HeatStrings

THE SEARCH FOR THE TASSILI FRESCOES

2009-12-07T08:18:00.000-08:00

When C.L.R. James was teaching at Federal City College in Washington, D.C., he always entered the classroom bearing an armload of books, each bristling with pieces of paper marking the passages he wanted to reference in the course of that day's class. Often these were simply his copies of the books we were reading from the syllabus, but he also tended to bring in works none of us had ever heard of. I quickly learned to make a note when this happened and to try to follow up by reading the book. That was how I first became aware of Nancy Cunard's NEGRO ANTHOLOGY, a text I still marvel at and share with my own students.

Another I always wanted to read but only recently managed to acquire was THE SEARCH FOR THE TASSILI FRESCOES. This book was first published in 1958, with an English language edition the following year, and James was still excited by the prospects the text offered. The volume is Henri Lhote's account of the discovery of prehistoric paintings in the central Sahara, some as old as eight thousand years. Not only did these discoveries demonstrate that this area had once been fertile, but they established the complexity and sophistication of the cultures that had inhabited the area, including, as the book's publisher puts it, "the earliest examples of Negro art we possess."

When I hear, as I still too often do, critics claiming that James was overly Eurocentric, I recall those class periods spent poring over this book and weighing its significance. I first saw this book, after all, in a course James offered on African Intellectual History.

This work, and others like it, remain largely unreferenced in contemporary discussions, even in this post-BLACK ATHENA world of discourse.

I think even these illustrations I have reproduced will give a sense of why C.L.R. James wanted his students to have access to this information.

POEM TALK

2009-12-02T07:26:00.000-08:00

from Al Filreis

Vachel Lindsay podcast

From left to right, Aldon Nielsen, Michelle Taransky, Charles Bernstein in my office recently for the recording of the 26th episode of PoemTalk. This is one is about Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo." Go to the PoemTalk page for much more and a link to the podcast audio.

THE HERO PROJECT OF THE CENTURY

2009-12-01T12:36:00.001-08:00

While the century is still young, this gets us off to a good start:

These pre-c.c. posts stream to us from some point “prior to predication.” It’s a place Tyrone Williams has been exploring on our behalf for a good, long time, beamed up, as it were, from some Ohio of the spirit, sending his missives back to us here on planet Grammar, a place of our own constant care and making where “meanwhile means dissent.” These are poems that teach us how to read them, or rather, teach us the deep structures that we didn’t know we knew. Take, for just one instance, the perfectly rhymed, perfectly logical line, “X nee YHWH.” The here unaccented “nee”-sayer marks the places the vowels should go, the Xed out spot the tongue should find in history, the unspeakable languages of our own territorial claims. That’s a lot of work for one line to do, but that’s in the nature of scripture. Tyrone Williams has been hard on the case on our behalf. We owe him at the least a collective thank-you post-it.

HEGEL AND HAITI

2009-11-28T13:09:00.001-08:00

When I was in Ottawa for the C.L.R. James conference in October, a frequent topic in our discussions was the Critical Inquiry essay by Susan Buck-Morss on Hegel and Haiti. Like many others, I had first known of Buck-Morss by way of her intriguing work on Benjamin, particularly her book on the Arcades Project. I'd followed with interest her turn to other subjects in political philosophy, evidenced in such work as Thinking Past Terror, but was still surprised to see her take up the place of Haiti in the evolution of modernity, a subject of interest to me since the days I used to pursue the topic in undergraduate history classes taught by C.L.R. James.

Now "Hegel and Haiti" has been conjoined to a new essay, "Universal History," and published as a book by the University of Pittsburgh Press. [Find the Amazon page for the book here.] Buck-Morss picks up on the arguments that James and DuBois were advancing in the 1930s, the point I was explicating in my chapter for the Geomodernism collection:

"The Haitian experience was not a modern phenomenon too, but first."

That argument appears in the new "Universal History" addition, and no matter what you may think of the disputes about the possibilities of the universal, or the propsects of some "new humanism," the book is well worth reading on that score alone. Still, it has much more to recommend it.

CALL FOR PAPERS -- PLEASE COPY AND CIRCULATE

2009-11-27T11:11:00.001-08:00

The African American Literature and Culture Society invites submissions for abstracts or papers for multiple sessions at this year's ALA in San Francisco, CA. The society will consider papers or panels on any aspects of African American life and letters. Proposals should be sent electronically to William R. Nash, program coordinator (nash@middlebury.edu). Deadline for submission is 3 January, 2010; notification of acceptance by 30 January 2010.

Will Alexander's Loxodrome

2009-11-19T11:37:00.001-08:00

For those who have never seen it before, that's Will Alexander's own artwork on the cover of his new book from New Directions. This piece, which shares a title with the book, is characteristic of Will's drawings and paintings. I first saw one of these back in 1993 when he had come to my Los Angeles apartment to record an interview for the radio program I was producing at KSJS FM in those days. That interview, which includes a fair portion of Alexander reading from his work, is now available via my pages at Penn Sound, and can be found by clicking here. On his way out the door, Will handed me a packet that included his current book manuscript and one of his entangling drawings.

"I feel perpetual"

--Will Alexander

KEITH WALDROP

2009-11-19T06:09:00.001-08:00

Congratulations to Keith Waldrop, who last night received the National Book Award for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, published by the University of California Press.

And while you're celebrating, look back to the April 17 HEATSTRINGS blog for an entry on Waldrop's SEVERAL GRAVITIES.

HAMBONE 19

2009-11-12T08:18:00.001-08:00

Hambone, Hambone, where you been . . . ?

Hambone 19 is just out, with this stunning art work by Rachel Griffiths. The new issue includes the transcription of a Berkeley lecture by Sun Ra from that odd period when he was in fact teaching for the University of California. (One of the more intriguing things in the Baraka papers at Howard University is a copy of the reference letter Baraka wrote in support of Sun Ra's getting the professorial appointment.) Another wonder is a selection of poems from Lloyd Addison, original UMBRA poet. You'll also find new work from Lyn Hejinian, Will Alexander, Fred Moten, Ed Roberson, Dawn Lundy Martin, Peter Gizzi and many others.

Get it here!

AMERICAN STUDIES 2009

2009-11-09T18:28:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE - Day 3

2009-10-27T17:16:00.000-07:00

[image by Nadia Wilson]

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

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

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

CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE - DAY 2

2009-10-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

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

Language

An abstract overcoat

Concealing laws

Which (in themselves)

Are abstractions.

The word seeking finitude,

The spirit loving space –

And we spin and spin and spin to catch

The outsider/ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE - DAY 1

2009-10-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

C.L.R. JAMES IN CANADA

2009-10-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN AT PENN STATE

2009-10-25T08:18:00.001-07:00

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

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

2009-10-22T09:42:00.000-07:00

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

Find the book here at the AK Press web site.

with TOM RAWORTH

2009-10-19T16:07:00.001-07:00

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

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

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER AT PENN STATE

2009-10-11T17:48:00.000-07:00

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

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

T.J. Anderson III

2009-10-08T11:59:00.001-07:00

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

Present no flowers

but when possible

substitute history

Came man to paper

came destiny to believe

stolen gods shape change

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

WALKS WITH PAUL CELAN

2009-10-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Now available from Burning Deck Press.

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

Joe Amato's ONCE AN ENGINEER

2009-09-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

A.L. Nielsen on Penn Sound

2009-09-27T08:35:00.001-07:00

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

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

You can find the page at Penn Sound.

Carl Senna

2009-09-25T13:26:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONFERENCE ON C.L.R. JAMES

2009-09-23T17:33:00.001-07:00

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

NEW BOOK FROM ED ROBERSON

2009-09-23T07:49:00.001-07:00

This wonderful new book from Ed Roberson is now available.

get it here!

Penn Sound Sessions

2009-09-16T17:44:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Charles views Aldon askance.]