Hemingway's Dinosaurs

Yes, I certainly understand what you're doing with this post, and part of me appreciates it - but I still think that a misunderstanding lies at the root of it.

In a sense, I wanted to see what would happen if we pushed the idea of accessibility to its logical – if ridiculous – extreme.

You seem to have this notion that accessible writing needs to be intrinsically tied to nonsensical content. There's nothing logical about equating readable prose with nonsequitors and childish observations - that's a bias you seem to be indulging in.

I guess I've spent a lot of time thinking about the subject of form vs substance - style vs content, if you will. As a(n aspiring) web developer, a key concept I've had to understand is the separation of style from content. It used to be that all websites were written in HTML, and so you'd use the same code to specify font size, background color and paragraph content.

Then in the late 90s a revolution swept through web design - using a new technique called CSS it became possible to create your entire page layout, down to font and color and everything, without mentioning your content. This meant that you could then swap different content in and out of different layouts, and it meant we could all become a lot more versatile in our development.

What does that have to do with this discussion?

I think of writing style as just that - a style. It's not an exact science, but it's possible to express the same thought in a verbose way or in a concise way - in paragraphs or in rhyming couplets. Your implicit bias here - that certain academic ideas can't be expressed in an accessible way - is wrong, in my opinion. If you are having a hard time expressing a complex idea in a simple way then honestly I think you just need to work at it - and yes, it's hard to write like hemingway.

But I think that's why a good teacher, for instance, is capable of teaching Derrida - they're able to take this dense idea and rephrase it and repackage it and finally present it in an intelligible way. That's why we go to class, isn't it? And of course it takes some effort on the part of the student - but it can be done, and personally I feel that it should be done that way a bit more often.

I dunno, what do you think?

The idea is that my choice for a perfect style is in direct conflict with others' senses of the perfect style.

But you're assuming that your perfect style holds true in all situations. I dunno, maybe for you it does - but for me and, I think, for most people it really varies. I enjoy news articles and blog entries that are written in a way that's easy for me to grasp when I look them over while drinking a cup of coffee at 730 in the morning. When I check my daily newsvine, that's the sort of thing I generally prefer to read.

On the other hand, I'm also a big fan of Finnegans Wake.

That doesn't mean that I always feel like reading Finnegans Wake, right? But anyway, this is just getting subjective so let me bring this back to the larger point in question:

What I am saying, though, is that the accessibility of any one idea can never be maximized to all audiences at once.

Well, I guess I can agree to that. The key here, though, is that in this exercise you're supposed to be making your writing accessible to a specific audience - the newsvine community.

If I want to be read and understood by the community at large, it would behoove me not to write in the style of Finnegans Wake, right? It's not a betrayal of my aesthetic principles to say "Alright, here, let me explain this idea simply." It's a pragmatic solution to a specific problem ("How do I communicate to a specific audience?")

Similarly, my understanding of this project is that your assignment is to write responses to what you're studying geared towards an audience of newsvine readers. I guess you can dismiss that and say "Well, they don't understand my writing style."

But to do that is to sort of...I dunno, miss the point? If A) your assignment is to be accessible to this audience, and B) this audience doesn't understand your writing style, what's the next step?

LMAO

LMAO

I was too.

;)

I love Def Poetry...I wish I had HBO...

Mm, I guess my immediate reaction is that he's packing a whole of context and subtext into that. If you're not familiar with the black experience in north america from 1700-2008 then you probably don't get it, right?

In this way, his "style" is somewhat elitist - in order to understand him, you have to have some understanding of the social context he's speaking in. However, given his audience this barrier to access evaporates and becomes instead a sort of common ground - everyone listening to him is familiar with the black experience he's referring to. In fact, instead of a barrier it becomes a unifying force that lets everyone get behind him.

Now, looking at it another way: he's taking some complex racial sentiments and explaining them in very simple language. The poem would never pass for an academic treatise, but part of me is asking why not - he's dealing with issues of social injustice, poverty, health care, nutrition and all this other stuff that's there if you look for it. He's just couching it in his own sort of jargon, right? His jargon, however, uses short words and is therefore less intimidating to the outsider, sort of?

I dunno. That's certainly a great thing to throw into this thread, Maurice, it lets me think about all this stuff from different directions.

you're not familiar with the black experience in north america from 1700-2008 then you probably don't get it, right?

Honestly, anyone who is not in a marginialized group won't get it. And I don't think everyone has to or is suppose to. It isn't meant for everyone, as was stated. Elitist? I would have to say very far from that. Any uneducated or educated African American (or African or Mexican or Native American or any colonized brown person) will completely relate.

given his audience this barrier to access evaporates and becomes instead a sort of common ground - everyone listening to him is familiar with the black experience he's referring to. In fact, instead of a barrier it becomes a unifying force that lets everyone get behind him.

I complete agree. It is a unifying force. That is what so much of African American culture is all about. From spirituals to just about everything during the Harlem Renaissance to Hip Hop (a good deal of it anyway). The jargon or short sentences or poetry and bodily expression (his aggressive posture and throwing down his hat) is a part of Black American artistic culture. Its not about being less intimidating to the outsider. This was made for the INSIDER.
Conquergood writes "Oppressed people everywhere must watch their backs, cover their tracks, suck up their feelings and veil their meanings. The state of emergency under which many people live demands that we pay attention to messages that are coded and encrypted; to indirect, nonverbal, and extralinguistic modes of communication where subversive meanings and utopian yearnings can be sheltered and shielded from surveillance ...Aware if the white man's drive to objectify, control and grasp as a way of knowing, subordinate people cunningly set a text, a decoy, outside the door to lure him away from 'homeplace' where subjugated but empowering truths and survival secrets are sheltered ...knowing so little about us he doesn't know what he is missing".

As DuBois said in1969 "…this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One over feels his twoness –an American, a [Black], two souls, two souls, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder"
Marginalized groups dont always want to think about or consider the outsiders. His poem is an insiders way of relating to and communicating with insiders. Anyone can attempt to come in, but there is no way of completely "getting" the jargon.

Honestly, anyone who is not in a marginialized group won't get it.

I want to push you on this. I am most definitely not part of most traditionally defined marginalized groups. I'm a rich white educated male (to just start the list). Yet I think that I "got" it on at least a few levels.

Is your comment one about group membership, personal experience, or what?

I think there is a difference in someone watching this performance and saying, "this man is talking about the history of being in a marginalized group and all of the downfalls that accompanying that subordinate status" and then someone completely holistically understanding, reflecting, associating, remembering experiences of their own, and hearing experiences of "apologizing". It's the "coded and encrypted… indirect, nonverbal, and extralinguistic modes of communication" that can't be wholly understood by an "outsider" in order to unpack a performance like Oscar's. For example, in class we watched "" The Couple in the Cage". I would say that there is a strong possibility that most people in the room believed and stated that this was a performance critiquing or a commentary on colonization and imperialism…and stopped there. Maybe some found it disturbing that people were paying to see these "indigenous people" in a cage, taking pictures of them, laughing, and watching them being fed by the museum curator/zoo keeper. But what I thought about was (like I said in class) Sarah Baartman and how this was ACTUALLY HER LIFE. And how time and time again I'm in classrooms where I am the only (or one of few) person of color and I bring out issues of racism and white people say "well that was a product of its time and was surely horrible…sorry your people HAD to endure stuff" but as the video showed, THIS STUFF IS STILL POSSIBLE. People will still pay to see Sarah Baartman (or her ancestors or other brown people), taken from her homeland, made to dance naked on a stage for some change. It was Sarah who "apologized" for being Black/female/"primitive"/different/ deviant/Not white. It was the men and women in the lynching photographs who "apologized" for (as Oscar says) "spoiling your righteous fun" because many blacks were gaining economic control and whites felt the need to put a stop to it. What outsiders don't "get" is what it means, feels like, sounds like, looks like to apologize for entering a white supremacist power structure that has always defined you as needing to be forgiven for being born inferior/savage/monkey/darkie/@!$%#. To apologize for pseudo scientific conclusions of environmental determinism/ polygenesis/eugenics/being "the son of Ham"/ being PLACED at the bottom of "the Bell Curve". To believe that Oscar's performance is simply about group membership or personal experience is too simplistic and I don't think I can make such a complex expression easy to digest.

Melissa,

I am hearing you loud and clear. Not only will I never truly know what it means to be a person of color in the same contexts as others have, but I don't want to even pretend to think that I can try.

However, I would like to entertain the possibility of knowing something (parallel, similar, is there a better word?) of the experience of a person of color. Obviously one characteristic of my color privilege is that I can "turn it off" and not worry about it sometimes, but I think that I have intentionally put myself in positions to have to consider it, as well.

I have been a community organizer around white anti-racism and people of color issues since early in college. I put myself in offices where I am the only male and the only white male. I have help organize in people of color communities in Kansas City and Southern California.

When I hear the line "will never know" I am always intrigued: is there a way for us to ever cross those disconnected lines? Is there a way for me, despite my tremendous differences, to recognize and feel similar feelings of outrage at racism?

Put another way, (borrowing from a prominent white theorizing about POC issues, even), if I acknowledge my privilege, seek to disinvest certain aspects of my possessive investment in whiteness (going a step further, even try to become a "reverse oreo" as Noel Ignatiev would say), and crash the white club, will I still never 'understand' what someone like OBJr is speaking about?

I think at the most you will understand how it feels to be a lower class white citizen…maybe. But I'm going to take a different route. Your story makes me think of a many books. I would suggest you read "Black Image in the White Mind" by George Fredrickson, "Black Power in the Belly of the Beast" by (OSU's own) Judson Jefferies, "Black Power" by Kwame Ture and "In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson. Ture talks about the repercussions of coalitions with people who are not of color and all the downfalls that occur(s). But what really came to mind is Carson and the many whites that came down to Mississippi to create freedom school and encourage Blacks to register to vote in the 60's. What happened was when middle/upper class whites spent their summer vacation to help the poor Negroes? They were more interested in making one race… the human race by trying to "raise" them up to (ultimately) white middle class standards. Although many would say their hearts were in the right place, what their actions said was "we are better than you, let us help you be like us. Also, let's negate your past and all that makes you, you and come join us in the normal human race. All you have to do is go to school and vote and everything will be fine." What was even more interesting, outside of many white peoples' paternalistic efforts was when SNCC suggested that the white volunteers stop trying to change black people, and instead go to their OWN communities and change the racist and moderate/ambivalent minds of their white family members, neighbors, and professors. What did they do? Figured out new ways created new organizations to help the poor Negroes. Why do I say this? Because white people tend to view the world as if every culture, people, ethnic group, class, gender performance that doesn't look like what their parents told them to be "right" needs to be fixed, something is wrong with it, and children grew up and decided to spend their off time from school, work, golf etc to help "fix" the world and pride themselves on it. Why would you need to "organize in people of color communities" when there are plenty of white communities filled with white people with power (maybe you know a few of them) that need to be organized so that our society can change? Especially when many of those communities HAVE leaders but someone (usually racist or moderate/ambivalent political figures) won't listen. Won't change, won't help until someone white comes along and says they same thing the people of color in the community has been saying for years. What many white activists DON'T do it AGGRESSIVLY attacking those political figures and convince them that their ideology is flawed. They are the ones that need to be "fixed". They need to disinvest in their whiteness and stop supporting the white supremacist power structure. Rather white "radical" liberals ask their parents to feed hungry Somalians or work on missions in Nigerian and not figure out what power structure have created such despair and fix that. Again, why do I say this? Not so much to put you on the spotlight (but hopefully you will do some reflection although as you said you can turn it off and not worry), rather I want to demonstrate that you, white people, are socialized to believe that they/you represent all of humanity. That's why you don't find many white people talk about being white. They don't need to (see Lipstz, Dyer, Rodiger). They/you are "normal" right? Everyone must talk about themselves in comparison to whites. It is a mind frame that you have to realize that you have. That most whites have. That is also a part of their/your investment in whiteness. THAT is the reason why you can't won't fully understand. There is nothing to compare the effects/affect of colonization, genocide, disenfranchisement, "otherness" of brown and black people to help you understand so that you can maybe feel better about being on the road to "disinvest certain aspects of [your] possessive investment in whiteness." The fact that you are only willing to release some says it all.

I really appreciate the book suggestions, I'll add them to my reading list.

I seem to be hearing a lot of really important points. I would caution you, however, to not characterize all white organizing as being liberal reformism.

I have worked hard on a number of social justice issues that affect communities of color over the last 5 years [education, food, housing, health care, nuclear colonialism, militarization, imperialism, to name a few]. I would like to think that there is a non-paternalistic way to act in unison and solidarity with people of color groups while still being white (and I think I have both succeeded and failed in different ways, myself).

No doubt, paternalistic white racism has been a mainstay of liberal politics (I am thinking here of Whiteness Studies as well as Pascal Bruckner's "Tears of the White Man", Wendy Brown's "Regulating Aversion" and historical accounts of whites in the civil rights era). There is probably a high correlation of whites choosing to pursue reformist politics (because of their investment in whiteness), but am I necessarily a reformist because I am white?

I am not liberal. I am unabashedly (post)-anarchist. I agree with you 100% that it's the white supremacist system that is the problem, not the failures of people of color. The current institutions that exist most likely need to be torn to the ground, not broadened to include traditionally disenfranchised folks.

Then are there other stumbling blocks that are preventing whites from being able to organize with people of color?

Lastly, I want to know more about your comment:

feel better about being on the road to "disinvest certain aspects of [your] possessive investment in whiteness." The fact that you are only willing to release some says it all.

First, while I don't mind being the target of criticism (I was a college debater, I can take it when when I'm expecting it), I am confused as to why you think I am only willing to release certain aspects of my whiteness.

Additionally, how is one to tell if they are disinvesting "enough" in whiteness? And who gets determine that? And is it always and completely a therapeutic activity? And lastly, can white privilege ever be "useful" (masters tools/masters house maybe)?

I going to think how to address you even more thoroughly. But here are some quick answers:

I would like to think that there is a non-paternalistic way to act in unison and solidarity with people of color groups while still being white

There are but very few achieve it.

I agree with you 100% that it's the white supremacist system that is the problem, not the failures of people of color

so why go into and organize communities of color rather than middle/upper class white communities?

The current institutions that exist most likely need to be torn to the ground, not broadened to include traditionally disenfranchised folks.

How are you helping to do this? Some would say tt can't be don't in the lower/under class people of color communities.

Then are there other stumbling blocks that are preventing whites from being able to organize with people of color?

Yes their investment in the white supremacist power structure.

I am confused as to why you think I am only willing to release certain aspects of my whiteness.

You said

if I acknowledge my privilege, seek to disinvest certain aspects of my possessive investment in whiteness (going a step further, even try to become a "reverse oreo" as Noel Ignatiev would say)

Will take that to a hypothetical question. So then, are you willing to disinvest completely? What does that mean to you?

how is one to tell if they are disinvesting "enough" in whiteness? And who gets determine that?

This requires a longer answer. Will get back to you on that.

And is it always and completely a therapeutic activity?

Probably not because disinvestment means loss of privilege. Unless the white person has guilt because of that privilege. Then I guess they would feel better afterwards...

can white privilege ever be "useful" (masters tools/masters house maybe)?

The fact that there is such a thing as "white privilage" is THE problem. Its useful to the white person. And if they use it to help people of color that in white paternalism and it implies that people of color can't be helped unless is white people decides (one who felt like turning their worry "on") to assist brown/black people as long as in doesn't infringe on their rights, property, liberties, and power. Maybe, a white person knows that they have disinvested in their whiteness when they are willing to lose as much or more than the people they are fighting for.

Melissa,

I will get back to you in a more meaningful way in a bit (I have a meeting to run to).

I would say, however, that I have done BOTH done white anti-racist organizing against whites and worked with POC (careful to work WITH not FOR).

My question, put maybe a bit too simply, is why should I be limited to the first and not the second?

Lastly, about the disinvesting in whiteness - I don't think it's possible to do so entirely, which is what started last series of questions (and why I never said 'all aspects').

okay.

So i'll reveal my hand: As long as there are only a small amount of whites with "adequate" race consciousness, I think there are ways they can retain/use white privilege.

One way might be:
1) identify what parts of white privilege can be easily used against the system of white supremacy and maintain aspects of this

example: arrestability (the Black Bloc serving as a buffer between the police and potentially un-arrestible folks at a pro-immigration rally is a good example)
visibility: copwatch. when white kids stare down cops (especially with a video camera), they treat folks better. i did that today. they actually unarrested someone. i wonder if i had anything to do with it.

2) identify what aspect of white privilege can easily be abandoned.
example: pay, jobs, housing, wealth, intentional favorable treatment of other whites. this category is pretty sizable.

3) carefully analyze what unfavorable aspects of whiteness cannot be easily jettisoned and figure out strategies to compensate for it.
ex: I look and perform white. Might as well use it against to take advantage of other trusting white folks (set up meetings with folks who don't expect you to be doing anti-racist actions. other acts of white sabotage).

lastly: 'Unfortunately' I don't get to engineer the society of tomorrow or lead millions of people to race suicide. Obviously, wholesale disinvestment of all white folks in whiteness is the best strategy. But when that isn't possible (I know that's not within my control any time soon...), I have to think strategically as a white anti-racist. That means retaining some of my whiteness so I still get enough access to the white system in order to fight it.

I don't think the goal is to disenfranchise the small amount of radical white allies you do have, no?

No worries and thanks for the response.

Look, I don't mean to step on anyone's toes or presume to tell you guys what you're supposed to be writing. I know that we came up with this project over a discussion about the accessibility of a lot of the literature that CS deals with.

I was running my mouth and saying that I think a lot of the ideas are interesting but that they tend to be written in overly long sentences with lots of jargon that makes it hard for people to understand them. I asked if maybe being understood by the uninitiated was perhaps a valuable skill that was undervalued by the authors of some of the more dense stuff I've had occasion to peruse.

Case in point: I took a critical theory course in the English department under Brian McHale. We touched on all sorts of stuff, up to and including Derrida and Foucault. The process when studying those guys went something like this:

1. Spend 3 days reading and re-reading a 5 page excerpt.
2. Scratch head because it makes very little sense and is hard to follow.
3. Go to class where in class discussion we basically spend the class period translating the Derrida into meaningful English.

I don't deny that I had a really good time digging into that stuff and trying to make sense of it - it was challenging and rewarding. But the moral of the story is that in the end we made sense of it and were able to understand it in common, everyday terminology. We had to spend a whole class session just translating - and I couldn't help but feel that if we'd started with that "translation" we could have spent that time discussing the implications and ramifications of the views involved rather than simply trying to follow obscenely long sentences around.

So yeah, Ryan and Maurice and I were talking about this and eventually we came upon this project. From that brainstorming session, my understanding of the newsvine aspect of this whole thing was that it would provide a challenge to the students by forcing them to take these complex ideas and regurgitate them in a way that would be intelligible to a layperson.

Some of the submissions have met that standard and some left me scratching my head - that's not an indictment by any means, you are of course free to write whatever you feel like writing on newsvine and for your class. I'm not your professor, I'm just a smartass who likes small words.

Ryan wrote what I thought was a wonderful little piece offering helpful pointers to anyone interested in taking up the newsvine challenge and writing with this audience in mind. I don't really understand the quasi-hostile reaction that ensued, culminating in this piece.

I dunno, maybe it's because my work schedule makes it impossible for me to jump into any of your classes. I find this whole thing really interesting, even this little confrontation we seem to have going on, and I won't take any of it personally if you guys don't. We obviously have some different ideas so I'm happy to argue about them all day and all night.

Thanks for your engagement,
myk

I hear you. My simple response is that it is always not that simple. Do-able but not simple as some of us are finding a little challenging. What I feel that makes our class a little more difficult than the class you were talking about is that we may be asked to read.. lets say The Gift of Death or Fanon's Black Skin White Masks in its entirety in four days and not a five page excerpt. Like I said its doable and I love blogging and commenting and...newsvine! I love everything that we are reading (and will have to re-read some of it). My whole point is we should all try to understand where everyone is coming from and know what you are asking and what we are providing is a learning process that most of us are not oppossed to. There just need to be a space where everyone can perform the shaping of their skills and allow that skill to manifest itself in different ways. No huge deal...at least not for me.

Oh certainly, that's fair enough. It sounds like a really hard assignment, and I for one would probably bitch and moan at the thought. I have no idea how you kids manage to read entire books of that stuff, let alone talk about them meaningfully - but I have to assume that you do, right?

Anyway, I'm here out of interest in the ideas and because I want to see some of you brainy grad students turn these ideas into intelligible english. I have this feeling like translating academic concepts into layperson's prose would be like finding ancient scrolls and translating them into English. It's a great forum for it and if done a certain way I'm sure a lot of these ideas would generate a lot of interest from a lot of people here who would otherwise not have been exposed to them.

So, I'm rooting for you guys and I'll be impressed if you can pull it off. :)

i'm not sure... this idea that performance carries with it resonances with all the performances that went before, and with the contexts of their performance... one thing i like about Brown's piece is it references and carries the 300 year history you are speaking of. We don't have to be familiar with the history to have a response.

Listening to it again you're right - he includes that context, and in fact seems to reach deeper into the past as the poem progresses. So I retract my earlier allusion to a barrier to entry, since even someone with no knowledge of black history could piece it together from that if they listened carefully and if they didn't they can certainly feel (I guess this is affect?) the meaningful parts of that history in his voice.

who knows what that particular audience response signified... one could say that he and some of the other poets who come to def poetry jam of the 'old school' type are trying to make a commentary on the kind of poetry that is usually taken up there. Kind of like someone like KRS1 commenting on MTV's uptake of gangsta rap...

That's a funny thought - in which case the antecedent of his performance is other performance, and the historical and social context takes a back seat. Very meta.

how did you respond? at the beginning of your post you posit an insider audience (which i suppose indicates an outsider one as well), later you mention not being intimidated because of the short words

Well I was trying to play both sides against the middle, right - given this discussion and given the limitations intrinsic to any "style" of expression it seems to me that almost any expression is "more accessible" than some and "less accessible" than others. It's not even a quantitative thing so much as a qualitative thing, as Justin points out above. So my process was to think about the ways in which his poem was inaccessible, then think about the ways in which it was accessible.

if performances stand in for past behaviors, if they host memory in that way, and if the context of their performance...has resonances with observers/participants and history, what might our reflection on the performance offer us in the way of a politics? or by way of motivating action not obsessed with 'putting ourselves back together' in the same old ways? yeah, so what did you feel? not emotions, but affects, intensities, sensations... and then, what emotion bottle did it get packaged in?

This is a hard question for me, I'm not used to thinking about things in quite this way, but I'll give it a shot -

If this performance is a sort of manifested memory, then the thing being remembered is The Black Experience in America, right? But also being remembered, through tangents, are things like the Old experience and the Poor experience and the Hungry experience and the Sick experience and all of these other sentiments he evokes.

So that's the historical context with which he resonates (let's call it A), and you and I and the people in that room are the audience with whom he resonates (let's call us B). So the question, if I understand it, is this: what is the result, in terms of "motivation generated" or something like that, of A + B?

Politics can almost be defined, really, as the public action and discourse generated when a certain audience comes into contact with a certain performance, because performance is history and context. Except, the "B" in that equation is almost always going to have to be an individual, isn't it? No performance can mean the same thing to two different people since the context of the performance is added to the context of the spectator's life. Or something like that?

I like that you stress that the motivation is not obsessed with recreating the initial condition - so politics is a measure of the way a certain performance fuses with a certain audience to compel them to seek to change something. This can be as simplistic as a child crying to get what it wants or as complex as world war II.

What affects did I experience in watching that? I don't know, I'm not sure how to answer that. I felt a sort of elation at the vision of this old guy speaking truth to power with an intensity that made me question if he wasn't perhaps younger than he appeared. I felt a sort of self-conscious "Wait, I'm a middle-class white surbanite, is he talking to me?" I felt a sort of power that clearly came from him but empowered me, as well (which relates quite well to the discussion of politics as motivation, above).

What did I hear in that gaze? An interesting question but a good one - I heard/felt/sensed what I can only describe as energy, it's like everything - all the images and emotions and history that he had just spent a few minutes conjuring up in the air around him - suddenly possessed him and I could see it all in his eyes.

It was quite a performance, and thanks for pressing me because I certainly wouldn't have tried to read so much into it otherwise.

I keep watching this segment from Def Poetry trying to find the moments, the places of slippage between "performing" the words and feeling, living the words. I was surprised to see Oscar Brown Jr. come onto the stage smiling and carry on through the first part of the piece still smiling, still detached (or so I imagine he would have to be to not allow the anger, rage, or sadness to creep into his voice or to avoid being crushed by his own words).

I keep watching the segment over and over again not to hear what you, Myk, are calling his short words as a means of explanation, but his body language - his face, his strained expression, his moments of aping and mockery that coincide with the words. No. I take that back -- the bodily emotion catalyzed by his own words.

I see what you are saying in your reading of Oscar Brown Jr, but what strikes me most in watching his anger rise and fall happens to come at the end. After he throws his hat and looks into the camera he holds that position for an extremely long time even after the cameras have switched to get a different angle. There is a moment of almost having to reconstitute himself that goes on so that he can stand and smile and bow to his clapping audience, shake the hand of Mos Def, and walk off stage.

I want to move beyond him, though, to the whole of the performance because there is something unsettling about both the clapping and his smile and gracious bow. Both of those are tropes of live performance - people are behaving politely and as they are suppose to - but those tropes of appropriateness seem to be undoing the gravity of what was just performed, what gets felt. The clapping and the smiling seem to be the sugar to make the medicine go down.

I want to move beyond him, though, to the whole of the performance because there is something unsettling about both the clapping and his smile and gracious bow.

I'm interested in your take on this and how you feel it undermines the gravity of the social and political message of the poem. Would you have preferred to encounter this poem on the page? How do you think this would have changed it for you? To perform it for yourself, in your own space, in your own time, in your own voice?

For me, I know without the performance, the words alone would not have the same impact. Oscar Brown Jr. and that poem are one. After this experience, it's not only the words and their (more literal) meaning that resonate with me, but Brown Jr.'s commanding presence, the timbre of his voice, and the rhythmic delivery that all vibrate through my body as well as bounce around in my mind (...in my mind...in my mind).

In his taking a bow, do you feel as though he was being somehow dishonest or inauthentic? That the audience cannot truly comprehend the gravity of these words and at the same time show appreciation for the artist's performance of them?

This type of performance renews my faith in humanity. I feel uplifted and incredibly grateful that someone can express so much horror and sorrow in a way that is intelligent, beautiful, meaningful and, for me, hopeful...that we survive and move on and learn and grow and make things better. And if I were in the audience after a performance like that, I would stand and clap and probably scream!

Ok, unfortunately there's a rare book with my name one it...check in later. Happy Friday.

I too want to run with this a bit... I am finding myself challenged as we move through this course. A year or two ago, i was asked to participate on a panel at the Performance Studies annual Conference --PSi. It was called something like the future of black performance studies... i was paired with an actual performance artist from MIT whose work i really like. He and i were typified as the "veteran" performance theory people who were expected to engage in a conversation in response to three papers presented by emerging black performance studies scholars...

ok, there's the scene setting...

so, one of the things i bring up is my worry about the centering of the body in performance studies and especially in the area of black performance studies... i suggested that there was so much overdetermining that emerges from the history of racial terror in this country that we aught to be asking questions about the centering of embodiment and the body, if only to make use of the ambivalence that condenses around such things...

i think even or conversation about "I Apologize" reflects these dynamics somewhat... or perhaps resonances works better here... the immanence of surrogation... always not yet delivered, but damn, the body feels it though, no!

so here i am at this point standing on the other side of that ambi-valence and saying that that particular performance stage, the Russel Simmons production of Def ___, is something of an HBO take up of the the Apollo theater environment... How did (was it DL Hughley?) put it... "there are East Coast audiences, there are West Coast audiences, then there's the Def Comedy audience"...

when Mos Def comes out and 'warms up' the crowd with "Brooklyn where you at?" playing over the top of beats from his (then soon to be released album) "Bedstuy parade and Funeral March" or "the Boogie Man Song", i know that there is something being celebrated, and with complete ambivalence i shudder and want to stand up and scream too... and if he lowers his head below his heart after staring in that way... i don't know if it is polite observance... Somewhere in Fatheralong, John Edgar Wideman talks about the something extra that is shared by people who don't even know one another but nod to one another in the street.... now i am not cliaming that, but there is a performance there that while shared between people like a handshake (impersonal), is also shared among people like a connection (trans-person-al)...

so maybe conquorgood has something important to say when he directs our gaze off of the text or surface of the text when looking for additional meanings. . . just riffing...

Both of those are tropes of live performance - people are behaving politely and as they are suppose to - but those tropes of appropriateness seem to be undoing the gravity of what was just performed, what gets felt. The clapping and the smiling seem to be the sugar to make the medicine go down.

I will see your Def Poetry Jam and raise you this from will.i.am of the Black-Eyed Peas, Barack Obama, and Jesse Dylan (son of Bob Dylan).