"A Winter Prayer," Arthur Solway

Atlanta, Georgia (2011)

"A Winter Prayer"

Arthur Solway

Along the frail limbs of a tree, outlining rooftops,

a light accumulation changes to heavy rain.

Just as any life can suddenly change

the way people foolishly complain, drifting

toward decline, quiet dissipation.

Do you hear the fainthearted complaints

of snowmen while others simply bitch

about the slush? Send us some healing notes,

the gentle hush of any god willing to listen.

"A Winter Prayer" by Arthur Solway originally appeared online at Word of Mouth, Athens, GA.

Sketches from "MetaMaus," Art Spiegelman's book about the creation of "Maus"

MetaMaus is Art Spiegelman's new comprehensive book about the creation of Maus, A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History, the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning story of his father's experience in a Nazi prison camp. It's a great look-behind-the-scenes at the creation of Spiegelman's ground-breaking approach to visualizing non-fiction.

The book, which includes a DVD of the complete Maus hyper-linked with source materials, is structured around an extensive interview with Spiegelman.

In a 2011 interview with David D'Arcy at The Art Newspaper, Spiegelman revealed what he called his "ambivalence" about doing press junkets for this particular work -- in essence, interviews about the interview presented in the book:

“I feel it’s a bit absurd to be interviewed about an interview, but the book came out way better than expected, so I feel protective of it. I’m in my usual situation, which I think is called ambivalence. I know I have to do something with the press. I’m not going to J.D. Salinger this one out. On the other hand, I don’t relish being in a hall of mirrors, like MetaMetaMetaMaus.”

Here, from The Atlantic online, is a selection of Spiegelman's original sketches that eventually framed the story for Maus.

"The Freedom to Surf": SOPA and the ACLU's "Don't Filter Me" campaign

(The Google homepage on Wednesday, January 18, 2012)

The American Civil Liberties Union has seen an increase in the number of censorship issues in public schools that relate to websites and domains school boards find objectionable or controversial. In the digital age, websites are an increasingly important source of information for everyone, including school kids.

The ACLU'S Blog of Rights has posted "The Freedom to Surf: Protecting Internet Access in Public Schools." Lindsey Kee, ACLU of Tennessee, details the case that sparked the group's nationwide "Don't Filter Me" campaign in conjunction with Banned Books Week in 2012.

Websites are an increasingly targeted component of censorship battles around the nation. Kee makes clear in the post that censorship can take a passive role as well as an active form -- as when school districts block student access to online gay and lesbian groups while permitting sites for ex-gay ministries and therapies urging sexual conversions. Here is an excerpt:

... eighty percent of Tennessee public schools used filtering software that blocked sites categorized as "LGBT." While Tennessee law requires that schools use Internet filtering software, that law is meant to protect students from information that is obscene or harmful to minors — material that was already blocked by a different filter and was not part of the "LGBT" category.

The discriminatory censorship in this case not only hurt students by making it impossible to access important material about scholarships, research for school-related assignments, and Gay-Straight Alliance club information. Students also need to be able to access information about their legal rights or what to do if they're being harassed at school, especially given the high rate of bullying and suicides among gay teens.

On May 19, 2009 ACLU-TN and ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court against Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools and Knox County Schools on behalf of three students and Storts-Brinks, who was also the advisor of the school's GSA.

On June 3, Knox County Schools Superintendent Jim McIntyre released a statement saying that their filters were no longer blocking the LGBT category. This change went into effect in all Tennessee and Indiana schools that used the same software. ...

Unfortunately the problem of web censorship still takes place in other school systems. The American Civil Liberties Union's LGBT Project is asking public high school students throughout the U.S. to check out your high school's web filters and help us make sure you're not being blocked from information that you have a right to have. ...

The right to information is as important to a free-thinking and knowledgeable society as any freedom Americans cherish. With the proliferation of websites and information sources, the ACLU's "Don't Filter Me" campaign is a vital part of Banned Books Week in spreading the message that internet censorship is a growing part of the targeted and selective banning of ideas.

Cataloguing Ubu, and links to Gysin's audio works

Gysin with William S Burroughs and the Dreammachine, 1966

Brion Gysin -- artist, writer, multimedian -- once commented on his many projects that the art world thought of him as a writer, and the writers thought of him as an artist. "I should have been one or the other," he said in one interview, when he had taken on another mantle -- "the world's oldest living rock star," onstage in his eighties. The inventor of both the poetic cut-up technique and the Dreammachine (which was, briefly, considered for production by Phillips Electrontics back in the heady days of the 1960s) seems be getting some well-deserved attention at The New Museum and accompanying features at Kenneth Goldsmith's UbuWeb media resource.

Brion Gysin - An Audio Retrospective (1958-81) Recently honored by a exhibition at The New Museum in New York, UbuWeb presents the full scope of Brion Gysin's sound poetry and audio works. Included are his seminal permutation poems from the early 60s such as I've Come To Free The Words and I Am That I Am as well as lectures on various subjects such as Thoughts On Modern Art. The historic Poem of Poems (1958), recorded at the Beat Hotel in Paris and considered one of Gysin's important experiments in cut-up and recording technique, is available for download, as is his more ambient works such as The Pool K III (late 1950s, early '60s) and Bruits du Beaubourg (1977). Finally, a posthumous 1993 recording -- Self-Portrait Jumping -- of Gysin's songs, poems and stories, are set to music by Ramuntcho Matta and performed by Brion Gysin and Ramuntcho Matta with Don Cherry, Elli Medieros, Steve Lacy, and Lizzy Mercier Descloux. You can read interviews with Gysin here and here, as well as William S. Burroughs' The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin. And you can view a demonstration of Gysin Permutation Software here.

Cataloguing Ubu

In its pages, the site UbuWeb "posts much of its content without permission; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos."

Margaret Smith's valiant efforts to archive the sprawling UbuWeb are a continuing project. Smith undertakes the job as site archivist for her Masters in Library Science at Syracuse University; more can be read about her ongoing work, with an excerpt from the project overview below.

"UbuWeb is a collaboratively curated website which includes thousands of historic and contemporary avant-garde texts, sound recordings, moving images and related curatorial and analytic commentary. Founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, it has grown to be a vast educational resource, providing online access to an obscure yet vital aspect of the cultural record that would be, in many cases, otherwise lost.

The initial goals of this project were to propose improvements to UbuWeb’s navigation and content access, and to introduce a plan for archiving and preservation."

Martin Amis on aging: "It all works out"

T.S. Eliot may have called April the cruelest month, but those whose luck it is to celebrate a January birthday may sometimes consider this accident of birth just as cruel a fate. Cold winds blow, ice forms, and springtime zephyrs seem more distant in January than in hearth-and-warmhearted December, when civilization at least has the hope inherent in a holiday season.

Many of my friends have birthdays this month, and to them I offer the solace of the following observation by Martin Amis. His words have the bite of rye whiskey on a wind-swept evening, and I hope all my friends are able to find some reason to believe that all things, even January birthdays, do work out in the end. I raise my glass with the hope that you all find a personally warm and happy reason to celebrate another year.

As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods, you may want to put it rather more forcefully. As in: OY!! THAT went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!!...

Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.

And it all works out. Your hams get skinnier--but that's all right, because your gut gets fatter. Your eyes get hotter--but that's all right, because your hands get colder (and you can soothe them with your frozen fingertips). Shrill or sudden noises are getting painfully sharper--but that's all right, because you're getting deafer. The hair on your head gets thinner--but that's all right, because the hair in your nose and in your ears gets thicker. It all works out in the end.

To all of my friends born in cold January, a warm and happy birthday!

Dizzy Gillespie, "To Be, or Not ... to Bop" (1979): "Everybody knew it was good"

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I've been listening to a lot of Dizzy today for Martin Luther King's birthday. The Gabriel with the bent horn and horn-rimmed glasses who started a musical revolution with Charlie Parker was born in South Carolina, staking a case for the Carolina Piedmont as the birthplace of bop: the one-and-only Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount, NC eleven days earlier than Diz.

His own book, To Be or Not ... to Bop was published by Doubleday in 1979, a rollicking and roughhouse story of jazz at it was lived in the TOBA circuit: "Tough on Black Artists" was the name given to the management style that required three-to-five shows a day. John Birks Gillespie, with a growing reputation for eccentric dancing on the bandstand, became a stand-out. "Where's that dizzy cat?" the musicians (and fans) began to ask, and the nickname stuck.

The book is told in the self-effacing style of one who is present at the creation, and who enjoys the stories and camaraderie of life on the road, as well as off the record. There are also reminiscences by companions and players who shared stages with Gillespie, recalling the times with genuine fondness and not a little awe. Here's drummer Kenny Clarke, remembering the hot-house moments of the New York jazz scene as it developed in the 1940s and '50's around Diz and Charlie Parker:

"I used to follow Diz around to all the jam sessions and hear him blow against other trumpet players. He was young and he was blowing. Everybody was asking me, 'What is Dizzy playing?' I was just telling them to 'Listen....' We were with Teddy Hill's band together, Ella Fitzgerald, Claude Hopkins, so we've been barnstorming, early, you know.

I noticed something unique about Dizzy's playing, that's why I was hanging out with him. His approach to modern harmonies, but rhythms mostly. He could take care of all that harmony, but his rhythms interested me real profoundly, and I just had to find out about that gift he had hidden in him, the gift of rhythm. It wasn't only his trumpet playing, he was doing a lotta other things that some people didn't see, but I saw the rhythmic aspect of it. The way he played and the way he would hum time and things like that. I knew it was avant-garde, ahead of time, so I just fell in line with what was going on ....

The most important characteristic of this new style of playing was camaraderie, that was first because everybody, each musician, just loved the other one, just loved them so much they just exchanged ideas and would do everything together. That's one characteristic about it I liked very much. Another word for that isunity. That's right, and I think that era of jazz had more enemies than any phase of jazz.

It was sort of esoteric from the beginning. Only a few people understood what was going on. Everybody knew it was good, but they couldn't figure out what it was. And when somebody doesn't understand a thing, he has a tendency to dislike. But I mean the music has been so strong and was strong, and is strong now ...

Whew! Oh, yeah, we used to discuss it on the bandstand sometimes and write out little things. I would say, 'Hey, Diz, whaddayou think of this?', you know. I think when we left Teddy Hill, we definitely knew that was going to happen. We were pretty sure of it, and everybody worked toward the same goal. That's what made it happen."

(Photos of Dizzy Gillespie at a Washington, DC elementary school by Donna Wilcox, 1965. From the JazzWax website.)

"The bleakness of corroding despair": Martin Luther King, April 16, 1963

My dear fellow clergymen,

... You may well ask, "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing Thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration.

We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?" when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" men and "colored" when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title of "Mrs." when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. ...

Martin Luther King was born January 15, 1929. The "Letter From The Birmingham City Jail" was a response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama (Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter, Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop Holan B. Harmon, the Reverend George M. Murray. the Reverend Edward V. Ramage and the Reverend Earl Stallings) and handwritten by Martin Luther King on April 16, 1963. It was then slipped out of the jail, turned over to his assistants on the outside, typed, copied, and widely disseminated to various organizations and individuals as an "open letter" in order to generate public support for Dr. King and his civil rights activities.