December 2011
1 post
November 2011
2 posts
August 2010
1 post
June 2010
1 post
36 Days in Harlem
I had big plans to blog for my entire sojourn, but already too many nights out cavorting with friends and lazy days sleeping in with my companion have devoured my first week here with nary a post or pic. I will do better. Right now, I am writing about about Bill Gunn at the Schomburg with the paintings of Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas hanging overhead. Feels pretty good.
May 2010
2 posts
“I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I...”
– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon is wack when it comes to gender, but the essay “The Fact of Blackness” is brilliant. I wonder what Barack Obama would take from reading this text.
March 2010
3 posts
Academy Awards
…so best actress award goes to the good white mother (Sandra Bullock for The Blindside) and best supporting actress to the bad black mother (Mo’Nique for Precious). I’m glad I didn’t bother to watch tonight. Shit pisses me off just typing it.
Yay to Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker though.
February 2010
11 posts
I heart Guillermo E. Brown
Saw this cat in Brooklyn last week. Went on a recommendation of a good friend into the wilds of Williamsburg. Great show. I have pictures somewhere, I think.
The quest for precise language.
What exactly is up with the peeve-inducing trend of referring to “men” or “women” as “males” or “females”? I run across this practice in so much student writing. I guess it goes to prove how deeply we conflate sex and gender in our language.
Untitled
Sometimes I wonder what my experiences would be like if I had ever believed in God. If I had ever, even as a child, even for a moment, been filled with true belief in a higher power, how would that make my life different? I was not raised to be a believer in anything really, not God, not Santa, not the Democrats, not the Easter Bunny, not white people, not money. For better or for worse, I was...
1 tag
I am not very good at poetry...
…but I will be teaching Lucille Clifton today. She makes me want to be good at poetry.
1 tag
1 tag
“When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in...”
– bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman
January 2010
4 posts
December 2009
22 posts
“In lamer terms, globalization is all about making a connection between the...”
– A sentence used by a student on their take-home final. I believe she means: In layman’s terms, but maybe not.
Vinyl Fever closing its doors after more than 25...
I returned home to this news. Sad, but inevitable. It was one of the many record stores I used to spend afternoons in with my dad. Maybe the last one left. All the others have long since closed. We used to go to the location before it moved to W. Pensacola, back in the 80s when it used to be in the plaza across Tennessee Street from the old Varsity movie Theater. Daddy always had mad records...
Home(sick).
Tomorrow I will travel back to a number of people and places that I call home. Since I left those people and places I have felt deeply unmoored. Lost. Lonely. Afraid. Since I left those people and places I have had to settle into the sounds of my own mind rattling around in my skull creating the faint echoes of life and the insistent lurching of my own blood running through my veins. These sounds,...
“I Want to Die While You Love Me” by...
Eu Quero É Sorongar, Elza Soares
I first heard...
Good stuff.
My friend, who spent 41 days without human contact in a small cabin at the foothills of the Himalayas, told me today that amidst his hermetic days of meditation, reading, and making music, he often thought about the people he cherished most in his life. I was on his list of people, and notable, he said, because I would be the only person on the list who probably wouldn’t guess she’d be...
1 tag
I want to see the BLK JKS perform this live one...
So fresh, so clean
When I was a child, my grandmother always had a bar of this soap in the soap dish at her house. I spent all the summers of my childhood in that small house in South Carolina with my seven other cousins and my sister. Somehow, she kept all of our bright black minds occupied for three months every year. She kept us clean with this soap.
I saw Grandmother two weeks ago. She is so frail now, a...
“Terrible teacher, if you don’t write the way she does, or if she...”
– One of my ENC 1101 students wrote this about me on RateMyProfessor.com. Perhaps if she had paid any attention to my writing instruction, this post would at least be grammatically correct.
"In today's society"
Perhaps one of the most threadbare of all phrases to be found in all of college writing, only to be rivaled by “In society today…” Yes, I have been grading.
1 tag
Morning.
I had a long conversation with a good friend that lasted nearly until dawn. I thought that would help me rest. But I still woke up after about 3 hours of sleep. I haven’t slept a full night in several months. I really miss my friend.
"Those people"
Today, a woman of color, a student of mine, referred to African men and women as “those people” in a class presentation. I am not happy.
