End of the Year Letter

END OF 2015 LETTER

 

November 25, 2015

Greetings from New Orleans.

2015 has been odd, a year immune to rational explanations.  Dying is so commonplace.  Death matters.  We celebrate and grieve for those we knew well.   We stare in anger at death we believe was uncalled for.  We are peppered and salted with vivid, detailed, socially networked narratives of how much death we can produce daily.  We tell lies to ourselves, saying that life matters; in fact, we lie as effectively as lawyers who use verbal magic to transform lies into truths.  We actually mean death matters more than life.  Anything that resembles love of  life must fight desperately.

A person who tries to use reason to sort out global tragedies (natural and unnatural)  and the horrors of domestic terrorism, especially a person who seeks  to discover which agents of  Evil operate the centers of genuine power,  is deemed insane or unpatriotic or just out of touch with reality.  Have our hearts become so cold that our enemies within have grown obese?  Why does the Zeitgeist that tortures us refuse to call out its name?  Why does it repeatedly punch us in the eyes?

 Should it  sadden us that all the candidates for the American Presidency feel that they must pretend to be  clowns and  owls in order gain our attention and our votes? No, it shouldn't.

 It is difficult to blame the candidates for anything other than their being stereotypical politicians.  After all, American citizens have created the climate of mutual hatreds, unethical greed, worship of amoral capitalism,  self-hatred, and promiscuous entitlement which allows these candidates to flourish.  It is difficult to blame others for our transmogrification of so-called democratic ideals.   We cooperate fully with dreadful international dynamics in shaping our fates.  We have thrown reason to the wind, and in due time we shall have a rich harvest.

 Among the candidates, Donald Trump and Ben Carson take the prizes for being the greatest  pretenders, the best clowns, and the most frightening owls.  Laugh at them if you must, but also listen to what they are revealing at the dawning of the Age of Post-  Future- Fascism.

November 26, 2015

 People in the United States of America  who believe that  common sense, a primal form of reason, can  benefit humanity, improve our character, and direct us toward goodness  are not crazy. They are dangerous.  They are in touch with actuality, and for having the courage to look at the many faces of the Absurd, they are pitied, maligned,  murdered literally or figuratively, cursed or treated as if they do not exist.  Few of us have the strength and resolve to deal with the entanglement of life.  The majority of us are content to exist on the animal farm of disposable realities.

 

November 27, 2015

 2015 was not all bad.  I turned  72 in July.  Only twelve more years remain in my life sentence.  I have always been in one minority or another, and I faithfully cultivate the virtue of poverty.  I tried to be good at least sixteen hours each day, to write, to teach invisible students,  to pledge allegiance to righteous indignation, and to pray that my soul will bury my soul  properly.

November 28, 2015

 I've not yet abandoned belief that moments of peace and joy can lighten the burdens which you and  I and others are condemned to carry.  Although common sense  informs me that 2016 will be more exquisitely hellish than 2015, I insist on wishing that you and your family will discover happiness in a future of mysterious promises

Sincerely,

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

 

 

CODA

 

 

Professional Activities 2015

 

January 14---Reading and conversation with Jonathan Klein’s creative writing class, Edna Karr

High   School, New Orleans, LA

 

 

February 26-28 –Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration

 

February 27 –“Genius and Daemonic Genius:  Crafting the Life of Richard Wright,” NLCC panel on

“Mississippi’s Four W’s in Literature: Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright”

 

March 12 –“Alvin Aubert: Literature, History, Ethnicity II,” Panel on the Alvin Aubert Papers, Xavier    

University of Louisiana Library, New Orleans, LA

 

 

March 19 ---Poetry Reading with Loren Pickford and Gray Hawk Perkins at the Gold Mine Saloon, 701

                   Dauphine St., New Orleans –benefit event for the New Orleans Institute for the Imagination

 

March 25 – Panel discussion on Margaret Walker with Robert Luckett, Maryemma Graham, and Carolyn                               Brown,  22^nd Oxford Conference for the Book, University of Mississippi

 

April 16 – “Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius: Margaret Walker’s Experiment with Autobiographical                           Biography,” Richard Wright Library, 515 W. McDowell Rd., Jackson, Mississippi

 

August 29 --Poetry Reading, Latter Library, New Orleans

 

May 2 ---Election Commissioner, Ward 14, Precinct 10, Orleans Parish

 

September 24-26 ---"Peripheries, barriers, hierarchies: rethinking access, inclusivity, and infrastructure             in global DH practice, " Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities forum, University of                Kansas

 

October 9 and 10, 2015 --post-performance discussion leader for RITUAL MURDER, Chakula Cha Jua        Theater production,  Ashe Cultural Center, New Orleans, LA

 

October 12, 2015----review of Oxford Bibliography essay on Richard Wright for Oxford UP 

 

October 17 , 2015----post-performance discussion leader for RITUAL MURDER, Chakula Cha Jua

                Theater production, Ashe Cultural  Center,   New Orleans, LA

 

October 24, 2015----Election Commissioner, Ward 14, Precinct 10, Orleans Parish

 

November 6, 2015---"Remarks on Tom Dent,"  Tom Dent Literary Festival 2015, Dillard University,

                New Orleans, LA

 

November 21, 2015 ---Election Commissioner, Ward 14, Precinct 10, Orleans Parish

 

 

Publications  2015

“Ishmael Reed and Multiculturalism.” The Social Science Studies (2015): 208-210. Translated into Chinese by Qin Sujue, Sichuan Normal University.

FRACTAL SONG. Lawrence, KS: Jayhawk Ink, 2015.  A special publication by The Project on the History of Black Writing, July 23, 2015.

"This Mississippi River Is." Down to the Dark River: Contemporary Poems about the Mississippi River.

Ed. Philip C. Kolin and Jack . Bedell. Hammond: Louisiana Literature Press, 2016. 187. [Actually published in August 2015]

 

"A Collection Remembered." MELUS 40.3 (Fall 2015): 14-15.

 

"America's Soul Unchained." Black Hollywood Unchained: Commentary on the State of Black Hollywood. Ed. Ishmael Reed.  Chicago: Third World Press, 2015. 99-101.

 

Ramcat Reads #6

v

Ramcat Reads #6

 

Marshall, Nate. Wildhundreds.  Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.  Marshall, one of the co-editors of The BreakBeat Poets (2015) and winner of the 2014 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize,  writes ultra-contemporary "love letters" for Chicago, thereby exposing the paradoxical limits of stereotypes, the "tertium quid of niggerdom" (16).  One imagines that Marshall would agree with a character from Spike Lee's Bamboozled that niggers is a beautiful thing.  His poetry is abrasive.  One can read his poem "Ragtown prayer" (30-31) as a defiant response to the instructions James Weldon Johnson gave us about writing Negro poetry and as a deconstruction of the models of excellence to be found in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.  Marshall truly speaks to his peers.

Rivlin, Gary. Katrina: After the Flood.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015.  Rivlin's interviews with those who stayed during Hurricane Katrina (2005) and those who returned invites us to measure the "new" New Orleans as a city of extremes, flash points, and blatant contradictions.  Rivlin sketches  how transparent urban pathology can be as well as how successfully it can conceal its sinister designs.  His verbal  snapshots of Alden McDonald, Mitch Landrieu, Pres Kabacoff, Jimmy Reiss, Ray Nagin, Oliver Thomas and Sally Ann Glassman are priceless.

Robinson, Marilynne.  The Givenness of Things.  New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015.  One result of Robinson's conversation with President Obama ( see The New York Review of Books, November 5 and November 19, 2015) may be renewed interest in her brand of  Calvinism and her startling audacity of piety.  Robinson is forthright in saying that Christ "humbled himself and took the form of a slave.  He humbled himself not in the fact of being human, but to show us the meaning of making slaves of human beings" (200). It is understandable that our embattled President might be charmed by such sentences in Robinson's essays as the following: "The Bible seldom praises God without naming among his attributes his continuous, sometimes, epochal, overturning of the existing order, especially of perceived righteousness, or of power and wealth.  when society seems to have an intrinsic order, it is an unjust order.  And the justice of God disrupts it" (199).  It is tempting to imagine that Robinson and her President could be persuaded to embrace Toni Morrison's recommendation that Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015) is "required reading."

Tipton-Martin, Toni. The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.  A survey of cookbooks from Robert Roberts's The House Servant's Directory (Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1827) to America I Am: Pass It Down Cookbook (New York: Smiley Book, 2011), edited by Jeff Henderson and Ramin Ganeshram.  Tipton-Martin provides a glimpse of what is rarely discussed about the centrality of African American cuisine in American culture, and it is a special treat to read what she has to say about Bobby Seals's Barbequen with Bobby (Berkley: Ten Speed, 1988), to be reminded that Black Panthers knew what to do in the kitchen.

Vella, Christina.  George Washington Carver: A Life.  Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2015.  Vella's documentation of Carver's discoveries and inventions is solid, but her strained interpretation of Carver's personality is a bit annoying.

White, Shane.  Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street's First Black Millionaire.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015.  It is refreshing to read this biographical study of Hamilton, a man who used his remarkable intelligence to beat nineteenth-century New York financiers at the racial games they loved to play.  It is instructive to consider how White, an Australian professor of history, exposes the architecture of writing history with the panache so often lacking among American historians who try to tell a black story.

Williams, Saul.  US(a.). New York: Gallery Books, 2015.  Readers who feel they must be hip about everything and nothing (in the existential sense of "nothingness") should hop through the pages of this mixture of poetry and fiction.  Williams is brilliant in witnessing the contemporary game  of daily life and giving us some of the best beat-broken writing on the planet.  His aesthetic and performance of sensibility demonstrate that the practice of diaspora is a relentless taker of tolls.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

November 28, 2015