written by Lou Potter and Samm-Art Williams. Both films deviate in places from Northup’s narrative. It would be impossible to be entirely faithful to such a book in a film of a couple hours duration, and I have never been one to demand absolute fidelity in an adaptation. On the other hand, there is poetic license and there is desecration. Think of what Hollywood did to Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury on first attempt. (We have another version of that coming, saints preserve us.)

Yes, both films alter what Northup had written. But keep in mind we’re not talking about the adaptation of a novel,. As with the Miles Davis and Hendrix films, we’re talking about the adaptation of an historical figure’s life. In Ridley’s retelling of this masterpiece of autobiography, Northup’s wife is erased from the great final scene of reunion with his family. This could have been a tense and dramatic scene simply by following the lead of Northup’s book, and there seems no reason within the dynamics of the film for this erasure to have happened. But far worse than the erasure of Northup’s wife is the insertion of an egregious bit of sexual suggestion. Early in the film, as Northup has been kidnapped into slavery and is being transported, Ridley and the director, Steve McQueen, take it upon themselves to add an element of sexual intimacy with a stranger that not only never happened, but would seem surpassingly unlikely within the very situation the film is depicting. Why is this scene in the movie? It has nothing to do with depicting the ways in which people in bondage created opportunities for themselves to have intimacy, family, love, all of which are shown much more realistically and movingly elsewhere in the film.

There has been a long-standing fixation upon black sexuality in mainstream film, and the mostly British production of this American classic continued that daft and deleterious tradition.

As have the preponderance of films about African American musicians, mixed well with extended scenes of drug taking and alcohol consumption, etc. Again, I am not suggesting that such things didn’t happen or that bio pics should pretend they did not. But I am suggesting that mainstream film has made these things the centerpiece of their telling of African American music history for far too long. The recent Queen Latifah flic about Bessie Smith is a telling instance. Watching that movie, you’d be hard pressed to know why so many have been so moved by Smith’s music. You seldom get to hear more than a snippet of a song. Clint Eastwood’s movie about Charlie Parker, already marred by having such flubs as a flashback inside of which another person has their own flashback, gives us a Bird who is really only about dissipation. The Hendrix movie flunks on just this score. Those of us who saw Hendrix during his life time hoped for a film that would convey something of his virtuosity and brilliance. What we got was a film about a guy who beats women up, crushing their faces with telephones. And of course, when you make a film about a recent musician, there will still be people on the scene who know the truth of what happened. In this case, the very woman depicted getting abused by Hendrix has testified repeatedly that none of this ever happened. So why is it there?

Given what we know of Miles’s own histories of drug use and violence towards women, all of which was detailed in his own autobiography (though there are reasons to mistrust even some of that representation), can we trust the current project to give us a Miles, moral blemishes and all, who is really about the thing that made him worth attending to in the first place. Will we get, at long last, a movie about an important musical artist that conveys something of the drama of composition, the excitement of improvisation, the kind of musical transcendence DuBois describes so well in many of his writings? (While waiting for the new Miles movie, you might go back and watch A Man Called Adam, a film that centers on a Miles-like character, and that features Cicely Tyson – The movie has its own problems, but is interesting to see in light of the approaching release.)

But no, these films have not really caused any problems for me when I am teaching my students about the music, because they aren’t about the music, though they cause problems when you try to talk about the life.

When Motown was making Lady Sings the Blues, I was puzzled by their casting Diana Ross in the lead. When I went to the movie, I spent the first several minutes thinking, “that didn’t happen – that was somebody else – where is that coming from?” But then I realized that the way to watch that particular film was to forget everything you knew about Billie Holiday. To forget that there had ever been a Billie Holiday, and just try to appreciate the film as a movie. Still, Motown gave us a Billie Holiday who was a mass of symptoms. Where was the mastery of voice; where was the triumph of phrasing; where was the invention of new relationships to melody and rhythm? Watching Lady Sings the Blues, would you really know why Lester Young always wanted to play with her?

So I will go to the Miles movie, hoping that Cheadle and company will avoid the usual pitfalls and really give us a cinematic Miles, the man who changed the face of music at least three times in one life. Yes, Miles beat Cicely Tyson, something for which he could never really atone. Yes, Miles fell into the grip of drugs. But that is not the reason we want to see a film about Miles; we can watch reruns of The Wire if that’s what we’re after.

And so – there should be major movies about DuBois (hell, there should be four or five movies about DuBois) – about Hughes, about Hurston, about Wheatley, about Harper (Frances and Michael!) About Baraka for sure – I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a Gil Scott Heron film one day. (Please don’t let Common anywhere near that project!) But I’m not hopeful I’ll live to see these films, and given the track record to date, I’m not sure I want to see them.

Will the African American experimental film makers please step forward!

(By the way, Billy Woodberry is set to premiere his documentary on Bob Kaufman, a project about which I am considerably more optimistic. Now there was a cinematic life!)

ASAP 2015 -- Greenville, S.C.

 I'd had to miss the last symposium of the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present, held in Shanghai, even though I was in China at the time, so I was glad to be able to get to this year's conference in South Carolina.  Well, mostly glad. I wasn't so happy about the small group of idiots marching down Main Street Friday evening brandishing Large Confederate flags. They also carried one U.S. flag, with no apparent sense of the ironic.

But the conference itself was great. There were TWO panels devoted to Claudia Rankine's Citizen. One panelist even insisted on reading the work as poetry.

I was there to present a paper on Joe McPhee and Amiri Baraka as part of a panel on Free Jazz, with presentations by Gregory Pierrot, Ben Lee and Paul Youngquist.

James A. Miller Memorial Symposium

We were all deeply saddened at the news that my good friend Jim Miller had passed on. When I first visited the campus of  The George Washington University, J. Saunders Redding had been on the American Studies faculty. He didn't stay long, and when I returned years later as a grad student, things had not changed much. There were many who wanted things to change, and that in part explains how it was that the resident writers during my grad years included Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Gloria Naylor and Julia Alvarez.  It wasn't till well after I had graduated that GWU recruited Jim Miller, and he rapidly became a central figure on the Foggy Bottom campus, and in D.C. at large.

I usually met up with Jim at conferences -- American Studies, The College Language Association and so on. Jim was invariably encouraging, a great supporter to all of us who were trying to do the good work. So it was only fitting that GWU hosted a symposium in Jim's memory. The symposium panel included Barbara Foley, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Paul Gardullo. That was followed by a reading presented by Edward P. Jones and a reception. Jim has left us an important legacy, one to be furthered as well as upheld.

LITERARY IRON MAN TELLS ALL - E. ETHELBERT MILLER - THE ALDON NIELSEN PROJECT NO. 14

Q.  How did popular culture shape your early years. What were some of your favorite television programs.  Did  you have any comic book heroes?



I had a comic book library.

I had already fallen in love with reading, had fallen in love with the library. We had one of those Summer challenge programs in Grand Island, Nebraska. The same school that sold me a block of discounted tickets to go to the matinee movies on Saturdays also sent me home for the vacation time with a little booklet into which I could enter the names of the books I read over the break. (Certified by the librarian.) Of course they made a competition of it, and I remember getting various colored stars and commendations on my booklet for my achievements in speed reading.  I believe I would have outread most of my classmates even without having been put into competition with them. (Unlike the high jump or the swimming meet, this was one I knew I could win.) 

But I stayed away from the children’s section. I’d gotten all I could stand of Spot and company in the readers at school, and though my younger brother was to spend time in the company of Winnie the Pooh and the Cat in the Hat, I somehow hadn’t known of them. My favorites were varieties of adventure fiction and Sci Fi. Later I added detective fiction to my addictions, and I was always a sucker for science books (biographies of Albert Einstein, George Washington Carver, Madame Curie – Books explaining climate, atomic energy, and, above all else, space exploration).  

The great comics debate was going on, had been since the thirties, though I knew nothing of that. While politicians and moralizers worried publicly that reading comics might lead to juvenile delinquency, I was busy collecting my juvenile art books. I had no idea what that stamp that appeared on the covers of my comics meant, or what the Comics Code Authority might be. To my eyes it just looked like the hunting stamps on my grandfather’s license or the stamps we saw on bags of flour and such. Neither did I have a clue that my beloved Mad magazine came about after William Gaines, responding to the comics code madness, folded his EC Comics (I loved those too) and started Mad, which, not being a comic book per se, was not subject to the code. (Couldn’t help remembering all this when Congress was pressuring the film industry, and the movie ratings resulted, followed by ratings on music recordings, followed by hearings on video games, followed by . . . )

I never attempted to produce my own comics, as Baraka had done, but I was an avid collector (though not remotely like the present day aficionados – we had no comic stores, no ComicCon, certainly no academic courses in comics, would have laughed at a term such as “graphic novel”).

There was a space beneath the stairs leading down to the basement where we lived by the time I was in fifth grade, and that space became my comics library. I made a card catalogue and stuck little checkout slips in the back of each comic. I don’t remember ever allowing anybody to checkout anything from my library, but it was a formidable archive. Walter Benjamin would have enjoyed unpacking my comics. If atomic bombs (or tornadoes) ever drove us to shelter in the basement, I was prepared for a long siege.

The Classics Illustrated versions of classics I had not read (Three Musketeers) and classics I had (Treasure Island) were prominent in my collection. But the heart of my library was the horror and fantasy genre, just the sort of thing that had driven censorious Congressional staffs to warn of impending Wild One outbreaks and rampant James Deanism. Aliens featured on the covers of most of these, aliens clearly ignoring those annual reminders to register at their local post offices. I loved aliens, probably the only literary figures with whom I ever identified.

Heroes I had, but, aside from coming home one day in third grade and announcing that I was changing my name to Roy Rogers, heroes were not points of identification for me.  I was not looking for myself in any of my reading, never did. The point of reading for me was to get beyond my own languages, beyond my own yearnings, to get elsewhere. (Did this have something to do with being born in the middle of the middle of the prairies? My parents had gotten elsewhere – first generation to leave the farm for the town. I had something more like Jupiter in mind, and there was Wernher von Braun in the news to encourage me. I had a comic book about him too, which was silent on his war time sins. Hadn’t met Sun Ra yet, though he had already left Birmingham for Chicago, with Saturn in his sights.)

There were the super-hero comics in my library too, the obligatory Superman, Bat Man, Flash – but I felt an attraction for some of the odder, now less well remembered ones, like The Atom. DC Comics introduced this figure in 1961, by which time I had been to the museum in Hastings, Nebraska where I had purchased what claimed to be an “Atomic Pencil,” and my feet had been inserted countless times into those X-ray machines they had in shoe stores before they realized they were murdering an entire generation of children. I was a nuclear kind of guy, so The Atom appealed to me, despite his having been created by a man with the unlikely name of Jerry Balls. The Atom was, by day, a physics professor in Ivy Town. (While becoming a professor as an adult, I never did get to Ivy Town.)  The Atom could shrink himself to sub-atomic size to do battle with aliens and crooks – Much as I liked aliens, I liked embattled aliens even more.

What I enjoyed most in the super hero comics, even more than the adventures, were the letters to the editor columns.  All these comics had them. The loyal fans were constantly coming up with the most logical questions, questions that generally had not yet occurred to the editors. Where does Superman keep his street clothes while he’s flying around saving the world? If Superman’s costume was made from the blanket he was wrapped in when he crash landed after the explosion of Krypton, how did it keep getting bigger as he grew? This was my first immersion in criticism.

By fourth or fifth grade I was reading tons of genre fiction (and yet more science books). There was a trilogy of fantasy novels that captivated me, though I no longer recall the titles or the authors. I bought all of the Twilight Zone books. I subscribed to the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and to the Mystery Book Club (which I couldn’t really afford). Through the book club I discovered Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries and read all of them multiple times. (My friend the late Rob Reed and I used to sit around fantasizing about a TV or movie version of the Wolfe series – we both lived long enough to see the sad spectacle Hollywood made of this great material once they did get around to it.) Wolfe wasn’t actually a hero (given his girth and inaction, he was nearly its opposite), but he was the apotheosis of the detective of ratiocination, and there was his faithful side kick Archie Goodwin to handle the action side of things.  And he was from some mysterious place called Montenegro. (As with the letters columns in the comics, the Wolfe novels have their close readers, who have noticed that Wolfe’s home has many differing addresses despite always being in the same place, and that for a period of years that address seemed to be in the Hudson River. In later life my friends and I would sometimes direct Washington tourists to such ideal sites as 31st and C Streets NW.)

I spent as much time browsing the racks of paperbacks in stores as I spent in the library. In those days, books were on sale in large quantity at every drug store, dime store and grocery. That’s where I found the fantasy trilogy I enjoyed so much, and where I got my Twilight Zone books. I have a strong memory of the cover of the paperback of Kerouac’s On the Road, though I wasn’t to read that for another five or six years. So far as I could tell from that cover, there were no aliens or murders in the book.

Television was a late arrival in our household, so, like Baraka I was raised on radio. But some of the neighbors had TV. One of my best buddies, Stevie Eggers, lived directly across the street, His family didn’t just have a TV, they had a color TV. That opening sequence for the Disney Show was breath-taking. (OK – I just checked and my memory has suffered a bit of displacement. Disney didn’t broadcast in color till 1961, by which time we had moved to Denver and away from Stevie’s TV – Memory is a funny, and evidently colorful, thing.) I have always suspected that my father’s motive in getting us a TV set of our own was largely a matter of getting me back in the house so he wouldn’t have to go looking for me at dinner time.

My sister and I weren’t supposed to be watching things like Alfred Hitchcock. (Parental fear of our having nightmares, not of our becoming juvenile delinquents.) But our home was designed in such a way that the two of us could sneak out of bed and sit just around a corner, out of sight of the parents, and see the TV set. But we generally got caught before too long because of our inability to maintain silence. At lunch time I usually rushed to get the seat at one end of the kitchen table, because from there I could lean back and see the TV in the other room. I was hooked. There was the aforementioned Roy Rogers, along with Hopalong Cassidy and Cisco Kid. (Many of these TV cow pokes had an odd way of firing their pistols – It looked almost as if they were shooting at the sky and only then aiming at their target. This struck me as wildly comical. In the rural areas, we always had guns around and knew something of their use, though it would never have occurred to any of us that we’d carry a gun to the store or any other public place. Guns were tools, often used to shoot predators and sometimes to shoot a pheasant for dinner. There was no politics attaching to their presence or their use. I might have toy guns for playing cowboy or cop, but our sense of the real thing was entirely pragmatic.)

There was Superman, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound and outrun a speeding locomotive in his zeal to protect truth, justice and the American way. We had no Sesame Street, but the good Captain, Kangaroo by name, read from books to us on TV, something less common today. I have vague memories of the Amos and Andy show being on, though that may have been reruns. I remember wondering why it wasn’t called Kingfish, since he seemed to be the main character. I remember wondering why they talked that way. In contrast, Nat King Cole was also on our TV. Smooth – 

I knew no segregation in Grand Island. But that same TV set showed me images of the Civil Rights Movement as it was unfolding. Superman wasn’t going to be much help against racism, it was pretty clear. I had no clear notion of what this thing called The South was, but formed the opinion that we were fortunate not to be there. 

There was Route 66, which was a prerequisite for my eventual reading of On the Road. Checkmate included Sebastian Cabot as a crime solving professor, setting me on the path toward my early career ambition to be a forensic pathologist.

These things might seem the random juxtapositions that commercial culture throws at us. Wait long enough and everything links back up. The singer/song writer who goes by the name of Stew fronted a band named The Negro Problem, and that band had a wonderfully titled album Welcome Black, and that album included the song “I’m Sebastian Cabot.” “I’m Sebastian Cabot in your dreams. / I’m Sebastian Cabot, what’s that mean?”

OR – when very young I was fascinated by Woody Woodpecker. Had a Woody Woodpecker hat and decoder ring at one point. Fast forward to my adult years and I’m dancing to Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers playing the Woody Woodpecker song.  Things are changed on the blue guitar.

click here and give it a listen

We didn’t call any of this popular culture. We breathed it.

I saw Carl Sandburg reciting poetry on the Ed Sullivan Show.