CRY ME A RIVER

 

Maybe we are all flat-headed fish trying to swim upstream into the future. It's the racism that keeps us wet - it's the water we cannot see.

We now live in a world without facts. It's obvious if you're following the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Trump. Voters claim they don't trust either candidate. But the issue here is not trust - it's gravity. Gravity is what's suppose to hold us down like facts. That's no longer

the case. It's what makes the average pundit too often a fish without water. What planet is this?  I listen to Trump and every speech he makes is an introduction into an alternative reality. One can only conclude that red and blue states have become parallel  worlds - or as Amiri Baraka once said - "one man's fast is another man's slow." A lie is a truth that has dirt under its fingernails. Immediately after the first debate in late September both candidates will claim they won. You can turn the television off now before watching - because nothing makes sense anymore.

We're dead when we think we're living. Seeing is no longer believing - it's only what the camera on our cell phones captures that matters.

 Smile- this is a stick-up you MF! Give me your money and your country. Yeah - that's a puddle you're standing in not a river.

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Lord

Listening to the album - Coltrane for Lovers.  A nice way to begin Friday and the last days of August.
Too often love is a farewell.  How often do we embrace loss?
So much seems to be ending. It feels like my departure is just around the corner. When will I wake and find my bags packed? Yes, leaving is surrender. A white flag around my life - suffocating me for too long and almost forever.

Those Last Days of August

David Fenza was my guest ON THE MARGIN this morning.  We talked about the running of AWP, creative writing programs and the culture wars. I'll air the program again when it gets closer to the AWP Annual Conference in February 2017. To access the show go to: www.wpfwfm.org

Access archived programs and then scroll down to ON THE MARGIN,  Thursday 25th at 9am.

Next week my guests will be writers Rose Solari and Rick Peabody.

I'll return to doing The Scholars (UDC-TV) on October 4th.

The next book I plan to review for the New York Journal of Books (NYJB) is Clarence Major's CHICAGO HEAT AND OTHER STORIES.

Annie Kim

Nice to receive an email from poet Annie Kim this morning. Here is a link to her website.

https://www.usi.edu/sir/sir-press-authors/annie-kim

E-News

Today I return to teaching my online memoir class (Mining The Mine for Memories) for the University of Houston Victoria.  Last year it went very well. It was my introduction to using Blackboard. A good opportunity to enhance my teaching skills and provide myself with a nice focus for 8 weeks.


I completed and submitted my review of The Strivers'Row Spy by Jason Overstreet to the NY Journal of Books. The next book I requested to review is Chicago Heat and other stories by Clarence Major.
My goal is to review a book a month.


I'll spend the day doing some correspondence and reading. Currently I'm reading Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond edited by Evelyn Louis Crawford and Marylouise Patterson. The letters are filled with some funny stories about Zora.
Nothing has changed in terms of how writers behave.


Yesterday, Bernard Richardson, dean of the HU chapel came by the house. I gave him a poster of Howard Thurman.


I'm still in the early stages of downsizing.

DICEE

Yesterday I found the folder that contained the early information about the District of Columbia Interracial Coalition for Environmental Equity (DICEE). This is the organization I started back around 1990 with Neil Seldman the president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.


I plan to place this information in my archives at the Gelman Library, George Washington University. It provides excellent documentation of how people of color were always concerned with the environment. The environmental movement is too often viewed as a white movement.

Windows & Mirrors

Below are remarks I made at the DC Jewish Community Center (DCJCC) on May 21, 2006. The event that evening was a bringing together of African American and Jewish musicians. "Windows and Mirrors'' was a popular cultural series I helped start with Miriam Nathan and Ken Sherman. Today there is still more work to do.






Several years ago I met Miriam Nathan and Ken Sherman, who at that time worked for the DC Jewish Community Center. Windows & Mirrors was simply an outgrowth of our friendship.
Whenever we came together there was always a lot of laughter and what the poet Lucille Clifton calls "good times."


Too often we look around our world and we wish we could find the good times; they seem too often to evade the headlines of our newspapers. As a poet I keep struggling to write love poems, to embrace a vision that will guarantee a better tomorrow.


Windows & Mirrors is simply built around the idea that one looks into a mirror and celebrates one's own identity; one turns from the mirror and then looks out the window. Outside is the world. Outside is one's neighbors.


African Americans and Jewish Americans share traditions as well as social and political interests. In the past Windows & Mirrors has looked at everything from sports to humor to music.


Culture is like lace, it gives a human being a style of grace. But it's not simply decorative, in fact it defines who we are. At times culture is that bridge which connects people. We walk across and dance across the bridge, suspended in our awe of one another.


If we were to stop for just one moment, maybe we would hear music and we would realize that life is one note. One note we can all hear, if only we listen to our hearts, or maybe just the musicians who on this evening will remind us how to love. Their new sounds nothing but a tapestry of beauty.


E. Ethelbert Miller