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West_africa
Regular Poster
Username: West_africa
Post Number: 46
Registered: 08-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 12:32 pm: | 
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1. Can we deny that implicit in the caliber of Ralph Ellison's work is an assertion regarding acceptable standards of literary composition?
2. Can we compare the caliber and compositional style of Ralph Ellison's work to that of Terri McMillan? Can we compare the works of Ralph Ellison to Eric Jerome Dickey?
3. From : Survey of American Literature, 1992 --- (on Ralph Ellison):
"The central theme of Ralph Ellison's writing is the search for identity, a search that he sees as central to American literature and the American experience. He has said that "the nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are," and in Invisible Man this struggle toward self-definition is applied to individuals, groups, and the society as a whole. The particular genius of Invisible Man is Ellison's ability to interweave these individual, communal, and national quests into a single, complex vision."
Has the quest of Ralph Ellison (in terms of style, in terms of vision, in terms of caliber) been advanced within African-American literature?
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Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 112
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 02:07 pm: |
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Hi, thanks for the interesting topic. Well, I'm hardly an expert on Ralph Ellison, but on the last count, I think there are many writers of fiction who have cited Ralph Ellison's work as an influence, including many of the younger generation.
I would say that Invisible Man is a modernist novel, episodic in structure, concerned with the disintegration of the individual in modern life, etc. But individual and group identities may overlap or even conflict, as in the example of the Invisible Man's tenure in the Brotherhood (or Communist Party) where he joins for his own reasons, not necessarily those of the organization.
As far as a "national vision," I think that during that time period, the CPUSA had put aside its revolutionary agenda in favor of a United Front Strategy, which included an emphasis on ethnic pluralism. I think the novel describes what many felt was the Party's abandonment of African Americans in this era.
He once said that "craft is morality" and compared the writer's skills to those of a doctor.
He wasn't interested in writing protest fiction, that is, the single-issue novels, the calls to action, as it were, in the tradition of the muckrakers, the anti-slavery novels, and even social realism (although he was a staunch defender of Richard Wright).
He defined the "blues idiom" as an art form, and described it in his review of Richard Wright's Black Boy:
"The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by the sqeezing from it a near tragic-near comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically."
James Alan McPherson notes that Wright did not seem to understand how the concept applied:
It is interesting to note, by reading the exchange between Wright and Ellison after he published this review in the Summer 1945 Antioch Review, that Wright seemed to have no idea what Ellison was talking about. "The Antioch came and I read the article," Wright wrote to Ellison. "I think I mentioned over the phone that I did not see the blues concept; I do see it, but only very slightly. And surely not enough to play such an important role as you assigned it. I'm not trying to carp over the fact that it was a Negro expression form. I simply do not see it."
Ralph Ellison considered the African American vernacular tradition of the blues an art form comparable in some ways to Greek Drama. Columbia professor Farah Jasmine Griffin refers to this as the "Western Civ Simile."
But to get back to the question, no, I don't think one can judge all writers by an Ellisonian standard, except perhaps in terms of "caliber," as you say, but not "compositional style" or anything like that. There are too many other ways to write.
But here's what's problematic. Invisible Man is often used, unfairly, I might add, as the standard by which to judge all other African American novels. I can think of one literary scholar in particular who continues to assert that, however, I don't think one can blame this on Ellison.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2489
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 03:41 pm: |
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Toni Morrison does a very credible job of preserving and even advancing Ralph Ellison's legacy. She never makes it easy for her readers, and completing one of her books is its own reward. Her characters personify adversity and resilience, and the impact of invisibility is never more apparent then when her plots mock the smugness of those who prefer the tangible to the intangible. Terri McMillan's writing skills are an example of prose triumphing over the prosaic. She succeeded in fleshing out the plight of invisible black sistas when her books cast black men as the common denominater for the problems of black women. She made a profit off of her ability to effectively make art imitate life and her dubious legacy might very well be her top position among the ranks of castrating female authors. Eric Jerome Dickey is a man for his times, a story teller whose readers are compatible with his unremarkable writing skills. Years from now, his works stand a better chance of being a reference book for the lifestyle of a certain era, rather than an example of literary excellence. And, considering that Ralph Ellison was never able to duplicate the genius or the success of "Invisible Man", his greatest asset was being a visionary. "Invisible Man" stood the test of time because race never stopped being an issue in America but, like Harper Lee, the author of "To Kill A Mocking Bird", and Margaret Mitchell, author of "Gone With The Wind", Ralph Ellison never again hit his literary stride. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1395
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 04:12 pm: |
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West_Africa:
So everybody else should drop dead, right?
Henry James and James Joyce are cited as the greatest white writers of all time. So Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Mailer, etc etc--all of whom I would say are not as good as them, should not have written, right?
It took Ralph Ellison seven years to write that book. He never wrote another novel during his life, some say because he dispaired of writing anything that could even equal it.
It is sheer lunacy to present the unparallelled and unequalled masterpiece of black literature, and then say that if you aren't writing like that you shouldn't write.
Not all saxophonists can play like Bird or Coltrane. So they shouldn't play the saxophone?
James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Leon Forrest, none of them have written any one book as powerful as Invisible Man. They should have given it up, too?
Who has written anything the equal of that?
Finally let me ask, what are you writing? Have you written anything that comes up to this? |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 113
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 04, 2005 - 04:05 pm: |
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To repeat West Africa's question: "Has the quest of Ralph Ellison (in terms of style, in terms of vision, in terms of caliber) been advanced within African-American literature?"
Oh yeah, definitely. Not to belabor the Charlie Parker analogy, but Bird, like most great artists, was surpassed, he just didn't live long enough to see it happen. Just as Beethoven went beyond his teacher Franz Josef Hayden, he, in turn, was surpassed by Brahms and many others (in terms of orchestration, harmony, etc.). The watermark in any art form is continually being raised, and so you kill the father and move on. Which Ralph Ellison understood, because at City College in 1984, after a testimonial honoring him, he was presented by Michael Harper with a wrapped present and the toast, "Ralph, this is a gift from your sons!" to which Ellison laughed and replied, "Then you'd better open it yourself, because it might explode!"
I'm about halfway through a short story collection called I GOT SOMEBODY IN STAUNTON by William Henry Lewis. I think that this kind of writing may be exactly what Ralph Ellison had in mind with his conception of a "blues idiom" in literature. These stories center on the ordinary lives of working-class people (most, not all) in the South, which the author elevates to the level of art, to a kind of lyric poetry about loss and leaving -- isn't that what the blues is?
The character in the title story, Uncle Ize, IS the grandfather in Invisible Man, the hidden, deeper meaning of whose dying words, "keep him running," the narrator searches out.
These are some beautifully written stories. I can't understand how anyone could not "get" this. I think it deserves the Pulitzer Prize, it's every bit as good as and even very similar in its understatement to Jhumpa Lahiri's collection which won a few years ago. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1414
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 06, 2005 - 02:38 pm: |
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Sometimes you only think that somebody was best and somebody comes along better, and sometimes somebody really is the best and nobody ever dethrones him.
There was nobody surpassed Bird. John Coltrane is the only person who equalled him and he was playing something different.
Ain't nobody written any one book that surpasses Invisible Man. I doubt that it will be done because nobody is going to kill himself for seven years wrenching something out like that-- |
West_africa
Veteran Poster
Username: West_africa
Post Number: 56
Registered: 08-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 07, 2005 - 03:03 pm: |
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From a text by Carol Fosse on "Invisible Man" :
"...Ellison's protagonist, the effaced narrator, is a young African-American male from the segregated deep south, who believes himself to be an "invisible man," a black man whose identity is, was and always will remain unseen and, therefore, unappreciated in American society unless something is done (*).
Critic Todd Libber points out that invisibility results from a perception each society holds to be true. What does not fit into that idea of “reality” is therefore assigned to “chaos” and is invisible (*)..."
However: What is the nature of the protagonists invisibility ? Is he invisible to himself ? Why is he, or why is he not ? |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 116
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 07, 2005 - 09:51 pm: |
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Goods points, however, one could argue that the Invisible Man is not necessarily FROM the deep South, although it's true that he is a student there and makes the trek northward, in the tradition of the ascent narratives.
As you probably know, Ralph Ellison was from Oklahoma. His grandfather had been a sheriff in (I believe) South Carolina during Reconstruction, or until the southern codes took effect, at which time the family followed in the footsteps of the Exodusters and went west.
Ellison was attracted to the jazz musicians who came through Oklahoma City, including Lester Young, Walter Page's Blue Devils (an early incarnation of the Count Basie Orchestra), and he attended school with the great Charlie Christian. Although he made the jam sessions on Second Street (AKA "Deep Deuce" or "Deep Second") in OK City, he knew he wasn't cut out to be a jazz trumpet player, so his ambition was to compose music and if that failed, to become a music teacher.
He had heard the Tuskegee College Choir on a nationwide broadcast from Radio City at Christmas. Although one doesn't usually associate Tuskegee with classical music, the college had hired composer William Dawson (former trombonist with the Chicago Orchestra who went on to compose an African-American Symphony in the 1930s which he named the "Negro Symphony") to head a world-class music faculty which included pianist Hazel Harrison (who had studied with Busoni) and a trumpeter name Frank Dye, et al.
Not to go to far off on a tangent, but the Great Depression and the death of President Robert Russa Moten (who was succeeded by Frederick Douglass Paterson - sp?) forced some changes in curriculum and I think by Ellison's third year the music school had lost its autonomy and had become a department, with the music program well on its way to being phased out completely. (I read Lawrence Jackson's terrific biography, "Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius," and although the author never spells out any specifics about how Ellison's experiences became the raw material for the novel Invisible Man, it's interesting to speculate about what went on at "the College").
To get back to the subject, the definition quoted: "What does not fit into that idea of “reality” is therefore assigned to “chaos” and is invisible . . " seems to fit, at least in my opinion (although Ellison had some specific meanings for the term "chaos"). I don't know if you're familiar with John Steinbeck's "East of Eden," but there's a character named Lee - Adam Trask's Chinese housekeeper - who's college-educated and highly literate (and also wise), but he has to speak in a pidgen English in order to be understood by most people who expect a Chinese housekeeper to speak a certain way. That's a kind of invisibility.
I think the question of who the Invisible Man is invisible TO, is an interesting one, especially since Toni Morrison addressed it a few years ago in her interview in the New Yorker ("Invisible to whom? Not to me"), however, "invisible to himself" is something worth thinking about.
Well, he does have those 1369 lightbulbs on all the time. Hopefully, they help illuminate something, LOL! But when he disappears down the rabbit hole, it always reminds me of Charlie Parker's tribute to the predicament of that Lewis Carroll character who always had to shrink or expand in order to fit others' expectations, "Blues for Alice," although it's doubtful that Ralph Ellison had that in mind, LOL!
That's about all I've got. Right now I'm in the middle of a 450-page book which I should try and finish for an upcoming discussion.
thanks. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2514
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 03:24 pm: |
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Very interesting, Steve. I learned some other interesting things about Ralph Ellison when I recently saw a PBS profile of him, and he was obviously a man who was torn. According to this documentary, Ellison rejected the black nationalism of the 1960s, and once during this era, when approached by a student at a private gathering on a college campus where he had appeared, Ellison laid his head on the shoulder of a colleague and broke into tears after this student said "Invisible Man" should've ended differently, and that Ellison was an Uncle Tom. This episode kind of made me wonder if Ellison, himself, really preferred to be invisible rather than militant when it came to confronting racism, feeling that the impact of exposing racism, served to make the message visible and that this made it permissiable for the messenger to fade into invisibility. Where race was concerned, Ellison was conceivably a personification of the pen being mightier than the sword. And since Ralph Ellison did receive a lot of acclaim from the White literary establishment, one has to wonder if over the years he became reluctant to bite the hand that fed him. When Ellison's country home burned to the ground and he lost the 450-page manuscript for the follow-up book he was writing, there were those who said this provided him with an excuse to be permanently in the process of re-writing a book he could never get a handle on. Of course, none of this detracts from the brillance of Ellison's one and only masterpiece. |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 117
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2005 - 05:59 pm: |
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Thank you, Cynique. Unfortunately for me, I missed that documentary, but I'm aware of the incident you're talking about (although the version I read didn't mention that the guy had critiqued the ending of Invisible Man, which is almost funny!). When I started becoming interested in the work of Ralph Ellison a few years ago (I had read the book for the first time back in the 1970s), I noticed that he was conspicuously ommitted from a book with a title something like "100 Black Heroes," while many less important writers were included. I soon learned that that's probably because in the 1960s he did not become a spokesman for the Civil Rights Movement. Here's one opinion from Gerald Early:
"Ellison may have withdrawn from public politics or direct involvement in the civil rights movement, but he never withdrew from the public realm as a writerly presence. He insisted, until his death in 1994, that both blacks and whites take him on his own terms. This meant that he resisted the temptation to become a spokesman like James Baldwin (a wise move when one looks at what happened to Baldwin the writer as a result) and also resisted the quackery and opportunism of jealous black nationalist critics who condemned his novel as "not contributing to the liberation of black people," as I remember the cant phrase of the day."
http://www.honors.umd.edu/HONR269J/archive/early.html
I think that Henry Louis Gates's profile of James Baldwin (The Welcome Table) in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man" adequately describes "what happened to Baldwin" (to use Early's phrase), or, at least some of the personal dimensions of it.
Readers might not be aware that the work of Ralph Ellison (and Albert Murray) is very popular right now because, for one thing, it's the philosophy behind the so-called "Lincoln Center Democratic Jazz Aesthetic" and the Ken Burns Jazz documentary. There are now jazz programs in colleges across the country and idealistic young people in their teens and twenties (one has to be idealistic when one realizes that there are only 2 gigs per every 2,000 music school graduates) are learning -- through the writing of people like Ralph Ellison -- about jazz music as a cultural contribution of African Americans. As a result, even cultural theorists like Cornel West (Democracy Matters) and Michael Eric Dyson (Open Mike) who previously may have taken a Marxist or cultural nationalist view of jazz, are now working within the Ellisonian philosophy. Here are some "Ellisonian" scholars:
http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML.cfm?page=ellison.html
Cynique, when we were young (or at least, when I was), those of us -- regardless of race -- who were interested in Black music and literature, learned how to talk about same through the prism of Black cultural nationalism, which, at the time, was relevant because people HAD to be militant in order to get Black studies included in college curricula, etc. So there were the so-called "Instant Black Classics" -- Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin. But the problem for me is when people continue to look at art through an ideological lens which may not even be relevant any more, even to the artists themselves. An example might be the young, extremely intelligent guy who recently posted a long screed here about the movie version of the Zora Neale Hurston novel. He mentioned the schools that he had attended and even admitted that he was aware that he was overreacting. It was like a cry for help. He could not even place the novel within the correct decade; he called it the "first great novel of the jazz age" when it's a novel of the Depression. He couldn't place the blues within the correct century. He mentioned a movie (the Big Chill) in which Julia Roberts and others dance to Motown music, which he called a "racist fraud," seemingly unaware that Berry Gordy's success, at least in part, was predicated on getting Motown music played on TV dance shows like American Bandstand, Shindig, and Hullaballoo. He called the novel a study in envioronmentalism or naturalism, when in reality, it describes winds of an unrealistic 160 mph and perpetuates the myth that the Seminoles started leaving early when they saw the sawgrass blooming.
As far as Ellison being a favorite of the "White Literary Establishment," to use your words, don't forget that as far back as the 1940s, he was the first writer to offer sweeping critiques of American culture from a Black perspective in the highly influential intellectual publications of the time -- the so-called little magazines like the Partisan Review, etc.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2522
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 11:22 am: |
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Steve, I agree that this generation of black "scholars-in-progress" are not that well grounded when it comes to the culture of a past era. They don't seem to realize how things changed from decade to decade, but want to lump everything between 1920 and 1950 into one big category, when, actually, each of these 10-year time frames was very distinquisable from the other when it came to literature, music, fashion, and attitudes about race. |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 118
Registered: 04-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, September 09, 2005 - 04:17 pm: |
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I recently read a review of Ralph Ellison's "Juneteenth" on this Web site. I think it was authored but Thumper, but, whoever wrote the review, I have to say that it expressed exactly what I felt. |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 119
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 12, 2005 - 03:24 pm: |
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I want to correct a few mistakes I made in my previous posts *wiping egg off face.* The unnamed protagonist of Invisible Man IS a southerner, he wins the battle royal and receives the briefcase which contains the scholarship to "the College." Also, the message, "Keep him running,"is that of Dr. Bledsoe, not that of the grandfather (who said "Overcome 'em with yesses, undermine 'em with grins," etc.)
West Africa, why didn't you call me on that? I don't claim to be a literary expert.
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Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 120
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 12, 2005 - 03:41 pm: |
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Chris, I think you're intentionally misunderstanding the point I'm making about Coltrane. Until his Impulse recordings (or at least his later Atlantic recordings) he was a "super-Charlie Parker," probably less original than Ornette Coleman, and the product of a college musical education (the Granoff School where he studied for years with Mike Guerra, the clarinetist from the Philadelphia Orchestra, and achieved level 8 of harmony (polychromaticism and hybrid scales) with Denis Sandole, a former guitarist with WHITE big bands like Charlie Barnet (see the biography by Lewis Porter).
I think that YOU, like Ralph Ellison, misunderstand the point about Charlie Parker. Mr. Ellison, who grew up during the era of Ellington and Basie, did not quite understand the persavie influence of Charlie Parker on all jazz musicians, regardless of instrument: JJ Johnson played "Charlie Parker" on trombone, just as Bud Powell played "Charlie Parker" on piano.
Some of Ellison's "theories" about Bird were a little weird (see Ken Burns' book. The beatniks were not responsible for the boboppers penchant for "weirdness," that's a bunch of bull. Read Wayne Shorter's biography. He called himself "Mr. Gone." Baraka called him "Weird Wayne" (see Black Music).
In high school, Wayne Shorter would give a concert and the musicians would spray water on their suits to get them really wrinkled. Then they would walk onstage (with their instruments carried in shopping bags, nothing as bourgeoise as instrument cases). They would be carrying newspapers under their arms which they would unfold on the music stand (the idea being that what they were playing was so NEW, it was still in the news), they would then sit on chairs turned backwards (John Wayne style), and "read" the music from the newspapers.
You have the Ken Burns book, look in the index under "Allen Ginsberg." That's a bunch of bullsh*t. Allen Ginsburg lived in my East Village neighborhood up until the time he passed. I would sometimes see him talking to the street merchants on Second Avenue. He was a totally real cat. Yeah, Allen Ginsburg, my man. |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 121
Registered: 04-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 12, 2005 - 04:06 pm: |
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No one may EVER have the influence on jazz that Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker had. That does not mean that they were not "surpassed" within their lifetimes. Man, talk about internalizing some white man stuff . .
There's never going to be another Ralph Ellison. That's not what I'm taling about.
Try walking into a jam session and playing like Benny Carter or Johnny Hodges (great as they were/are) and see what people think.
Read the acccounts of Monk in the early '70s on tour with Dizzy, Sonny Stitt, Kai Winding, Al McKibbon and the "Giants of Jazz." He was losing it at that point, creating arguments, starting tunes on his own, etc.
It's very easy for a John Wideman to romanticize the "silence" of Thelonious Monk, but I question how much of that is understanding vs. exploitation.
While Monk was still alive, Kenny Barron founded a group calle "Sphere," dedicated to playing the music of Thelonious Monk (Btw, years earlier, my late friend, Denis Charles, an original member of the Cecil Taylor Quarter, had a group with the late saxophonist Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd, and Henry Grimes, dedicated to playing Monk's Music: see "School Days," if you can find it).
Anyway, Terrence Blanchard, one of the baddest trumpet players in jazz (and incidentally, the musical director for the naughty, naught, TV adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's TEWWG) related a story about Kenny Barron's recent concert at Rutgers Newark in which a young black woman stood up inb the middle of the performance and yelled: "stop playing that WHITE music!"
That's exactly the disconnect to black culture I'm talking about.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2542
Registered: 01-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 12, 2005 - 10:04 pm: |
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How about we just resort to the old cliche about comparing apples to oranges when determining who is more inimitable than whom? When it comes to Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, think be-bop vs. straight-ahead jazz; comparisons are meaningless. As for Ralph Ellison being in a class by himself, we can always say that he was at the right place at the right time and was ready with the talent to write a story whose time had come. If Ellison hadn't written "Invisible Man," somebody else would've tackled the subject of black men being relegated to oblivion by a racist society, and could've possibly developed this theme into a novel that was better than "Invisible Man," a fateful sequence of events that would've truly rendered Ellison invisible. We can never discount the luck of the draw. |
Snakegirl
Newbie Poster
Username: Snakegirl
Post Number: 22
Registered: 05-2005
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 12, 2005 - 11:10 pm: |
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In the words of TONI MORRISON, regarding this novel:
"invisible to who?"
And by the way,
MORRISON's "Song of Solomon" and "Beloved" are BOTH superior to "Invisible Man" in my opinion----although I do rank "I.M." as one of the greatest American novels ever written.
I also feel that "The Bluest Eye" told the same story as "I.M." and took it to a deeper place---but of course, we can't see the "Black Struggle" through the experience of a female.
Chris Hayden can say all he wants about Ellison's masterpiece and talent....but I still say that Morrison was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century.
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Snakegirl
Newbie Poster
Username: Snakegirl
Post Number: 23
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 12, 2005 - 11:11 pm: |
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Poor Kenny Barron.
I really like his music!
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Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1433
Registered: 03-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - 11:09 am: |
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Snakegirl:
Nope. Because Ellison's was first. Without Invisible Man as a lighthouse she wouldn't have written either one of them. |
Snakegirl
Newbie Poster
Username: Snakegirl
Post Number: 24
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - 05:47 pm: |
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Actually, she credits WILLIAM FAULKNER for her work, Chris.
While I love "I.M."----I could name at least 10 novels that I think are superior to it.
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West_africa
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Username: West_africa
Post Number: 90
Registered: 08-2005
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 14, 2005 - 09:52 am: |
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Excerpt by: Dr. Karen A. Droisen
Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas --- Dept. of English
"Ellison graduated with honors from an all-black high school in Oklahoma City.
He went on to the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) on a music scholarship: Ellison was an accomplished trumpeter and hoped to become a jazz musician.
He was also a sculptor: in 1936, he went to New York City to study sculpting and to work as a musician to cover his college tuition costs. Ellison was interested in all the fine arts: throughout his life, he was an avid reader of contemporary literature, including the poetry of T. S. Eliot. He saw many interesting similarities between Eliot's writing and jazz music.
In 1937, Ellison's friend, the poet Langston Hughes, introduced Ellison to novelist Richard Wright (Native Son).
Wright encouraged Ellison to develop his considerable literary talent and Ellison began to publish short stories and literary reviews. He became editor of The Negro Quarterly in 1942.
Throughout the 1940's, Ellison often worked at odd jobs to supplement his income as a writer. He worked, variously, as a part-time musician, an installer of audio equipment, a builder of audio amplifiers, and a photographer.
Ellison published his best-known work, Invisible Man, in 1952."
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Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1438
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 14, 2005 - 10:53 am: |
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<<That's awful. She should be boiled alive in oil.
I don't care who she has credited for her work If Ellison hadn't published Invisible Man--while she was probably in grade school, she'd have had a much tougher time trying to make it as a literary writer.
Toni Morrison's work has in now way been as ground breaking or important. Taken in sum, her books might be superior, but no one book she has ever done has been as influential as widely and as long.
And he did it without Oprah, too. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1439
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 14, 2005 - 11:00 am: |
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Correction:
Chloe Wofford (Morrison's birthname) was born in 1931--so she was in college--and swooning over Faulkner.
I wonder if she exulted when he announced he'd like to be in the streets of Mississippi shooting down the Negroes who were demonstrating for their rights?
If I was ever to descend to the burning of books, his would be on top of the pile. |
Snakegirl
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Post Number: 25
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 14, 2005 - 04:13 pm: |
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Chris,
Toni Morrison considered Faulkner a racist.
But she also was smart enough to read and study only the most gifted writers available to her---most of whom were white and racist.
She started reading Faulkner at 12 and 14 years old.
Toni Morrison was AGAINST "integration" Chris.
She and Faulkner and Zora Neal Hurston were all against integration. And you know full well that Faulkner would never have shot black people with guns. He campaigned against such behavior and was shunned by many of his peers/country clubs/family for that.
Morrison became a BOOK EDITOR at RANDOM HOUSE in the 1960's, Chris, so I seriously doubt that Ellison's book would have affected one way or the other whether her own was published. And I also think that Zora Neal Hurston's books (which came BEFORE "Ellison") were the ones that made it possible for Toni Morrison to write what she writes.
Lastly---I think you over-state the influence of "Invisible Man" and it's laughable to suggest that Morrison's "Song of Solomon" or "Beloved" haven't been MORE celebrated and aren't as important---in fact, anyone can see that "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker and "The Bluest Eye" have had much larger impacts on the society.
Ellison's "Invisible Man" is literally made invisible by Black males today.
They don't want to relate to Ellison or Wright or Baldwin.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2568
Registered: 01-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 14, 2005 - 05:29 pm: |
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West Africa, after reading the brief bio of Ellison you posted, it suddenly occurs to me that his life story would make a good made-for-TV movie. His personal journey certainly had its share of triumphs and defeats and his marriage was a classic love story. And for that matter, do you wonder why "Invisible Man" itself has never made it to the screen? I think in the hands of a good script writer it would make a compelling film. Maybe Oprah will tackle this as one of her projects. Or should we pray that she doesn't! LOL |
Steve_s
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Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 122
Registered: 04-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, September 15, 2005 - 11:58 pm: |
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If I remember correctly (I've read Invisible Man 3 or 4 times, though it's been a few years since my last reading), shortly after arriving in Harlem, the Invisble Man meets a blues musician named Peetie Wheatstraw on the street carrying a wheelbarrow full of blueprints to the dump. This is (choose one):
a) Ellison's sly allusion to Richard Wright's "Blueprint For Negro Writing," whose social realist aesthetic he rejected.
http://home.gwu.edu/~cuff/wright/blueprint.html
b) an allusion to Chapter 10 of "Up From Slavery," in which Booker T. Washington relates how the students made the plans for the college and even made the bricks (out of straw). It might be Ellison's way of saying that the Invisible Man will not be going back to "the College," just as the author never returned to Tuskegee.
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/hst/biography/UpFromSlaveryAnAutobi ography/chap11.html
c) an example of the blueprints representing the founding documents - the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc.
Stanley Crouch has an answer in his latest book, "The Artificial White Man." He and Ralph Ellison were friends, so it's possible that they discussed this, however, I still like my two "wrong" answers better:
Ellison is indispensible because of his literary concern with what our nation is, has been, and might become. With Saul Bellow, he stands as the greatest thinker our fiction has produced since 1950. His thoughts are profoundly composed of vernacular materials, the ideas expressed in the international world of art, and the implications of our social contract. In chapter 9 of Invisible Man, he brings together the common man symbol of Charlie Chaplin and the surrealism of the blues with the "blueprints" of American society -- the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. It is one of the high points of our literature and a supremely brilliant extension of what Melville and Joyce showed could be done with popular materials, and that jazz musicians did with the Tin Pan Alley songs they expanded with improvisations that gave those show tunes melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, psychological, and emotional range and intimacy far beyond their original renditions. -- Stanley Crouch, The Artificial White Man
Ellison's debt to Joyce was apparently the combination of high modernism with the dirty, grimy street rhymes, i.e. the "vernacular material," that one hears from Peetie Wheatstraw in the novel (I'll have to locate my copy). Can't say that I've read much Joyce, but in the last few years I have read quite a bit of Melville, which I'll have to think about. Well, for one thing, the first page of Chapter One of Moby-Dick begins with a kind of blues (and almost an invocation of a New Orleans second line, as well):
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly, November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. -- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
FYI, there was a contemporary bluesman named William Bunch, born c. 1902, who adopted the persona of Peetie Wheatstraw, the badman character from Black folklore who apparently went Faustian bargain-hunting down at the crossroads (and presumably crossed at the crosswalk). I forget which Ralph Ellison essay it's in, but he stated that his knowledge of Peetie Wheatstraw was limited to a pool room rhyme he had heard growing up, which also included the name "Lord Stingeroy" or "Lord Stingroy," I forget which. Maybe someone remembers.
This "dealing with the devil" was a mythology which, of course, the bluesmen themselves didn't believe, but in case anyone's interested, here it is (disclaimer: unlike your average billionaire British rocker, I don't think I've ever heard the music of William Bunch, AKA Peetie Wheatstraw), right out' the book:
The myth of Satan, a man's soul, and the midnight meeting at a deserted Delta crossroads had not yet been invented when Peetie Wheatstraw staked his claim to the devil's patronage. Peetie was a great singer and an able pianist, who had only a limited repertoire of melodic ideas and lyrical topics. But he was one of the biggest stars of the late 1930s, recording more than 160 titles in the eleven years between September 1930 and his death. Peetie was so popular because his lyrics were appealing to contemporary audiences, and his songs were enhanced by his exuberant delivery, Moaning, mumbling, and slurring, he could certainly sell a song.
Little is known of Peetie's early life: his real name was William Bunch, but no one is quite sure where he was born. Most likely it was four days before Christmas 1902 in Ripley, Tennessee, where Hambone Willie and Sleepy John Estes came from. Early on he relocated to Arkansas, before moving to East St. Louis around 1929. He was a better guitarist than pianist, which is surprising given the fct that he would later accompany a number of singers, including Kokomo Arnold, Jimmy Gordon, and Casey Bill Weldon, on the piano. From the outset, Peetie was canny in his choice of accompanying guitarists, befinning with Charlie Jordan (who had to walk with crutches, after being shot in the spine) and later Lonnie Johnson, while both Kokomo Arnold and Casey Bill also returned the favor.
Peetie's first recording was a duet with a mysterious man known only as Neckbones. A week after this one-time session, he began a five-year association by recording four songs with Charlie Jordan, which were credited to "Peetie Wheatsraw." Written underneath his name on the label was "The Devil's Son-in-Law."
HERE AND GONE
By 1931, Peetie began establishing his own legend when he switched to Bluebird to record four sides. His first cut, "Devil's Son-in-Law," backed with "Peetie Wheatstraw," is probably the most blatant piece of self-promotion in the whole history of the blues.
Although the Depression had limited his opportunities to record, from March 1934 his career wqent into overdrive, and he made regular visits to the studio during the rest of the decade. In 1936, he cut "The First Shall Be Last And The Last Shall Be First" and "Deep Sea Love" for Decca, which mysteriously billed him on this record only as "The High Sherrif From Hell."
The circumstances of Peetie's death are somewhat strange, and almost as confusing as his birth. There is no uestion that he died, along with two friends, at 11:30 a.m. on December 21, 1941, when their car was hit by a train in East St. Louis. According to Big Joe Williams, who had been in the car with Peetie, but left to go home before the crash, they were all drunk. Less than a month before he died, Peetie's final recording session included "Bring Me Flowers While I'm Living" and "Hearse Man Blues"; shades of Leroy Carr's prophetic last session.
............................
This is all interesting, but as I mentioned, Ralph Ellison claimed no specific knowledge of the bluesman Peetie Wheatstraw. |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 123
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, September 16, 2005 - 12:14 am: |
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Hey, it doesn't really make sense that Peetie would be taking the blueprints to the dump. Maybe he was just carting them around, I really don't remember. Does anyone have a copy they could check? Muchas gracias. |
West_africa
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Username: West_africa
Post Number: 101
Registered: 08-2005
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 - 02:23 pm: |
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Is it valid to assert that many current popular writers are actually storytellers who have become classified as writers more as a consequence of developments in printing and information technologies (which have allowed them to make written records of their stories), rather than as a result of their having actually achieved significant mastery as writers ?
This implies the possibility that there is a difference between true literary composition and storytelling. What are the differences?
Possibly, then . . . Eric Jerome Dickey is a storyteller. Terry McMillan is a storyteller.
Who are the real writers of the current generation? What are the differences between "storytellers style" and "writer's craft" ?
What would be the cultural consequences of confusing storytelling and literary craft? |
Cynique
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Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2584
Registered: 01-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 18, 2005 - 02:12 pm: |
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Interesting question. One thing to consider is that every good writer is a good story teller, but every good story teller is not a good writer. What might also be noteworthy is whether a writer's body of work stands the test of time. Will it be as good "Tomorrow" as it is "Today." Determining that judgment is how you separate pop lit from classical literature. Also it has been said that there are only about 6 plot lines that can be utilized for a novel. So, basically, authors are just recylcing stories. That's when writing skills come into play. I agree that nowadays a lot of books are mechanically printed as opposed to being artistically written. |
West_africa
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Username: West_africa
Post Number: 134
Registered: 08-2005
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, October 20, 2005 - 03:36 pm: |
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Coming Soon --- Princeton University Press:
Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing
By: David Yaffe
January 2006 | $29.95 ( ISBN: 0-691-12357-8 )
240 pp.
Summary:
How have American writers written about jazz, and how has jazz influenced American literature? In Fascinating Rhythm, David Yaffe explores the relationship and interplay between jazz and literature, looking at jazz musicians and the themes literature has garnered from them by appropriating the style, tones, and innovations of jazz, and demonstrating that the poetics of jazz has both been assimilated into, and deeply affected, the development of twentieth-century American literature.
Yaffe explores how Jewish novelists such as Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, and Philip Roth engaged issues of racial, ethnic, and American authenticity by way of jazz; how Ralph Ellison's descriptions of Louis Armstrong led to a "neoconservative" movement in contemporary jazz; how poets such as Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, and Frank O'Hara were variously inspired by the music; and how memoirs by Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis both reinforced and redeemed the red light origins of jazz. The book confronts the current jazz discourse and shows how poets and novelists can be placed in it--often with problematic results. Fascinating Rhythm stops to listen for the music, demonstrating how jazz continues to speak for the American writer.
David Yaffe's writings have appeared in many publications, including the New Republic, The Nation, the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Village Voice, Slate, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University.
Endorsements:
"David Yaffe's Fascinating Rhythm is a marvelously evocative celebration of the interrelationships between modern American writing and jazz, which is in itself the outstanding American contribution to the arts, at least since Walt Whitman. I find particularly poignant the understanding that Ralph Ellison's true sequel to his Invisible Man was his poetics of jazz."---------------Harold Bloom
"This is a fascinating and formidable response to Ralph Ellison's famous call for a 'jazz-shaped' reading of American literature. Yaffe's bold and often brilliant treatments of black-Jewish relations in twentieth-century U.S. culture, Ellison's own seminal works, poetry and jazz influences, and the autobiographies of Mingus, Holiday, and Miles Davis are major contributions to American and Afro-American studies."-------Cornel West, Princeton University
"Fascinating Rhythm is an extremely absorbing and compelling demonstration of the key part jazz played in the construction of literary modernism. The book demonstrates an unusually mature intellectual self-possession and great analytic insight into U.S. cultural history, particularly the area of race and music. Yaffe is on his way to becoming one of the most notable public and scholarly writers of his generation."---------Eric Lott, University of Virginia, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
"David Yaffe's Fascinating Rhythm does not simply fill a gaping vacuum in contemporary literary studies. It is likely to become the canonical text on jazz and literature, radically influencing all future writing on the subject. Each chapter is unique in its approach and sheds new light on books and poems we thought we knew."----------Krin Gabbard, State University of New York
"Written with a combination of vigor and shrewdness that is rare in jazz studies, Fascinating Rhythm possesses a clarity of argument that is both inviting and provocative. Yaffe captures the flavor of the jazz musicians and writers he covers--something of the elegance of Ralph Ellison, the saltiness of Miles Davis, and the bristle and energy of Charles Mingus."---------Scott Saul, University of California, Berkeley
"Yaffe is one of the best informed--probably the best--of the younger scholars working in the relationship of jazz and the arts. His writing is clear, his descriptions evocative, and his comments judicious and shrewd. This is a book that should be read by serious students of America's arts, including the jazz scholars, and those in literature, American history, and American studies."-----------John Szwed, Yale University
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Steve_s
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Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 146
Registered: 04-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, October 20, 2005 - 04:19 pm: |
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Thanks for the info, I'll look for it when it's published.
Stanley Crouch, in his latest book, mentions a "forthcoming book" by David Yaffe which must be this one. That's in Crouch's very favorable review of what sounds like a similar book, "Jazz Modernism" by Alfred Appel Jr.
Some books with related themes:
"Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America" by Horace Porter, which explains the jazz influence in Ralph Ellison's art (and one of the first literary analyses of Ellison's "Juneteenth.")
"The Jazz Cadence of American Culture," edited by Robert O'Meally, a 665-page anthology about the influence of the jazz art form on the world. I believe there's a second volume called "Uptown Conversation."
I own these books but so far have only read selectively from them.
PS Albert Murray's new novel "The Magic Keys" is a fictionalized account of his early years in NYC -- his friendship exchange of ideas about art, music, and literature with characters representing Ralph Ellison, Romare Bearden, Duke Ellington, et al. It's a beautiful book.
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Cynique
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Post Number: 2846
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, October 21, 2005 - 01:32 pm: |
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Hey Steve. I continue to be increasingly fascinated as I learn more about the "influence of the jazz cadence on American culture." Are you familiar with Lambert, Hendrix and Ross, a trio who became famous by putting jazz solos into words and singing them exactly as they were played by the artist? Then there was "Moody's mood for love" the vocalized version of James Moody's "I'm in the mood for love" saxophone solo as sung orginally by King Pleasure. Of course these are examples of collaborations between jazz and prose, as opposed to Ralph Ellison and others who rhythmized their writing. Anyway. I find this all very ZEN because it's about how the placement of spaces and pauses makes what is heard or read have more of an impact. (I've always thought the styles of Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis were also very Zen because of their impeccable timing.) Of course rappers and spoken word artists are certainly articulating freestyle jazz. But I'm curious. Does the book you mentioned say where else the jazz cadence has influenced American culture? |
Steve_s
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Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 147
Registered: 04-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, October 21, 2005 - 03:24 pm: |
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Cynique, The easiest way to answer your question is to post the table of contents for O'Meally's anthology - which actually contains about 100 pages more than this ad states - which I'm guessing is a textbookfor the Columbia University jazz studies program, of which I believ he's the head:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023110/0231104480.HTM
John Kouwenhoven and Constance Rourke (who's not included in the anthology) were a few of the many individuals whose theories of American culture interested Ellison. The Ann Douglas excerpt is deep, it's from her book "Terrible Honesty," which the library here has. I haven't read this stuff yet.
When I was a kid, Yolande Bavan (who wore a sari!) had already replaced Annie Ross, but yeah, I wore some of those records out so I knew the "words" to Snooky Young's solo, for example, on Count Basie's "April in Paris." |
Cynique
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Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2849
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, October 21, 2005 - 07:00 pm: |
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Thanks, Steve! |
Libralind2
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Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 233
Registered: 09-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, October 23, 2005 - 11:24 am: |
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Hi Steve: Im about to read The Invisible Man and would love to discuss it with you as I read. I'll start today.
LiLi |
Steve_s
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Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 149
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, October 23, 2005 - 12:10 pm: |
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Hi Lili, Hey, thanks very much for your post about "Joplin's Ghost" on the other thread. You've got me interested!
I'd love to hear your thoughts/insights or anything you want to share about your reading of "Invisible Man." Enjoy!
Steve
PS Waiting on Hurricane Wilma at the moment. Looks like we're directly in its path just before it enters the Atlantic so it should not be too bad (although the power could go out). |
Libralind2
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Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 251
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, October 26, 2005 - 06:56 pm: |
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Hi Steven: I think the way I want to discuss this is to talk about what Im feeling as I read. So far Im just in the prologue and I am so feeling his descriptin of "feeling or being" invisible. I suggest this was typical inthe era Ellison grew up in. I also suggest it still exsists today just more subtle so if one comments on it, that person is made to feel stupid because the offender of course wont admit they were conscience of ignoring such person. Example I experienced. I was at the meat store. The clerk was busy with back turned to the customers. The white person who walked up AFTER me kewn I was there first. So when the clerk turned around, it was as if I wasnt there. She never asked "who is next"? She asked the white person what they wanted and they responded. Now the first time this happened. I was unsure what to do. You might say, "Oh I would have....(whatever), but I let it go. But the next time that shyet happened, I was like " EXCUSE ME BUT I WAS HERE FIRST". Everyone looked like I just pissed on the floor. I was waited on. LOL Ok back to the book
LiLi |
Steve_s
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Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 152
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, October 26, 2005 - 09:43 pm: |
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Hi LiLi, You mean mostly psychological and subliminal rather than physical discrimination? Being ignored, given the cold shoulder, not taken seriously, etc. That can take its toll. A while back, Cynique was talking about covert and overt racism, but still, those are both conscious forms of racism, however, I think a lot of it is internalized through socialization.
I notice that in the second paragraph the narrator says "It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often wearing on the nerves."
I don't know if you've read James McBride's novel, "The Miracle of St. Anna('s)," but anyway, the character named "Big Train," who's one of the soldiers in the black infantry division, is protected (or so he believes) by his invisibility (he uses the term) when his unit comes under attack. It's like he's in a zone or something. I've read that boy soldiers in African war zones often feel invulnerable, which is probably just out of ignorance though, or maybe drug-induced psychosis.
Anyway, James McBride once said in an interview that to him, "Invisible Man," describes what it's like to be black the same way that John Coltrane "nails" rhythm changes in his solo on "Good Bait." I should explain that Good Bait is a jazz tune composed by Tad Dameron and based on the chord changes to Gershwin's I've Got Rhythm (probably the 2nd most common jazz form after the blues) which Coltrane recorded in the 1950s. It's such a stunning solo and contains more ideas per bar that it's almost like there's nothing more to be said. So I can understand the analogy at least.
I just noticed the two epigraphs at the beginning from Melville's Benito Cereno and TS Eliot's Family Reunion. I think I understand what he's saying with Benito Cereno, but I'm not familiar with Family Reunion. Maybe I should read it. LOL!
steve |
Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 252
Registered: 09-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, October 27, 2005 - 10:20 pm: |
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Steve writes: Hi LiLi, You mean mostly psychological and subliminal rather than physical discrimination? Being ignored, given the cold shoulder, not taken seriously, etc. That can take its toll. A while back, Cynique was talking about covert and overt racism, but still, those are both conscious forms of racism, however, I think a lot of it is internalized through socialization.
LiLi: exactly.
Steve writes: I notice that in the second paragraph the narrator says "It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often wearing on the nerves."
LiLi: Powerful
Steve writes:Anyway, James McBride once said in an interview that to him, "Invisible Man," describes what it's like to be black the same way that John Coltrane "nails" rhythm changes in his solo on "Good Bait." I should explain that Good Bait is a jazz tune composed by Tad Dameron and based on the chord changes to Gershwin's I've Got Rhythm (probably the 2nd most common jazz form after the blues) which Coltrane recorded in the 1950s. It's such a stunning solo and contains more ideas per bar that it's almost like there's nothing more to be said. So I can understand the analogy at least.
LiLi: I love Gershwin
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Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 153
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, October 28, 2005 - 10:40 am: |
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Hi LiLi, I was just thinking about the prologue while reading an African novel which I finished last night, so I'll try to explain.
In the prologue, the Invisible Man is living in the basement of an apartment building in which whites live upstairs, and it's located in a "border" area (symbolic of crossroads and the color line) on the edge of Harlem. There's the red white and blue imagery of the vanilla ice cream, sloe gin poured over it, and the "blues" on the phonograph played by Louis Armstrong, "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?"
Here's the coincidence. Just yesterday I finished "The Stone Virgins," by Yvonne Vera, the beautiful Zimbabwean author who sadly passed away earlier this year at the tragically young age of 40. I may post something about it later.
The following lyrical passage is about 3 pages long and I can't post all of it, but see if you agree with my feeling that it may reflect the influence of Ralph Ellison's novel:
In a secluded bar, black men recite all they can remember about that time when Satchmo was suddenly in their midst, taking their song, their song, "Skokiaan," from their mouths and letting it course through his veins like blood, their blood. The wonder of it. The enduring wonder of it. The love of it. The Bulawayo men play it again in their half-lit bars, wondering if their memory is true, if indeed they have touched the arm and sleeve of that glorious man, that Satchmo. That basement. A dark dank room in one of the finest hotels on Selborne Avenue, a storage place for empty beer bottles and crates of disused cutlery, where only the black workers descend; they note the amusement and let it be, from midnight till dawn.
Dream begets dream. Smoke burns on an evening and buries talk and blinds the view. The drinking glasses passing from hand to hand are improvised from brown Castle beer bottles cut in the middle. Drinks spill over the tray and splash between the lowest chairs and the highest chairs and among the blossoming yellow shadows cast by the kerosene lamps pegged to the walls, where they hang, swing, hang. Nothing is permanent, neither anger nor caress, just swinging . . . . .
The band has been playing softly on the raised platform in a corner of the room. The bandleader sits back in his pale blue shirt and his navy blue trousers and his sky blue tie, and in his deep blue voice says, "Did you say Louis . . . Louis Armstrong? . . . " He rises. He plays a trumpet. Plays his "Skokiaan" with Louis before his eyes, as far as he can imagine to the left, under that dimming lamp and the smell of kerosene light. And everyone agrees that yes, he played with Louis; there is no doubt about that. He is Satchmo -- so what, can he play upstairs in the President's Room? The country is landlocked, bursting. The war is in their midst. The Umtali-Beira railway line has been bombed. He sure cannot play upstairs, but it is clear he is trying to get that train where it is heading; he is crossing that line, and his trumpet is glittering in the faint light, his eyes squeezed blind.
They want him to be heard above ground -- somewhere. This is the day they are all waiting for. Not for Satchmo to come, and go, and play their "Skokiaan," leaving them breathless and blue, but for this man to carry their own desires above ground -- somewhere. Not to cover their sorrow with their hats, like that, their trumpet covered with a hat, like that. To be honest, there is nothing they actually wish to enjoy up there, not all that velvet on the chairs, all that ribbon on the curtain, and all that frill on all that curtain . . . They have no wish to acquire that. All they want is to come and go as they please. At independence, they just want to go in there, and leave, as they please, not to sneak or peep, but to come, and go, as they please. They would stay gone if they could establish this one condition, to come and go, as they please. Satchmo.
The above excerpt represents the author's Zimbabwean city (then called Rhodesia) of Bulawayo just before independence, or about 1979.
It's probably a reference to Louis Armstrong's 1960 tour of Africa in which the band played in Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Rhodesia, and Nyasaland (Malawi). That tour and many other State Dept-sponsored jazz tours during the Cold War are documented in an excellent book I read earlier this year, "Satchmo Blows Up The World" by Penny M. Von Eschen. For anyone who's interested, this is not a frivolous book, it explores the cultural politics of the music, the musicians' vs. the government's agenda, etc.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/VONSAT.html |
Libralind2
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Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 253
Registered: 09-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, October 28, 2005 - 04:39 pm: |
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I tell you what, it broght tears to my eyes. Thanks for sharing.
LiLi |
Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 267
Registered: 09-2004
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, November 10, 2005 - 09:06 am: |
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Hey Steve check this out:
From Time Magazine Nov 14.2005
People like me — the descendants of immigrants, whether Arab, black or Asian — are turning to our roots and embracing our heritage, just the opposite of what our parents did when they arrived. My grandparents, for example, who came to France from Algeria to live, work and build a better life, accepted the role of guest. They did all they could not just to fit in, but to become invisible. Calling attention to themselves usually meant trouble — endless ID and visa checks from police, racist remarks and insults — so they avoided that. They tried as much as possible to integrate, and in doing so shut away their customs, language and heritage.
I certainly don't belittle their choice. But people of my generation are not shy about embracing their heritage, and far from seeking invisibility we're standing up to denounce the prejudice and injustice we face. In my case, Islam is an enormous part of who I am, just as being French is. The two aren't in opposition, or even mutually exclusive. Yet when you hear the debate in France today, you'd swear they must be.
The people who live in projects like those where last week's riots raged are treated as second-class citizens. We have less access to the rights and services of the republic — schools are run down; job opportunities are remote. What we do have is a supermarket, a mall for low-cost shops, a few fast-food joints and maybe a movie complex. That's it. The idea is to create just enough diversion so we stay where we are. The message is: Don't come in to mix with the people in the city centers. That's what the police tell you when they stop you on a bus coming into town: "You have no business in the center? Then you have no reason to be there. Go back where you belong."
Before Sept. 11, I would have said this was a kind of residual racism. The problems people had with us were due to our ethnicity, our skin color. Today, with many young people returning to religion as they start searching for their own identities, faith is becoming the difference that's most often pointed out. I'm not just a black guy or an Arab anymore; I'm a Muslim. And that's a code word for alien, someone who's determined not to fit in.
But I was born and raised in France. I've been a citizen since birth. How much more "French" can I be? And there are many more people like me, not just Muslims but blacks, Asians and South Asians. It's time for the French to reject these outdated labels. And it's time for minorities to reject the cult of victimization, too. Things aren't perfect. There are a lot of problems. Those problems exploded last week, unleashing the long-held resentment of people who feel unwanted, scorned and swept into the margins like so much trash. To change that, the gap between the banlieue and the rest of France must be bridged. We need to make peace with the things that make us different. I'm French, I'm Muslim, and there are millions like me. We live here, and we're not going anywhere. So let's start getting used to it.
Médine, 22, is a Muslim rapper from Le Havre. His latest record is Jihad: The Greatest Struggle Is Within Yourself
LiLi |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 179
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 15, 2005 - 05:16 pm: |
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LiLi, I missed your post cause I've been mostly reading on my own. Yeah, it's a real drag what's happening there and I hope the government takes it as a wake up call and makes some meaningful changes. Anyway, most of the Algerian musicians that I know (not personally), like Khaled and Cheb Mami have long been resident in Paris. |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 180
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 - 12:00 am: |
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LiLi,
Today's NY Times contains Margo Jefferson's piece about Zora Neale Hurston and Constance Rourke. Rourke's interpretation of the American hybrid identity which was so influential to Ralph Ellison and others is contained in the book described here, "American Humor." I didn't even know it was in print, so I'm interested.
PS The links to these NY Times feature articles tend to expire after a few weeks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/books/16jeff.html |
Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 272
Registered: 09-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 - 06:29 pm: |
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Thanks Steve. I am going to have to put Invisible down due to work related issues and a bad cold. Dont feel like reading anything this heavy. Im off to check out this article.
LiLi |
Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 273
Registered: 09-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 - 06:35 pm: |
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Steve, Great article ..Thanks
LiLi |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 181
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2005 - 08:39 pm: |
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LiLi, Check out this article by the same author from a few months ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/books/27jeff.html?ex=1132290000&en=dd54c37caed 78fe9&ei=5070&fta=y |
Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 280
Registered: 09-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, November 17, 2005 - 11:27 pm: |
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Now I have more books to add to my ever growing TBR pile..thanks Steve, yet another great article. She made me want to go to the library tonight..LOL
LiLi |
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