Thoughts on Allusion, Quotation, Remixing, and Poetry

Both on this blog and on “Reginald Shepherd’s Blog” (which I’ve been maintaining since his death), I recently posted a piece called “Reginald and the Muses” (Follow this link for the piece on this blog, or this link for the post on Reginald’s blog). The post discussed both Reginald’s views on the nature of poetic inspiration and production and a poetic fragment he had written while he was in the intensive care unit in the hospital last year.

On Reginald’s blog, a former student of his, Deanna, wrote to ask, “how do you feel about poets using the fragments in order to create new poems in dedication to him?”

I wrote the following in response to Deanna’s question. It’s fairly substantive for a simple reply, so I thought I’d post it here in addition to placing it in the discussion section of the previous post on Reginald’s blog.

It’s taken me a few days to formulate a response to this question. I was initially struck with a mix of emotions and thoughts that took me a while to disentangle. I think my feelings on the issue of others working with this particular fragment or other poetic works of Reginald’s are related to two distinct sets of issues – the quality of the work produced and the nature of what’s being done with another’s material.

Regarding quality, in general I prefer good art to mediocre. Poets and artists of other sorts draw upon, allude to, or incorporate elements of the works of others all the time – it’s a normal part of artistic production, and there are a number of perfectly legitimate ways in which this can be done. Here, too, I’d prefer that the products of the use of the work of others be good art. (What constitutes “good art” is, of course, a thoroughly complicated matter – one that I’m not addressing here, because it would take me on a long tangential trajectory in a case where it’s been difficult enough for me to disentangle and articulate what I think on the issue. It’s a topic that Reginald addressed at great length in many of his posts on his blog or in his essay collections.)

In principle, I feel that my feelings about how others might draw upon Reginald’s work in their own poetry shouldn’t be any different from my feelings regarding the use of anyone else’s poetry. Realistically, though, that’s not the case, especially regarding this issue of quality. Part of the mixed bag of emotions I initially felt upon reading this question was fear and wariness. There’s a big part of me that for purely emotional but very strongly felt reasons doesn’t want anyone mucking around with Reginald’s work. What I’ve done with this fragment was uncomfortable enough, but I’m ultimately happy with the result and the process of producing it, where what I did was to distill what was legible in his fragment, but where all the content is his. I wouldn’t be comfortable adding significant content to it, and I’m certainly not comfortable with anyone else doing so.

That said, I also recognize art isn’t always comfortable.

There are a number of ways in which poets or other artists quote, allude to, borrow from, or otherwise use or incorporate the work of others. That’s normal, natural, and one of the things that creates vibrant connections between different artists and works. While I may be uncomfortable about the idea of others drawing upon Reginald’s work – which is frankly a worry that I won’t like what’s done, or that I’ll think the result inferior or unworthy of him – I also realize that one of the ways an artist’s work continues to live is through the refractions of it in the works of others. As such and despite my wariness, I’m not opposed in principle to work that utilizes Reginald’s work, though with some important caveats, which constitute much of the rest of this reply.

One basic way in which the work of others is utilized is through artistic quotation or allusion (where quotation and allusion are not the same thing, but where quotation may be seen as a specific form of allusion). In the case of quotation, in general, I’d prefer credit be given (especially with borrowings from my Reginald). At the same time, I realize that, so long as things stay within the spirit of fair use (or for that matter the letter of fair use, for there can be intellectual property issues at stake), there are many cases of legitimate quotation or drawings upon the works of others through allusion without explicit attribution – for example, Shostakovich’s quotation of the “Lone Ranger” phrase of Rossini’s William Tell Overture in his 15th symphony, or Reginald’s drawing upon the imagery of a Manet painting in his poem “Kinds of Camouflage” (which I commented on in “Comments on ‘Kinds of Camouflage’”). There are many examples of poets borrowing a few words, a phrase, a line from another’s poem. Again, so long as it stays within the realm of fair use, the main difference I see between this and drawing upon phrases one encounters on roadside signs or that simply pop into one’s head is that the practice of drawing upon the poetry of others contributes to the intertextuality of poems.

There are instances of drawing upon another’s work that are more systematic or extensive than allusion or quotation of a small part of the work, cases where there is utilization of a whole work, or significant portions thereof, with a reworking of the material and/or incorporation alongside added material. The most obvious example of this in contemporary art is remixing of music, where for lack of a better term, I think we could speak also of remixing in other artistic genres, including poetry. My perspective here is that remixing is acceptable if credit is given and permission gotten. (Since remixing involves reworking significant portions of another’s work, “fair use” doesn’t cut it. Remixing without credit or permission is in the territory of Vanilla-Ice-ripping-off-Davd-Bowie-and-Queen-for-lack-of-decent-material-of-one’s-own.) Beyond legal or moral acceptability, remixing, of music or poetry, can be done well or badly. A good remix is both an original work of art and something that forces a rethinking and brings a new appreciation of a familiar work. At best, a bad remix reminds one of how much better the original work is and makes one want to return to it.

While I’d be fine with (or at least not opposed to) someone quoting or alluding to this or other works of Reginald (preferably with explicit credit, definitely within the framework of fair use or with permission gotten), and while I’d be fine with a “remix” (preferably well done, and definitely with credit and permission given [with a further caveat that for poems published in collections, that even as literary executor, I may not be the sole person needing to give permission]), one thing I definitely would not want to see done with this fragment is for someone to add to it in an attempt to “finish” it, and certainly not to add to it and present it as a finished Reginald Shepherd poem. The reason I’m strongly opposed to that is because even if well intentioned, it strikes me as active misrepresentation, if not a lie.

Things I Miss, 3

It’s now been a month since my dear Reginald died, and the loss has only gotten harder as the reality of his absence and the realization that I’ll never see him again in this life has begun to fully sink in.

One of the things I miss most is his empathy and generosity.

Reginald was the most empathetic person I have ever encountered. This could bring him pain, as the suffering and sorrow of others hurt him dearly, but also great joy, as the successes and happiness of others brought him great happiness, too.

Although he kept up with the news, it was almost a burden for him, for all the news of suffering in the world depressed and saddened him almost as much as his own personal health problems. Though he loved reading history, reading about recent history was difficult for him – books about the 20th century and all the violence and atrocities therein he often had to read in small doses spread over months because they upset him so.

Obviously, it’s not this suffering that resulted from his empathy that I miss, but his kindness and generosity that were linked with his empathy. One fond memory I have (fond though wrapped within pain) is from mid-April of this year. I had been teaching all day when I got a phone call from Reginald that he had gone to the emergency room with very severe abdominal pain (pain, we soon found out, stemming from the abdominal perforation that almost killed him at that point). I rushed to the emergency room, and when I entered the waiting room I found him stooped over with pain walking as best he could across the room to give a vomit basin to another man who was getting sick. It was so typical of Reginald that of an entire roomful of people, it was he, doubled over with pain more severe than I can imagine from something that very nearly killed him, that took the trouble to perform this small act of kindness. I don’t want to knock the other people there – they were all either sick or injured themselves, or tending to a loved one in that condition – but simply to acknowledge the way in which he was almost as concerned with others as himself even in the worst of circumstances. Likewise, towards the end of his life, while he was certainly scared and didn’t want to die, he was more concerned that I and others were suffering on account of losing him.

Reginald internalized the experiences of others to a great extent, so that suffering in the world caused great pain to him, but the happier side of this was that the successes and joys of those he cared about brought him intense pleasure as well. He was always greatly pleased by the accomplishments of those around him, with so far as I could tell never a hint of the secret jealousy and envy that so frequently accompanies the success of others for many, if not most people.

The many online tributes that have been posted in the past month are full of tales of his generosity to his fellow poets and/or friends. Though he was quick to acknowledge those who had been important to his success in life generally and in poetry and other writing (see his many writings about his mother or the tributes to Alvin Feinman on his blog), he had clawed his way to success as a writer largely through his own efforts without much benefit of patronage or personal ties to bigwigs. While no one is fully the proverbial “self-made man,” he was about as close as they come.

His response to this was to do what he could to help others to success to the extent he could in a way few had done for him. Occasionally he did this when another course of action might have done more for his own career. For example, with his first poetry anthology, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, Reginald had multiple reasons for selecting the poets he did: they’re all excellent poets, they share certain qualities in their work, making for a coherent volume. At the same time, Reginald knew that he could probably do more for his own career by selecting more established poets (i.e. most everyone likes being invited to be part of such projects, and choosing more established poets would have established or reaffirmed personal connections for Reginald with people more established in their careers and generally more powerful), but he chose to focus that anthology on less established, emerging poets, partly because he thought it would be more interesting for readers, but more importantly because he felt that in that way he could contribute to the success of their careers as writers in a way that wouldn’t have been the case with writers already more established.

Reginald Shepherd on Samuel R. Delany

On his blog, Reginald Shepherd has written an engaging overview of the work of science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, On Samuel R. Delany.

Here’s a quotation from Shepherd’s essay:

“Samuel R. Delany is a prolific science fiction writer, memoirist, self-described pornographer, literary critic, and social commentator. Since the publication in 1962 (when he was twenty) of his first book, The Jewels of Aptor, he has published numerous novels, short stories, essays, interviews, cultural commentary, and memoirs. What's most remarkable about this prodigious output is its consistent quality, wide range, and continual development. Delany has never been one to repeat himself or rest on his laurels. Unlike some writers who, beginning in the genre and subsequently seeking literary respectability, and despite his numerous works in other genres, Delany has always strongly identified himself as a science fiction writer. But his work has always pushed at and expanded the boundaries and conventions of the field, constantly seeking out new forms, ideas, and themes. Indeed, his work has become more challenging and complex over the course of his career.”

I’ve discussed Delany on this blog before (“Uses of Myth” and “Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture”). Science fiction in general is a genre ethnographers should take seriously, given the parallel ways in which both involve the presentation in textual form of plausible worlds (though with the key difference that ethnography is ideally based on empirical fieldwork). Delany in particular is a science fiction writer worth taking seriously by anthropologists both for the consistently stimulating quality of his work and for the ways in which he takes seriously anthropological ideas and ideas from across the humanities and social sciences and incorporates them into his construction of plausible worlds.

Here is Shepherd again on a Delany novel that may be of particular interest to anthropologists:

“Babel-17 (1966), inspired by the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determnism (that our language controls our thought), centers on the efforts of the poet Rydra Wong to crack what is believed to be a military code used by an alien race with whom Earth is at war. What she finally discovers is that this code is a highly exact and analytical language which has no word for “I,” and thus no concept of individual identity. The novel examines the capacity of culture and language not only to control the way people see and act in the world but to determine who they are as persons. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein so famously wrote. Two different words imply two different worlds.”

Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing

The following is a revision of an earlier blog post:

Most cultural anthropologists would agree that ethnographic and other anthropological writing should be as clear as possible. A primary goal of ethnographic writing is to communicate a sense or understanding of a particular cultural context. Clear writing facilitates this and unclear or difficult writing obstructs this. When engaging in “public anthropology” and attempting to communicate anthropological understandings to an interested lay audience, the stricture to write clearly is even stronger.

Something that anthropologists have not discussed much, though, is what exactly constitutes “clarity” or “difficulty” in writing. There is a general sense that we should avoid overly complex syntax or particular vocabulary that our intended audience might not be familiar with (or at least to clearly explain complex vocabulary when necessary), but not much consideration that there might be different types of difficulty (and hence different types of clarity) that might call for their own particular responses.

Here, I find the recent work of Reginald Shepherd illuminating. Shepherd precisely delineates types or sorts of difficulty in another genre of writing, poetry. What is difficulty in general? Shepherd argues (and I agree) that difficulty in writing involves in one way or another violating readerly expectations. This can be good or bad, a barrier to grasping meaning and/or a spur to further experience and pleasure, but difficulty in its different varieties always involves this violation of expectations (that the words used will be familiar, that its referents will be clear, that the sense of the text “makes sense,” that the text will have a recognizable and clearly interpretable form).

Shepherd discusses five types of difficulty, which he identifies as: lexical difficulty, allusive difficulty, syntactical difficulty, semantic difficulty (with two varieties – explicative and interpretive difficulties), and formal difficulty.

A major difference in poetic and ethnographic writing has to do with the goals or motivations for writing. With poetry, a primary goal is to create a unique sensuous object with its own qualities to be experienced in itself (something that happens with any text, but something that is a primary function of literary writing, including poetry). The poem may make reference to something in the world outside the poem through the sense of the words, but it need not necessarily do so, and in any case, that is not the main raison d’etre for poetry (and if you want to communicate something directly and clearly about the world, there are far better means than poetry). Ethnography at its best might have poetic or other literary qualities, but that’s not what makes it ethnography. Unlike poetry, a definite connection between the sense of the text and the context in the world outside the text which is its reference is a necessary component of ethnography – it wouldn’t be writing culture if it weren’t writing about culture.

As a result, one difference between my writing about difficulty in ethnography and Shepherd’s in relation to poetry is a difference in attitude toward difficulty. Shepherd is interested in difficulty as an aspect of poetry which is neither inherently good nor bad – since reading poetry is about experiencing the poem as an object of experience in its own right, various difficulties in grasping its meaning are not bad per se, and are often important components in the experience of pleasure from the poem. In the case of ethnography, where communication about something in the world is a key consideration, to the extent it creates a barrier to understanding, difficult writing is often simply something to be avoided – though there are interesting exceptions.

Lexical Difficulty

Lexical difficulty is straightforward – words that are unfamiliar are used, or words are used in an unfamiliar way or at variance with convention. Anthropologists of all stripes commonly use words that are not familiar to the general public; we might speak of agglutinative languages, philopatric social organization among cercopithecine primates, or the differing consequences of avunculocal versus matrilocal residence alongside matrilineality. Recently, a student, after having read a chapter from a textbook on Native North American cultures and reading that some Plateau cultures practiced the levirate, came to me to ask just what in the heck the levirate was. He had even done what I always admonish my students to do when they encounter words they don’t know and had tried to look it up in a dictionary, but unfortunately even his dictionary didn’t help.

We use technical terms all the time that are unfamiliar to most people, and often with good reason – they allow us to very efficiently communicate complex and subtle shades of meaning. The response to difficulty is not to ban the use of “difficult” words – anyone can benefit from encountering new words and learning their meaning. Not knowing the meaning of a word doesn’t prevent learning and understanding it. In the interest of clarity, this is in some ways an easy form of difficulty to deal with. We can avoid the use of technical terms when they aren’t necessary, when less technical terms will in fact suffice, or by clarifying their referent and meaning when they are needed. The difficulty for a writer is judging the potential audience. It’s annoying when reading an article in a scholarly journal to have every technical term explained, given that most anyone who’s potentially reading it is probably familiar with the terminology or at least has an interest in finding out such things for themselves. In writing for a popular audience, lexical difficulty can be overcome simply by providing clear explanations when unfamiliar terminology is useful; e.g. the textbook my student was reading really should have briefly explained what the levirate was.

Allusive Difficulty

Shepherd writes of poetry, “The poem that alludes frequently eludes. The poet refers to something we’ve not heard of, assumes a piece of knowledge we don’t have.” Returning to the previous category, much lexical difficulty in ethnography can be seen as a variety of such allusive difficulty, insofar as the main problem is generally knowledge (of the meaning of a term) which it is assumed the reader has when in fact they may not. As a distinct form of difficulty, though, for ethnography what is meant is allusion to a set of facts or discussions which the reader is assumed to be familiar with. As with lexicon, for the writer this is often a matter of mastering the art of gauging one’s audience. In a scholarly anthropological publication, one could allude to the kula ring, or Geertz’s Balinese cockfight, or potlatching, or Coming of Age in Samoa and generally assume at least a passing familiarity with the allusion on the part of the reader, whereas in works for a popular audience the same assumption can’t be made. As with lexicon, the difficulty for the writer is not so much in being aware that one should write “clearly,” but in successfully gauging an audience, whether popular, scholarly, or specialist scholarly, in order to strike a balance between not assuming readers know something that they in fact don’t (and leaving them lost) and not assuming that readers know less than they in fact do (and leaving them annoyed or bored).

Syntactical Difficulty

Shepherd describes syntactical difficulty as “the obstacle of complex, unfamiliar, dislocated, broken, or incomplete syntax: one cannot discern or reconstruct the relations between the grammatical units.” In poetry, moving away from conventional prose syntax has often been put to creative and innovative use, but in ethnographic prose, syntactical difficulty is generally the result of plain bad writing. Also, we generally encounter only one subset of syntactical difficulty in ethnography. Except in cases of truly bad editing, dislocated, broken, or incomplete syntax, which can be used creatively in poetry, are not typically encountered in published ethnographic writing, even while they are increasingly encountered in more informal communication, such as email. And blogs. Overly complex, unfamiliar, or convoluted syntax, though, is all too common in ethnography and culture theory.

Semantic Difficulty

Shepherd writes of semantic difficulty in poetry: “We have trouble determining or deciding what a poem means, we cannot immediately interpret it. (It is important here to remember that sense and reference are distinct: sense is internal to the poem, as it is to language itself. As linguist David Crystal elucidates in How Language Works, ‘Sense is the meaning of a word within a language. Reference is what a word refers to in the world outside language.’ From this perspective, it’s more useful to think of the poem as a field of meanings than as a thing that means something else, a container for a vehicle of meaning.)” He writes also, “It is semantic difficulty which readers are usually experiencing when they say, ‘I don’t understand this poem.’” Shepherd further subdivides semantic difficulty into explicative and interpretive difficulty. “In the case of explicative difficulty, the reader cannot decipher the literal sense of the poem.” “In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do.”

Explicative Difficulty in Ethnography

In ethnographic and other anthropological writing, this sort of semantic difficulty, where someone looks at a passage of text and simply cannot make heads or tails of it, often involves in part a concatenation of all the previous forms of difficulty. Take the following sentence from Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (p. 72, emphasis in original):

“The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”

I often emphasize this particular passage when teaching this text because once all the elements are carefully unpacked, you have created a good starting point for understanding Bourdieu’s practice theory. This passage certainly has plenty of lexical, allusive, and syntactical difficulty, but even once its individual elements are carefully considered, the sense of the whole still escapes many a student forced to read Bourdieu for the first time. Even when understanding each individual word, the syntax, and the ethnographic traditions being alluded to, it’s still difficult to grasp the total meaning. Some of that difficulty could be clarified with more careful attention to lexicon, allusion, and syntax, but some ideas we wish to express are in fact subtle and complex aside from any difficulties we might add because of bad writing, and there will always be a certain amount of difficulty resulting from attempting to communicate complex ideas.

Interpretive Difficulty in Ethnography

Shepherd writes, “In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do. John Ashberry’s poems, usually syntactically and explicationally clear, often present this interpretive difficulty. To say that one doesn’t know what a poem means, if one understands its literal sense, is to say that one doesn’t know why it’s saying what it’s saying. The reader asks, ‘Why am I being told/shown this?’” There really aren’t many examples of this sort of difficulty in ethnographic writing. If the sense of the text is clear, the reference and reason for saying what has been said are generally clear also. There are some examples, though, and one that I find often confuses students is the ethnographic treatment of magic.

The convention in writing about magic in ethnography is to write about it as if magic has all the effects that its adherents claim and believe. Sometimes, the ethnographer indicates that people of a particular context believe or claim this or that, or do this or that, but as often as not, magic and its results are presented not as matters of belief and practice but as straightforward elements of natural reality. Students, not previously privy to the convention, are often confused, not knowing how to interpret such accounts, “Do (anthropologists think that) Trobriand witches really fly through the night? Do (anthropologists think that) muisak souls can really take vengeance by causing trees to fall on their killers?” What is often confusing here is a broader convention that encompasses the ethnographic treatment of magic, where cultural contexts are represented in terms of their own underlying premises and arguments.

Formal Difficulty

Formal difficulty involves the lack of recognition or the failure to accept the form of the expression. For a long time, free verse didn’t seem like poetry to a lot of readers, any more than Duchamp’s urinal seemed like art or the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, or Albert Ayler seemed like music. As Shepherd writes, many of today’s readers, raised on the free verse that has long been standard, now have trouble recognizing and appreciating aspects of the form of metrical or rhyming poetry. They have trouble recognizing and hearing the rhythms; they are turned off by or simply miss the rhyme schemes.

Formal difficulty in ethnography involves simply not recognizing some writing as ethnography. This sometimes involves writing that fits into another genre of writing, but which might also be ethnography. Other times, this involves writing that intends to be ethnography, but in an experimental way which violates or plays with the conventions of the genre in some way.

Writing Culture and the Writing of Culture

At least since Writing Culture, there has been widespread recognition that ethnography is “writing culture.” But is all writing of culture ethnography? Some texts that clearly fit into another genre are also writing of culture. Novels such as Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, or Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, all evoke a particular cultural setting in detailed ways, yet we wouldn’t normally recognize these or other novels as ethnography (and at the same time, most wouldn’t normally recognize Oscar Lewis’ The Children of Sanchez, which claimed to be both an autobiography of a Mexican family and a novel, as anything other than an ethnography).

Experimental Ethnography

Experimentation with form in ethnography has a long history in anthropology, with an intensification in such experimentation since the mid 1980s. As with atonal music, modern art or free jazz when they were new (or even now when they’re not new at all), many experience difficulty in interpreting how or to what extent some experimental writing is ethnography or why it should be written. Many experimental ethnographies, particularly those experimenting with the form of the genre, have been perennially among the most interesting and thought provoking ethnographic texts, but they are also among the most difficult to come to terms with, to understand, or to evaluate (and it is often largely these qualities which makes them interesting).

Without claiming at the moment to have any clear sense of what precisely defines the form of the ethnography in contrast to other genres and even other genres of writing culture, the presence of such “formal difficulty” spells out a need to more intensively investigate the importance of form for ethnography and other genres. We cannot glibly fall back on something like fictionality, at least not in a simple sense, to define the difference between ethnography and some novels – some “fiction” tells great truths; as Geertz pointed out long ago, ethnography is always a crafted writing; and we should keep in mind the many “fictional” aspects of much ethnography, including pseudonyms for people and places, composite persons, confabulations of place and story, etc. Perhaps an important difference is that ethnography is “writing culture” which has as a primary motivation the understanding of a particular context via a correspondence between the sense of the text and the reference in the world, a sort of iconicity between text and world that need not be adhered to for even the most “ethnographic” of “fiction.”

Identity Poetics, Culture and the Individual

On his blog, Reginald Shepherd has written an incisive comment on what he terms identity poetics, "Against Identity Poetry, For Possibility." His post primarily concerns identity politics in poetry, but would be of interest to an anthropological audience or anyone else interested in the relationship between culture and individuals.

The following is an excerpt from Shepherd's work:

"Ideally, one writes poetry as an act of exploration, as a venture into the unknown. (As Yeats wrote, out of what one knows, one makes rhetoric; out of what one doesn’t know, one makes poetry.) Too often today, though, writers want simply to “express” the selves they have decided that they are or have, and readers demand to see themselves (or what they imagine as themselves) reflected back to them. In Ann Lauterbach's incisive words, “The idea that the act of reading expands and extends knowledge to orders of unfamiliar experience has been replaced by acts of reading in order to substantiate and authorize claims and positions which often mirror the identity bearings of the reader.” Identity poetics is boring, giving back the already known in an endless and endlessly self-righteous confirmation of things as they are. It is also constraining, limiting the imaginative options of the very people it seeks to liberate or speak for. If one follows the assumptions of identity poetics through, saying “Here are the gay poets, here are the black poets, here are the straight white male poets, and everyone just reads the poets who match their demographic classification,” not only could a white person have nothing to say to a black person, or a straight person to a gay person, but a black person could have nothing to say to a white person, or a woman to a man. So there would be no reason for a white person to read anything written by a black person."

Myth, Mythic Literacy, and Contemporary Culture

I recently posted a piece, “Uses of Myth,” in which I discussed a recent essay on Reginald Shepherd’s Blog, “Mythology in Poetry.” I mentioned Shepherd’s discussion of different modes of utilizing mythology in poetry, and I also discussed ways in which myth is used in examples of other sorts of literary writing.

A key consideration in all this is the relationship between myth and contemporary culture, especially contemporary discourse and shared cultural models or knowledge. Consider again a key paragraph I previously quoted from Shepherd’s essay:

“Mythology can serve several functions in poetry. Myths are interesting in their own right as culturally resonant, compelling, amusing, frightening, or just intriguing stories, an engaging realm to explore. They are a reservoir of cultural knowledge, hopes, fears, and passions, of archetypal figures and situations, an inexhaustibly rich lode of charged materials that each poetic generation can mine and remake. Much of Western literature is built on allusions to mythology, particularly to Classical mythology and to Judaeo-Christian mythology, and much of it doesn’t make sense without knowledge of those myths. Myth can also be used to place one’s own experiences, thoughts, and feelings in a larger context, opening them up to realms beyond the individual, making them less purely personal and idiosyncratic, as Louise Glück does in Meadowlands, in which she treats her own divorce in the terms of the myth of Odysseus. One may not have access to Glück’s personal experience, or even care about it, but anyone has access to the stories in which she couches that experience in that book, and the myth opens up beyond the merely private.”

I received an email from a reader of my previous post that essentially raised the question of whether a lack of religious literacy (and I’d expand that more broadly to "mythic literacy") is a problem here.

Certainly for the sorts of literature Shepherd or I were discussing, lack of literacy in or awareness of the myth being alluded to, relived, or revised, can present problems of comprehension, though to varying degrees. Again, “Much of Western literature is built on allusions to mythology, particularly to Classical mythology and to Judaeo-Christian mythology, and much of it doesn’t make sense without knowledge of those myths.”

Take the four prose examples I presented. Even without prior knowledge of The Epic of Gilgamesh or The Iliad, Mitchell’s and Baricco’s texts should make sense to any reader, as they present new versions of those tales. Prior knowledge enriches the experience, but isn’t necessary – I’d even say that anyone unfamiliar with the originals would be well served by Mitchell’s Gilgamesh and Baricco’s An Iliad as jumping off points.

I said that parts of Delaney’s Tales of Neveryon present a complex instance of using myth turned scholarly theory turned back to myth. The section of the book in question is certainly most fully experienced with awareness of the Freudian/Lacanian and Malinowskian allusions, but it probably makes for an interesting narrative even without.

Atwood’s Penelopiad is, I think, a different story – it’s presented in a way that I don’t think any intelligent reader would be too troubled following the story, but at virtually every turn, the narrative’s impact largely depends on simultaneous awareness of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca in The Odyssey.

This is, of course, an issue for allusion in general. Any creative activity utilizing allusion, whether it be poetry, prose, ethnography or other scholarly writing, visual art, or music, by definition relies on prior knowledge of what’s being alluded to for the full experience to register. Shostakovich’s Symphony #15, with its musical allusions to Rossini and Wagner, depends upon a listener familiar with the canon of classical music in order to register the full experience of the music (though a listener not familiar with the allusions would still experience something – perhaps something quite enjoyable or profound to them).

Is there a problem of “mythic illiteracy” in contemporary culture?

In one way yes. There’s broad awareness in the U.S. of a de-emphasis in public education on topics like the arts, religion, myth, and the classics, or increasingly any number of topics not emphasized on standardized tests. (See this news article. This is simply one article focusing on “religious literacy,” but it’s common to encounter accounts of the alleged ignorance or lack of literacy of Americans on a wide variety of topics.)

It’s possible to overdo this, though. I’d say that it’s not that Americans are less literate or knowledgeable with regard to myth, religion, the arts, etc. It’s more that highly educated individuals are less literate in such fields than highly educated individuals in the past, and moderately educated individuals are less literate about such topics than their corresponding peers of the past – and that’s something to be concerned about.

At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that now and in the recent past, a much higher percentage of people in the U.S. and in many other parts of the world have the opportunity to become at least moderately well educated – so that aggregate awareness of mythic, artistic, or other allusion may be at an all time high. Throughout the 19th century and through much of the 20th century, many people in the U.S. were either not served at all or were ill-served by public education, something more strikingly the case for some sub-sets of the population if you take into account social factors like race, gender, or class. Public libraries were unheard of until the late 19th century, and as an interesting study by Paul Sturges, “The Public Library and Reading by the Masses,” makes clear, for much of their early history served mainly a very small, highly literate and highly educated elite.

Caliban and Colonialism

Reginald Shepherd has posted an excellent and interesting essay, Caliban to the Audience: The Tempest as Colonialist and Anti-Colonialist Text.

This essay should be of interest to anyone interested in Shakespeare generally, The Tempest specifically, or the complexities and relatedness of colonialist and anti-colonialist discourse.

Accessibility/Difficulty as a Quality of Creative Expression

One quality of creative expression is its accessibility or difficulty. Although this quality can be expressed using either of two concepts, “accessibility” or “difficulty,” it is a single quality with accessibility and difficulty being inverse measures – a high degree of accessibility equals a low degree of difficulty and vice versa.

I have previously written about different types of difficulty (and thus, implicitly, different sorts of accessibility) in ethnographic writing as one form of creative expression (See Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing). In that piece, I was drawing on Reginald Shepherd’s writing in “Defining Difficulty in Poetry,” where he delineates five sorts of difficulty in artistic expression: lexical, allusive, syntactical, semantic, and formal difficulties, where in each case, difficulty results from disjuncture between readerly expectations and textual experiences, with different sorts of disjuncture arising from separate components of creative expression.

What I’d like to most emphasize here is that when it comes to artistic expression, accessibility/difficulty is an important quality (or really a set of qualities, given different varieties of difficulty) which is independent of the aesthetic merits of a work, that is, independent of whether a work manifests something profound or beautiful, independent of whether a work successfully unifies the concrete and universal, the timely and timeless (see my recent post, Great Art, Timeliness, and Timelessness).

This is actually a fairly simple and straightforward point, but I make it in opposition to common claims or assumptions that either accessibility or difficulty signal either good or bad art. (For example, I recently attended a conference on creative writing at Florida State University. During a panel discussion on poetic difficulty, one audience member continually asserted that poetic success was measured by “communication,” that accessibility fostered communication, difficulty hampered it, with the implication that accessibility is inherently good in itself and difficulty inherently bad.)

Similar assumptions are often made with regard to a related quality of creative expression – its popularity or obscurity (like accessibility and difficulty, these are simply inverse ways to regard the same basic quality). (These qualities are related not in that most accessible art is particularly popular nor that most obscure art is necessarily difficult. For that matter, a work’s level of popularity or obscurity can change over time without its level of difficulty particularly changing, e.g. a 1930s movie comedy I briefly mentioned in “Great Art, Timeliness, and Timelessness,” Earthworm Tractors, is now a quite obscure film, though it starred a then popular comedian, Joe E. Brown. It’s neither difficult now nor then. Instead, the relationship between accessibility/difficulty and popularity/obscurity is more that most popular works tend to be relatively accessible and most difficult works tend to be more obscure – it’s hard to imagine the free jazz saxophone work of Albert Ayler ever being hugely popular – though there are plenty of exceptions – inventor of free jazz Ornette Coleman will be playing at Bonnaroo.) Some argue that either popularity or obscurity signal good or bad art, something I argued against in my posts “Miles Davis’ Ferrari, or Popularity and Art” and “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop.”

With accessibility/difficulty as an independent quality of creative expression, art that is profound or expresses beauty or is otherwise of high aesthetic merit can be either accessible or difficult. Much of Robert Frost’s poetry, or Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, is fairly accessible. Orff’s Carmina Burana or Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring represent musically accessible works (perhaps deceptively so) in that most listeners are immediately able to ascertain basic features of these works (and most tend to immediately react positively or negatively to them as well – though both also have great depth in the sense that many subtle features of the works are typically missed on initial or superficial listenings). On the other hand, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is not what I’d consider accessible. Free jazz, serial music, and aleatory music in different ways present formal difficulty for many listeners – a feature they share in common is an often minimal distinction between musical sound and noise, making it difficult to ascertain such works’ status as music at all (see “Free Jazz and the End of the History of Jazz” and “The End of the History of Music”). Likewise, when it comes to bad art, both accessible and difficult examples could be found (an exercise I’ll refrain from here, because I don’t think it would add anything to the basic point and would simply be snarky).

Accessibility/Difficulty is a quality not just of art but of any form of creative expression, including ethnography. I’ve argued before that ethnography can function in an artistic mode, and at the least, many ethnographies have their artistic moments, but ethnography need not function that way, nor is that what makes it ethnography (see “Ethnography as Art or Science” and “Ethnographic Research Methods and Ethnographic Writing”). Ethnography has as a primary goal the elucidation or explanation of some cultural context. This makes a difference. With art, accessibility/difficulty is a quality independent of other considerations, whereas with ethnography, some forms of difficulty do comprise barriers to basic functions of the text as ethnography.

As I wrote in “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing:”

“One major difference in poetic and ethnographic writing has to do with the goals or motivations for writing. With poetry, a primary goal is to create a unique sensuous object with its own qualities to be experienced in itself (something that happens with any text, but something that is a primary function of literary writing, including poetry). The poem may make reference to something in the world outside the poem through the sense of the words, but it need not necessarily do so, and in any case, that is not the main raison d’etre for poetry (and if you want to communicate something directly and clearly about the world, there are far better means than poetry). Ethnography at its best might have poetic or other literary qualities, but that’s not what makes it ethnography. Unlike poetry, a definite (and usually ideally clear) connection between the sense of the text and the context in the world outside the text which is its reference is a necessary component of ethnography – it wouldn’t be writing culture if it weren’t definitely writing about culture.

“As a result, one difference between my writing about difficulty in ethnography and Shepherd’s in relation to poetry is a difference in attitude toward difficulty. Shepherd is interested in difficulty as an aspect of poetry which is neither inherently good nor bad – since reading poetry is about experiencing the poem as an object of experience in its own right, various difficulties in grasping its meaning are not bad per se, and are often important components in the experience of pleasure from the poem. In the case of ethnography, where communication about something in the world is a key consideration, in most cases difficult writing, to the extent it creates a barrier to understanding, is more straightforwardly something to be avoided – though there are interesting exceptions to this as well.”

A Round Up of Recent Blog Posts and News Articles of Note

Over the past week of so, I’ve encountered a number of blog essays and online news articles that I’ve found interesting. I thought I’d share them with anyone who might be interested.

Reginald Shepherd’s Blog

Reginald Shepherd’s Blog is important to me for several reasons. Reginald is my partner, so I’m inclined to like it, but any personal bias aside, it’s an impressive blog dealing with poetry, poetics, and art and society. One thing making Reginald Shepherd’s Blog different from many is that he writes long, substantive essays. (I’m not knocking the short and often diaristic blog posts on many blogs – just saying this one’s different.) His blog is different from most in that he frequently posts revisions of earlier posts, treating posts as serious pieces of writing and revising to reflect his own developing thought on a topic.

Over the past week, he has posted three such substantive revisions that are well worth taking a look at:

“On Difficulty in Poetry” explores the issue of what makes some poetry (or other art) seem “difficult.” What’s useful about Shepherd’s approach is that he recognizes that there are different sources of difficulty and explores them as distinct phenomena. This essay, in its earlier form was an inspiration for my own writing. My blog essay, “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing,” was written largely as an application of Shepherd’s ideas to ethnography.

“What is Progressive Art? A Revision” discusses the progress or development of art, utilizing in part the work of Neo-Hegelian philosopher of art Arthur C. Danto. As above, this essay in its earlier form was inspirational for me, with my blog essays “Free Jazz and the end of the history of jazz” and “The end of the history of music” written partly in response to this essay.

Finally, “Revised Thoughts on the Long Poem” offers a thoughtful reflection on the issue of form and importance, specifically here the relation between the long poem as a form and “major poetry.”

Nicolette Bethel’s Blog

I’m also quite fond of Nicolette Bethel’s Blog. Like Reginald Shepherd’s Blog, this blog consistently offers substantive and interesting commentary.

In the past week, two essays, “On Images of Savages, Part One” and “On Images of Savages, Part Two,” continue an ongoing exploration on this blog of the importance of race in the Bahamas specifically and in general. These two posts explore the important contradiction in Enlightenment thinking associated with the invention of “The Savage,” that just as Europeans and Euro-Americans began to think seriously about equality and freedom, they invented the notion of the inherently inferior savage to rationalize the continued brutal exploitation of some, most egregiously in the form of slavery in the Americas.

Culture Matters

Another blog I like is “Culture Matters,” a group blog by faculty and students at the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. One thing I like about this blog is the frequent support faculty show for their students’ ideas and work. A recent post briefly describes and links to an online article by a student there, Khatab Sabir, “A United Iraq: An Impossible Dream.” An important part of Sabir’s argument is that Iraq cannot work as an united nation because it does not work as an “imagined community.” It is not that there are not “imagined communities” at play, but rather that they (plural) are specifically constructed as disunited, standing strongly in the way of any united Iraq.

Someone to Believe In

I’d like to draw people’s attention to a new blog: “Solipsistic Effluvia.” This blog is written by a promising, young scholar whom I had the pleasure of working with while he was a student at the University of West Florida. (For now, he’s posting the blog anonymously, so I won’t name him.) The first entry, “Return to Faith,” laments the fact that in contrast to the 1960s, when there were politicians and other important public figures who not only were important but whom people could have faith in as “good people,” there seem now to be no such public figures.

David Shumway’s article “Where have all the rock stars gone?,” published online by The Chronicle of Higher Education, asks a similar question of music celebrities. Shumway points out that in the 1960s and 70s, musicians like James Brown or Bob Dylan were important public figures who were respected and taken seriously as people who mattered, even by people who weren’t necessarily fans of the particular musician. I don’t personally see that this sort of public figure has disappeared to the extent Shumway implies. Bono immediately comes to mind. Shumway does address Bono: “Bono, whose political advocacy in the courts of real-world power has expanded his reach, may have been the last rock star to capture the imagination of a broad spectrum of the public. But even this case reveals a change. Bono's advocacy does not seem to be of a piece with his role in U2, the way, say, John Lennon's antiwar activism seemed to be a natural continuation of his role in the Beatles.” I don’t really see where Bono’s different here – U2 is a band that’s been a politically engaged band since its early work, e.g. “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Pride (In the Name of Love).” But it’s an interesting article nonetheless, especially for the commentary on the importance of niche marketing in today’s music industry, in sharp contrast to music marketing of previous decades.

Biting Commentary – Literally

An interesting piece of trivia – men are 12 times more likely to be bitten by another person than women, at least in Ireland where the study reported on in “Men bitten more than women and alcohol is the culprit” at News-Medical.Net was conducted. I’m not sure why I find the article fascinating, but I do.

Vitriol and Jazz

I recently discussed Clive James’ book Cultural Amnesia . It’s a book I admire for its pithy and engaging discussions of many important cultural figures in all areas of human activity. There is one part of the book, though, that’s been bugging me, and that’s his occasional discussions of music, jazz especially.

I don’t take issue with James’ taste in jazz, though they differ from mine. James has a clear preference for 1930s and early 1940s swing, with an especial fondness for the Duke Ellington band of 1940-41. He’s ambivalent about mid-1940s bebop, in some ways expressing fondness for Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and in other ways taking issue with them. He clearly loathes what came after, Miles Davis and John Coltrane especially. I, too, like the early stuff – the Ellington crew of the early 1940s is one of the best, swingingest bands of all time, but for me the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s was the golden era of jazz, and the following decade up through the mid-1970s was great, too. For that matter, there’s a boatload of current jazz I’m quite fond of. But I figure, to each their own.

What I take issue with in James’ discussion of the beboppers and of Davis and Coltrane is not his preferences but some of his claims about them and the vitriol with which he rejects Davis and Coltrane.

Parker and Gillespie stand accused of taking the spontaneous joy out of jazz and of producing music without clearly discernible rhythm. The rhythm question first – sometimes James clarifies that they didn’t play danceable rhythms. That’s true to some extent. Certainly bebop wasn’t dance music in the way that swing was. I’m not sure how that devalues bebop, though – that’s a bit like claiming that Mozart and Beethoven produced inferior music as they moved away from the tradition of courtly dance music. Other times, though, James claims that bebop was characterized by rhythm sections that didn’t keep the time, being freed up instead for melodic improvisation. It was the case that some rhythm instruments, e.g. the bass, were more freed up for improvisation than in earlier forms of jazz. But listen to a recording like the May, 1945 recording of “Salt Peanuts” by Dizzy Gillespie and His All Star Quintet (Gillespie: trumpet; Parker: alto sax; Al Haig: piano; Curly Russell: bass; Sid Catlett: drums). Curly Russell’s bass lays down a rhythm that’s loud and clear and can’t be missed.

The notion that Parker, Gillespie and the other beboppers took the joy and spontaneity out of music is simply baffling to me. These were musicians who played and recorded songs with titles like “Salt Peanuts,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” “Pickin’ the Cabbage,” “Disorder at the Border,” and “He Beeped when he Shoulda Bopped.” They took their musicianship seriously, but they also had a sense of humor. The expression of joy and spontaneity might have been different than in swing, but it was there – and not so subtly there either.

James seems to see no merit at all in the work of Davis or Coltrane. He is most vitriolic in his discussion of Coltane (located in his essay on Ellington). Again there is the charge of lack of discernible rhythm. There is also a claim for Coltrane’s having committed ritual murder on helpless standards – which is really a bit much, even while James’ writing is always engaging.

There are many instances when Coltrane’s playing was loud or gruff or not pretty (though it was usually beautiful in its own way). At the same time, there was much that was lyrical and tender in Coltrane’s music. “In a Sentimental Mood” (on the Duke Ellington and John Coltrane album) and “Lush Life” (on the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman album) are two of the most lyrical and conventionally beautiful versions of jazz standards ever recorded. The 1963 recording of “Alabama” (on the Live at Birdland album – even though “Alabama” was actually a studio recording added to the mostly live album) does more to evoke the simultaneous melancholy, tragedy, and hopefulness of the Civil Rights era South than any other music I’ve heard through the at times strong, at times fragile and quavering tone of Coltrane’s horn.

I would disagree with the claim that Coltrane’s music lacked rhythm as strongly as I disagree with the same claim for the beboppers. The claim is simply not true. Much of Coltrane’s music is largely about rhythmic exploration. In his later music (say 1965-1967), the rhythm is often highly complex and diffuse. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea to be sure, but there’s a definite propulsion to recordings like “Sun Ship.” Or take the example of “Ascension.” “Ascension” is an album length free improvisation for eleven musicians – think of it as a big band where everyone’s freely improvising. It’s not easy or background listening. It’s definitely not dance music. It really doesn’t have any easily discernible rhythm. Still, the first time I ever listened to this recording I was riveted. By the time it was half way through, I was possessed, unable to restrain myself from jumping up and down and yelling. This music literally moved me, and any music that can do that is powerfully communicating. It won’t communicate to everyone, or even many people perhaps, but then simple popularity is no good way to weigh the worth of a work of art.

James’ sometimes vitriolic reaction to Coltrane reminds me of the similarly strong reactions and rejections that are common with regard to Miles Davis’ “electric period” of the late 1960s through mid-1970s (when Davis’ band included multiple electric instruments, often including electronic modification of his trumpet’s sound), as well as to other developments in jazz in the 1960s and 1970s, such as free jazz and/or jazz-rock fusion.

A few examples:

1. On the DVD Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, about half of which is documentary footage of Davis’ band’s performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival (which alone is more than worth watching the video for), and about half of which is a documentary about Davis’ electric period, one of the interviewees is Stanley Crouch, who is almost always insightful and always entertaining. He likens his attempts to listen to the album Bitches Brew as a young man to being hit repeatedly in the head with a hammer over and over and over. It’s a quite amusing bit, but it’s also a bit much.

2. In Episode Ten (the final episode) of Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary, cultural critic Gerald Early (who I had found one of the most insightful commentators throughout the ten part series up until that point) makes a number of problematic comments, again about Miles Davis’ electric bands. As with James, I don’t take issue with Early’s taste. If he, or Crouch for that matter, don’t care for Davis’ electric period, that’s fine. However, like James (but actually not like Crouch), some of Early’s characterization is simply inaccurate. He claims that the music of the Davis electric bands tended to “fall apart” musically. I would direct anyone interested again to the Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue video, specifically to the performance footage from the Isle of Wight Festival. The rhythm section of Dave Holland on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drum kit, and Airto Moreira on percussion present one of the tightest performances I’ve seen. No one has to like Davis’ music from this period, but he always insisted on musicianship of highest caliber. Early’s other claim that the music was like “tennis without a net,” i.e. Davis had set his standards lower than before, seems to me similarly groundless.

3. Episode Ten of Ken Burns' Jazz in general represents one big slap at avant-garde or electric jazz in general. Many others have critiqued this episode. One particularly insightful commentary is that of David R. Adler on the All About Jazz website.The episode left a bad taste in my mouth after the highly enjoyable first nine episodes.

Fusion is written off as if it didn’t exist at all, but Cecil Taylor, the avant-garde pianist, takes a mauling. As Adler points out, he’s the only artist in the entire ten episode arc who is systematically attacked with no balance. Most egregiously, Branford Marsalis accuses him of engaging in “self-indulgent bullshit.”

I understand that not everyone likes the same music. As I’ve written before (See my earlier posts: "Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and the Experience of Art" and "Reading, Looking, Listening"), I also understand that when people encounter music they don’t like, they often have a visceral reaction against it. Music affects us bodily in a way that other art doesn’t tend to do, and if it’s music you don’t like, it can be a highly unpleasant experience.

Still, there’s something more at play. Jazz is a musical genre that’s also highly invested with identity. There are not only many people who are highly passionate about jazz (count me in that category, obviously) but whose identity is wrapped up in jazz. For some, when jazz musicians begin to play in ways that don’t fit a certain notion of jazz (and arguments about what jazz is can be as engaging and endless as arguments about what barbecue is), beyond not liking the music, they clearly feel betrayed – and that seems to be a big part of the sometimes vitriolic reactions to Coltrane, Davis, Taylor, Ornette Coleman or others.

Even so, I’m unable to understand the continuing extreme reactions now to music that was performed or recorded thirty or forty years ago. I can understand the visceral rejection of Ornette Coleman in 1959 or of Miles Davis’ electric music in 1969. But at this point, if listening to Bitches Brew is like being hit in the head with a hammer, turn it off. It’s not like we’re bombarded with constant John Coltrane or Cecil Taylor recordings everywhere we go these days (and it wasn’t the case in 1965 either).

I’d like to close by calling attention to a post on Reginald Shepherd’s blog calling for more civility and less vitriol in public and online discourse generally. He’s addressing this issue with regard to online poetry discourse, but his general points apply to discussions of jazz, arts and culture in general, and a variety of other topics. Here I’ll quote his final paragraph:

“The situation I discuss is but a minor and marginal example of the general degradation of discourse in contemporary American culture (what Al Gore calls the assault on reason), a process seemingly designed to disengage people from sociality. In this case, however, I would like to point out that the enemy, if an enemy is required (as it seems to be), is not other poets, however different their aesthetic dispositions (I am opposed to John Barr, for example, not as a poet but as a polemicist with, as he put it in The New Yorker, a bully pulpit), but a culture and an economy of scarcity—of money, of resources, of attention, of recognition professional and personal—that pits people in the society as a whole and in any given social subset against one another in a zero-sum competition for crumbs of a shrinking economic and social pie precisely in order to prevent them from cooperating in changing the reward/withhold/punish system some profit from, some rail against (some of these are actually suffering and some just don’t want to admit that they’re profiting too), and most are actively harmed by. Those engaged in the constant turf wars with which the online poetry world in particular is rife might do well to recognize that their mock battles in tempestuous teapots are the direct result, indeed can accurately be described as symptoms of, this economy of scarcity. The energy expended in these toy gladiator contests might be put to more productive uses .”

An Important Essay on Race and Academia

On his blog, Reginald Shepherd recently posted a thoughtful, nuanced, and important essay on the topic of race and academia. It can be accessed at:

http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-thoughts-on-race-and-academia.html

Reginald Shepherd's Blog

The well known poet (and my partner) Reginald Shepherd has a blog well worth reading. His blog deals with poetry, art, and culture. Reginald Shepherd's blog can be found here.