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Brown Named Director of MXIBS
by Jim Amidon
July 29, 2011
Wabash College President Patrick E. White has named Dr. Michael Joseph Brown the Director of the Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies. Dr. Brown, who has taught at Emory University for the last 12 years, will begin his service as Director and Associate Dean of the College on September 1.
The Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies at Wabash was founded in 1971 and for 40 years has served as a multifaceted educational and cultural center of intellectual and co-curricular activity focused on student success. Dr. Brown will build upon the Institute's history of engagement with the African American experience, and will support Wabash's strategic goals to attract and retain diverse students, faculty, and staff and help strengthen global and cross-cultural learning.
"The Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies has a long and honored history of helping young men find success and achievement at Wabash and develop as leaders on campus and beyond. As a mentor and teacher, Michael Brown has shown an ability to inspire great ambitions in young men and a commitment to helping them make the most of their education. Dr. Brown will work with a team of faculty and administrators to collaborate in enhancing the achievement of African American students and all Wabash men.
"He will also work with colleagues from across campus to engage the MXIBS in encouraging interdisciplinary scholarship, developing courses, and inspiring teaching and learning that helps faculty, staff, and students undertake the critical engagement with global issues and perspectives essential for every educated 21st century Wabash graduate," said President White.
While Dr. Brown comes to Wabash from Emory University, where he is Associate Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins and Chair of Biblical Studies, he is not new to the College. From 1995 to 1999, he taught at Wabash as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion. He received his undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University, his master's degree in divinity from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
"I am thrilled to return to the Wabash community, especially as the director of one of its most central institutions, the Malcolm X Institute," Dr. Brown said.
"The timing is auspicious as well. The MXI will celebrate its 40th anniversary this very year. I am excited to assume its leadership during a time of both taking stock and envisioning an even more productive future. Moreover, I am eager to work with the administration, faculty, and students as Associate Dean of the College. Wabash is a distinctive community of teaching and learning, one that I have missed since my departure in 1999. I cannot think of any better place to be at this point in my life than Wabash College."
Horace Turner, who directed the MXIBS for 35 years from the founding of the Institute in 1971 and who served on the search committee, praised the hiring of Dr. Brown as the new leader of the MXIBS.
"Michael served Wabash and the Institute early in his career, and even after he left the College to begin his tenure at Emory University, he continued to help the men of Wabash," said Turner. "Over time, he continued to pave the way for many Wabash men to attend graduate school at Emory and at other universities. I am very happy to see him return."
From 2008 through 2010, Dr. Brown directed the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. In that capacity, he managed the doctoral program comprising 65 faculty members, 160 graduate students, and a staff of four. He also served on the Candler School of Theology's Curriculum Task Force, which reshaped the master of divinity degree program. In 2008, he was one of 12 members of the Emory faculty selected to participate in the Academic Leadership Program, which is designed to prepare faculty for administrative leadership positions.
"I believe that I can bring a strong presence to the Wabash community that will facilitate stronger integration of the MXIBS into the larger College," Dr. Brown said. "Wabash's commitments to diversity and encouraging interdisciplinary scholarship means that institutional units like the MXIBS play a pivotal role in recruiting students and faculty of color, as well as assisting faculty in the development and success of course that expose students to a diverse and globally-interconnected world.
"In my estimation, the MXIBS should be both a resource and a platform for students and faculty seeking to engage educational opportunities in a 21st century environment," Dr. Brown said.
He is the author of three books,
including The Lord's Prayer through North African Eyes: A Window into Early Christianity
Blackening of the Bible: The Aims of African American Biblical Scholarship
(2004), and
What They Don't Tell You: A Survivor's Guide to Biblical Studies
(2000). He has published two-dozen scholarly articles, given 17 invited lectures and presentations, and has received seven grants to advance his scholarship. Dr. Brown is working on two additional books and an article.
"As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies at Wabash, we are very excited to welcome Michael Brown back to the College," said President White.
"He brings a deep commitment to an education that transforms young men's lives, long experience in leadership roles, and a national reputation as a teacher and scholar to his work at Wabash. With his leadership we look forward to building on the Institute's past achievements to create great days ahead for the MXIBS and Wabash College."
Wabash College
301 W Wabash Ave Crawfordsville, IN 47933 765.361.6100


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A Conversation with Amiri Baraka
by Kalamu ya Salaam
Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones) is widely celebrated as the father of the Black Arts Movement and is one of the most prolific and influential African-American writers of the 20th century. Baraka is a widely published poet, playwright, essayist, fictionalist and journalist. His book of music criticism, Blues People, is widely regarded as a classic in the field. In 1965 he, along with others such as Larry Neal and Askia Touré, founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, an institution which quickly became a model for the development of Black Cultural Centers in the sixties.
In addition to his creative work as a writer, Baraka is also a social activist. Baraka was a founder of the Congress of Afrikan People and the National Black Political Assembly as well as a major member of the Afrikan Liberation Support Committee. In the late sixties, Ebony Magazine listed Baraka as one of the 100 most influential Black leaders. Baraka started his professional life as a writer in Greenwich Village, moved on to become a Black Nationalist, and in 1974 converted to Marxism.
Baraka lives, writes and continues to be active in politics in his hometown of Newark, NJ.
This discussion with Amiri Baraka covers his development as a writer and his views on the craft and impact of writing. Baraka discusses in detail his formative years and gives an in-depth insight into his own approaches to style and technique in writing.
Advice to Young Writers: Amiri Baraka
On February 17, 1998 Amiri Baraka offered words of advice to aspiring writers of NOMMO Literary Society, a New Orleans based writing workshop founded by Kalamu ya Salaam. Baraka not only gave advice, he also expounded on his viewpoint concerning the importance and process of writing. In the process he often revealed both his idiosyncrasies as well as his insights. Filled with humor and highlighted by gestures and copious use of body english, the conversation was informal in tone and lasted over two hours. Barakas sharing was neither a lecture nor prepared speech, but rather was made up of spontaneous comments from the heart. The following is an edited transcript of that sharing.
Amiri Baraka was one of the first people to introduce to me [Kalamu ya Salaam] the possibility that you could write "Black" and at the same time write anything you wanted - Blackness was not a formula. There was no specific mode you had to fit in. Back in the day, it would be interesting when The Journal of Black Poetry or some of the other journals would come out, Baraka would have a poem like "SOS"--calling all Black people, calling all Black people, SOS, Come in, wherever you are, calling you, come in, come in--stuff like that which everybody could relate to. And then, he would have some weird-a-- [sh--]. You would go, damn, what was that. Since that time he has gone through various ideological developments, some people would call it changes, but I think he would choose to call them developments, in an effort to become clearer politically, but he has always maintained an oppositional stance to the status quo while balancing popular and experimental forms. Some of Barakas literature is what I would call "popular literature" written for the masses that not even Joe Blow the wino would misunderstand what is being said, and another part of his literature was written for, as he would say, the advanced, for people who want to sit down and study and peep some things philosophically and politically. He has agreed to take some time and talk a bit about his advice to young writers and to talk a bit about his approach to writing.
ya Salaam: Amiri, was it a conscious decision to write both what academe would call "agit-prop" pieces which have a mass orientation, and also these, for lack of better term, these way out experimental pieces?
Baraka: No, I think the culture is that broad. I dont feel any less Black trying to find out something I dont know than trying to say something I do know. At one point, you are always trying to find out more which always leaves what youre saying seemingly more discursive because you are not quite clear on what youre saying. But you know a lot of things clarify themselves as you get older. When I wrote that play Dutchman, I didnt know what I had written. I stayed up all night and wrote it, went to sleep at the desk and then woke up, and looked at it and said "what the [f---] is this?" And then put it down and went to bed. (Laughter.) Some things you know absolutely what youre saying, youre absolutely clear. Bang, its an idea you want to express. Sometimes though you cant limit your mind by what you know. You have to always figure that you can hold on and you just open your mind to where it wants to go to, which you dont know at the time, but if its legitimate, youll find out what youre saying.
See, there are levels. Can you understand the levels of what knowledge is? The first level of knowledge is perception. Perception is nothing but a sponge. Everything you are around, you pick it up. You might not even know it, but your mind is just picking up stuff like a blotter. The second level is rationalization, you actually name it. Oh, that was this. But the highest form of knowledge is use. For example, I can say I know about the piano. I know all kind of stuff about the piano, about music, but then they say: can you play? I say, oh, no I cant play. You can conceive all kinds of things and give them names, but of that myriad of perceptions and rationales, how much of it can you use? A lot of stuff you do that is reaching out is really you trying to clarify stuff for yourself.
I always got the feeling that, well, I guess maybe some of it comes from Dumas. You know Henry Dumas work? Dumas was a great writer of the Black Arts Movement, murdered by the police. Ark of Bones, those stories, great stories. I think Toni Morrison cops from him a lot. She really is influenced a lot by Henry Dumas, more than a lot of people know. The whole fascination with the bizarre, with the hidden. Moselys first book is like that, Gone Fishin. Yall read that book? You should read that. Thats a much heavier book than those detective stories. But that kind book where you walk in the Black community and suddenly its like youre opening the door to a whole other world. You step into there and all kinds of wild things happen. Like that Dumas story Fon where these White people stop this brother at night on a road like they going to lynch him or something like that. He leads them to this abandoned city where theres Black peoples ghosts still living their lives. That never occurred to me that you follow blood down the road and that might lead you to a ghost town and then suddenly an arrow comes out of the night. And when they start messing with him, he says, my brothers are watching you. You better watch out and they dont believe him, and suddenly this arrow comes--twing through the air and gets them through the neck. Well, that opened up a lot in me because I started thinking about well, yeah, I know some Black people look like they be doing stuff like that.
Also, Larry Neal had a story about religion, a weird church. These Black people had a church and they had Jesus up in there beating him. It was like a White Jesus and they had in this storefront church. Thats what they would do every Sunday, they would go to church and whip this White boy up in the church, and then they would, I guess, lock him up till the next Sunday. I dont know what that was. It was the sense of the strange, the bizarre. So, Ive been writing these stories about these Black inventors. They are just brothers you see in the community, theyre not in the University of Nowhere.
They are just in the community and might call you up and say, why dont you come over and check my stuff out, I got something new. And you go over there and they might have a machine that might do any number of things.
I think that idea of the depth and sometimes bizarre quality, sometimes profound quality of Black life, sometimes we miss that when we have to deal with the beast everyday. Im talking biblically, Revelations. When you have to deal with the beast everyday you forget that theres John sitting there, John the Revelator. You know everybody didnt see no stuff flying through the air. You know four horsemen of the apocalypse, everybody didnt see that. Now John was sitting there looking at all of that, but everybody looking up at the sky didnt see that. That sense of wonder, of revelations, has always intrigued me about Black people. I guess in our everyday struggles with 666 we sometimes forget that there are some very wonderful, miraculous things that Black people do. I saw this Negro play some spoons with an amplifier on it. Who would think about that? Who would look at a spoon and say, I know what, Im going to amplify this sucker. That doesnt seem like an everyday concern.
I think its that sense of the bizarre, the sense of the wonderful, and also the sense of the comic. In my studies of world Black culture, there still the smile at the bottom of the world. You know the masks of drama, one smiles, one frowns? That geography, thats aesthetics, that smile at the bottom of the world. That sense of the wonderful, the bizarre, and the comic, I was always intrigued by that.
ya Salaam: Its one thing to have that sense, and its another thing to have the technical facility to put that sensibility on the page.
Baraka: Practice. Practice. Practice. I think thats the only thing you can do. Like my grandmother said, practice makes perfect. To do anything you have to practice. You have to do it. If you dont do it, you wont do it. You cant be a writer in your head, just like you cant play the piano in your head. Im the meanest piano player I know--in my head. I can play some piano in my head, its just when I get to the piano it gets difficult. You have to work at it.
And then I think, young writers, you have to get to the point where you start grading your work. At first when you start doing it, everything is great. Everything you write is valuable and you must (mimics holding stuff to his chest), this is my work, this a poem I wrote in nineteen-whatever. Thats normal but you have to work through that and get over that. Im not saying get to the point where you think your work is expendable, but get to the point where you can grade it.
You know the worse thing you can do is write a "you-poem." Nobody can imitate you like you. I can write a hundred poems that I write, but those are "you poems." Those are poems using the things that you know are you. Once you become practiced in writing then you have certain skills that you can put a poem together, but the point is that it wont have any substance to it. There wont be any moving, there wont be any life in it, any heart in it, cause you can imitate yourself.
The whole point of developing the skill is so that the words fly on the rhythm. You feel the rhythm before you know what youre talking about. If you trust the rhythm and youve worked so that you dont have a lot of dumb stuff in your mind all the time. (Laugher.) No, its true, because you might want to write about McDonalds boxes, I dont know. Thats why Mao says--and this is very important--when we look at your work we can tell what you love and what you hate, what you celebrate and what you put down, and we can also tell what work youre doing and what study youre doing. We can tell what youre concerned with, we can tell by your writing, what you know and what you dont know.
Now, the lyric poet is, of course, the great hidden personality of our time. They can write about "I"--I feel, I want, I do, I am--and really be hiding the world because all theyre talking about is this great vacuum in my heart that must be filled by, I dont know, ice cream cones, a walk down the street, another person. You know what I mean, it could be anything? Thats the lyric "I"--I want, I need. But actually to begin to talk about who is I and where is I in the world among all the other Is, and how that relates to a real objectively existing world that exists independent of us. The world exists independently of us--if you can get that in your mind. The world does not depend on you to exist, it exists independent of you. Thats hard sometimes, because were so subjective, especially we great artists, we think the whole world is in our heads. Its not. The world exists independent of your will. Things will happen you dont want to happen. How did we get here?
That point of writing past the preservation of everything, being able to grade your work--you know what I mean, being able to tell the fake from the true--and of getting past imitating yourself, those are important things.
Also, going back to Mao Tse-Tung. You ever read the Yenan Forum written in 1941? Mao was trying to build the communist party and one of the things he was talking about was intellectuals. What is the role of the intellectual? What is the role of artist in making social transformation? Now, if anybody needs to know that its us. That is what Yenan is about. The first question he asks: for whom does one write? Who are you writing for? Why are you interested in writing? Is it to titillate your own compulsive personality? What is it for? Thats a good point. Think about it sometimes. Once you begin to isolate "for whom" then you also know "what it is." How do I explain what has gone down in this world for us?
So, when people be going up to me and saying Baraka you always political, I say why do you want me to be different from. You want me to be different from Baldwin, you want me to be different from Lorraine Hansberry, you want me to be different from Langston Hughes, or DuBois? Who should I get away from? Our tradition is intensely political. And for this recent group--and Im not trying to categorize you in age terms--but for this recent little group of buppies that theyre publishing who think that somehow writing is not a political act, that always has been around but its something that Black people and indeed the people of the world have flogged.
Anyway, thats a very important question--for whom?--because for whom answers why. You want to know for whom, look at your work. Who does it celebrate, who does it put down, who does it think is beautiful, who does it think is ugly, what work are you doing, what study? We can see it in there. We dont have to ask you nothing, you give me your poetry or literature, I read it and I know a lot about you just from reading that. You could be writing about something you think is totally disguised, dont have nothing to do with your life, you could be writing about Johnny Jojo way over there in Nobo land, you know, but it bees about you. Thats what it bees about. Why? Because thats all you know about. It bees about us.
Thats another thing, a lot of people get frightened at; once they know that people know that when you write something, its about you, Jim, it aint about that one, its about you, then people get constipated. They dont want to expose themselves. People be saying, I dont know how he could write that book, Baraka you... hey, what I care. You be dead in a minute, people will read it--I always thought that if you felt strongly about a thing then you would face it.
For me, I had come out of a lil petite-bourgeois family, my mother was a social worker, my father was a postman, they always told me: y'all, are the smartest colored kids on the planet. They gave me piano lessons, trumpet lessons, drum lessons, piano lessons, painting lessons. I used to sing Ave Maria with my sister. I used to recite the Gettysburg Address every Lincolns birthday in a Boy Scout suit for about six years--this was my mama. The point is that for them two Negroes right there, they knew what they were going to do, they were going to give us all the information in the world, and they was going to equip us to go out and fight the White people. Thats where my people were coming from. Why? Because they wanted that. You were fighting for them. I never knew that, I never understood what they had planned for me until one night when the White people came--I had this play, Dutchman, and all of these papers, they were calling me names and all kinds of things, stupid, crazy, evil, but I could see that they were going to make me famous.
The minute that that came to my mind that they were going to make me famous, I said, now, Im going to pay your ass back. (Laughter.) Naw, it was very clear. It was like, bump. I could see how my mama had put the shell in there. Click. Right. Oh, you gon make him famous, I got some shit for you. Thats what it was, it was like you had been doctored on by masters. You understand? Every night at dinner, theyd be running it. Youre sitting there eating biscuits and what not, and they would be running it. They would be telling you the history of the south, the history of Black people, the history of Black music and you would be sitting there. They were actually teaching you. But I didnt know that then. My grandmother would tell me all the time about this Black boy they accused of raping this woman and they cut off his genitals and stuffed them in his mouth and then made all the Black women come there and watch. My grandmother told me that story when I was a little boy. Why would your grandmother tell you that story? Because she wanted you to remember that shit forever. You understand? Sweet little old lady from Alabama would sit you down, give you something to eat, and tell you this horrible story, and then you trying to figure out: why would she tell me that story? Why would she tell you that story? Oh, you still know the story, you still got it in your mind, sixty years later, you still remember that story?--"yeah, I remember it"--in detail?--"absolutely"--well thats why she told it to you.
I dont know if y'all still have that in your homes, I cant speak on that, but I know that is what we as writers have to do, continue that tradition. The only way I can see that tradition being extended is through the role and function of the writer in the community.
ya Salaam: You said earlier, practice. Tell us about what you did to practice to prepare yourself to write A System Of Dantes Hell.
Baraka: Ill tell you about that book. Do y'all know Aime Cesaires work? If you dont, you should. Thats the first dictum of writing: to read. For African people hooked up around the world, we have the treasure chest that is boundless, boundless! You should never be bored in your life--of literature Im talking about, whether you talk about Afro-American literature. Thats what amazing about these folks, these filmmakers, Im talking about Negroes, they can make all of this garbage, yet the treasure chest lies untouched. You got all of the slave writings for instance, Fred Douglas, Linda Brett, Henry Bibb. Incredible slave narratives, more exciting than anything you see in the movies. Nothing is more exciting or more beautifully written than Fred Douglas, there is no American speech at any higher level than Fred Douglas.
Anybody who tells you different is crazy. There is no higher level, not no Melville, nobody. You want to know about American language go to Fred Douglas. Tell me somebody can match that, anywhere, anytime. I go to Willie Shakespeare in English, you have to reference that. You need footnotes for that. Read Fred, you dont need no footnotes. Thats talking about right this minute. "Would you have me argue the profundity of the human soul? Is that a topic for Republicans." He says, "there is no one who does not understand that slavery is wrong for them." That statement there, what can you do with that? Unassailable logic. In English there is no literature at no higher level than Fred Douglas. Not Shakespeare, not, not, not, not. Not the Bible.
Fred takes the Bible, he takes Shakespeare, when you read Freds writing, he already copped the Bible, and he copped Shakespeare, and then he put the Black thing in there just to make it sweet. Read that.
How do you practice? You first have to read. You first have to read. You have to read everything. I can say that now, but then again, when I was a kid, when I was in the Air Force, I used to read everything because I didnt have nothing else to do. I was locked up in the Air Force, I would read for twelve or fourteen hours a day. I mean terrible stuff, Thomas Hardy. Stuff I would never wish on nobody. You know what I mean.
ya Salaam: But do you think that helped you?
Baraka: Yes, it did. Why? Because all of those things were confirmations. My mama and daddy already had told me, y'all the smartest colored people on the planet or we going to make you that. You see, but I wasnt sure, because I always thought that White people, because they had that enormous public relations outfit saying how hip they is--at seventeen and eighteen I was trying to figure it out. I said, well, let me check them out, they might know something, you know? I wanted to know something, so I checked them out. I was the night librarian at Randy Air Force base and I ran the library. This White woman who ran it found out that I knew the books and loved the books, so she went on a vacation. She went down to the beach and just stayed there and said, you got it. So, I would have my boys in there every night and we educated ourselves in the history of so-called western, i.e. European, culture. Thats what we did, every night. Whether it was Palastrina or Bach, the madrigals, we would sit there and listen to it, and then we would read all that stuff. Tess Deverviel, Thomas Hardy, all of that, Jude the Obscure.
Why? Because we thought it might have something of value in it. So we read through it. We would read all of the New York Times Book Review stuff. To say what at the end? There was limited information in it. Although I can not regret any of it, a lot of that time I could have spent trying to get through them ten thousand magazine articles DuBois has written. I could have spent my time trying to get through all of DuBois works and all of Langstons work.
Just that. You know that DuBois actually wrote ten thousand articles that he published. Now figure that out. How could he write ten thousand magazine articles? Well, first you have to live to be ninety-five. Then you have to write maybe ten articles a month, thats a hundred a twenty a year, no, that aint enough. How many you have to write? About two hundred a year for fifty years.
Did I answer the question?
ya Salaam: No, you were talking about how you prepared to write A System of Dantes Hell.
Baraka: Oh, yeah, and I asked had anyone read Cesaire, and no one answered? Read Aime Cesaire. His great work is called Notes On A Return To My Native Land. He was one of the founders with Senghor and Damas from Guyana of Negritude, that was the Black consciousness movement that comes out of the thirties and the forties from French speaking peoples. They had a movement in Haiti called Indigismo, its the same movement. They had a movement in the Spanish speaking Black countries called Negrismo, same movement. Blackism, Black consciousness. Throughout the West Indies, and through out the world.
The reason I say Ceasaire is because when he was a student over at the Sorbonne in Paris, he, Damas and Senghor were writing what they described as French Symbolist imitations. They were imitating the French Symbolists. So one day he got disgusted with this and said, Ill never write another poem. Ill only write prose. Well, he lied because the prose that he wrote was Notes On A Return. What does that have to do with Dante, well the Dante is the same thing. I was under the influence of a lot of writers in the Village.
I said to myself, Im not going to do this anymore. Why? Because youll find out when you imitate peoples writings, you also imitate their point of view. I wrote a long paper on something called the "content of form." Forms are a form of content. You understand what Im saying? When Claude McKay, for instance, chooses the English sonnet form, thats an aspect of his content.
His focus on that English form, tells you something about his philosophy. I began to see that even being influenced by these people, I was being influenced by their content which I didnt believe in. When I was among the White writers we used to argue all the time about politics not having anything to do with art, thats what they would tell me and I would say, for whatever reason, say, but it does. Even down there among the beatniks, I would say that it does. Why? Because if you were describing an apple thats your description of it. You are trying to convince me that that apple is an apple for me as it is for you. Whats the difference between that propaganda and me telling you capitalism aint no good. Finally, one might have more implications than the other. So anyway, I said, I have to stop being influenced by these peoples form because the form is also making me think some of the things that they think. So, I said Im not going to do that anymore. Im not going to try and write poetry anymore. I didnt know Cesaire had said that till maybe fifteen or twenty years later. So, I said, what will I do? Im going to write a story in which I do not the story, but write the story that the story makes me think of. And thats what I tried to do. In other words, I was telling myself a story in my head, and I said, Im not going to write that story that Im telling myself in my head. Im going to write the story that that story makes me think of. You know what Im saying?
ya Salaam: No. Break that [s---] down.
Baraka: In other words if I say, I walked into this room and saw a group of writers sitting around a table with books on table. Thats the story, but that aint what I think. Thats the story, but what that story makes me think of is something else. I called them association complexes. I would be thinking of something, but I wouldnt write about what I was thinking, I would write about what thinking about that made me think because there are associations. Because I would say, well, I know the story but I dont know what the story would make me think. In other words, Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Now, what does that make you think about? Thats the story, but what does that make you think about? Well, I remember Jack when he was downtown last week, he had this funny looking hat on, so forth and so on. Then I saw Jill the other day coming out of this bar. It all had to do with what those associations were more than anything else. I think poets do that a lot and they dont know it, or they do know it.
Also, youd be surprised if you let your mind run as free as it will, it aint gon run that free, cause you going to stop it. (Laugher.) Naw, thats right, cause youll think youre not making sense. But youll be surprised, youll be making sense that you dont know is sense. Its true. Youll say something, itll come out your mouth--you know you mouth is fast--and then two or three beats later you will say, oh, thats what that means. Youve got to trust yourself. Its just like anything else, like sports, like them basketball players. Youve got to trust yourself. Michael Jordan says when he goes up in the air, he dont know what hes going to do. He goes up there and creates, thats what you have to do. You have to create. Now, if youre crazy, well find out. If you cant make it, well find out. But, youve got to go for it.
This might sound peculiar to you, but theres a lot of stuff in your own life you dont even know. You dont know nothing about yourself. You want to know about the world, check out yourself. What was your grandmother talking about the last time you saw her? What did she mean? Where did she come from? What her boyfriend look like? How did your grandmother get to the place where you met her. Theres stuff in your life thats incredible. All kinds of things. I dont know what they are, you dont know what they are, but you can find out. If you was to turn detective like Easy Rawlins and try to go down your own life, who are you parents, how did they meet, where they always your sweet parents, who were their parents, where did they live? Theres a lot of secretes, even when you live with somebody, when you married to somebody, you dont know everything about the person youre living with. My wife and I been together 31 years, now thats a long time to be with anybody, but that dont mean you know everything about them. Cause every once in a while you be talking and you said "what??? I never knew that? I never knew you believed that? Life is very, very complex and it changes all the time. What you want to be today, you might not want to be tomorrow. What you called yourself a few minutes ago, you might not want to call yourself the next time I see you coming around the corner. I dont mean youre all like Rodman--Rodman changes his hairstyle, he got purple today, tomorrow he might have yellow--I just mean your mind is subject to all kinds of things.
ya Salaam: What did you do in terms of craft. I want you to speak about craft. How would you practice writing?
Baraka: How would you practice writing? Read and write. Read and write. Write what? Whatever comes into your head. Whatever. But also have projects. Things that you want to do. I have projects lined up into 27A.D. that I want to do. A lot of which are done but not done. The reason projects are important is because thats something you can apply yourself to. How do you do it? You have to do it. You have to write and correct it. You have to write and look at it. Im not a big one for rewriting. Im not a big rewrite fan. My rewrite is choome, into the trash can. I dont mess with it. If it looks like its not going to hang out, Ill throw it away. Im not going to torture it. Why? Thats arrogance. Like Bill Cosbys says, Ill kill you and make another one just like you. Ill kill you poem and make another one just like you. Dont have that fear of it. Youve got to be free and open to write about anything from any point of view that appeals to you but you have to actually study, do that mental gymnastics. You cant write on an empty brain. Some people does.
What do you have to study? The world! What a silly thing to be in the world and not know anything about it. I mean how silly is that to be here everyday and not know nothing about the world, to be walking around just ignorant. Thats a hell of a thing. Im ashamed of my own ignorance, you know what I mean?--not in anyway that would make me less arrogant--but ashamed of it in the sense of there is a lot that you gots to know that you will never know. When I get to something, you know, find out something and then think about how many years I been walking around thinking that I knew something and didnt really know it, didnt know nothing about it. Like I was somewhere today and I opened up a book and started reading about the Boer War. Now, I know about the Boer War. I read Conan Doyles little jive thing--you know Sherlock Holmes man--Doyle wrote a thing about the Boer War so I read it.
Why? Cause I wanted to know about the Boer War, but then, Im reading some more on it and I say, I didnt know that. I started saying, hey, I better go back and look at the Boer War again. But then you say, why you want to know about the Boer War Baraka thats some old corny stuff. Because I want to know about it, thats why. I want to know. It was in South Africa. They were fighting over our land. Why would the Boers and the English fight? What was that about. What were the stakes in that. Who sold out? What niggahs sold out, I know there must have been some who sold out. Thats true. When you look at the Civil War or the destruction of Reconstruction, you start thinking it was all White people, thats a game. Just like today, if somebody was to tell you, aw, theyre getting rid of Affirmative Action and this and that, and forty years from now, you say it was White people this and White people that. Hey, list all the niggahs that was in it. Who helped them do that. Same way during the Civil War. Yes, they did. Some of the same people we be calling out as the first Negro so and so, look at who they were and why they was that.
ya Salaam: When you wrote, you wrote on a typewriter?
Baraka: Always.
ya Salaam: Manual or electric?
Baraka: Well, it was manual until, lets see, a while back I started writing on an electric typewriter. Ive had a computer maybe since ninety-something. But always with a typewriter. I didnt never like to write longhand.
ya Salaam: Why?
Baraka: My hand hurt. (Laughter.) I could write faster on a typewriter. I was the only boy in typing class in high school. I got a C, but I can type. Im always grateful for that stroke of revelation that made me take typing. I wasnt thinking about it for no special reason, but then again, I guess I was thinking about writing because I had been to a writing class. So I learned to type and I am forever grateful for that. I think typing, computing, thats the way you have to do it. That longhand, Im not with that. I do it a lot because I dont have any choice, traveling all the time, Ive written a lot of stuff in longhand but I cant do nothing with it because once I write it out like that Im disgusted that I had to do that in the first place because thats just a lot of work.
ya Salaam: And then you would have to do it again, type it over, because no one can read your writing?
Baraka: (Shakes his head yes and smiles. Laugher.) I dont know why that is. I know my wife says she cant read it, and, I dont know, I think she would be suspicious if someone else could, but I know I cant read it and she cant read it. It takes a long time for me to read my own handwriting. I dont know why even bother.
ya Salaam: Were you one of those people who had a writing routine or did you write anytime, the morning, at night, or whatever?
Baraka: When I was younger I used to like to write late at night and early in the morning. Now I write late at night.
ya Salaam: Whats that about?
Baraka: Quiet. The rap concerts go off in the house. The little twenty-five year old children stop running up and down the steps. That dont slow down until about two. About three or four is the best time, four until light is the best time.
ya Salaam: If you were absconded as you walked out of the door and they said, tomorrow we do the operation and this operation is going to wipe out all of your books except two and you can tell us what two that would remain--its sort of a Sophies choice kind of question --what two books would you want to have left behind?
Baraka: The ones Ive still got to write. (Laugher.) I really feel that way. I dont have no worshipful relationship to my work in that way. I did it. Thats it. It aint me, thats just some books on the shelf, because if you dont act like that, then that will be you over there on the shelf. Youve met people who dont go any further than that. Thats where they at. What they said in 1928, thats what they say today. Why? Because they worship that fact that hey, I have a book and I said this. A lot of stuff that I have in books, I dont even agree with that anymore. Somebodyll say, well, you have it in a book. Yeah, but that book aint me. That book was written in 19--, I was a little boy then, I dont believe that anymore. Thats like Skip [Gates] and them be talking about DuBois and the talented tenth. Hey man, that was 1890-something he wrote that. For you to keep running that back to a guy who joined the communist party when he was 93 years old, thats kind of far out. Why do they do it? For obvious reasons. They cannot deal with all of DuBois, so they make believe his life stopped there. The White people do that to me all the time with the downtown stuff, lets make believe his work stopped there. You cant allow yourself to be linked to the work as if it were you. You can defend it or cop out about it, but Im not going to pretend its me because thats death. You become a bookend, a literary figure thats somebodys going to bury. Thats what I loved about Jimmy [Baldwin] finally, when we made our rapprochement. He was a good brother. That was somebody you could hang out with. He didnt think of himself up on a bookshelf and he would burn you in a minute if thats what you wanted to approach him with.
Jimmy had a terrible mouth for those of you that dont get that inference out of his books, he had the sting of a cobra out of his mouth. He would hurt you. He never took that idea of being "the author" seriously. Now, a thinker, thats different. He didnt want you to take him light on the thought side. If you would try to play him cheap in terms of what he thought, then you were in for trouble, but the book thing. You see to be stuck like Ellison on one book and to be there polishing the weapon, polishing the gun so much till you dont get another shot. Thats what that is. You be there polishing the gun so much till the gangster done went away. And youre sitting there, well, Im trying to get it so its like this. The thing is to bam, pull it out and shoot it. For me thats what writing is, you got to pull it out and shoot it. What is in your mind, what is in your feelings, go for it. Nobodys feelings are more profound than yours. Nobody knows more than you if you know what they are talking about.
ya Salaam: What do you mean by that?
Baraka: If you know what they are talking about--if they go off in some jargon or linguistic code, thats different, but if they are talking about the world and you know what theyre talking about, they dont know no more than you do. They might have more experience which you are then suppose to respect, but there is no such thing as they have an exclusive hold on meaning.
ya Salaam: Youve spent a lot of your time being an editor. Assembling writers, poets, you put together a number of anthologies. You did a press. Put together Totem Press and worked with Corinth Press. You did Kulchur, Floating Bear, all those magazines, you even did that music magazine Cricket for a minute. Tell us about your perception of being an editor as integral to being a writer or do you see it as two different things?
Baraka: (right) I see it as a continuation. I also became an editor because I wanted to publish my own work when I was young. I never believed in waiting for anybody to publish me. I never believed I was going to be discovered by nobody. I never believed that somebody was going to say, hey, I want to publish you. I thought that if anybody was going to publish me it was going to be me. Im not going to make believe, Im just going to publish. Why? Because I wrote it. I want it out. Thats it. Why did I do a magazine? Because I thought that there were a lot writers like myself who needed to be published. I think you all, you writers, you publish your stuff. All you need is a mimeograph. You dont need a whole lot of money and stuff. In this day and age of Kinkos--we didnt have that when I was coming up--you can get twenty books published in five minutes. For the next poetry reading you can print twenty or thirty books and then sell them. I would do that. You love the poetry, youre writing the poetry, put it together, charge a couple of dollars for it. You can make the money back you spent and get your work out. To me thats the best armament for writers. Always have your stuff with you. Always. Mash it on somebody. Sell it. Give it away. Youre a writer, you want people to read your work. Right? Thats what you want. If you want to get rich, get into another field! But if you want to write, you want people to read your writing, well then, write it down and publish it, give it away. People been holding on to their writings talking about, one day, the sun god is going to come down and discover me, and make me chief editor of Playboy. You know that kind of stuff. Whoever discovers you is going to turn you into something you wish you wasnt, Ill tell you that. They used to tell me all the time when I was down in the village, so and so sold out, so and so sold out. I would say, well, wheres the office. Aint nobody asked me. They was discriminating even in selling out.
Dont wait for anything. Just wait for your own agreement. When you think youre ready. Two poems. One poem. A broadside. Anything. Get it out. Because if you dont, youre constipating yourself. Its true. You walk around with a whole sheaf of stuff that youre not publishing, thats constipation because your mind is fixed on that, and youre not going to do much until you get that out of you. And once you--even if its on Kinko's paper-- do something with it, its out of you. That act will get it out of you and then you can go on to your next thing. But you have got to do it.
ya Salaam: Talk a bit about poetry specifically and literature in general as sound rather than as text. Weve been talking about text for the most part.
Baraka: First, the music. Always being intensely interested in the music, I always tried to use the music as a catalyst and a kind of object lesson or a paradigm for my own work. It comes from Langston who said, I try to use the forms and content of Black music, of jazz and blues. I was trying to do that. As far as the sounds are concerned I always thought of myself as a saxophone player or a drummer, and a trumpet player I guess, in terms of the poetry. I always thought too that the sound of the voice is important. Just the sound of your voice has an aesthetic quality to it. In order words, it's tonal. It has timbre to it, it has a sound, and that that sound is useful in terms of poetry. For me it always goes back to musical sounds, how do you replicate musical sounds, how do you replicate the percussive kind of catalyst that our music rides on.
ya Salaam: But why music?
Baraka: Because poetry is nothing but music. Poetry is words given the musical emphasis. Its nothing but music. If you dont like music, then you shouldnt be no poet. I dont think you should be a writer, but then that might be biased. I know that there were several European writers who hated music. I dont know how they could make it, because language is musical, rhythmic.
ya Salaam: With performance, where did you pick that up? In the early years we can imagine you sitting down and reading your poetry, but by the seventies, no one can imagine you sitting down in a chair and reading Its Nationtime.
Baraka: Thats a combination of things. One, the first person I saw reading poetry to music was Langston Hughes. I had never thought that you were not supposed to. I never came into the world thinking that poetry and music were divorced. I always thought that they should be together. Why did I think that? From the blues, thats where I took my thing from, the blues. I always liked that. Larry Darnell. The old talking blues, I loved that. Lighting Hopkins. Charles Brown. Thats where I was coming from. And all them "bird" groups: The Orioles, The Ravens, The Flamingos. I used to walk down the halls of high school doing that. I thought it was hip. Also, thats the activism coming in to it. I read a guy named Brown, I think it was W. W. Brown in England, who said, you can always tell when the activist period is coming in politics because theatre becomes dominant. At the point where words turn to action. When theatre comes in, when real theatre is dominant, then it means that people are getting ready to go to war, getting ready to make revolutionary change. Why? Because it means that they are actually going to do it and not just observe. I began to notice that my poetry began to have talking in it. Conversations in the poem. With peoples names like in a play except this was before I started writing plays. And then the more I got busy actually, started working in Harlem, went to Cuba six months after the revolution, we were trying to send guns down to Robert Williams. The more I got into activism, the more the language changed. Then I met people like Askia Toure.
Askia always had that singing quality, that kind of epic quality like reciting the work. Larry Neal had that singing quality. Those were influences on my reading style, but it was the music that took it. So I guess, the music in combination with the activism.
ya Salaam: By the time you were doing Black Art, Sabotage, Target Study and some of those books, the poems actually had instructions for gestures in them in parenthesis.
Baraka: Right. Right. And thats just making your way. You dont know where youre headed but thats where its headed. First, the poetry is headed up on the stage. Its going to come out of somebodys mouth in a minute. Youre writing it as a poem, but in a minute youre going to put it in somebodys mouth and theyre going to be up on a stage. With that sound, you could write poetry but have some people say it. It was a much more popular form than theatre. I love theatre, I love its results. You have to deal with a lot of nuts, but I still love theatre. Thats really a sad thing, that we dont have a repertory company that you cant just see the works of an ONeal, Langston, Zora, Tennessee Williams, thats horrible, all the great works. Why we dont have it? Because that stuff is dangerous. If they start doing the historical literature of America: White, Black, Latino, Asian. Hey, its so hot, in terms of what its saying about this, not just us. Look at ONeals The Hairy Ape or Waiting For Lefty. Those are hell of plays. They dont want young people to come in and look at that every day. Tennessee Williams, to me, is the greatest of American playwrights. His portrait of America is out to lunch. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird Of Youth, look at that. Ill tell you the one, Suddenly Last Summer. You want to see something, see that. Its a portrait of colonialism and a portrait of America. The White thing to Williams was a symbol of craziness and decadence, though White he may be.
ya Salaam: Whenever somebody asks you a question about basketball, we end up on a football field with a reference to baseball. I still want to know about the basketball. Your performance style as a poet.
Baraka: My performance style came from listening to other people influenced by the music and the political activism, I think. The fact that I was interested and attached to the music, attached, I mean I used to live over the Five Spot. When Monk and Trane played there, I was there every night. I dont mean metaphorically, I mean literally. I would go downstairs and Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane would be in there getting ready to play, where was I going to go? It was incredible. I think also that shaped a lot of my ways of seeing things. Like these group of stories Im writing on the musicians about Sun Ra, and Monk, Walter Davis, Don Pullen, Albert Ayler. People I knew. The way they talked, the music they played, thats very important. That influenced me a great deal. The performance style is wanting to be a horn but also the activist. Having to speak before people, speaking before hundreds and thousands of people. In the street, trying to move people in the street.
And then there was the fact of performing for the people. Ill tell you, my class, anybody, you think your work is good, read it to some of these brothers on the street, you know the ones who be digging holes in the ground and they have a half hour break and they be sitting there eating them sandwiches on break. Read your stuff to them and see if it interests them. They are not blocks, nor stones, nor worthless, senseless things. They are human beings. See if your work can reach them. Dare that. Thats your people. In that situation of being out in the street having to deal with people on the real side, then you have to come up with the real thing. You have to make your feelings translatable, reachable. You have to move people and not with no "do it baby, do it baby, do it baby." Not like that. But with the kind of depth and profundity youre really talking about. How do you actually reach the people with a message of profundity and not some kind of artificial garbage that comes out everyday on the hit parade? You know what I mean, you hear the lyrics to them songs, they say the same thing all the time. And it doesnt have anything to do with the lyrics, its (begins pounding monotonously on the table), if I do that your hearts going to pick it up. Your heart picks up the beat, you cant help it, and I could be saying: youre stupid, youre stupid!, youre stupid! You need to kill yourself! And you would do it, you will start to say, Im stupid, Im stupid, Im stupid! I need to kill myself. (Laughter.) They do it everyday on television, dont they. Everyday. And youll be walking down the street, if you dont catch yourself, die, die, die, Im stupid, Im stupid, Im stupid. They know it dont take nothing but that (beating). Your heart assumes the beat.
ya Salaam: Its like people say, I didnt understand everything they said, but you could dance to it.
Baraka: Thats the point. See? If you notice, now, rap and reggae have gotten intelligible, whereas before--Bob Marley was very clear. Try to understand these people now. See if you can understand what theyre saying. Thats movement into another thing. To me, the point of art is communication. Now, I aint saying how or what, but thats the point of it communication.
ya Salaam: Is emotional communication, for you, as valid as intellectual communication?
Baraka: I dont see that kind of separation. I mean I can see it in certain kinds of tortured kinds of definitions, but to me, I would say, what can not feel, can not think. What can not feel, can not think. Thats what I think about that! The whole European thing about thought and emotion being at odds is bizarre. Thats like Wagner and the birth of tragedy talking about emotionalism interferes with his thought; well, your thought is messed up. I mean if you Hitlers hero, I can see that. Thats always been one definition of that kind of tortured, alienated Euro-sensibility. Im saying that not so much in terms of nationalism, but rather as an identification of the kind of psychology that has developed out of capitalism, because you cant feel if youre going to torture people. You cant feel if youre going to have slaves. You have to then find a way to define profundity as alienated from feeling, otherwise you cant have no slaves. You cant be whipping peoples ass and doing all kinds of terrible things and celebrating feeling at the same time, you know what a mean? Because otherwise youd be saying, oh, my god, look at that, oh, no thats bad. Have you ever been to the slave castles in Africa? If you get a chance, check those out. Theyll do wonders for you in terms of why the people who created slavery, can not feel, or rather, why you must not feel.
ya Salaam: And why you must celebrate thinking above feeling.
Baraka: Right. Why you must elevate the intellectual process above emotions, cause you couldnt possibly feel because then you couldnt make that money. For instance, my son Ras and I went up there in Goree. He had just graduated from college and we went over there, and when we went to the slave castle and we sat up there in this dungeon with the door closed and everything, tears started coming out of our eyes. The two of us sitting there, father and son, not saying a word, just sitting there crying. Why? I don't know. It's just that feeling is too strong, it's too strong. You sit in there and there's a window (pointing towards the twelve-foot high ceiling) about up to where that chandelier is, you have to leap up there just to see the ocean. Imagine fifty Black people in there trying to survive. You just sit there and suddenly, psychologically you begin to feel it on you. It's something. You don't want that but you start feeling it. I remember we came out of there crying and when we came out in the open, it was a group of French tourists walking towards us, and Ras says to me, Imamu, what they want? What do these White people want? At another point I stood by a wall that had those chains on it and I put my arms in the chains and said, Rashida, take a picture of this. She said, no. I said, Rashida, take a picture of this. She said, no, no, no, and she started crying. She said, no, I'm not taking a picture of that. That thing grips you. When you come into that, when you actually come close to slavery itself--I don't mean stories of it, but when you actually get close to it, it will do something to you. No doubt about it. They got a hole in the wall, the door of no return and if you couldn't make it they would just kick you aside into the ocean. A lot of the people had never seen the ocean, you know, because they were from inland. They had seen lakes. They might jump out there and think they could swim it, might think it was a lake, but that was the Atlantic ocean and the sharks be circling down in there. Now when you conceive that and conceive that there were people upstairs over the prison, who lived there, who had a little hatch, like that light in the ceiling, a trap door in their floor where they could look through there and check on the slaves, you understand what I'm saying? You've got to be a cold mamajamma to do that. People down there (makes screaming sounds) screaming and what not, and you can pick up the door, you have your dinner and [sh--] upstairs and you could pick up the door and look down and see what was happening with that, well, you can't have no feeling with that. Feeling has to be abolished. That's why I'm saying they make that separation between the intellectual process and emotion. But I say, if you can't feel you can't think. That's my feeling about that. That's why we ask philosophers every morning, how you feel? (Laughter.) That's it.
ya Salaam: When you spoke of DuBois and the rhythms and forms he used, do you think they had trouble with DuBois' rhythms or his content?
Baraka: It's always the content. Always the content. Form is secondary, always. Each class has its own politics and that's what it's about. That's what literary criticism is: a form of class struggle. In the literary canon that was just published by the Encyclopedia Britannica, the greatest books in the world, there's no Black people in there. There's no Brown people, Yellow people, there's nothing in there. There's one woman in there, Wilma Catha, the Catholic writer, and all White men. They had a little disclaimer, well not a disclaimer, I guess you would say "claimer" where they explained that DuBois almost made it, but he kept insisting on talking about real [sh--]. It is in essence political. Like the man said, the most dangerous thing the devil does is convince you he don't exist. That's why the man says, politics, ah that's too political to be art. But you're fighting politics against politics. You mean to tell me you really believe their stuff is great. Look at it. Tell me what you think of it.
If you are not forced--and that's what your education does, force you to accept something you would not accept otherwise. The middle class is taught to be bored. You could sit there and be bored, and be bored, and be bored because somebody has told you that's some hip [sh--]. And you start to say, oh, yes, yes. And all the while they be beating you up. But see the average working person won't go for that. They said that's corny, I'm getting out of here. But we've been taught by our education to go for it, to stay there. You might hate it, it might be ugly, it might be nonsensical, but, it's deep! (Laughter.) Oh, my god, when you imagine all the hours and hours of your life you have spent investigating trash, and garbage and stupidity. It's incredible. It's the politics. Form is important but I think content is more important. What you are saying is more important than how you are saying it, but at the same time, how you say it is important because if you don't say it in a way that people can understand you than then there's no use in you saying it. The form that you develop has to suit that content, has to be a vehicle for your content, it should enhance that content. It's not form our critics be objecting to, finally though, it's the content, it's the politics.
from The Black Collegian Online.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
While researching an article about school cafeterias, News Bulletin staff writer Brian Hughes recently lunched with about 200 Riverside Elementary School students and shared a critique of the cuisine on the lunch line.
Editor's note: While researching an article about school cafeterias, News Bulletin staff writer Brian Hughes recently lunched with about 200 Riverside Elementary School students and shared this critique:
I followed Kaleb, Cayden, J�Marcus, Hayle and their classmates through the line and was impressed by how much the servers cared for their students. At one point, manager Lydia Bradley paused to tie J�Marcus� shoelaces for him.
Selections all looked and smelled delicious. There was no depressing, stale-food smell I always associated with the lunch line as a kid. Everything radiated freshness and gave no indication of having sat under warming lights since late morning. In fact, there was a constant parade of freshly prepared food coming from the kitchen.
Staff was also constantly cleaning up the serving and dining areas and buffet line as each wave of youngsters trooped through. Every kid enjoyed a clean, tidy lunch line as well as a clean table and bench in the multi-purpose room.
I decided on one of the hot entr�es. Tempting as the quesadilla looked, I opted for the chicken patty sandwich. The whole-wheat bun was fresh, and the baked breaded chicken patty was savory and tender. The edges were not at all tough, as often happens when they sit on a serving line too long. The baked tatortots were much lighter and tastier than their fried cousins, and the baked breaded green beans were something new for me and � with that wonderful cornmeal breading that fried okra is done with � really gave the veggie an enjoyable kick. Everything was lightly seasoned with none of that unpleasant fast-food institutional reheated tang.
I was delighted with the choice of a fresh orange half, but opted for the fruit cocktail just to see if it had that nasty, canned fruit �tin� taste.
It didn�t.
The fruit was crisp and was served in a rich, tasty juice.
For a beverage, there was a selection of fruit juice as well as bottled water and sweet tea. I took a container of 100 percent apple juice, which hit the spot after such a tasty lunch. Then, I sat back and envied the kids.
If only my school cafeterias had served such great choices!


text:
Starwood, X-Day
First a couple announcement/corrections.
July 3, 2011 (Sunday) at 11-something p.m. ZERO DEFEX will play at X-Day 14 at the Wisteria Campground near Athens, Ohio
July 6 & 7, 2011 (Wed & Thu) I will be speaking and leading workshops at Starwood, also at the Wisteria Campground
I believe these are both listed wrong on my Book Tour Page. Unfortunately the files with which I created that page are now lost. So I'll have to recreate the entire page from scratch to correct anything on it. I'll get to that...
Both of these events are far out of the range of the kinds of events either I or the band usually do. We're not really hippie-in-the-woods kind of people. So I'm a little nervous as to how they'll turn out. Does a bear poop in the woods? Yes. But I do not usually poop in the woods.
Apparently people often go to these things "sky clad." I will not be sky clad. I'm not sure how much I want to see sky clad hippies with beer guts boppin' around at the drum circle. But I guess I'm gonna see a lot of that.
X-Day (but not Starwood) is a festival run by the Church of the Subgenius. The Church of the Subgenius is a brilliant parody of cults and organized religions that is always tottering on the edge of becoming either a cult or an organized religion itself. Each year the leader of the church predicts that aliens will descend in a fleet of UFOs to pick up the members of the church and blast everyone else in the world to smithereens. Each year the members meet to await the saucers. Each year the saucers fail to arrive. And each year the leader of the church makes a new excuse as to why it didn't happen this year and promises that next year the aliens will come for sure.
I'm a great believer in robbing bad things of their power by making fun of them. So I'm all for the Church of the Subgenius. For all their lunacy, some of the philosophy in their books is pretty deep. And some is just goofball nonsense.
Last night Zero Defex played at Thursday's Lounge in Akron. In attendance was our original guitarist Tommy Strange. He said we played too fast.
The truth is a lie!!!


text:
Office: Agriculture and Natural Sciences Building, Room 330
Email: email@example.com
Phone: 806-651-2570
Dr. Schultz joined the Department of Geology (now the Department of Life, Earth and Environmental Sciences) in 1964. He hails from Red Wing, Minnesota and received a B.S. in geology from the University of Minnesota in 1958, a M.S. in geology from the University of Minnesota in 1961 and a Ph.D. in geology/paleontology from the University of Michigan in 1966.
Dr. Schultz teaches introductory Earth Science, Mineralogy, Minerals and Rocks, Geomorphology, Oceanography, Paleontology and Human Origins. He also advises students majoring in geology and has given numerous talks and presentations on rocks, minerals, fossils and regional geology to public school classes, teachers' workshops, Texas Master Naturalists and museum activity groups, like Dinosaur Day at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.
Dr. Schultz's research interests are in the field of vertebrate paleontology and biostratigraphy, especially the fossil mammals (three-toed horses, camels, rhinos, saber-tooth cats, mastodons and tiny rodents and shrews) that lived in the Southern High Plains during the last 10 million years of geologic time. He is the author of many scientific papers, co-author of the book entitled "Ice Age Mammals of Northwestern Texas" and is a member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and the Paleontological Society.
Dr. Schultz lives in Amarillo with his wife, Joyce. Both are active in their church. They have three grown children. Hobbies include attending concerts and plays, travel, collecting and enjoying old opera and jazz recordings and old movie serials, westerns and detective films. He would love to get together with fellow 'oldies' buffs.


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Gov. Dave Heineman recently announced that Peru State College is one of 50 Nebraska employers honored for successful workplace wellness programs.
Gov. Dave Heineman recently announced that Peru State College is one of 50 Nebraska employers honored for successful workplace wellness programs.
"These awards recognize employers for their serious commitment to employee well-being," Gov. Heineman said. "Prevention and wellness efforts in the workplace have produced higher productivity, better employee satisfaction and helped control health care costs. Wellness works every time and these programs are helping more Nebraskans lead healthier lives."
The award was created to recognize Nebraska employers that have developed successful models for encouraging wellness at work. Factors considered for the award included the level of support for the program by company leaders, assessment of employee needs, wellness plan design, outcomes and benefits, and policies supporting healthy behaviors. Wellness programs typically provide employees with health education, health screenings and opportunities for exercise.
Dr. Joe Acierno, Nebraska's Chief Medical Officer, said, "Wellness programs empower employees to make good decisions about the health risk factors in their lives. They can help workers take action to avoid chronic illnesses that can adversely impact their health and affect their quality of life. We hope this award program will encourage more businesses to offer employee health and wellness programs."
Nebraska's workplace wellness program offers two categories. The Grower Award division honors businesses and organizations demonstrating significant improvement in employee health behaviors, while the Sower Award division recognizes workplaces with quality wellness programs. Peru State received a Sower Award.
Peru State President Dan Hanson said, "I want to thank Governor Heineman and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joe Acierno for recognizing Peru State's commitment to healthy living for our employees. Our enthusiasm for educating others about health and wellness doesn't stop on campus. Through a variety of faculty-led and student-led initiatives, members of our campus community are reaching out to southeast Nebraskans in an effort to combat childhood obesity, bolster blood bank donations, feed the hungry – the list goes on. I look forward to continuing to engage our surrounding communities in these and more initiatives."
Peru State is a member of the Employee Health Alliance (EHA). Additionally, the campus established a Wellness Coalition in 2011.
The brainchild of Peru State Associate Professor of Health and Physical Education Dr. Ellie Kunkel, the Wellness Coalition seeks to educate the campus community about ways to live healthy lifestyles. Under Kunkel's leadership as chair, the coalition established an annual Health and Wellness Fair, a collaborative effort between students in the college's health/physical education and sport/exercise science programs and area healthcare professionals. Throughout the semester, students involved in the initiative select an area of health and wellness for which to advocate, conduct research, and develop informational booths that are both educational and interactive. Some of the topics have focused on healthy eating habits, drug abuse, stress and suicide, second-hand smoke, artificial energy and more.
Kunkel said, "The Wellness Coalition, in support of the mission of Peru State College, seeks to foster healthy lifestyles to further contribute to society in a positive manner. Through providing health initiatives and strengthening existing services for optimum wellness, the coalition works to promote student, staff and community engagement in holistic wellness programs. Thanks to the support of President Hanson and his administration, the coalition continues to embark on new endeavors to provide information and opportunities to all of our constituents."
Nebraska businesses can apply for the Governor's Wellness Award online at www.nebraska.gov/wellness. Awards are presented annually and are good for three years. The award program is a partnership of the Office of the Governor, the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, and WorkWell, a division of the Nebraska Safety Council.


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Caramels, Bonbons et Chocolats
"Paroles Paroles" by Dalida & Alain Delon (1973)
One of the most pleasurable movies I own is Alain Resnais' romantic-musical comedy On Connaît La Chanson (1997), in which Resnais, as an homage to Dennis Potter, uses French pop songs that actors lip-sync to.
The movie deviates from the conventions of the musical genre in interesting ways. Resnais only uses song fragments, never complete songs. He'll toss the song shards in briskly and briefly, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Dialogue and song are simply two different modes of 'speech' here, the only distinction being that the songs represent a character's private thoughts or reveries, unheard by other characters. Herbert Ross' wonderful Potter adaptation Pennies From Heaven (1981), with Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters and Christopher Walken, uses a similar idea.
Also, like Potter, Resnais uses original recordings rather than modern re-recordings or the actors' own singing voices. And the characters never break into song and dance (there's no dancing at all); they simply interpolate song bits into their dialogue without any change of tenor.
The movie features one of the best-kept secrets of cinema acting of the last decade or two: the crack ensemble that Resnais has been deploying consistently, with some permutations—Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi, André Dussolier, Lambert Wilson, etc. These four also turn up in Resnais' new (and strong) film, Coeurs (U.S. title: Private Fears In Public Places), which is being released here in a few weeks.
Resnais: "Nicole Vedres, with whom I worked as an assistant in 1947 on Paris Mil Neuf Cent, told me one day that the novel, in its descriptions of love and its melodies, could never match so-called popular or music-hall songs. And I've often noticed that popular songs accompany the acts of our everyday lives. If we behaved at all naturally, we'd use song lyrics in conversation."
"Paroles Paroles" [mp3], by Dalida and Alain Delon, is one of the songs featured in On Connaît La Chanson. Its appeal comes through even in the charmingly dated clip above, from a 1970's French TV show. The arrangement is pure bossa-nova, complete with flutes and finger-picked acoustic rhythm guitars and subtle, pastel-like strings. (I'm reminded of the work Claus Ogerman did for Jobim.) The entire "B"-section is a beauty, with some lovely melodic turns and a couple of great, hair-raising chord changes right before it heads into the chorus. (The "B"-section kicks off with "Caramels, bonbons et chocolats" and spans 1:00 – 1:30 and 2:45 – 3:15 in the clip.)
A big shout-out of thanks to one of my daily reads, the omnivorous and erudite Belgian blogger Jan of Jahsonic, for tipping me off to "Paroles Paroles" on YouTube!
I occasionally teach in France for a couple of weeks in the spring, and picked up the DVD of the film on one of my trips. The film was released briefly and weakly in the U.S., and never came out on DVD. I searched high and low for the soundtrack CD in France, with no success. I have a few of the individual songs on other CDs (e.g. by Jane Birkin or Maurice Chevalier) but would love to get my hands on the entire soundtrack disc. I recently managed to track down Mancini's soundtrack to Howard Hawks' Hatari after a few years of searching, so I'm not giving up hope for On Connaît La Chanson. If anyone has a lead, I'll be eternally grateful!
And now, I'm wondering: is there a great soundtrack album that has eluded you? Or, alternatively, a film you wish had a soundtrack album you could own? Perhaps we could collectively share our soundtrack wants here….


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|Statement by Ambassador Wang Min, Deputy Permanent Representative of the People's Republic of China at the 66th Session of the GA under Item 123: "Strengthening of the United Nations System (b) Central role of the United Nations System in Global Governance"
Mr. Chairman,
I wish to first welcome the report of the Secretary General under item 123 (b).
The lingering effect of the international financial crisis and acute global challenges like food and energy security and climate change have brought into sharp relief the structural flaws of the current global economic governance. While it has undergone some changes recently, the global economic governance still adapts poorly to the changed world economic landscape. China believes that improving global economic governance will provide a strong institutional guarantee for the stable and healthy development of the global economy and is thus in the common interest of the international community.
The portion of the developing countries in world economy is now steadily expanding and their role in global economic governance is increasingly visible. The new global economic governance mechanism should reflect the changes in the world economic landscape, lay emphasis on representation, equality and effectiveness, follow the principle of mutual respect and collective decision making, and increase the representation and voice of the developing countries. The developed and the developing countries should enhance mutual understanding and coordination. The developed countries should fulfill their duties and obligations in global economic governance and take more concrete actions for development; and the developing countries should, based on their national conditions and levels of development, take up international responsibilities as their capabilities allow. Thus, all countries will work together for a balanced, inclusive, sustainable, innovative and secure growth of the world economy.
Mr. Chairman,
As the most universal, representative and authoritative inter-governmental organization in today's world, the United Nations plays an irreplaceable role in international affairs. Under the current circumstances, the international community should support the UN in playing an important role in global economic governance, especially in the field of development; and should engage in cooperation under the framework of the UN to tackle various global challenges in an appropriate manner. Other mechanisms can play a supportive and supplementary role to complement the work of the UN. China believes that the international community should focus efforts in the following aspects:
First, the United Nations should continue to play the central role in international cooperation for development, increase attention and input to the pillar of development, move forward the position of the question of development in the international agenda, and promote development from the macro and strategic level, especially to strengthen the coordination function of the ECOSOC.
Secondly, UN agencies should play an important role in international cooperation for development by securing resources, improving mechanisms, and promoting cooperation in this field, and provide solid institutional guarantee for international cooperation for development.
Thirdly, international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF should reinforce their development function, increase resources for development, and implement development projects to help the developing countries, the LDCs in particular, to realize development.
Fourthly, the G20 should give priority attention to development and make it a major topic of its discussion. It should strengthen cooperation and exchanges with the UN and other international organizations in order to provide the global development agenda with greater political impetus, more economic resources and better institutional guarantee.
Fifthly, the international community should work together to build a free, open, fair and equitable global trade environment, push for an early achievement of comprehensive and balanced results of the Doha Round, and realize the goal of the Development Round, thus injecting new energy in international cooperation for development.
Sixthly, the international community should expedite the establishment of a fair, equitable, inclusive and orderly new international financial order, strengthen international financial regulation, build up the capacity of the developing countries to withstand financial risks, and create a favorable international economic environment for international development cooperation.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.


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Diana Troldahl's patterns
Diana has been playing with fiber and needles since she was a child, but in the past few years knitting has become obsession. It satisfies both the geek and the artist within her to create a pattern, but the true reward comes when someone else makes the item, enjoys the process and feels pride at the result. The Michigan winters mean her knitting is of great value to her husband and family; the cats are just happy about the abundance of free-range yarn in the house.