Lectures in China

PHBW blog –July 16, 2012

Lectures in China

                To address the growing interest in African American literature and culture at HuaZhong Normal University (Wuhan) and other institutions in China, I have given lectures there since 2009.   Chinese auditors, however astute and savvy they are, may be easily confused by the literary critical games played in the West.  Often they do not understand the cultural dynamics of academic trends.  Why do Western critics so dread the absolute, the essential, and the certain?  The reasons, of course, are at once philosophical, racial, and political.  One must exercise care in explaining that the universal is not universal but merely a smokescreen for intellectual hegemony, that deconstruction can too often be a weapon of massive destruction. 

                During May and June 2012, I presented nine lectures designed to plant seeds for critical growth.  The listing includes a post-delivery comment for each of them.

1)      Trickster Criticism: Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature?--- In international forums for literary study, it is necessary to have a critique of Warren’s tendentious misreading of African American literary history and culture and its probable consequences of such misreading  in a future of African American literary study.  I am indebted to Maryemma Graham for drawing my attention to an important example of a consequence:  Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “What Was Latino Literature?” PMLA 127.2 (2012):335-341.

2)      The Poetry of Natasha Trethewey ---Trethewey’s strategies for recovering history in Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard are aesthetic warnings against post-racial delusions. To put Trethewey’s being named Poet Laureate of the United States in proper perspective, one must read Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s brilliant essay “The Subjective Briar Patch: Contemporary American Poetry.” Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2012): 97-106. Access http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2012/spring/jeffers-contemporary-poetry

3)      The Cambridge History of African American Literature and the Limits of Literary History – This commentary seeks to explain the inevitable absence in literary historical narratives of writers who are of equal merit with and sometimes of greater importance than those who are discussed.

4)      On Reginald Martin’s Idea of Transcultural Theory –This discussion of Martin’s appropriation of transcultural theory as a method of reading texts foregrounds the need to make clear distinctions among theory, methodology, and method.

5)      The Tonal Drawings of Asili Ya Nadhiri: Temporality and Musicality – Given the absence of critical attention  to how Nadhiri  uses oral/aural memory , grammatical innovations regarding tense, ideas about music and art, and some problems of time and being dealt with in theoretical physics  in a conceptual poetic genre, this lecture acknowledges his unique contribution to African American poetry.

6)      Ishmael Reed and Multiculturalism –A  discussion of Reed’s sustained efforts since the late 1960s to promote real rather than lip-service multiculturalism in the literature of the United States, this lecture suggests that Reed has provided a rich matrix for the delayed conversation on what it means to be an American.

7)      Acknowledgement: The Contact/Combat Zone ---A meditation on the function of the literary critic in the 21^st century, this lecture argues that warfare is the dominant but rarely acknowledged trope in discussions of the literature of the United States.

8)      Richard Wright and Twenty-first Century Questions ---The purpose of this lecture is to argue that significant research questions and making of transcendent connections (imaginative reflection) can be derived from close reading of Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” and his novella The Man Who Lived Underground.

9)       American Literature and Digital Humanities ---This lecture involves a series of speculations on how new technologies may change the study and teaching of literature, especially of African American literature.

I have little interest in fashionable academic games, efforts to avoid telling a truth about the essential complexity of African American literature and its continuing evolution, or rhetorical lies about the existence of shared values among diverse citizens of the United States or Europe.  To promote honest exchanges among Chinese and American intellectual communities, I embrace an unfashionable humanism that minimizes post-human dominance. I want my Chinese colleagues to have more options for making conclusions about truth.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Wright, Hurston, and Bad Blood

Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Bad Blood

Q:   I really want to read Richard Wright’s review of Their Eyes Were Watching God.  I wonder what caused the bad blood between him and Hurston.

A (1):  To read Wright’s review, access http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam854/summer/hurston.html

There you will find the in-house review by Hurston’s publisher and reviews by George Stevens, Lucille Thompson, Sheila Hibben, Otis Ferguson, Sterling Brown, and Alain Locke.  Wright was not the only male who did not praise Hurston’s novel in 1937.

A (2):  As one result of American cultural games, the bad blood has been so magnified that what is a sub-atomic particle looks like a Siberian tiger.  In literary circles, one game is played by driving a contrived wedge between selected African American iconic figures.  The divisive action is formulaic.  Select two people ---let us say, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison, or Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.  Extract diametrically opposed quotations from each either in or out of context.  Magnify and distort the differences.  Claim the differences are symbolic of some more or less permanent fault line in the collective consciousness of a people, symbolic of a wailing wall of hate between the two people selected.  You do not have to provide proof, nor exercise the civility of waiting for an answer.

This very American game is replete with racialized ideological baggage.  It is marked by bad sociology, bad psychology, and bad history.  It is vicious.

Fortunately, we can speculate about the bad blood between Hurston and Wright outside the boundaries of this game as I have said in my unpublished essay “Hurston, Wright, and Literary History.”  In 1937, Wright published “Between Laughter and Tears,” a combined review of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds in the October 5 issue of New Masses. Wright’s evaluation of both novels was less than favorable.  Hurston had an opportunity to repay Wright in kind when she reviewed Uncle Tom’s Children under the title “Stories in Conflict” in the April 2, 1938 issue of Saturday Review of Literature.  Hurston was less than pleased with Wright’s accomplishment.

Wright had been critical of Hurston’s sentimentality, her exploration of the human heart and love at the expense of ignoring any impact systemic racism might have had on the lives of her characters.  Hurston in turn was critical of Wright’s preoccupation with race hatred, his exploitation of “the wish-fulfillment theme,” and his apparent fidelity, as she informed her audience, to “the picture of the South that the communists have been passing around of late.”  Hurston was not sympathetic to the restrictions of thought implicit in Marxism American style.  Wright became disillusioned with those restrictions in the early 1940s.  But in 1937, Wright had no patience with Hurston’s “facile sensuality,” the structure of feelings that could be a portal to the realm of minstrelsy.  The difference between the two writers is grounded in ideological opposition, incompatible ideas about the function of literature or writing in life and the obligations of the writer.  Hurston and Wright had genuine reasons for concern about the effects of writing upon the minds of racially embattled readers.

Wright and Hurston were at once blunt and considerate in their attacks.  They were careful in deflecting attention from personality to writing, from content of character to matters of technical skill.  “Miss Hurston can write,” Richard Wright admitted.  He found, however, that her dialogue “manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their simplicity but that’s as far as it goes.”  Hurston did not catch the “complex simplicity” that Wright had called for in “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”  That is to say, she succeed in simplicity but missed “all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence….”[ Blueprint, section 6: Social Consciousness and Responsibility]  Wright misread his own critical language and failed to see the sheen in Hurston’s novel.  At second glance, it is not Hurston’s romanticism that he is criticizing.  He is condemning her failure to link folklore with “the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.” [Section 6]

Hurston complimented Wright by suggesting that “[s]ome of his sentences have the shocking-power of a forty-four,” a feature that confirmed for her that Wright “knows his way around among words.”  Nevertheless, she found his representation of dialect to be “a puzzling thing.”  How did he arrive at it?  “Certainly,” she proposed, “he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf.  But aside from the broken speech of his characters, the book contains some beautiful writing.”  What was not beautiful was Wright’s male-dominated subject matter.  “This is a book about hatreds. Mr. Wright,” according to Hurston, “serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live.  Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work.”  By way of hyperbole, Hurston found the violence of black life in Wright’s stories to be excessive. In contrast, her novel was a testament that violence and hatred in fiction should be tempered by civility, love, and compassion.

It is reasonable to propose the two reviews are gestures of respect.   There is some degree of balance between the two reviews if we attend to what might have been reality for Hurston and Wright and their readers. Wright and Hurston were playing literary politics, and their discourses had to be social and political.  They were writers writing about writing. Wright was conserving the radical tradition of black nationalism; Hurston was subverting the idea that a black writer had to be radical according to an “ism” that was alien to deep roots of folk wisdom.  Perhaps we can avoid exaggerating bad blood and focus on how speech acts properly contextualized show that distinctions between the aesthetic and the political can be exposed as the fictions that they are.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                            PHBW A/Q BLOG

October 28, 2012

On Being Made in America

I bought Gancho Cerrado, distributed by Crown Bolt, Aliso Viejo, CA 92656.  Gate Hook & Eye hecho en China.
I bought revestido de latex de uso general, firm grip gloves from Big Time Products, LLC, Rome, GA 30161.  They were made in China.
Caution/Advertenca: Este projecto contine latex natural de goma que puede causar an allergic reaction.
En el evento de una reaccion alergica causado por estes gloves de latex, para el uso y consulta your health care provider.
Americans who do not make work gloves y gancho cerrado talk much bad about the Asians.

Math and Humanity, Part 3

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October 23, 2012

Mathematics and What It Means to Be Human, Part 3

Manil Suri

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Manil Suri

By Michele Osherow and Manil Suri

In May 2009, Michele Osherow, an English professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and resident dramaturg at the Folger Theatre, in Washington, invited her colleague Manil Suri, a mathematician at the university, to act as mathematics consultant for the Folger's production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The play explores the relationship between past and present through the characters' intellectual pursuits, poetic and mathematical. That led to a series of "show and tell" sessions explaining the mathematics behind the play both to cast members and to audiences. In the fall of 2011, the two professors decided to take their collaboration to the classroom and jointly teach a freshman seminar, "Mathematics and What It Means to be Human." Here is the final essay of a three-part series on how the experiment played out. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Manil Suri: It's reassuring to see that whether in mathematics or the humanities, the last few weeks of a course with a final project follow the same pattern: The jolt of energy that suddenly animates the room when students realize this is it. The grandly ambitious (and hopelessly infeasible) ideas that first emerge. The excitement that turns into consternation when confronted with the impracticality of the studies being proposed. ("And how exactly will you chart all the babies born out of wedlock during the Civil War?" we had to ask one student.)
Most predictable is the panic when the invariable lurking surprises start popping up like the frantic (and usually inaugural) visits during office hours and the 11th-hour abandonment of a doomed project to start another one. I'd forgotten how entertaining it can be to prolong their agony thus—really must remember to give more projects instead of finals!
This time, in addition to the usual pitfalls of research and creative works, students had an extra quagmire to watch out for: the mathematics. It had to be an integral part of what they did (a requirement that some tried, unsuccessfully, to dodge), it had to be correct (a requirement we were more willing to bend), and they had to convincingly show they understood the concepts used. Sadly, that last point overwhelmed one of the most unusual of the projects: a short story based on the Prisoner's Dilemma payoff matrix. Yet another reminder that mathematical constructs can be deeper than they appear.
But we had some sparkling successes, too. One student wrote a story that elegantly finessed chaos theory to imagine a world in which Lincoln might never have become president. Another produced a slick, professional-quality video on beauty and the golden ratio. Mathematically deepest of all was an instrumental composition that musically interpreted what it means to be a sine (or cosine) function—by a humanities scholar inspired to take calculus this semester.

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Michele Osherow

Michele Osherow

Michele Osherow: Most students who opted for "creative representations" of humanities and math seemed to procrastinate and be far less certain of their plans than the others. Perhaps they thought such an option would be easy, despite our severe and steady warnings. (Had they forgotten Manil was an accomplished novelist?) The repeated bouts of writer's block and artistic despair we encountered during the final weeks were monumental. Everywhere we turned, there was Konstantin with his dead bird.
We had planned from the start to also give students the option to produce a research proposal for quantitatively dealing with any humanities topic. We could see it now: our crew of 13 freshmen submitting completed, original research (involving mathematics, of all things) with their applications to the country's top graduate programs in the humanities.
To nudge them toward real-life research questions, we appealed to their love of cash. The University of Maryland-Baltimore County offers generous grants each year by way of Undergraduate Research Awards. "A real opportunity," we told them. "Once your proposals are crafted, you can parlay them into a URA proposal as a logical next step."
We don't know that any students actually took that step, but then, freshmen often need to work up the courage. One student has continued to develop her project, which attempts to quantify the influence that specific language or word choice may have on survey respondents (thereby aiding statisticians in the elimination of question bias).
In the end, I was more impressed with the students' performance than they were with mine. Our course evaluations were the harshest I've seen in years. I'm not naïve or obsessive about this stuff—I know every class can't work for every student, and I know very high evaluations can indicate a lack of rigor.
Still, the students were critical of areas I'd never before questioned. Some commented that neither of their instructors seemed interested in what the other one had to say. That cut me to the core. I took notes in class, asked questions, confessed my confusion. What does "interest" look like to students nowadays? I wonder, though, if their confidence wasn't shaken when they realized that we two didn't have all the answers, or even all of the questions, but proposed to make these discoveries around the seminar table.
Manil: Although Michele seemed crushed by a few of the student evaluations, I was actually relieved at how good they were.
My experience has been to be severely punished in the evaluations whenever I've tried to do something experimental in the classroom. There was the sparsely attended first-year seminar I taught on mathematics in the media, in which, toward the end, only one student was still showing up to class. (The video talk we created as his class project, on the concept of infinity, has had more than 20,000 YouTube viewers, which makes me feel better.) Another workshop I taught that required participants to use mathematics in a creative endeavor (short story, musical piece, artistic creation) ended with a series of e-mails from an irate student excoriating me for the grading scheme that led to her B.
And then there was the spring 2012 semester. Scheduled to teach the university's usual general-education Math 100 course for nonmajors, and still invigorated by the humanities seminar, I decided to use the most successful aspects from that experience to "perk up" the syllabus (or so I brightly thought) in my intro course. Besides including the videos and computer exercises on fractals and probability, I also employed the basic philosophy of tying everything to real life (for example, having the students read an article on the growth of cities during the chapter on nonlinearity). After all, wasn't this one of the original goals of working on the humanities seminar? To develop materials that could be spread among wider populations, thereby hastening world domination by mathematicians?
It's true that some of the more motivated students genuinely enjoyed my new and improved Math 100. But many in the class simply couldn't be bothered to keep up—as evidenced by their lackadaisical attendance. Which meant they were stumped on tests and couldn't do the homework. Which meant they were in a decidedly ornery mood during the class before the final, when I handed out evaluation questionnaires. My scores were the worst I've ever received in close to 30 years of teaching. Maybe I will show them to Michele to cheer her up.
Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the clues from the humanities seminar. Each math assignment (e.g., on fractal music or chaos in population growth) that I slipped in during the seminar generated so many pockets of anxiety that we had to make them extra-credit. The freshmen seemed fine with understanding underlying math ideas, but, as happens even with math majors, absorbing those ideas with enough precision for applications was a problem—as it certainly was for the Math 100 students. One can probably learn almost anything with reasonable competence, but the time to do so depends on both aptitude and interest (which is why Professor Suri, alas, will never be a singer).
Michele: Well, maybe Professor Suri will never perform live at the Met, but might he be a strong member of the chorus? And couldn't that engagement increase ability, demonstrate skill?
I don't know if it's a difference in our fields or in our persons, but my co-instructor and I ultimately have different views on how much math the students need to understand in order to see the potential for exchange and the possibilities for collaboration between our "two cultures." I know that the small amount of knowledge I gained at Manil's hand as he took me through the math of Arcadia made a difference in my comprehension of the play. But I could not, based on those sessions, apply an iterated algorithm in problem solving. What I could do was understand an iterated system, and apply that understanding successfully to my work as a dramaturg. And to me, that was really something.
Scholars in the humanities are constantly looking for connections between fields. How can we discuss literature without knowledge of history or philosophy or (enter discipline of choice)? The interdisciplinary knowledge may come slowly, but even small pockets have value. I don't think mathematicians are required to make such connections as consistently as we do. Manil may never forgive Howard Moss for his insouciant reference (in his poem "Particular Beauties") to Zeno's paradox, or those countless poets for their inaccurate use of the word "infinite." Such connections, sometimes "yoked by violence together," may not always reveal mysteries, but when they do, it's thrilling.
And that's what seminars foster ideally. They bring together assorted people and perspectives, all focused on examining a subject, so that the participants affect the learning taking place. But I can see now that it was not a setting with which my colleague was as comfortable. There was too much the students did not—could not—know about his topic. Smart and used to speaking up in class as they were, their input appeared initially as a parroting back of our statements, as an indulging in stream-of-consciousness reactions. They participated often, but without necessarily moving things forward. And this drove Manil crazy.
I understood his frustration but knew, from experience, that the students would improve. They'd start to appreciate what meaningful participation looks like. They would recognize that in seminars, participants are responsible for their own and one another's learning. I'm not sure students are up for that responsibility in their first semester, though studies suggest that they learn better from one another than they do from their instructors. (See a 2010 article, "A Case Study of Cooperative Learning and Communication Pedagogy: Does Working in Teams Make a Difference?," in the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.) But wait: I learn from students, too.
Manil: Actually, the imperative of interconnection affects mathematicians as well. Few with gainful employment can operate in a bubble. We are constantly called upon to apply our results to engineering, science, and business (and, very gradually, to humanities as well).
Rather than casting a wide net, what's needed by mathematicians is often more a directed effort, concentrated on the problem at hand. The more pressing problem is one of communication: The volubility of humanities scholars does not necessarily bless those with a more mathematical bent. How to make one's voice heard in a Wall Street team with no other mathematicians? Convince engineers while armed only with a proof's abstractness? Formulate a problem with, or explain its solution to, someone who does not even speak the language?
Those are issues that perhaps a seminar for mathematics students could examine, even if the format falls short in conveying the amount of technical content that must be absorbed in a typical math course. Perhaps it's time for us to plan the sequel to our course: "The Humanities and What it Means to Be a Mathematician."
But coming back to humanities students, what math would I prescribe for them? That's a question I was asked several times while teaching the seminar. Most important (and difficult) would be material that establishes numeracy—in particular the ability to judge whether or not numbers, reported figures, calculated quantities, and so on are plausible in their context. It's a skill that doesn't come automatically to most people, not even math majors.
Closely related would be the ability to recognize what's mathematically relevant. While doing the mathematical exercises, students had a tendency to ramble around, use lots of unnecessary description, without really homing in on the crux of things.
Next would be a course in statistics: The two outside speakers who addressed the class on using math in their research both employed statistical analysis to buttress their conclusions quantitatively, in addition to just qualitatively. We had fun with various numerical facts and figures that one can mine doing searches on Google databases—for instance, charting the historical course of tuberculosis by counting the number of times it appears annually in published works—but students need to be educated on all the misinterpretations and pitfalls possible.
On a more ambitious "wishful thinking" scale would be the math required to model social and historical phenomena. For instance, we read the first few pages of a paper that showed how the differential equations used to track the spread of epidemics could be reformulated to model the spread of ideas. Perhaps that's what the crystal ball shows will gain prominence in the future: the mathematical modeling of sweeping historical movements—a fledgling field called "cliodynamics."
Needless to say, I'd encourage everyone to get enough of an understanding of contemporary mathematical ideas so that they can claim to have a well-rounded education. In return, I pledge to read more Shakespeare.
Michele: Though there are a lot—I won't say infinite, but an impressive batch of natural numbers' worth—of moments I'd redo if I could, I would not have missed out on co-teaching this seminar, tricky as it was. There is a language to mathematics, and I'm devoted to seeing what language produces and provokes. It was fascinating, even if sometimes frightening, to see how different Manil's and my responses were to various texts and ideas. That didn't make one of us "wrong" (though I didn't realize that immediately); it made the possibilities of scholarship more rich. There wasn't a class in which I didn't learn something, and I've given real thought to certain of our topics and ways I might deal with them on my own. It won't be easy, but then, I know where my co-instructor lives.
I admit, too, that I loved entering the department of mathematics and statistics with a purpose. I could never have imagined such a thing. I couldn't have told you what side of campus it was on. I knew no math faculty by sight. I knew only those mathematics course numbers that English majors need to graduate. And I suspect that I was as foreign to those numerical types as they were to me. There was an impressive array of surprised/amused/skeptical/dismayed looks from Manil's colleagues and from mine when they heard about our course. "What do you know about math?" people would ask me. "Not enough," was my answer, "but I'm working on it."

Michele Osherow is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and resident dramaturg at the Folger Theatre, in Washington. Manil Suri is a professor of mathematics and statistics at the university, and author of the novels "The Death of Vishnu" and "The Age of Shiva". His forthcoming novel is "The City of Devi."

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Mathematics and Humanity

October 16, 2012

Mathematics and What It Means to Be Human, Part 2

Michele Osherow

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Michele Osherow

By Michele Osherow and Manil Suri

In May 2009, Michele Osherow, an English professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and resident dramaturg at the Folger Theatre, in Washington, invited her colleague Manil Suri, a mathematician at the university, to act as mathematics consultant for the Folger's production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The play explores the relationship between past and present through the characters' intellectual pursuits, poetic and mathematical.That led to a series of "show and tell" sessions explaining the mathematics behind the play both to cast members and audiences. In the fall of 2011, the two professors decided to take their collaboration to the classroom and jointly teach a freshman seminar on "Mathematics and What It Means to be Human." Here is the second of a three-part series on how the experiment played out. Part 1 is here.
Michele Osherow: While Manil astounded the students with mathematical impossibilities—the trisection of an angle assignment, Zeno's paradox—I focused on the possibilities that characterized the study of literature. Shakespeare's King Lear made it easy to note the range of readings inspired by a single work. But not every text we gave to the students was as richly complex as Lear.
In fact, convoluted might better describe the poetry we introduced next in the classroom from a collection called the Oulipo Compendium. Oulipo poetry emerged in 1960 when Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais gathered a group of writers and mathematicians in France to create literature guided by strict (very strict) and often bizarre constraints. For example, the S+7 (or N+7) constraint requires that every noun in a text be replaced with the seventh noun appearing after it in a dictionary. (You can find more information about Oulipo poetry here.)
I had never heard the word Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature) and was surprised when Manil handed me the anthology during our course planning. He qualified the suggestion by saying he had "no idea if it was any good." But I was intrigued: Literature produced through a series of strict constraints was an interesting fusion of our two fields. I wasn't sure, though, if the art was to be found in the language or in the template. I worried that to some students it wouldn't matter.
When I began reading the material I told myself it was probably more compelling in French. Mostly, I thought the Oulipo pieces were sometimes clever, but more often bizarre outcomes of linguistic games. There are some impressive names among the Oulipians (including Italo Calvino), however, and we decided to let the class have at it. I saw it as an opportunity to introduce students to postmodernism, and give them a chance to think and write creatively. Though I dreaded that they would love the stuff.
It felt strange calling the selections we examined "poetry." I couldn't pull much meaning from the works, and neither could the students, which lead to a discussion of the ways in which meaning might be determined by a reader's will. Somehow, though, the more time we spent examining Oulipian patterns, the more compelling I found the game. I liked these poets' sense of humor and their intolerance of pretentious artists and academics alike. Plus, I appreciated their name—the word potentielle seemed so compelling, and forgiving. Could we brand our class a seminaire potentiel?

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Manil Suri

Manil Suri

Manil Suri: It had seemed like a plausible item for the syllabus, but delving deeper made me realize just how pseudo-mathematical (not to mention pseudo-literary) Oulipo was. At one point, I asked Michele if it was OK to use the term "mental masturbation" in a humanities class—words I'd never found an appropriate occasion to deploy in 28 years of teaching. She said yes, so I did, to only a stray titter (my math students would probably have been more shocked).
Fortunately, Oulipo did lead to some good dialogue. The fact that the anthology opened with a grandiose manifesto of qualifying rules (surely an unpromising sign for any literary work, even if partially tongue-in-cheek) paved the way to explore the axiomatic foundations of math. One reading was an English translation of the fantastically ambitious (at least in title) Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, or One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. It's a set of 10 sonnets, from which new poems can be formed by choosing the first line from the first line of any of the 10 poems, the second line from the second lines of the 10 poems, and so on. The only problem is the new poems don't necessarily make sense.
Our reading led to a discussion of permutations and combinations. That was my cue to point out that each poem in Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes could be identified by a unique 14-digit number (specifying the source poem for each line). Given our society's obsession with quantification, I asked the students, would we eventually find a means to reduce all literature this way? The class didn't believe so, at least based on what Oulipo had to offer.
But Michele rose to the movement's defense, striking upon the correct word to capture the link between mathematics and Oulipo: At their core, they were both games. Once we arrived at that insight, the class dove in. The students' creativity blossomed when we told them to come up with their own Oulipian constraint and then create a work based on it. Some formulated their constraints based on an Ipod's shuffling, others on hair braiding, or language overheard in a cafe. One even constructed a poem using the time-signature function of a metronome.
Michele: The students' forced poetic labor with Oulipo inspired them to tackle more challenging works. We examined poems specifically on or referencing mathematical topics, such as Blake's "Tyger," Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet on Euclid, Howard Moss's "Particular Beauties."
I found myself jazzed by the poets' playfulness and investigations of mathematical concepts. My colleague? Not so much. It was during a discussion of Moss's poem that I saw an alarmed look sweep Manil's face—a look that erupted into the lamentation, "I'm drowning in a sea of metaphor!" It was the lack of precision, the seemingly endless array of meanings, that frustrated Manil. He was at his most earnest that day and I welcomed it, although I was surprised to hear an accusation of imprecision leveled at poetry, in particular.
But I knew enough by that point to see that the precision to which he was accustomed was different from that found in the humanities. There is precision in poetry—in its crafting and in its comprehension—but interpretations are not limited to a single, most correct reading.
It was easy to concede that Manil was right about one thing: These poets were playing fast and loose with mathematical concepts and were not conveying the full complexity of constructs like Zeno's paradox (in Moss's "Particular Beauties"). But then that wasn't their job, I protested. The task of poets is to use those things available to them in order to share observations about the world.
I think the students liked those days when Manil and I went at it. I liked those moments, too, because I not only had to confront another perspective head on but also had to challenge my own. I loved seeing the baffled expressions of the students while their instructors disagreed; the things we were asking them to consider were perplexing and appropriate.
Manil: I like to think I'm cognizant of the precision needed in literary construction, being a writer myself (there—I've played it—my trump card of having dabbled in different disciplines; the academic equivalent of the sensitive male).
But yes, I found it difficult to sit still as meticulous mathematical principles were divested of their integrity in the service of poetic cleverness. Mathematics is so poorly understood as it is, by poets and readers alike. To further confuse its meaning in swirls of willful metaphor seemed a dubious pursuit. (I suppose I must have come off as a grumpy party-pooper—probably still do.)
As for more general accusations, I wasn't knowledgeable enough about the humanities' goals and methodologies to make a comparison with those of mathematics. Perhaps there'd be a chance later for a no-holds-barred thrashing out. Which would be invigorating and instructive, even with odds against me of 14-to-1.
But onward with our story. Freshly spewed out by the sea of metaphor, I led the class to hopefully firmer ground: a field trip to Baltimore's Walters Art Museum for a perfectly timed exhibition on a recently rediscovered palimpsest that recorded several discoveries by Archimedes (including an understanding of infinity and aspects of calculus).
The poster for the exhibition, "Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes," showed much mathematical promise: geometrical figures floating in space seemed to be the clear stars of the show. Except the exhibit turned out to be mostly about the conservation techniques used to decipher this and other manuscripts.
While Michele lingered lovingly over each panel, I gnashed my teeth in bitterness (but discreetly, so as not to alarm the students). Mathematics was a clear afterthought, relegated to some modest exhibits in the final gallery. Another opportunity to make the subject come alive was lost. The New York Times reviewer complained about this, as did (a bright spot!) some of our freshmen.
Toward the end of the visit, though, was a sight to warm the cockles of even the coldest mathematician heart. On a low-set table was Archimedes' famous "Stomachion" jigsaw, where visitors were invited to assemble 14 irregular pieces of colored felt into a square (something that could be done in 17,152 different ways). Students from our class were trying to solve the puzzle jointly with math majors we had invited along. Michele and I watched the collaborative effort as proudly as doting parents. Maybe there was hope, maybe the twain could meet after all.
Michele: We carried that hope into the final unit for the course, one devoted both to fractals and to the Tom Stoppard play, Arcadia, that first caused me to seek out Manil as a mathematics consultant for the Folger production.
I felt optimistic about the upcoming lessons: This was, after all, the text that prompted my collaboration with my unlikely (I nearly wrote unlucky) co-instructor. I hoped the students would be as fired up as we were by Stoppard's smarts, and by the connections he makes between mathematics and literature. I hoped they would appreciate the layering of time, ideas, and relationships; I hoped they'd dispute the penicillin versus poetry binary.
It was easy for me to forget, blinded by love, that Arcadia is a difficult read, especially for freshmen who hadn't been exposed previously to a staging of the play, or to Stoppard (true genius, but dense reading). They needed more hand-holding with the play than they did with Lear; they were confused by the shifting time periods and even by the humor. There was much historical and ideological ground to cover—the transition from Enlightened to Romantic thought, the role of knowledge and landscape. They didn't understand iterated algorithms or the play's ending. We needed another semester.
But we also needed closure. It was that time when the students were expected to see the connections we'd been hunting throughout the term. I took them back to where we had started, the search for patterns, and we went through the play looking for patterns of thought, situation, and language. The students could do that well but also had a good eye for the differences among the repeated patterns.
"Right!" I said, "Does that mean they're 'iterated?' Is the play a kind of literary fractal?"
Manil: And there we have it, a question that crystallizes the conflicts in this course—and perhaps in the interaction of art and mathematics in general. A fractal is a precise mathematical entity, one with infinite levels of self-similarity, and moreover, possessing a fractional dimension (e.g., neither a one-dimensional line nor a two-dimensional patch, but something cloudlike that lives in between).
Mathematical training insists such definitions be rigorously observed. If they're not, everything that follows can collapse like a house of cards. Clearly, such an attitude would be downright Talibanistic for a course like this one. And yet, to make analogies, to bandy about technical terms, or to employ them in art, one needs to achieve a certain level of understanding first.
Which, alas, does not come easy. Bringing the class to a point where they could discuss the play in terms of fractals had taken work. It was a definite accomplishment (fortunately, we could use the animations I had prepared for the Folger production of the play).
Did the students have more than a hazy idea of fractional dimension? Of course not. And neither would most math majors without a course on the topic. But we fortunately didn't need to go that deep, just like my understanding about Romantic versus Classicist garden design in Stoppard's play (something I'm still indignant at him for expecting me to be familiar with) remains cursory. What Arcadia does is invite you to expand your horizons, offering tantalizing glimpses of interlinked worlds waiting to be explored. The extent to which you journey into them, the work you put in, the connections you forge with what is familiar to you, have to be your own. In hindsight, that was perhaps the main message of our course.
The last thing we did with Arcadia was read aloud an excerpt from it—the diatribe that Bernard, the literary don, aims at the mathematician Valentine: "Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need."
It was the perfect juncture to loop back to C.P. Snow, whose famous "Two Cultures" essay about the divide in Western intellectual thought between the sciences and the humanities we had discussed at the beginning of the course. The class still saw the divide, still saw the long road ahead.
But perhaps the students were more optimistic than Snow (or Bernard). They'd now glimpsed the future: the digitalization of the humanities, the emphasis on statistical and quantified evidence, the interconnectedness of human experience. The next phase, their individual projects, would reveal whether the corner had been turned.
Next week: The students strike back!

Michele Osherow is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and resident dramaturg for the Folger Theatre in Washington. Manil Suri is a professor of mathematics and statistics at the university, and author of the novels "The Death of Vishnu" and "The Age of Shiva." His forthcoming novel is "The City of Devi."

Our Poets are Our Dangerous Friends

 

Our poets do many beneficial things for our commonweal.  They teach in public schools, in colleges and universities, in alternative education programs, in community centers and churches and sites of ill-repute.  When they feel generous, they call our attention to the works of other poets, to the writings of novelists, essayists, hard and soft scientists, and dramatists.  When they feel bitter and small, they call attention only to their egos.

They ---  Dudley Randall, Naomi Long Madgett, Margaret T. Burroughs, Margaret Walker, Ishmael Reed, Lenard D. Moore, Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady,  Haki Madhubuti  ---build institutions of great importance in our cultural lives ---Broadside Press, Lotus Press, DuSable Museum, the Margaret Walker Center for the Study of the African American Experience,  I. Reed Books, the North Carolina Collective African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem Foundation,  Third World Press.

They --- Al Young,  Gwendolyn Brooks, Lance Jeffers, Ntozake Shange, Angela Jackson, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Sapphire, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed,  Sherley Anne Williams, Gayl Jones  --- write novels.

They  ---  Kalamu ya Salaam, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers,  and E. Ethelbert Miller  --create and maintain list-serves, websites, and blogspots.

They  ---  Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed,  Clarence Major,  Camille T. Dungy, James Weldon Johnson, Larry Neal, Kevin Powell, Sterling Brown, Mari Evans, Dudley Randall,  Tony Medina, Arna Bontemps, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez,  Michael Harper, June Jordan, Kevin Young, Louis Reyes Rivera, Rita Dove, Kwame Dawes, E. Ethelbert Miller  ---  edit noteworthy anthologies.

They  ---  Eugene B. Redmond, Alvin Aubert, Rudolph Lewis, C. Liegh McInnis ---  found and publish magazines   --- Drumvoices Revue, OBSIDIAN,  ChickenBones, Black Magnolias.

They  ---  Audre Lorde , Lorenzo Thomas, Kalamu ya Salaam, LeRoi Jones[ Amiri Baraka],  Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Nathaniel Mackey,  Eugene B. Redmond, Maya Angelou, Margaret Walker, Jean Toomer,  Harryette Mullen , Bob Kaufman ---  write touchstone books  --- Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Extraordinary Measures, What Is Life?, Blues People, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Liberating Voices, Discrepant Engagement, Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Jubilee, Cane, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews, Golden Sardine.

Our poets are our dangerous friends who give eyesight to the blind.

The Jackson Advocate

For the Jackson Advocate

 

 

Jackson Advocate: Source and Resource

by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

 

                For an ordinary reader in the twenty-first century, a newspaper is simply a certain number of pages containing print and photographs. The quality of paper used and specifics of design or packaging of information allow the ordinary reader to distinguish a newspaper from a magazine.  The reader is very sure that information in a newspaper must be easy to read.  It must be brief.  The headline is the story.  A magazine paragraph can have four or more sentences.  The ideal newspaper paragraph must be limited to three sentences or less.  Brevity is all.

                Such exaggeration makes a point about African American newspapers. Since the founding of Freedom’s Journal in 1827, many black newspapers have violated the rules of elegant journalism.  They have done so out of necessity.  They have violated rules and custom in order to expose the more compelling social, political, and cultural violations of rights and entitlements which obtain in the United States of America.  Since 1938, the Jackson Advocate has been a player in this game.  It has violated some of the laws of journalism and most of the rules of thumb used by ordinary readers.  Habitual transgressions have made it a model African American newspaper for 75 years.

                The primary mission of the black press (newspapers) has been oppositional.  The mission has been one of revealing the facts and events which the so-called mainstream American newspapers have concealed, minimized, or ignored. In this sense, the black newspapers have been more transparent or forthcoming in using the function of journalism in everyday life.  At the time of its founding in the State of Mississippi, the Jackson Advocate had to do more than merely print the news. Conditions in Mississippi did not allow the Jackson Advocate the luxury of imitating the debatable “objectivity” of such national papers as the New York Times. It had to be overtly partisan in a closed society where “truth” was a cardinal sin.

                We are indebted to the late historian Julius E. Thompson for much that we know about the founding of the Jackson Advocate and its existence as a vital source of information for black Mississippians and the rest of the nation.  Thompson, who was relentless in his pursuit of truth, in his research on the facts of African American history, published three books that are essential for understanding the history and importance of the Jackson Advocate:

The Black Press in Mississippi, 1865-1985: A Directory.  West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1988.

The Black Press in Mississippi, 1865-1985. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993.

Percy Greene and the Jackson Advocate: The Life and Times of a Radical Conservative Black Newspaperman, 1897-1977.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1994.

Thompson’s work is foundational for any future histories of the Jackson Advocate and of African American journalism.

                One tidbit of information about the Jackson Advocate in the 1940s whets one’s appetite to know about the impact of journalism on the evolving of Mississippi’s history. In Lynchings in Mississippi: A History, 1865-1965 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007), Thompson noted that in 1942 Percy Greene bravely “spoke out against the deaths by lynching of the two fourteen-year-old black boys in Shubuta, Mississippi.”  Other black Mississippi newspapers, notably the Delta Leader and the Mississippi Enterprise, “largely remained silent on the lynching crisis in Mississippi.”  When the brilliant editor Charles Tisdale became the Jackson Advocate’s publisher in 1978, he swiftly breathed new life into what had become a conservative, lackluster newspaper.  Unlike, Greene, Tisdale was a stalwart radical, a true heir of nineteenth-century nationalists who understood that African American newspapers served as instruments in the long struggle for freedom and literacy.  Until his death in 2007, he ensured that the Jackson Advocate would make special contributions to the historical record.  Under his leadership, the paper never failed to serve the political, intellectual, and psychological needs of black Mississippians despite many efforts to discredit him and to destroy the Jackson Advocate.  Since his death, Alice Thomas -Tisdale has worked tirelessly to maintain her husband’s legacy in the face of irreversible changes in journalism and new information technologies.  She is dedicated to maintaining the newspaper as a resource for the future.

                Any celebration of the newsworthy fact that the Jackson Advocate has survived for 75 years in Jackson, Mississippi must be purposeful.  In 2013, the Jackson Advocate should be the central subject of rigorous inquiry about the past and future of African American journalism

Mathematics and Humanities

October 7, 2012

Mathematics and What It Means to Be Human, Part 1

Manil Suri

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Manil Suri

By Michele Osherow and Manil Suri

In May 2009, Michele Osherow, an English professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and dramaturg at the Folger Theatre, in Washington, invited her colleague Manil Suri, a mathematician at the university, to act as mathematics consultant for the Folger's production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The play explores the relationship between past and present through the characters' intellectual pursuits, poetic and mathematical. That led to a series of "show and tell" sessions explaining the mathematics behind the play to both cast members and audiences. In the fall of 2011, the two professors decided to take their collaboration to the classroom and jointly teach a freshman seminar, "Mathematics and What It Means to be Human." Here is the first of a three-part series on how the experiment played out.
Manil Suri: The pre-theater talks I gave at the Folger really fired me up. Few intoxicants are as dangerous to a mathematician as an audience of laypeople willingly listening to a math lecture. So when Michele tantalized me with a whole semester's worth of such highs with a class full of enthusiastic (OK, at least captive) students, the endorphin factory in my brain went into high alert.
I could be Johnny Appleseed, strewing impressionable young minds with the seeds of logic and algebra; or Florence Nightingale, bringing mathematical succor to these poor, deprived humanities rookies. This was a chance to engineer a grand meeting of diverse disciplines and worldviews—to create, in one corner of the university, our very own Arcadia.
My chairman was less enchanted by those lofty aspirations. In fact, he seemed downright distracted by the mundane matter of course release. "Who will cover the extra cost over what they're offering?" he asked. I'll skip the next part—squeezing out money, like squeezing out sausage, is best left off-screen. Suffice to say, we managed to get the go-ahead.
Which meant it was time to figure out a syllabus (http://www.math.umbc.edu/~suri/HUM120H_syllabus.doc). My evangelistic fantasies resurged, stronger and surer than before. There was so much to dazzle the students with the joy and beauty of math—all the "top 10" hits from Fermat to fractals. Even though the focus of the course wasn't to teach actual mathematics, how nice if some students went on to take something useful, like calculus!
My mind racing with the possibilities, I lavished Michele with a series of popular books on math (Keith Devlin's The Math Gene and Barry Mazur's Imagining Numbers). Since one of our themes was going to be "the two cultures," I even came up with an elaborate scenario: In the first lecture, I would join the class in disguise as a student, to make provocative comments from the back row, pitting the humanities against the sciences. Surely with Michele's experience in the theater, she could appreciate how that would start off the class with a bang? "You have a very strong sense of drama," she said.

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Michele Osherow

Michele Osherow

Michele Osherow: After countless (in the metaphorical, not Cantor set-theoretical sense of the word) sessions hashing out the syllabus with Manil, I held a June 2011 orientation for the 13 incoming freshmen chosen for our Humanities Scholars program. They would take the seminar in the fall. When I revealed the title and focus of the seminar, I noted their horror. "Don't worry;" I told them. "You can't find this more frightening than I do."
And it was true. Ever since the word problems my father forced on us at dinner, I've always been terrified of math. I probably skipped dessert for all of fourth grade in order to escape some design to have me calculate how to share five ice-cream cones among eight friends who had a variety of flavor preferences. (As if I'd ever share ice cream, no matter how good the friend.)
So how did I find myself cheerleading for a course involving math?
Blame it on Stoppard's Arcadia—a gorgeous play filled with poetry and math, English professors and mathematicians and students and teachers (and turtles), all inhabiting a very rich, very smart world. It was a world in which I wanted to live, or at least visit for two class periods a week. Manil had made the math in the play interesting and almost familiar; the complexities hypnotized me a bit. The images of fractals he'd generated on his laptop mirrored the mise-en-abyme of deconstruction; the proofs he'd talked about reproduced the precision of poetry in dazzling ways.
Might the allure of mathematics captivate the incoming freshmen? Hard to tell, but if it could, I was sure Manil was the person to supply it.
I was significantly (exponentially?) less confident in my own abilities, but after a series of communications (equal parts enthusiasm and uncertainty), the plot had been laid. Our first collaborative task was to give the students their summer assignment. After rejecting a variety of texts (Manil rejected Alice in Wonderland; I rejected Fermat's Enigma), we settled on Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and an excerpt from Keith Devlin's The Math Instinct. The students would have to read and write. But they were humanities students; they should be able to do that.
Manil: The week before the fall semester began, students began blitzing my e-mail inbox with their summer writing assignments. I tried to grade one at random and quickly realized how ill equipped I was for the task.
Throughout my career, I'd graded only problems, not papers. Beyond negotiating the minefield of creative syntax and convoluted arguments, how did one evaluate something as subjective as opinion? I missed the reassuring certitude of the crisp red marks that I made across math homework. Proofs and calculations were either wrong or right. In my heart, I wept in sympathy for my long-suffering colleagues in other fields.
Having stared at the same paper for two hours without making any headway, I also shed several tears for myself. What had I blundered into? The semester hadn't even begun yet.
Fortunately, Michele turned out to be a true grading maven: "87," she would pronounce, or "79," or "91"—an exact percentage arrived at through a precisely calibrated grading system seemingly hard-wired into her brain. She tried explaining it to me a few times, but I never could quite get the hang of it. What mattered was that she was there to unobtrusively neutralize the more egregious of the grading crimes I had probably committed.
Michele also solved the mystery of why so many of the papers ended on an alarming "Let's make the world a better place!" note. Apparently this was one of the lessons students took away from high school: Find the "message" in any assignment and parlay it into an uplifting call for action. Part of our assignment in the course would be to liberate them from such training, and nudge them into more-scholarly modes.
In other words, I had apparently signed on to teach one of those dreaded "writing intensive" courses. As I would learn through much effort over the semester, merely being a writer oneself isn't preparation enough to teach such skills.
Michele: One of the first texts on the syllabus was Pi. When Manil suggested it, I assumed he meant Yann Martel's book, Life of Pi. "No. That isn't mathematical at all," he corrected, "I mean the film Pi. (beat) Aronofsky."
Manil liked the way the film riffed on fractals and chaos theory, but what came to interest me was the deconstructive potential in attending to patterns in a film whose hero sought to expose the ultimate pattern of pi. I alerted students to the repeating tactics employed by stockbrokers and Talmudic scholars: The brokers wanted pi to reveal patterns in the stock market; the Hasidim hoped pi would reveal God's ineffable name. The trade on Aronofsky's Wall Street was stocks and gods: I wanted students to unpack both forms of power. I wanted them to consider ways in which the hero was dehumanized and what that revealed about our culture's attitude toward math and mathematicians.
The students were quick to pick up on the dangers of math as presented in the film and applied the concept of hubris to mathematicians with marvelous precision. (Manil was out that day.) Then someone linked the film to Fight Club, and our class discussion descended into a gala of gore. The students recounted (and enacted) moments of Pi's hero ingesting discharge from his computer or drilling a hole into his head. When the last bit started to appeal to me, I knew I had to shift the focus.
"But what prompts him to make these choices?" I asked, too cheerfully. I was hoping we'd move toward a discussion of man versus machine. Instead the students wanted to talk about God and kabbalistic numerology ... and Madonna.
I might have realized that beginning the course with a film that locates God in 3.1461592 ... would trigger students to seek out the sacred in every text. And sure enough, mathematical links to divinity began surfacing everywhere: in Blake's poetry, in the fractal designs of Hindu temples. The students found math and God in everything from unicorns to infinity. One student remarked that mathematics might prompt people to faith.
That was not on the list of course objectives. My remedy: We'd substitute one God for another. Next up: Shakespeare. There's reference to the gods in King Lear, but it's hardly a play to compel faith. And there's the added bonus of reminding students who went off topic, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!"
Manil: I still wake up some mornings wondering how, exactly, King Lear ended up on the syllabus. There was something about connecting his predicament to the madness suffered by mathematicians in movies like Pi, something about linking the multiple mentions of "nothing" in the play to the concept of zero, newly emergent in Europe at the time of writing. But Shakespeare and math? Really? Plus (and this was not something to complain about to my colleague, who is the interim director of the Shakespeare Association of America), I'd actually have to read the darn thing.
Which proved harder than I thought. I carried it all the way across the Atlantic and back on a conference trip, barely getting past the copious explanatory notes on the first page. Why had I allowed myself to fall victim to such cruel and unusual punishment? It wasn't as if I was torturing Michele with a tome on calculus. Eventually I did read it and—score one for the humanities—found it compelling. The novelist in me marveled at the masterful craftsmanship, the economy in developing character and plot. But the mathematician remained scratching his head.
Michele: Was it my imagination, or was Manil more resistant to reading Lear than the freshmen were?
Still, I couldn't let it go: If the goal of the course was to enable students to make connections betwixt and between subjects—the mark of intelligence to some—who opened more windows than the Bard? Besides, I needed something familiar in this course. Surely this play was relevant: It begins with a math problem (poor division!), features a constant reappraisal of value, and pitches the term "nothing" some 29 times. I persuaded myself that the play was as close to math as I'd gotten in the past 15 years (aside from Arcadia and taxes). I'd never thought about Lear and figures, but I wanted to; I wanted to know if "nothing can come from nothing" philosophically, metaphysically, mathematically.
We enlisted a colleague to discuss nihilism with the students (a common interpretive frame for Lear, and one related to discussions of zero and nothing), and considered the play's hero in relation to Joseph Campbell's theories of the archetypal heroic journey but it didn't feel like we were getting any closer to the mysteries of Lear or zero. I pointed out the way the play alerts us to disappointing math: the inequitable division of land; the attention to diminishing numbers of daughters, sons, servants; the difficulty reckoning equivalences among citizens. (For a fascinating examination of mathematics and Shakespeare, giving particular consideration to Renaissance units of measurement, see Paula Blank's 2006 book, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man.)
I could sense my colleague's increasing despair; so we cut to it: "Does the play suggest that Lear's observation on 'nothing' is correct? Yes or no?" The students spoke about the significance they assigned to the acquisition of knowledge (this was worth hearing). They recognized that the more Lear lost, the more he learned. Nil was proving to be a rich subject.
Manil shot up from his seat and introduced set theory and questions of the empty set. Elaborate, bracketed images found their way to the board: Zeros seemed to amount to things—and, when paired with a number like 1, amounted to a lot. That number proved useful in speaking about the individual in Shakespeare's world and the ways in which the value of 1 (or I) is determined by what surrounds it. It was inspiring to see those connections made and, although it took us some time to distinguish them, I'm glad we duked it out. I read Lear a little differently now, and never without hearing Manil's surprised aside: "Really, this play is very good."
Manil: Yes, I did shoot up from my seat to rein in the proceedings when they strayed too far from being math-related. To me, the characterization of Lear's gains and losses as a mathematical question remained strained. Although exercises like comparing 1 to I were interesting, I worried we were gliding over the careful truths that symbols and equations represent. Would we produce a class full of students who went around believing that math was no more than the language used to express it?
On the other hand, this was not a course in mathematics, it was all about connections, as Michele reminded me in our nightly e-mail exchanges. Using math as metaphor to shed light on other areas might be startling, but was intellectually legitimate. (Certainly my own horizons were getting challenged and stretched every day.) Still, there was the danger of moving too far off, so I gave them a mathematical version of King Lear's division problem to compensate. "Find a way to trisect any angle using only compass and straight edge." It's a classical problem, I announced, although I neglected to mention that it was one proven to be mathematically impossible.
Next week in Part 2 (to be published online only): Poetry versus Math: The battle escalates.

Michele Osherow is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and resident dramaturg for the Folger Theatre, in Washington. Manil Suri is a professor of mathematics and statistics at the university and author of the novels "The Death of Vishnu" and "The Age of Shiva." His forthcoming novel is "The City of Devi."

Ishmael Reed

ISHMAEL REED AND THE AMERICAN WAR OF WORDS

The October 3 presidential debate was a capital example of America’s war of words and visualized rhetoric.  The spectacle was ulotrichy.  Viewers are still at a loss to determine whether either debater said anything substantive regarding the economy, health care, the role of government, or a philosophy of governing.

Things would have been different and clearer had Ishmael Reed rather than James Charles Lehrer been the debate moderator.  Reed would not have stayed out of the flow.  He would have directed the debaters into the superdome of history.  Unlike Lehrer, Reed understands that a presidential debate is predicated on America’s social and racial contract and that one dividend of this contract is our nation’s contemporary nervous breakdown.

Reed opens his most recent collection of writing, Going Too Far: Essays about America’s Nervous Breakdown (Baraka Books 2012), with two sentences that fundamentally establish his locus in the history of black writing:

When they tell me “don’t go there” that’s my signal to navigate the forbidden topics of American life.  Just as the ex-slaves were able to challenge the prevailing attitudes about race in the United States after arriving in Canada, I am able to argue from Quebec against ordained opinion that paints the United States as a place where the old sins of racism have been vanquished and that those who insist that much work remains to be done are involved in “Old Fights,” as one of my young critics, John McWhorter, claims in articles in Commentary and The New Republic, where I am dismissed as an out of touch “fading anachronism.”

Reed is not an anachronism.  He is a pre-future sage.

Trillions of words have been spent in shaping and mapping the American mindscape since 1492.  Reed’s sustained efforts to keep us somewhat honest about that fact have been commendable.  His fictions, poems, plays, and recordings are a moral looking glass for envisioning what we might be.  His nonfiction, however, is at once testimony and indictment of what we are.

Reed turns 75 in 2013, and now is the time to give dedicated attention to his writing, anthologizing, and selfless work in publishing the multicultural/multiethnic writing of others. Special inquiries should be made about his nonfiction:  Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978), God Made Alaska for the Indians (1982), Writin’ is Fightin’ (1988), Airing Dirty Laundry (1993), Blues City: A Walk in Oakland (2003), Mixing It Up (2008), Another Day at the Front (2003), Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers (2010), and Going Too Far.  Fame has given Reed a few rewards, but the reward he most deserves is knowing, within his lifetime, that his uncanny intellect succeeded in making people a bit more honest.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.  October 6, 2012