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Thumper
Regular Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 483
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, June 10, 2007 - 08:32 pm: | 
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Hello All,
I have been busy. I have read 5 books this last week. Yep! Some OK, some so so. I read a memoir which will be released in September, That Mean Old Yesterday by Stacey Patton; Want Some Get Some by Pam Ward, a word novel that would have been better if the editor took a hatchet to it; Mommy's Angel by Miasha, it was OK but in need of some overhaul; Black and Ugly by T. Styles, a book I was prepared to hate, but I have to admit I liked it even though it could have stood some more character development. Steve S.: I started the Ellison biography, but I have to but it down for now. The last novel by African writer Ahmandou Kourouma came across my desk. The title of the book is Allah Is Not Obliged. Is that an ass-wiper of a title or what?
The first line in the book is, "The full, final and completely complete title of my bullshit story is: Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth. Okay. Right. I better start explaining some stuff."
Now, you see why I got hooked on this novel IMMEDIATELY! So Ralph is going to have to wait. I'll let you all know in a little while if Allah Is Not Obliged lives up to its suprisingly amusing beginning.
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Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 269
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, June 10, 2007 - 10:06 pm: |
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Thank you. I'm currently re-reading Lawrence Jackson's "Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius," one of the best literary biographies I've ever read.
I hadn't heard of Ahmandou Kourouma before. Thanks for the tip, I'll be interested in hearing how you liked it.
Now I'm reading about a sweet amazing woman named Zelia N. Breaux, superintendant of music for Oklahoma City Colored Schools when Ralph Ellison was in junior high school and high school, between the early 1920s and early 1930s. It's unbelievable how advanced and varied her music program was.
"Breaux had her sights set on institutionalizing music in black Oklahoma City's school curriculum, and she wanted to keep as many of her disciples on the straight and narrow as possible. She implemented the Public School Music Program, which produced orchestras, operettas, choral groups, and famous marching bands. Breaux advocated instrumental instruction at a time when anything more than vocal instruction was unusual at black schools. Though she was confident that "the Negro can sing as perhaps no other race can," Breaux recognized the handicap blacks might suffer without access to the ensemble, the band, and the orchestra. She also felt strongly that music classes in the public school should be offered for credit toward the diploma. Because of her influence in Oklahoma City, where she directed musical education for the entire black public school system, black students began musical instruction in elementary school and received academic credit for their work.
Breaux was not a snob. She realized the lure and purpose of vernacular culture, but chose to aim her students' expectations beyond the ordinary. Any student could hear barrel-house music on the 300 block of Second Street, coming from Honey Murphey's, Hallie Richardson's, or Ruby Lyon's. However, her desire to teach the classics in the schools did not cause her to condemn folk art. In the interest of providing the black public with first-rank popular entertainment, she had opened the city-famous Aldridge Theater in the heart of the Second Street commercial district in 1919. The theater, named after the nineteenth-century black British Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, gave everyone from millionaire S.D. Lyons to the lowliest hod carrier a forum to hear King Oliver, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Blind Boone, Pigmeat Markham, Dusty Fletcher, Butterbeans and Susie, and Bessie Smith.
Ralph learned sight-reading as a part of the school curriculum, and gained appreciation for varieties of musical styles through another novel approach for an early 1920s public school, the use of phonograph recordings. Breaux, moving from school to school throughout the week, instructed her young pupils in theory, elementary harmony, and music appreciation. On the lookout for aspiring musicians, she had developed a program that made music a core course in black grade schools throughout the city. Music became an elective in the ninth grade. Breaux realized that training in the elementary school would help to prepare players for larger high school groups, and she also believed that with suffiecient guidance during the early years, the youngster would choose to take musical classes in high school. Ralph was one of her early successes, a boy who made the transition from mandatory classes in elementary school to musical electives in high school. Another reason for Breaux's success in implementing music into the school curriculum was her family connections. The Oklahoma City school board had hired her father, Inman Page, as principal for the princely sum of $3,300 in the 1923 school year. The same year, Douglass purchased two Kimball pianos, several Victrolas, and $974 worth of band instruments. Youngsters flocked not only to the remarkable teacher but to the newest equipment in their undersupplied school."
There's much more, but I think you can see what I'm getting at.
Now, by contrast, here's how Arnold Rampersad characterizes the same music teacher and her music program:
"When Ralph dreamed now of "success in this world," most often he saw himself as a renowned black classical composer, writing symphonies based on the folk music of his people. Other blacks would then revere him as a credit to the race. Whites would respect him as a Negro genius transcending the limitations of his culture and creating a universal art....Paradoxically, in those days black race pride could drive a black American to excel in classical European or "white," music. People like Zelia Breaux hoped that blacks' success in classical music, painting, literature, and the other arts would offer proof of their collective humanity. Unfortunately, that proof had substantive value only when tendered to whites, who were disposed to deny it. Left to their own devices, blacks would never have questioned their innate humanity."
See how provocative and patronizing he makes everything? Hard to believe that this is a man who for years served as the Assistant Dean for the Humanities at Stanford University.
thanks,
steve |
Yukio
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 2400
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, June 11, 2007 - 10:49 am: |
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LOL! What you have called "sweet," Rampersad has called a typical white liberal.
Rampersad has a historical perspective, while Jackson seems to only narrative Ellison's history as if his life was outside of the racism, both from conservative and liberal whites, that all black endured in Jim Crow America.
Ellison's work, as you know, speaks to the patronizing liberal white people--such as Mr.Norton and Brother Jack.
As historians are apt to do, I'm sure Rampersad's bio of Ellison was written exactly in response to the shortcomings that he saw in Jackson's bio. |
Renata
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Renata
Post Number: 2270
Registered: 08-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, June 11, 2007 - 09:40 pm: |
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I'm interested in knowing what you think of the book as well. I love authors with a sense of humor and who know how to shock and hook a reader on the first page. And he did it within a couple of (not always complete) sentences.
Another thing I love....when a writer knows it's OK to not follow all grammar rules, and writes "incorrectly" right. LOL |
Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 270
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, June 11, 2007 - 10:41 pm: |
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Yukio, Zelia M. Breaux was an African American woman, not a white liberal. She was the daughter of Douglass School principal Inman Page, born a slave in Virginia who became the first black graduate of Brown University. Rampersad is not an African American, as he admits, and he came to the US in 1965 on a State Department scholarship at age 24. He became a US citizen 20 years later in 1985 and he didn't endure Jim Crow.
Rampersad spent 7 years writing a biography and he thinks that Ralph Ellison wanted to compose symphonies "based of the folk music of his people." That misunderstanding speaks volumes.
Ralph Ellison wanted to compose orchestral music using melodic themes from the Negro vernacular, i.e. JAZZ themes, not spirituals. The term vernacular culture is central to an understanding of Ellison's thought, which, frankly, Rampersad holds in such contempt, he flaunts his ignorance of it.
Lawrence Jackson, who appears to be about 20 years younger than Rampersad understands the culture in depth. Ellison, in his junior year, gravitated away from the legit music of the school and the Avery A.M.E. church, toward Second Street where he sometimes attended rehearsals of Walter Page's Blue Devils, who were based out of Oklahoma City from 1925 to 1932 at which time Bennie Moten lured them to KC and they later became the Count Basie Orchestra. Ralph also studied trumpet and composition privately with a German trumpet player, an immigrant who was the music teacher at the white high school. Ralph often sat in on rehearsals with musicians like Ben Webster, Buster Smith, Lips Page, et al. Lester Young, who was only a few years older than Ralph, also moved to town.
Ralph Ellison knew that he couldn't compete as a soloist with musicians like these, so his idea was to become a composer. His model was Duke Ellington, not Anton Dvorak. You could say that Billy Strayhorn ended up achieving Ralph's dream.
He went to Tuskegee to study with William Dawson, an African American composer who had written a symphony in the Dvorak mold that Rampersad has in mind. Although I've never heard Dawson's Negro Symphony, it's described as a late Romantic piece using African American folk themes.
Zelia N. Breaux had supported Ralph's interest in both classical and vernacular (jazz) music. However, Dawson did not. So Ralph became close to pianist Hazel Harrison, who, unlike Dawson, was a modernist. She had studied in Europe with Busoni and Prokofiev, whose piano sonatas are like McCoy Tyner compared to late Romantic music. She was the African American pianiste of her generation and she admired and encouraged Ralph's interest in literature.
Rampersad's condescending attitude towards music reminds me of Booker T. Washington opinion about the impracticality of studying Latin and Greek if you're the daughter of a laundress.
Here's an interview with Dr. Lawrence Jackson. By the way, is Rampersad your favorite brand, like, say, Welch's, so that you have to defend his product name?
http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML.cfm?page=jackson.html |
Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 271
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, June 11, 2007 - 11:03 pm: |
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Here's Inman Page's graduation photo in 1877. He was principal of the Douglass School in Oklahoma City in the 1920s and 1930s. Later in life, Ralph Ellison spoke at Page's alma mater, Brown Universtiy, for the dedication of a portrait of his former principal, I believe.
http://dl.lib.brown.edu/pollard/earlyalumni.html
His daughter Zelia N. Breaux, although I couldn't find a photo, shares a family resemblance and has graying hair in the photo in the biography. She received her masters degree in music education from Northwestern University |
Yukio
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 2404
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, June 12, 2007 - 05:47 am: |
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Steve_s: Thank you for the correction. But I think you're missing Rampersad's point. Let me make something clear first. I have read neither of the biographies, so I can not say much about the specifics of Ellison's history. From the quote you used, however, Rampersad says nothing explicitly about spirituals.
But....I am considerably versed in the fundamentals of economic, social, political, intellectual African American history. And clearly Rampersad is placing Ellison's life in the context of African American intellectual, political, and social history.
In so doing, Ellison embraces whiteness [white european art forms] to claim the humanity of blacks. You are regurgitating details, and Rampersad is making an intellectual point about Ellison's implicit denial of black humanity.
With that said, Breaux's being black doesn't change his, or my interpretation of his, point. The message is the same: cultural imperialism.
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Steve_s
Regular Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 272
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - 09:21 pm: |
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Yukio.
The character Brother Jack in Invisible Man is not a "white liberal." He's a radical, in fact, he's head of the Communist Party in New York City during the 1930s. I think you're using the term to describe what you see as a hypocritical form of racial egalitarianism.
What do you think of the Republican radicals during Reconstruction? Were they hypocritical racial egalitarians too, like the Union Soldiers who died in the Civil War? In fact, the 19th-century meaning of "liberal" had to do with a belief in limited government and laissez-faire economics, not racial egalitarianism.
I have to say that I'm not missing a thing about Rampersad's opinion of jazz. He looks down his nose at it just like Du Bois did, who Anita once said considered jazz jungle-bunny music. And don't worry, I won't post any more excerpts which you've insultingly described as "regurgitating."
Arnold Rampersad has benefited from the confusion over his ethnic identity to forge a comfortable 40-year career in elite academia teaching literature and black studies to a predominantly white constituency while marketing hagiographies of "safe" African American cultural heroes as a sideline.
The narrative voice of this biography, on the other hand, is that of a trickster and it fits the description of a "double-voiced narrative" as described in Henry Louis Gates's "Signifyin(g) Monkey."
Rampersad is reminiscent of Rinehart, the shape-shifting hustler/preacher in Invisible Man who uses the community for his own benefit while Invisible Man and others earnestly deal with issues of identity and invisibility for themselves and the community.
Your cries of cultural imperialism ring hollow, Yukio. Ellison was from the black lower-class, largely autodidact, and on his own, at the height of segregation, sought out literature which fed his creative imagination and challenged his high intelligence. He's not the middle-class son of a journalist from a foreign country, a trained intellectual who makes his living in elite academia. The book describes something like a parasitic symbiosis between Ellison, the creative man, and Rampersad, the critic.
Despite the initial hoopla, this book might come to be regarded as the albatross of his career. |
Yukio
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 2413
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - 10:34 pm: |
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You're right...Brother Jack was a communist...but he was patronizing...furthermore, communist are only "radical" when compared to the U.S. party system and the bourgeois. But if you view the world outside of racism, then then to criticize capitalism with engaging the role of racism then to black folk you are liberal.
Racial egalitarianism can characterize Brother Jack too, but the phrase de-politicizes antiracism .
From the black perspective, those who focus on class only are part of the liberal white spectrum. This is why communist, the party that is, has trouble keeping black members.
I'll answer your questions sooner than later! |
Yukio
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 2414
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - 10:56 pm: |
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What do you think of the Republican radicals during Reconstruction? Were they hypocritical racial egalitarians too, like the Union Soldiers who died in the Civil War? In fact, the 19th-century meaning of "liberal" had to do with a belief in limited government and laissez-faire economics, not racial egalitarianism.
They were liberals, which is the term I used in the first place. You're the one defining liberal according to 19th c. standards. LOL!
The problem is, you're so limited by definitions that you failure to acknowledge that regardless of how liberalism, racial egalitarianism etc...were defined in the past and the present, when it comes to black folk...white people have always been liberal, sans John Brown.
Your cries of cultural imperialism ring hollow, Yukio. Ellison was from the black lower-class, largely autodidact, and on his own, at the height of segregation, sought out literature which fed his creative imagination and challenged his high intelligence. He's not the middle-class son of a journalist from a foreign country, a trained intellectual who makes his living in elite academia.
LOL! Are you talkin about Ellison the man or the student of Breaux? Rampersad is talkin about Ellison the student. I'm using YOUR quote... |
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