Month: July 2020

Why David Palumbo-Liu is Wrong about THE LETTER

I once had some respect for David Palumbo-Liu.  Sure, we mixed it up at Facebook, but I never doubted his intelligence or his good intentions.  Now I have to question both because he’s written a response to THE LETTER that is stupid and malicious.  It’s pasted below. DP-L makes three moves.  Each carries equally ugly doses of malice and stupidity which are in turn amplified by his own pedantry.  First he says the signatories are “celebrities thoughtlessly piling on to sign a ridiculous, ill-conceived, attention-getting ‘Open Letter.’”  Thoughtless, ridiculous, ill-conceived, attention-getting.  Oh, and, like dumb jocks in pads and helmets, they’re “piling on.”  They’re not people on the other side of an intellectual divide, they’re brutes.  I went through the signatories, and didn’t recognize half the names. These are celebrities?   More to the point, they’re quite diverse by any measure, race and gender to be sure but also by their political positions. Second,  DP-L claims that the letter has no cause–there are no “real events” here, he announces, no “solid facts” that would allow for genuinely open debate on the cultural crisis the signatories cite as their motive in writing.  He says this immediately after quoting an entire paragraph of worrisome incidents that any reader of Harper’s–any sentient being who doesn’t rely on FOX News–would recognize, and might well have endured. Third, most maliciously and most stupidly, DP-L turns...

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the letters always poet

I read lynk bella hues’s poems on Facebook in the aftermath of the “Harper’s Letter” and wanted to feature them (even though, or precisely because, some of our editorial staff were signatories). –James Livingston lynk bella hues is a differently abled anti-racist queer labor feminist who lives in Newark, New Jersey. They explore mad intersectionality within a liberatory marxist poetry framework, itself a product of their experiences and studies to know self, words, and the unequally structured world, past to present, toward understanding and changing it. An unemployed worker because of their serious psychiatric disability, hues shares literary and reportage work on their blog, the matrix and the mess, which is located at...

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Throwing Your Voice

I’ve felt the urge to play out recently, well, duh, precisely because I can’t.  I was trying to get into an online/virtual open mic up the street, at Lenox Coffee on 129th, but it kept postponing a reopening, so I complained to my brother Andy about it, and, in view of our recent cover of John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” we decided I should convene an open mic via Zoom.  I invited him and an old friend of his, Johnny Omand; two old academic friends of mine who happen to be wonderful musicians, Charlie McGovern of William & Mary, Barry Shank of Ohio State; and two new friends from Facebook–never met ‘em in person–Anne Moriarty and Kerry Candaele. Three weeks ago we met for the first time, minus Kerry, but plus Shari Shank, who sings like an angel, and a good time was had by all.  A week ago, we met again with a depleted crew, but with the addition of Billy Knoblauch, of Finlandia University, another wonderful musician I know via academe.  The revelation of the evening was Charlie’s performance of “Everything is Free” by the Holmes Brothers–not just the excellent guitar, we’re all used to that, but the voice.  I had never heard him sing before, and I was just knocked out.  I wrote excitedly to my brother, saying “Wow, Charlie can sing!” Andy responded by saying...

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Showerman Gets the Blues

Fans of Showerman** know what he knows, that cleanliness is next to Godliness, and not as if He’s your next-door neighbor to be called upon when a shortage of flour is discovered mid-recipe, while cooking, nor when a shortage of intelligence is discovered mid-life, while listening to NPR as you run out of flour, no, cleanliness is, for Showerman, just about every goddamn thing, from Alpha to Omega 3, and all the good fats in between, some of which, he is told, can be squeezed from fish, cooked or cured. Now, Showerman believes in the blues as the place where the pentatonic scale, the root of African and Celtic music, met on the desolate soulscape of the American South, Faulkner’s home field, where enslaved Africans and Scots-Irish immigrants congregated and found common aural ground, inventing a music that, in time, became the soundtrack of liberation. But Showerman does not believe in the blues up his ass, which is what he recently discovered upon entering the temple, which, as fans, or, if you will, disciples, will know, is the bathroom, where the tools of cleanliness, personal hygiene as it is called in this narrow space, are stored, and where, most importantly, the ritual of the shower is performed. Showerman cannot describe this ritual in detail (see: Showerman, Season. 1, Episode 3), but he can explain how it was disrupted, detained,...

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Tear What Down?

Why not tear down the monuments of the slaveholders who made the American Revolution, viz., Washington, Jefferson, and Madison?  For me, a guy who teaches history for a living, the question boils down to this: what was that revolution about?  It’s a good question on this fateful eve of the 4th of July, when the republic created by the revolution is endangered by features–failures–of its own design. If Gerald Horne and his minions are right to answer that it was actually a counter-revolution meant to preserve slavery, or if their “progressive” antecedents** are right to answer that the American Thermidor came between 1787 and 1789, when conservative nationalists put the republican lid called the Constitution on the democratic radicalism of the 1760s, 70s, and 80s, why then there might be a point in celebrating independence–but in mourning what followed, and in taking bids on rebuilding the Mall. Except that bestride this “progressive” narrative we find the imposing figure of Thomas Jefferson, the slaveholder who lamented slavery as Charles Bukowski the alcoholic lamented alcohol, also the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, which claimed that “all men are created equal,” then again the man who wrote the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 and 1789, which barred slavery from territories north of the Ohio River and which in 1865 became the legal/rhetorical groundwork of the 13th Amendment–but a man who played...

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