IPS Board Meeting today: www.ips-dc-org


Look for E-Notes this evening.

I finished reading NATIVE GUARD by Natasha Trethewey.
I liked her poems"Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971" and "Southern Gothic" A couple of weeks ago we watched( in my class) the reading she gave at Furious Flower.

So should I let the day pass without making reference to something I read this morning? Check the Metro Section of the Washington Post (B2) and read the article about the teens that cut class in order to commit a series of burglaries in Montgomery County. We are talking about middle class kids and not Malcolm Little and Shorty. Here is a question that was asked in the news article:

What motivates children in an affluent suburb to commit a property crime?
What's the answer here?

Did rap music make them do it?
Is there a "crisis" in the white household?
Are the kids being raised without their dads?

Hmmm.

Hambone! Hambone!
Congrats to Nathaniel Mackey who recently won the National Book Award for his collection SPLAY ANTHEM. One can find an interview with this Pound/Tolson of a guy in the latest issue of New American Writing # 24. It was conducted by Sarah Rosenthal. I always saw Mackey as another Cecil Taylor -playing the page. Dogon Right! Go Mack Go.

Here is an early Black History Month quiz question:
Who is the Buddhist in the Black Caucus?

OK this sounds like a joke but don't laugh:

Alcee Hastings is up to be chair of the Intelligence Committee.
The guy has legal debts between $2.1 and $7.35 million.
Last May he listed assets worth less than $15,000.

Are we talking AI here?

Quote of the Day:

"On top of all that, Black Caucus members, who tend to be more liberal, might find it hard to push their traditional social agenda. Conservative and moderate "Blue Dog" Democrats, whose numbers are nearly equal to those of Black Caucus members, have vowed to counter agendas that they have deem too liberal."
- Darryl Fears, Washington Post Staff writer


Boy - sounds like Reconstruction all over again. Beware of the Dog? And you thought Cave Canem was just a term to explain a literary movement. I suggest someone send all members of the Black Caucus some Cave Canem t-shirts. Quick!

OK here is a pop quiz for you. How many of you knew about the "Blue Dog" Democrats? Geez...these guys sound like Reagan pups. Bow wow and a bite up your ass. Sounds like they want budget cuts after all the money has been wasted. Unless a new Teddy R makes a ride up another hill look for poor people to be sufferers after all the talk, talk. Or maybe we won't even get there. What's Pelosi doing so far? This Murtha issue looks like a hole in her drapes or maybe there are no curtains at her windows and we can see into the "house" and it's business as usual. Who put the wreath on the door before Thanksgiving? Maybe that's just our votes hanging there. Happy New Year!

Vocabulary building time. I'll be tired of the word "bipartisan" before Thanksgiving. I think the origin of this word must be from a New York playground. It's the old "do-over" call. As soon as Democrats win anything big, Republicans grab their arms and sex organs and twist....folks either shout "uncle" or "bipartisan." It means I won't be as mean to you as you were to me. Promise?
This is another reason why good people get trapped inside the political game. You want to be fair and play by the rules, but the rules keep changing or maybe the entire game isn't fair. Who's going to admit that?

Listen to my interview with activist James Early by going to the IPS website:
www.ips-dc.org

I'm walking around today with copies of IN THESE TIMES, NEWSWEEK and THE NEW YORKER to read. I want to read Peter Boyer's article on Rumsfeld in The New Yorker. The title is "Downfall" on page 56.

Funny how Rumsfeld has been replaced by O.J.Simpson (in the news). Any connection?

Congrats to historians John Hope Franklin and Yu Ying-shih for being awarded the $1 million John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity.

Good news today from the library of William & Mary College. They are interested in my Reetika Vazriani files. I'm make arrangements in December to house the material there. I had a nice chat with RV's Mom and told her what I've been doing. She was happy.

Other news- the Charles Johnson material that I gave to the University of MN will be cataloged soon. I should have a link to the material in a few days.

So, it's been a good day. I thought the James Early interview went well. One will be able to access it from the IPS website either today or tomorrow: www.ips-dc.org

Class preparation tonight. I'll miss some good book parties around town - John Edwards, Alice Walker....

I have an interview with James Early at IPS today. See yesterday's E-Notes.

Day Break is the new ABC drama series. Taye Diggs is Brett Hopper an LA police detective who is forced to live the same day over and over. Can you imagine living in Baghdad and watching this show?

O.J. Simpson is back with a book and a Fox interview. This must be about money. Please no more oranges, no more juice.

Did you see Manny Acta putting on "my" manager shirt and hat yesterday?
This is what happens when you don't have inside connections. It's like being left out of an open mic reading. So maybe the only thing left to do is run for the Ward 4 Council seat left vacent by F-Man. Everyone in the ward seems to be running. I think I'll write my own name in when I vote. If I win I'll take everyone who voted for me to dinner.

New word for our vocabulary list:
World-class capital

Look for this to echo from the lips of F-Man the next few months. See his OP-ED piece on Home Rule in today's Washington Post.


OK here is our quiz for the day:
Is Murtha just another Murtha... ?
Read Robin Marcus in today's Washington Post.

New book out from Jimmy Carter: PALESTINE PEACE NOT APARTHEID.

An organization to follow in the news next year: KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root). Once a part of Halliburton it will probably get some sniffs from the House Government Reform Committee.
KBR are the guys with the overbudget construction projects. They must make money the old fashion way - they keep getting no-bid contracts.

I was surprised to see promotional material for THE NATION magazine featuring Russell Simmons. Did this guy start reading the magazine after election day? The last time I saw him he was pushing Michael Steele on folks. Geez.

Talking about photographs - the picture of Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young on the front page of the Washington Post today captures an important moment in history as well as the discussion about black male images. The photo shows the "weight" of history we too often carry. Young seem old now. Jackson seems compassionate and not angry as the media likes to label him. The picture in today's Post is even more moving than the one taken of Coretta at King's funeral where she is holding her family together. If you want to know what it means to be on the side of truth and justice and finally win (something) --then here it is. It's the tears that fall from the eyes of the marathon runners.

Must reading:
Arthur C. Danto's review in THE NATION (November 27th) of Columbian artist Fernando Botero exhibit at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. Botero has done a series of paintings about Abu Ghraib. Here is a statement by Danto:

"Botero's astonishing works make us realize this: We knew that Abu Ghraib's prisoners were suffering, but we did not feel that suffering as ours. When the photographs were released, the moral indignation of the West was focused on the grinning soldiers, for whom this appalling spectacle was a form of entertainment. But the photographs did not bring us closer to the agonies of the victims. Botero's images, by contrast, establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims, whose suffering we are compelled to internalize and make vicariously our own."

So the Redskins are going to change their QB. Hey guys! That's not the problem. Where is YOUR defense? The team can't stop the run. They can't cover anyone going deep. They have no pass rush. Campbell seems like a nice guy. He reminds me of a young Joe Louis. We know he can run but can he hide? I never saw what all the rah rah was for the guy. Against Tampa I would look for 1 TD and maybe 3 interceptions. Redskins will only score 10 points.

No hiding the fact that the Redskins are a weak team because of a certain type of player missing. Brian Mitchell was my model for this team. Thrash comes close. I have no idea why he isn't the second receiver on this team. Play the guy and he might prove to be a good safety valve for a young QB like Campbell. Thrash can keep drives alive with clutch catches. The other weak link with the Redskins right now is the kicking game. Those missed field goals are beginning to add up. The NoNO needed two chances to kick one.

This morning Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and I were discussing an "underground" proposal to take away all cell phones from "free people of color" who have been talking too loud and giving away "too many secrets." Hmmm. What would Garvey do?

Just being curious...

I was wondering- What was the lowest number of Iraqi people killed in one day since the war in Iraq started?

Are there any neighborhoods in Baghdad that are safe?

Have many of the suicide bombings been in roughly the same area?

How many people have fled Iraq since the war started?

How difficult is it to leave the country?

How many mosques have been destroyed since the war? How many are being rebuilt?

What's going on in Babylon? Basra?

Where is my banana dress?

The Smithsonian is hosting the Centennial Celebration of the Birth of Josephine Baker

Join us Saturday, Nov. 18 for: In Vogue: Black Culture and Identity in the Jazz Age Washington D.C., Paris, and New Orleans .

A Symposium on the African American Presence in American Public Life.
National Museum of Natural History, Baird Auditorium; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Presented by The Humanities Council of Washington, DC In partnership with The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture & The Embassy of France .

This program is free and open to the public but reservations are required. Limited space is still available for the following sessions:

Session I, 10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. Josephine and the Jazz Age Overview: Bettye Gardner, Ph.D., Symposium Chair, Coppin State University Social-Historical Context for 1920s Jazz Age: Lonnie Bunch, National Museum of African American History and Culture Visual History of the 1920s: Donna M. Wells, Howard University, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center Josephine Baker: Farah Jasmine Griffin, Ph.D., Columbia University

Session II, 11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. Panel Discussion -- The New Negro in the New Century: The 1920s Revisited Facilitator: Starmanda Bullock, Ph.D., Howard University The Paris Scene: Deborah Macanic, Independent Curator/Historian Washington, DC: Eleanor Traylor, Ph.D., Howard University New Orleans: Michael White., Ph.D., Xavier University 1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Lunch on your own

Session III, 3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Panel Discussion -- A 2020 Vision: Black Culture and Identity in the 21st Century Facilitator: Donald Murray, Chair, Humanities Council of Washington, DC Panelists: John W. Franklin, National Museum of African American History and Culture Malkia Lydia, Independent Film Producer and Director Marvette Perez, National Museum of American History Tricia Rose, Ph.D., Brown University Michael White, Ph.D., Xavier University

To register send name, name of session requested and number of people attending to InvogueSymposium@wdchumanities.org or fax to: (202) 387-8149 For more information on this event, contact Jennifer Foley, jfoley@wdchumanities.org, or (202) 387-8391. ext. 15 For further information on this message contact Fleur Paysour, Office of Public Affairs - National Museum of African American History and Culture at 202-633-4761 or paysourf@si.edu .

INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES
Monday, November 13, 2006
Contact: Joia Jefferson Nuri
cell 240-603-7905; joia@ips-dc.org


Defining The Issues Series

The Evolution of a Revolutionary: James Early

Wednesday, November 15, 2006
12:30pm-1:30pm
Institute for Policy Studies
1112 16th St. NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036
(near Farragut North Metro)
Audio will posted at www.ips-dc.org 2 hours after the briefing

On Wednesday, November 15th IPS Board Chairman E. Ethelbert Miller will launch a series of interviews with the men and women who shape the progressive political movement from behind the scenes. The hour long discussions will explore the political and cultural development of people who beckon governments and civil society worldwide to respect and support the human journey with resources and politics. The series begins with James Early. Mr. Early is fluent in Spanish and travels frequently to Cuba and Venezuela with Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover connecting civil society leaders in a dialogue for change.

James Early is the former Chairman of the Board of the IPS. He is Director of Cultural Studies and Communication at the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies at the Smithsonian Institution. As a long-time advocate and supporter of cultural diversity and equity issues in the nation’s public cultural and educational institutions, Mr. Early began these pursuits at Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish. Over the course of a 25-year professional career, Mr. Early has consistently recognized the integrity of historically evolved values and cultures of African-American, Latino, Native-American, and Asian-Pacific American communities. He has taught high school Spanish, worked with the incarcerated, taught at the college level, lectured in the U.S. and internationally, and written extensively on the politics of culture.

The moderator for the discussion is Ethelbert Miller who describes himself as a literary activist. He is presently the board chairperson of the Institute for Policy Studies. He is a board member of The Writer's Center and editor of Poet Lore magazine. Since 1974, he has been the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University. Mr. Miller is the former chair of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. and a former core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington

For more than four decades, the Institute for Policy Studies has transformed ideas into action for peace, justice, and the environment. IPS is a progressive multi-issue think tank, and can be visited at www.ips-dc.org. Defining The Issues is a bi-weekly discussion and radio taping with a live audience, featuring nationally known speakers and providing cutting edge analysis on the issues confronting the United States and the world. The entire program is available in digital audio at www.ips-dc.org two hours following the discussion. Media can use the briefing in its entirety or as sound-bites.

The changing America...
Good to see the election of Keith Ellison (Minnesota) to Congress. He is the first Muslim elected to our federal government. Ellison converted to Islam in his 20s.
It's important that all faiths be acknowledged and protected within the US.

So there I was waiting for the Washington Nationals to call.
This week they are giving the job to Manny Acta. We "both" have no experience as a major league manager. They say Acta has a reputation as an outgoing, personable man - so maybe that's why I was overlooked. Who wants to be around a moody poet in the dugout?

Monday morning. What should I talk about first? The Republicans or the Washington Redskins? I think in an E-Note I took the Philadelphia Eagles by 20 points over the Skins.
27-3 was the final score. I could make money betting on the horses. The problem with the Skins is similar to the Republicans. Folks won't admit the team isn't good. Notice how the Republicans want to return to the same playbook. It must be that same big playbook the Heritage Foundation put out several years ago. The Republicans still want to run the ball - like the Skins. Pound the right-wing stuff down the throats of the American public. But look what happens when the other team puts up points. The Republicans can't play defense and neither can the Skins. They keep giving up the big play - are we talking about losing the presidency in 2008?

Another word slipping into our vocabulary is war profiteering. This is just going to upset folks.
A war going on and someone can only think about making money. Here is where Democrats and Republicans have to come together - even the religious right. If you want to talk about sin- just look at folks making money from a war. Oh, and you know the Katrina stories that will surface at future Congressional hearings is going cause another levee to break.

Meanwhile, notice how the media simply wants to ignore what took place on election day. Check the Wall Street Journal. Boy are they downplaying what happened. Oh- and what about Rowe in the Washington Post yesterday. The guy must have been the player whistling in the shower after the Redkskin lost. Arrogance without apology. It's like believing you're suppose to go to the SuperBowl but you're only 3-6.

Benny Andrews the painter died last Friday. He was 75. I was just looking at some of his work at a gallery in New York a few months ago. Andrews was the director of the visual arts program for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1982-1984. Andrews was a visual storyteller. He will be missed.

THE E MAG

TREVE DE BLUES
- Leon Damas

WELCOME TO THE E-MAG: A Sunday kind of love.

On Sundays I invite other writers to share my E-Space and contribute their own E-Notes. Today my guests are Michael O'Keefe, Chenjerai Hove, Sarah Browning and Ed Ochester.


# 1
O'Keefe

November 6, 2006

I am following my standard practice of getting up; doing a meditation that feeds all the hungry spirits of known and unknown words, and then writing. After graduation from the Creative Writing Seminars at Bennington College, I learned two things. In order to write, you have sit down and actually write. Thinking about writing is not writing. In order to write well, you have to read those that have. This duel realization cost me thirty thousand dollars. I highly recommend it.


I’ve been rummaging around secondhand bookstores and gotten into Mary Shelley, Randall Jarrell, Sartre, Kafka, and a host of others. I am writing the great American novel about a monster, created from scratch by a renegade medical student, who becomes a poet, and cannot get out of a castle that may or may not be employing him.


After adhering to strict discipline and writing at least three pages of narrative gems, I attend a yoga class. In this particular class, the temperature is kept at 104 F for ninety minutes. After five minutes, one’s eyes are clouded over with sweat. This lends a halo effect to me and my classmates that lasts the entire class. The teacher, who talks ceaselessly while we wrap our bodies in knots that no seaman could unravel, describes in minute detail what one does and does not do with one’s body in order to complete the class. They have no halos around them while they teach because they talk too much. Only the quiet, long suffering students, achieve the halo effect. One should not necessarily construe that this is due to any special status of the students but assumptions have been made and not just by me.


After class, I eat a lunch of wheatgrass and bran and return to the other half of my literary life. I read. Sometimes I read for up to fifteen minutes a day before falling asleep and napping until around 5 PM, whereupon, I rise and enjoy a hearty dinner of pomegranate seeds on white toast. Then I watch sports on TV, my only indulgence of the day.

While I cannot presume to advise each and every one of you reading this to follow my lead, one can hope. Just think what a life of fasting, studying, and sweating has done for me and set your own course to adventure, or don’t. See if I care.

Michael O'Keefe became an actor after his parents dropped him as a child. He's recieved both Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, though little is known about the connection between the nominations and his early childhood.

Most recently he's appearing opposite George Clooney in his new film, "Michael Clayton," and with Catherine Keener in her film "American Crime," which was selected to be at Sundance in 2007. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is currently working at a Starbucks, like most graduates, until his parents set up him in a steady job. Contributions to defray the costs of Mr. O'Keefe's education can be sent to the O'Keefe Relief Fund.
www.michaelokeefe






#2
HOVE

This week has been a cold one, rainy and windy, with those harsh winds from the sea. I could have been blown away like a leaf. So I decided I will read the memoirs of Geoffrey Nyarota, the most persecuted Zimbabwe newspaper editor now in exile in the United States.The experience of reading the book titled 'Against The Grain,' was like me clandestinely going back home,sneeking into all those places which I am now not able to visit.

Talking to all the journalists who have been either arrested or tortured, those who now know what freedom of the press is all about. It was so painful to be so intimately in touch with my own psychological and geographical landscape, yet emotionally feeling already detached and afraid to know it after five years in exile in the cold whether of Norway.

A good book is a journey into myself and into the world out there.Then it made me go back to my own work after two days of reading this sad but hopeful story. I went back to work on my latest poetry anthology(untitled) which I always seem to abandon because of my travels.I felt so bad on realising that some of the poems are scattered all over the place. Assembling them again became like the work of a surgeon putting back the scattered pieces of the human body in search of life once more.

When I read about my cruel, beloved homeland, Zimbabwe, the anguish in my soul always sends me back to my poetry. The journey never ends until I touch the pieces of paper with new lines and then smile again,feeling that at least in the fragility of exile, one can write beautiful lines, echoes of a life that has been and might never be.

The yearning is also so beautiful, the nostalgia for the voices of my street, the shouts of the market women, and the ruthless but profoundly gentle drivers of those little mini-buses which seem to carry the greatest number of passengers in the world. Twenty can fit into a mini-bus normally designed to carry eight.What a miracle!In all this search, I once again feel the wanderer that I have been for five years, especially that my contract with Norway ends soon. Maybe I will end up in other lands soon, in the UnitedStates, teaching once again, in some college, university, or somewhere.

Born in 1950s in the south of Zimbabwe, Chenjerai Hove is a Zimbabweanpoet, novelist and columnist who lives in exile in Norway. His novels include the award winning novel,'Bones' which was the best African book in all categories in 1989. Other novels include 'Shadows' and 'Ancestors'.Hove's poetry anthologies include'Up In Arms', 'Red Hills of Home', 'Rainbows in the Dust', and 'BlindMoon. Currently, Chenjerai Hove is Guest Writer of the City of Stavanger, Norway.


#3
BROWNING

My week as a poet-activist-mother

A big week in this life. Background: I am the coordinator of DC Poets Against the War and we are planning a festival of poetry of witness, to be held in DC in March, 2008. It’s a big step for us – we haven’t done anything on this scale previously. But we’ve lined up many of our favorite poets who write poetry engaged with the world: Ethelbert, of course, and Lucille Clifton, Naomi Shihab Nye, Joy Harjo, Galway Kinnell, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Mark Doty, Patricia Smith, and many others. The excitement is growing.

But we didn’t have a name. It’s been challenging, with many brainstorming sessions, some fueled by caffeine, some by alcohol. I’ve read endless poems by Langston Hughes, Essex Hemphill, June Jordan, Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. Nothing had popped for me. I suggested finally Provocations: Poetry of Witness and, given the lack of anything else, folks were starting to warm to it. It wasn’t ideal, but I was feeling desperate: the deadline for copy for an ad in the AWP program book (for the 2007 AWP conference in Atlanta) was looming for Friday and we needed a name.

Then Tuesday, I had my monthly breakfast ritual with Ethelbert: I pick him up at 8:15 and we get breakfast at a café and talk the many overlapping poetry and personal issues in our lives. This month we chose Savory in Takoma Park – it’s quiet and we’re not likely to run into people we know. In the basement room, Ethelbert challenges me to try one more time, to find a name for the festival rooted in a poem by one of our forebears. I am in despair, but I know he’s right : something more lyrical would be better and would be an immediate entrée to the themes of the festival, if we could invoke a poet model from the past.

So, after dropping E at Howard U., I set myself up at Busboys & Poets and read all day (until 2:30 that is, when I have to leave to pick up my son and go grocery shopping, as Tuesday has been my Baseball Mom day, the afternoon of Little League practice – until this week, when the season is finally over). I read every poem Langston Hughes wrote and in the 1930s and ‘40s. I read more Rukeyser. I write down a number of excerpts from both poets. (Read them on my blog at: http://sarahbrowning.blogspot.com/.) I go home to think.

Over the next two days, the possible names percolate. Finally, Thursday morning I make a choice and it is done: Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation and Witness. Here is the citation from Langston Hughes:

Don’t you hear this hammer ring?
I’m gonna split this rock
And split it wide!
When I split this rock,
Stand by my side.

I email it around for comment. Everyone likes it! We are done. Now, of course, I have to write copy for the ad for the AWP program book and get it to the designer (we got an extension…); write the copy for the web site and get it to the web designer (both these lovely people are volunteering: Nancy Bratton and Michael Heroux, respectively – all praises); contact all the poets who’ve committed to participate; write the fundraising letter; write myriad grant proposals; reserve the URL, etc., etc. It’s exciting and terrifying. I go to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on December 8 for two weeks and the list of things to do for the festival before I leave scares me.

But as Ethelbert reminded me at breakfast, this is the life I want to be living. On Monday morning, I got together with my friend Yael to write and she wrote the most moving, painful, and beautiful poem about torture. How is that possible? She did it. I wrote about my son spraining his ankle in his last little league game of the season, sliding into third. My second baseball poem, the first written last year about not standing during the singing of God Bless America at RFK Stadium during the second inning stretch. I simply can’t ask a god I don’t believe in to bless the country that is exacting untold suffering on another country. And yet, sitting while everyone around me stood felt only like a gesture. The poem, still in the notebook, wrestles with that uneasy feeling. Perhaps I am still uneasy; the poem is still in the notebook.

Wednesday evening DC PAW gave a reading with Esther Iverem at the Shepherd Park Library on Georgia Avenue for Veterans’ Day. It’s a beautiful neighborhood library and everyone should use it more. We were late getting a group together to read and late publicizing the reading but still had a good crowd of 15 or so. A poet new to us all, Dr. Kyi May Kaung, an exile from Burma, read for the first time with the group. Very moving – in a straightforward voice, with simple language, she detailed the daily experience of living under, and resisting, dictatorship: the fear, the unknowing, the not-writing-down. Esther also read and so did Richard Peabody. I discovered that they were meeting for the first time. It is striking how often this work for peace brings people together – it gives me great pleasure.


Tonight, Saturday, I’m just back from a party for Brandon Johnson’s new book Love’s Skin, published in the Hilary Tham Capital Collection by the Word Works. Brandon gave a terrific reading – his poems are mini-movies, whole stories wrapped into poem packages a page or two long. I loved the characters, their voices, the rhythm of the language that moved them through the problem to the solution, however the poem might resolve. My own book of poems, Whiskey in the Garden of Eden, is forthcoming in the Capital Collection next year, which adds to the thrill. Congratulations, Brandon.



#4
OCHESTER

Hi Ethelbert,

Thanks for inviting me to participate in the EM network.

I've been working today at some finishing touches on UNRECONSTRUCTED, my new and selected poems that'll be published next fall by Autumn House, and on an anthology of poets in the Pitt Series that'll be out next spring.

I think it's a terrific, readable book, and would urge folks to check it out for possible class use:American Poetry Now: The Pitt Poetry Series Anthology (early 2007):Jan Beatty, Wanda Coleman, Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Russell Edson,Lynn Emanuel, Edward Field, Barbara Hamby, Bob Hicok, Etheridge Knight, TedKooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Cathy Song, Dean Young,Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn and many others in the Pitt Poetry Series.

After that, Britt & I visited my mother (as I mentioned before, she'll be100 in January); she does have onset Alzheimer's but right now she's still as contrary and pissy as ever--she blames the nurses for soiling her diapers.

And we listened to the Pitt football team go down in flames(again). But this whole week we've had a good glow about the election.America is enough to break your heart and drive you crazy--a step and a halfback for every two steps forward--but it looks as though, possibly, it maybe starting once again to heal itself after this terrible waste of life and money under evil monopoly capitalism.

And speaking of evil: we finally got rid of Senator Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, the only human being I've ever met who literally looks like a prick with ears. As old as I am, and I'm old enough--as Charlie Rangel says about himself--not to buy green bananas, I've never been more pleased about the outcome of a Senate race.

I miss you, man, and hope to see you soon.All good wishes--Ed

I was thinking about how you can tell when the weather is going to change. You step outside one morning and you feel a sudden chill. When do you reach into the back of the closet and pull out that heavy coat? How does one's body change? My mother talking about aches in her bones just before it rains. Maybe I can go back to a day in the my childhood, and find that moment when Hip Hop started. There must have been a sudden change in the weather of the South Bronx, an incident that was not noticable until after the radiation or the coming of Rodan. What if it was a virus getting into some of us, changing our personalities and how we sound? What if behind P.S. 39 on Longwood Avenue was a big hole or a space ship? Where did the guy wearing the Indian hairstyle come from? He was much older than we were and an evildoer. He changed our lives in a bad way. I did notice one afternoon that he walked with a hip and a hop. I ran as far as Kelly Street would let me. But there are some things that didn't make sense back then. It had that Outer Limits script or maybe it was Alcoa Presents. No not the Twilight Zone- that was Brooklyn and maybe parts of New Jersey. No the 2 strange things that happened around 1959 were the fires near St. Margaret Church that took place almost every Thanksgiving. It would leave the first abandon buildings- and the film world would call the place Fort Apache in a few years. But what I remember from my youth -what tore a page from my memory and I wanted to forget was my brother's friend who had two large dogs. They both looked like Lassie. I was in the hallway coming down from Dinky's apartment when one of the dogs went running by me, bounding up the stairs, and heading for the roof. Later that evening my brother Richard told me the dog had jumped off the roof. Suicide? The dog just jumped. It was something that never made any sense to me. Why would a dog commit suicide? What do animals know before humans? Was it the first sounds of a new music, hurting the dogs ears? The way my neighbor's dog today howls when the police cars pass by with their sirens blaring. Things falling a part....and the most important question we have yet to answer - Who let the dogs out?

DON'T MISS THE E-MAG this Sunday with:

Michael O'Keefe
Chenjerai Hove
Sarah Browning
Ed Ochester

All day I've been listening to one song - Annie Lennox singing "The Hurting Time" on her BARE album. This evening an old friend called and said his mother had died...

To Everything there is a purpose
To Every blade of grass
And Every leaf on Every tree
Every Livin' Thing will surely
Come to pass
And what will be will be...
That's when The Hurtin' Time Begins


Sending prayers and love out to the Mckay family - night in our lives but not our hearts.

I received Don Mee Choi's new book today. The title is CONTEMPORARY POETRY BY KOREAN WOMEN: Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon and Yi Yon-ju.
It's a Zephyr Press book: www.zephyrpress.org
Don Mee is one of the leading translators of Korean women poetry. She lives in Seattle.

So all the Republican Party has to do now is find new leadership. That's the spin. It's another attempt to interpret reality. Meanwhile - what should be done? Look for Bennie Thompson to take over the House Committee on Homeland Security. An examination of the Katrina contacts is going to make a number of folks angry. There's just too much greed that needs to be exposed.
Especially those Iraq reconstruction contracts - no bid stuff. Even "new" Republicans are going to have to support Democrats on this investigation.

I was sitting in Busboys (this evening) and someone was talking about impeachment hearings against Bush.
Let's not go there and harm the structure of our nation. Why weaken the presidency? What would be the outcome?

No Bolton at the UN will be a major move by the Democrats.

In other news- New York Mets third base coach is still in the running to become the next manager of the Washington Nationals. What about E. Ethelbert Miller? He wants the job. We are talking about poetry being read at all home games during the 7th inning stretch. We are talking about giving all players cool nicknames so the fans can cheer or rap. We are talking about interactive baseball where fans can talk to me on my Blackberry. Hmmm. F-Man I'm sorry for stealing one of your ideas, but no one laughed when you created your own bullpen. Did they?

Quote of the day:

"Ed Bradley had cool like a vault has money."
- Wil Haygood

I plan to use the weekend to read the books I borrowed from the King Library Wednesday:

MOZART AND LEADBELLY by Ernest Gaines
HOOPS by Major Jackson
NATIVE GUARD by Natasha Trethewey

I will also complete the reading of ON AND OFF THE COURT by Red Auerbach.

Next week I will be interviewing James Early for the DEFINING THE ISSUES SERIES.
The public is invited:
Wednesday, November 15th, from 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
1112 16th Street, NW, Suite 600
(Near Farragut North Metro)

If you're not ObamaOUT - read The New York Review of Books (November 30th issue).

Looking ahead to 2008 I'm still supporting Edwards right now.



In other news:

It will be interesting to see what the Democrats will do regarding Iraq. I support the following:

Sitting down with Syria and Iran and trying to find a regional solution.
Reduction of US troops in 2007.
We also need to acknowledge that we are trying to end a Civil War that has religious roots. There seems to be a bit of ethnic cleansing taking place. :-(

Well I'm back from Philadelphia. I watched my son play the Saint Joseph's Hawks. It was an exhibition game. Widener (Division III) against St. Joseph (Division I). Widener held their own - pulling to about 9 with about 3 minutes left in the game.
The final score was 71-55. My son played well; especially in the first half when he had 2 three pointers, 2 assists, and 1 rebound. One turnover in 18 minutes of play.
Next week the regular season begins. They play Lincoln University. I think my son's team will do well. Major concern might be getting beat on the boards. The team could use a real big man.

Sad to learn about Ed Bradley's death. I remember getting a call from him about 2 years ago. He had to give a speech and was trying to find a poem by Sterling Brown.
Bradley was one of the "strong men" in media. He will be missed. We are left we so few minutes - 60 was not enough.

I have to teach a class over at AU tomorrow. Students are reading my poems. I'll share some new work. Around 6 PM I'm heading over to Busboys to see Natalie Moore and Natalie Hopkinson - they are the authors of DECONSTRUCTING TYRONE: A NEW LOOK AT BLACK MASCULINITY IN THE HIP-HOP GENERATION.

Well look for an old word to become part of our vocabulary again. Are you ready for GRIDLOCK? Do you remember that word? Look for Bush to start talking about veto power.
This could mean 2 years of nothing getting done under Democratic rule. Oh, and then we're into 2008 and the race for the presidency. More folks talking about change, etc.

Republicans are already putting out their spin for losing on Tuesday. They are talking about how the election was about competence and not ideological change. Hmmm.
That's like saying it was only about foreplay never about sex.

Now here is one for historians - did we just witness the end of a "revolution" in the US? Is that what happened back in 1994 when Republicans came to power? Why won't the Democrats proclaim their own "revolution" today? Is it the failure of no new ideas or is it the failure of nerve?

Watch for Bush to start doing his legacy march. Folks might call it a shuffle or a dance. Will he be remembered for the war in Iraq or going to Vietnam? Will he be remembered for what he did after 9/11 or for maybe bringing homerule to DC? I think Bush could play to the historians by opening the door of dialogue with Cuba. A meeting with Fidel would be a bold thing to do between now and 2008. It would also open the door to establishing a better relationship with those South/Central American countries that are moving to the left. It might end the "cold war" in our hemisphere.

In DC the battle between F-Man and Big Bobb will be around education. Robert Bobb is the new school board president. He is going to fight Fenty's attempt to takeover the schools. Bobb seems to have a plan. See today's Washington Post. If F-Man is not careful he could get a few political cuts on the chin before April 2007. Who will become part of the "Justice League" and fight alongside F-Man? Ah - this has the making of a DC comic strip. Just like the old Dell days.

If you get a "thumping" at the polls then you steal that person's thunder as soon as you can. That's what the Republicans did. Notice how Pelosi and the Democrats got blindsided by the President's announcement of Rumsfeld stepping down. A slick way to capture the headlines and downplay the election results. Do you hear anything about a Democratic Revolution? Of course not. That's why the Republicans can lose and win.
They know how to shape the news and put a spin on things. If the Republicans had given the Democrats a thumping - you would hear nothing except all the "radical" change that's going to come. All I hear Democrats doing is talking about how we all have to work together. It sounds like Rodney King at a press conference - after several blows to the head. It's not about all of us getting along. It's about some serious change on issues that demand leadership. We need better health care. We have to curtail the greed that's taking place by many large corporations. Not an easy thing to do. By coincidence a friend of mine living in New Orleans sent me copies of The Times-Picayune. Check this paragraph from an article by Bruce Eggler, writing about the New Orleans City Council:

"It's not unusual for New Orleans City Council members to vote on measures they know little or nothing about, much less have read and studied in detail. Given the variety and often complexity of the documents the council is called upon to consider every two weeks. it is almost inevitable that members sometimes have only a sketchy idea of what they are voting for or against."

This sound like something out of "Birth of A Nation." All that's missing are the council members hunger for chicken. This is a Reconstruction government?

Oh - and on the same page of the article by Eggler is one by Coleman Warner. It's about Nagin being unprepared about project requests to the Lousiana Recovery Authority. If Nagin has time to go to Hornet games he should be doing some work.
How did this guy ever, ever, get re-elected???? My friend calls him a jackass of a mayor. Maybe there will be a link the next time someone does a Google search. Is there no answer to this type of failed leadership?

Bringing it back home...it looks like I'm going to be faced with a couple of "jokes" to select from by next April. Someone has to replace F-Man on the DC City Council from Ward 4. Geez - the folks running make me want to keep my back porch lights on at all time. I just read the list of folks running in the latest issue of The Northwest Current. Please --these folks are not going to do anything but add something to their resume. I might write a poem on my ballot in April. It's going to be National Poetry Month - I need to do something positive. Voting for any of the Ward 4 candidates is going to be very difficult. If I wasn't waiting for the Washington Nationals to call and offer me that manager job, I would run for the Ward 4 City Council seat. F- man is such an inspiration. We can all get elected to something - can't we?

A minor point: but here is something to think about. President Bush has selected Robert Gates to be the new Defense Secretary. Let's overlook the guy's former CIA job and mention the fact that the he has a doctorate in Russian Studies. This might be the generational problem in many agencies that are responsible for shaping our overseas policies. Where is the generation of leaders whose area of study is the Middle East, Africa and Asia? We keep having decisions made by folks who are experts on Europe or the Cold War. How much do they know about Islam? Let's hand out a pop quiz? How many folks in these agencies speak Arabic or are learning?
Well I wish the guy well. Another Gates in the news.

Look for Bush's upcoming trip to Vietnam to be a major one. What has the US learned since Vietnam? How is the old war similar/different from today's conflict?

Quote of the week:

" This is not my first rodeo." - President Bush at today's press conference.

Rumsfeld stepping down might mean more power and influence for Rice. As the world turns...

E

Well since the Republicans won and it's a new day maybe I should go back to the past for a moment. I'm on the 70 bus going to work and read the Sports page in the Washington Post.
There is an article by Josh Barr and how the Georgetown Hoyas have recruited top basketball players. I think about sitting in the office (2 years ago?) of the former HU basketball coach. Here was a guy talking to me and my wife about our son being a walk on - to the HU basketball team.Geez. What was there record that year? My wife and I left his office disgusted. When I look at all these local basketball players getting invites to play at these "name" Division I area schools, I'm very happy for them. I wish these guys well. I also know that they had nice numbers against various area teams. My favorite local player has always been Chris Wright. From the moment I saw this kid play at St. John I couldn't stop talking about him. I also think Wright's dad is a wonderful person. I loved talking to the guy at those St. John/Gonzaga games.

But I'm going to talk about my son here - because folks were always giving him those "unsong" heroes awards each season. My son played defense and shutdown a lot of these area Division I guys...just go back and look at the tapes. He also played for coaches that really prevented him from shooting. If he missed one or two shots...someone had him sitting on the bench. It was as if he could never make a mistake. Meanwhile- guys on the otherside were always jacking up shots, not passing and trying to get to the next level. Hmmm They also had parents pushing them. My son always told me to be cool after I saw some bad coaching or how someone told him not to shoot the ball. So it comes down to this...I'm glad with how things are for my son.
He went to a Division III school and not Division I. He probably won't be on television as much as some of the other kids, but he made a good choice. He's at a school where he is getting a very good education. He is having fun playing basketball. I'm proud of him because so many things are never in the newspapers...the quality of our lives is measured by so much more. It's something I've learned from my son.

Congrats to my friend Bruce Weigl. He is the winner of the 2006 Lannan Poetry Award.
Weigl is the author of DECLENSION IN THE VILLAGE OF CHUNG LUONG.

The photo in the New York Times today of Hillary and Bill Clinton is priceless. There they are - backs to the camera. Bill has his arm over Hillary's shoulder. They are waiting on line to vote.
The US flag is on the wall in front of them. It's a tender moment. A moment of love and forgiveness. It says so much about personal relationships and what makes America a great country. What I like is that they are not facing the camera. They are not posing for the media.
Notice how Hillary is holding her hands in front...head leaning a little to the right? If we want to learn something about ourselves and others...it's all here in this one picture. I looked at the picture and the words of Alice Walker kept coming back:

Looking down into my father's
dead face
for the last time
my mother said without
tears, without smiles
without regrets
but with civility
"Good night, Willie Lee, I'll see you
in the morning."
And it was then I knew that the healing
of all our wounds
is forgiveness
that permits a promise
of our return
at the end.

So are rumors spreading that Republicans are being stopped and checked for circumcision?

Look for a few folks to start leaving the Bush Administration soon. The excuse will be to spend more time with the wife and kids. How many times do you hear this?

I don't expect Bush or the VP to change their views or plans the next 2 years. Do you? Things will only change when we attempt to deal with "ideas" and not people. It's true we have a problem in Iraq but what we really need is a new foreign policy. First, we are fighting 2 -not 1 major war.

Second we need to prevent Israel from moving too far to the Right. Is anyone paying attention to what's going on in the Gaza? We have to start talking to nations like Syria and Iran. Let's look pass the sulpher jokes and talk with Hugo, Danny O, Evo - Oh and Fidel, Fidel. Major meetings need to be held with China on a number of issues. And this is just the international stuff.

Democrats are going have to lead and not just tell jokes or how they are going to work together with Republicans. What they need to do is just set their own agenda FIRST and THEN build a consensus behind it. That's leadership. It means taking "new" ideas into the red states and working with folks who are poor, lacking health care, education, etc.

Oh - and all this must take place with one eye on terrorism. The present is still a dangerous place to live.

Quote of the Day:

"For everyone who is worried about the country's big economic problems - energy policy, health care, the budget deficit - today is a good day. It should be a good day regardless of whether you're elated or disappointed by last night's results, because a campaign that included almost no serious discussion of these issues has now ended. Today marks the start of the 2008 presidential race."
- David Leonhardt

What's going on out there? You get that "feeling" something is happening but you don't know what it is. Do you Mr. Jones? I overheard a conversation outside my office - someone upset because their voting place was moved. Hmmm. What year is this? Do we need the UN to observe? Is Carter back from Nicaragua yet? I don't want to hear horror stories tomorrow about how voting machines didn't work. I was on the voting line at 7AM trying to remember my grandfather's middle name - just in case I was asked. Did George Washington have a dog? Is that a trick question?

I'm having problems gaining access to AOL today. A possible virus? That's not good. Today is election day. I'm certain there are quite a number of people who might need to send election day information out to someone by email but they can't. They might want to work at getting the vote out or communicating with a campaign person. It doesn't take much to pull the plug on things. Technical problems? Who do we blame? Janet Jackson?

Quote of the Day:

"For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell's black depths..."
- William Styron

Countdown to my son's second year of basketball at Widener University:


Men's Basketball on Thursday to Visit Saint Joseph's in Exhibition Contest

Widener’s men’s basketball team this Thursday plays an exhibition contest against Division I Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
Tip-off on Hawk Hill is 7:00 pm.

Widener is coming off a remarkable season in which it closed 23-6 and advanced to the “Sweet 16” of the NCAA Division III Tournament for the first time since 1987. The squad, which won the Commonwealth Conference regular-season title, clinched its spot with an upset at No. 9 York (PA) in the second round.

The team brings back two second team all-conference players in Malcolm Thomas (Baltimore, MD) and fellow senior Essien Ford (Baltimore, MD). Thomas gives Widener a lift a small forward after ending last season seventh in the conference with 13.8 points per game, 15th with 4.6 rebounds per contest and ninth with a .368 three-point percentage. Ford is back at shooting guard after closing ninth in the league with 13.3 points per game and eighth with a .382 three-point percentage.

Widener welcomes a new face on the sideline in head coach Chris Carideo, an All-America shooting guard for the squad in 1995. He arrives after compiling an 86-51 record in five seasons as head coach at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, twice advancing to the NCAA Tournament.

Carideo played for Widener from 1991-95, graduating by hitting a 3-pointer in an NCAA record 75 straight games and closing with a then record 402 three-pointers.

Familiar faces for the Pride will be on the Hawks’ sideline. Head coach Phil Martelli (1972-76) was a former point guard for Widener and is third in school history with 421 assists. Assistant coach Dave Duda served as coach for Widener the last eight years, totaling a 143-68 record and two conference titles (Middle Atlantic 2000, Commonwealth 2001).

Widener opens its season Friday, November 17 against Lincoln, also a “Sweet 16” team last season, at the Rotary Classic in Lancaster, PA.

Well don't forget to vote today. Get the word out. Change begins with you.

OK a little football before Monday ends and everyone has been a QB. The Redskins win and folks are thinking SuperBowl again. Right? Yeah -right. But let's look at the game and someone who never gets any REAL credit - J. Thrash. This guy is my MVP. I've always liked him. Key catches...no flair. If I was Gibbs this guy would be a starter every week. The problem with the Redskins this year has never been Brunell. It's the defense that's weak. Fix it and the team might go somewhere. Not far...but somewhere. The key upcoming games will be against the Eagles. You have to catch the clubs in front of you.


T.O. should catch some balls with his mouth. Too many drops this year...not putting the time into practice? Harrison on the Colts is # 1. A very cool guy. T.O. take some notes. Stay awake.

OH - so what's going on in Pittsburgh with Big Ben? Nothing but a fluke. Look for this guy to be a trivial question like Kordell Stewart. The guy was never a "smart" QB. Nothing but hype.
No Bus in the backfield. No free rides.

Good News before the election tomorrow:


P&W Announces Winners of Writers for Writers Award:

Poets & Writers is thrilled to announce that the three recipients of its 2007 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award are E. Ethelbert Miller, Francine Prose, and Susan Shreve.

Established in 1996, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, which is presented at P&W's annual dinner, recognizes authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community. Honorees are nominated by a committee composed of past winners, other prominent writers, and the Board of Directors of Poets & Writers.

So 2 things can happen tomorrow after you vote:
- Republicans stay in office and don't lose that many seats.
- Democrats upset Republicans around the country

Now what's going to be the media spin?
Who won the election?
Was the election about Bush? The war in Iraq?
Who was responsible for voting people out? Who has the new power?
- Rural white people? Gays? Women? Latinos? People who wear sneakers?
No matter what happens - look for the spin doctors to takeoff.

Oh- and look for Bush to ignore it all or say I told you so. Either way the folks in power can ignore the election the way they've been ignoring so many other things these days.

A new study just came out citing student injuries on school buses. They recommend safety belts.
I always thought it was strange that school buses didn't have these things. Have you ever wondered why the design of the school bus hasn't change in all these years? Where are these buses made? Who selected the color?
I wonder how many years it took for this study to be completed? 15 years?

It can happen anywhere. Here - there and perhaps- here again. Look at the pictures in the newly released photo book by Dorothea Lange - IMPOUNDED (W.W. Norton). 111,000 people of Japanese ancestry moved to internment camps in 1942. All you need is the media, politicians and some incident and folks might do the same thing against another group. It could be you or me. Notice how after 9/11 Muslims were attacked and people started looking funny at people of Arab descent. I was looking at a picture of Japanese Americans standing on long lines waiting to be sent somewhere. A tag around their necks...

I watched the Deepa Mehta movie WATER last night and highly recommend that one see it. In the movie the young girl Chuyia asks- Where is the house for male widows ? This is "shocking" to the women around her. A "sin" thought. WATER is about Hindu women women living in penitence after their husbands die- no matter how young they are. I watched the movie and thought about men who stay in unhappy marriages their entire life. Living in small places - a house or room. No joy in their lives. No pleasure. Not even a touch. Maybe just a meal placed in front of them like a dog. The thing about water is that there is never enough to drink, or you can't get across to the otherside without a bridge, or it's falling on your head and you have no shelter. I've known rivers and hard rain. So many of us drown and never learn to swim. I met a woman once - I thought she was walking on water- until she sank beneath me like a stone.

I'm still doing major cleaning in the HU African American Resource Center. I went through a large box of letter/cards deciding what to keep for historical purposes. Geez...so many people in a box. I have no idea what happened to them. Some I don't remember. :-( Friends?
Lovers? What's the average life span of a good friendship? I'm certain a number of the people in the box of letters are fighting illness and old age. I came across a few people who are no longer living. So many more boxes and files to sort. Last week my assistant found 3 pictures of June Jordan. I'll ship these out in a few days to the Givens Collection at the University of MN. I just read a 1994 letter from Marty Lammon. The guy was living in Fairmont, West Virginia back then. A letter from Peggy Shumaker...

The return of Danny O(rtega) in Nicaragua? The US should work with this country instead of pushing it over the edge again. Geez. Why can't folks get on the same page. As long as we fail to deal with issues of poverty, land reform, and education in Central and South America, the shadows of Sandino and Bolivar will always be there to comfort the unborn. We have to talk about a new hemisphere, where all nations can benefit from trade agreements and no nation is isolated. It's so important to have dialogue with Cuba while Fidel is alive. Haiti should just be "adopted" as an important issue for all African Americans. Do we need a 15 year plan to help Haiti too? Where is the black college that can take the lead in helping this nation plant trees, build schools, and improve healthcare.

Hussein has been sentenced to death by hanging. How many ways can a person still die in Iraq? Car bombings, sniper fire, beheadings, you name it. Hanging sounds like the last chapter of IN COLD BLOOD. If I was writing a short story set in Iraq it would be about an old man who dies a natural death. So you're a young bride living in Baghdad? How do you plan for the future? Do you want to have a very large family so that one child will survive? Why do dictators and cruel leaders believe they will live forever? Someone needs to explain to them how the river only bends.

Tomorrow I'll vote for F-Man. It's 3/5 of a vote. I saw where he was going to different cities asking for advice from various mayors. Do these other guys have answers? Are the streets of Baltimore safer than DC? Is SE Washington- Brooklyn? The person F-Man should be talking to is Ex-Mayor of DC, Sharon Pratt. Pratt was DC Mayor from 1991-1995. She has to be the most attractive ex-mayor in the country. I guess since she wasn't getting a phone call from F-Man she decided to just have her advice printed in the newspaper. Checkout the "Close To Home" section of yesterday's Washington Post. I like her advice about protecting the interest of those not in the room. I loved her Hubert Humphrey quote about government serving those "in the dawn of life and the twilight of life." It's not about serving those simply with the power and the special interests. F-Man should also be talking to Marion Barry and Eleanor H. Norton. Let's see where things are around Juneteenth? Will we hear about changes in DC before StateHood and Emancipation? Toto are we in Texas?

Yesterday was Sunday but look at the nonsense that was in the Washington Post. Did you know the D.C. public schools have plans to do school renovations over the next 15 years?? Are we talking better schools for our grandchildren? Anyone who accepts this is simply crazy. 15 years to fix a sink or repair a gym floor?? An entire generation is going to ballet forever in the "halls" of Ellington High School? Oh- if you think the problems are repairs and renovation and not maintenance then you'll accept a 15 year solution. Why fix things if you don't hire folks to keep things in order. You can't cutback on the custodians.

Next year we should produce a new reality show for television. "The Summer of 2007: The Big Public School MakeOver." During the summer we film people in DC taking back their schools. Yes - a citywide reality show like the NEA BIG READ. Everyone fixing a school instead of reading the same book. Oprah or Katie C giving out awards for the best "repaired" school. We bring in major corporation sponsors and NBA players to give away prizes. Do you know how much we could accomplish between June-August 2007? Do you want to wait 15 years??? What are you doing next summer? Waiting for someone to replace a light bulb? Darkness for you baby - nothing but darkness for you - if you do.

THE E MAG

Treve de blues
- Leon Damas

Welcome to the E-MAG: A Sunday kind of love.

On Sundays I invite other writers to share my E-Space and contribute their own E-Notes. Today my guests are Bijan Bayne, Susan Shreve, and Thomas Stanley.



# 1
BAYNE


Hey, I like it inside 'bert's blog- wall-to-wall books. Speaking of what page my life is on, I'm tiptoeing through a friend's copy of Orhan Pamuk's "My Name is Red", having finished "A Well-Paid Slave", colleague Brad Snyder's worthy exploration of the life and case of baseball challenger Curt Flood. The battle killed Curt much as it had claimed Jackie. In one of those whirlwind writing binges that visits me less frequently than it does the prolific, I dashed off my review of "...Slave" to the e-zine "Sports Central", and submitted two travel features on the comedy scene in Cleveland to a couple of Ohio mags.


I was fortunate enough to have met former Fulbright Scholar Dr. Kyi May Kaung in a DC travel writers' monthly meetup several months back, and enjoy our barter of ideas and observations. This week, besides explaining how lemon grass fits into cuisine , Kyi favored me with her vivid 1990's short story "Black Rice". We also arrived at a March date for one of her Dr. Kaung's Salon series at Silver Spring's Kefa Cafe- this particular week her paintings and my captions will be accompanied by a discussion of physical conceptions and notions regarding "race", called "Who Am I?". Those who have been rudely asked on the street, "What race are you?" would want to be present.

As a longtime election addict, been peeping a lot of daytime MSNBC and CNN, from pundits to panderers.. While I realize Schadenfreude is unhealthy, I have some unsolicited advice for President Bush's Rove-ing consigliere. Take a page from the New South of Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, and don't bash your gay base, embrace it. Hey, votes are votes.

Coach Auerbach dead, and while his alma mater George Washington U. is DC's second largest landowner, not a speck of it bears his name. I see Styron died up on Martha's Vineyard, my literary memory of him is as the object of scathing criticism for his take on Black slave rebellion. I'll be 47 next week, which sounds funny, like the future. One watches "Eyes on the Prize" and realizes how young our heroes were.
Thank you Ethelbert, and I speak for many writers.

Bijan C. Bayne is the author of SKY KINGS: BLACK PIONEERS OF PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL.

# 2
SHREVE

A strange teaching week. In a Voice and Voices class at George Mason we read Things Fall Apart and I was amazed at the violence of the student reactions. It gave me a sense of the real fissures in one small class in a northern va. university failing to find a common ground. But I also love that about teaching--when there's such disagreement-Maybe only with passion that you can be moved to a broader understanding.

I have a memoir which will be published in June about the two years I lived at the Warm Springs Polio Foundation having when I was between the ages of eleven and thirteen. I never intended to write a memoir but this came to me in a white heat. I wrote very quickly and it's now done and edited etc. This week is the first time I've actually thought about writing one's own self as a character and how much of the self is always construct.


I love the novel form, the imagined life. We have a new puppy, a new house, new baby coming. Nevertheless I sometimes find myself a person who likes to live among strangers, to make brief friendships in the fresh produce section of the grocery store, at the coffee shop at the dry cleaners and then retreat from the world.

Sometimes I'm unaware of how much the bad news takes its toll. This is not good. My mother used to pin self improvement notes on the fridge and I loved that she did but thought it so weird that you get to be a certain age, set in your ways, on the other side of young and you're writing little moral notes to yourself.


Susan Shreve is a professor at George Mason University, a novelist, essayist and children's book author. Her most recent adult novel is A Student of Living Things published by Viking in June, 2006. She had a children's book published by Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic in September, 2006 and a memoirWarm Springs: Traces of a Childhood will be published in Juine 2007 by Houghton Mifflin.




#3
STANLEY
From Williamsburg to Gaza, by way of Fairfax

If my week has a beginning, it’s in a converted Williamsburg, NY warehouse called Sugar. Looking across the river towards Manhattan, Sugar has a swank lower level that draws the hard-dancing, well-dressed clientele that line-up behind velvet ropes at over-designed clubs all over NYC. Upstairs they’ve put a stage, a pa-system, and a bar into a cavernous bare room with three porta-johns on an open air deck as the only bathrooms. It is, of course, a funkier crowd who arrived upstairs last Saturday ready to participate in a loft-style night of October’s end Ritual replete with synchronized video projections and costumed models.

I was absolutely buggin’ to be on the same bill with Marshall Allen and the men of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Sun Ra (that black angel with an orange beard) is a pretty significant marker in my thought. Post-Sun Ra, my life has responded to an agenda that is shaped by the most valuable distillations of his legacy of philosophy and bandleadership: 1) That [musical] performance is a powerful ontological force whose effects can be far reaching; 2) That “freedom” is over-rated as a defining value or operative principle; and, perhaps most importantly 3) That something Sunny called the “alter-destiny” really is our only hope for escaping the dire implications of our despicable way of existing on this planet.


I hit the spot just as Greg Tate was leading his Burnt Sugar ensemble through their own arkestral vision of solidarity and truth through music. After their set, I told Greg that my teaching assistant had given me a copy of Hal Foster’s Recodings and reminded him that he had a promo-blurb on the back cover of the book. Foster’s style of argument and his attention to the latent significances buried in the details of artistic practice had been holding my attention during the week I had invested into detangling him. His observation that “it is in fascism that one sees a culture struggle with a loss of the real” resonated with the collapse of a certain kind of reality-checking in what is left to pass for civic discourse, especially in a week book-ended by John Kerry’s “botched joke” and Reverend Haggard’s pathetic public outing.

But it also cut against Sun Ra’s deconstructions of the tyranny of the real, his constant admonitions to dwell in the domain of potential. The real is a form of death.

Bushmeat (my sound system) is an i-tal stew of sampled life and live synthesized sound, improvised into an arrangement that is somewhere between a work of aural cinema and music. I was supposed to go on right before the Arkestra. My intention was to perform a mix of the next installments of Discipline 99, a serial work begun last year that recontextualizes Sun Ra’s powerful Alabama drawl against soundscapes drawn from the same juices that lubricate neural synapses. After setting up the tedium of cables and effects boxes that make up my clumsy instrument and dragging it all on stage, the organizer came up to me waving his arms and trying to explain a situation that had the fire inspector in the middle of it.


The night was getting late and the Arkestra’s hit might not happen at all if it didn’t happen right then. Graciously, I pulled my own plug and yielded the stage to the band Sun Ra had left to play his earthly music.

The middle of the week is about teaching, teaching about text, language, and interactivity in my writing class. We learn through Utterback and Achituv’s Text Rain and Wardrip-Fruin’s Screen that our bodies can be used as instruments not just of inscription/writing, but reading too and we try hard (real hard) to understand why there might not be a text at all if there is not a living body around to interact with it.

Towards the middle of the week, a month ends that is counted in bodies, 105 bodies boxed in flag-draped coffins that will not be photographed (shhh – it’s a secret). Sun Ra’s alter destiny is a moment of decision where we collectively and individually concede that maybe being a human being isn’t as good as it used to be. Maybe it isn’t quite good enough. Sun Ra reminds us (like we need the reminder) that black folks weren’t brought to these shores as human beings. But if we are the only people in this joint with any protracted experience of being pre-human, then maybe we are also the most ideally qualified to catalyze a movement towards the post-human.

The week ends with my heart stretching towards Gaza, where bodies are well-used to reading history with an atomically precise calculus of time that factors us (all of us) in. The Israeli war machine rolls over those bodies, destroying some, breaking others, but for such a big machine it doesn’t make much noise. The music that I played to honor Sun Ra that night in Brooklyn was louder.


Thomas Stanley is an assistant professor of Audio Art and Consciousness in the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University. He is a regular contributor to Signal to Noise magazine.



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IS IT STILL NEGRO SUMMER?

You walk outside and your neighborhood
is changing - especially the color. Leaves
have better luck catching cabs.

It's early November and you're wearing
a sweater. You overhear someone talking
about turning the clocks back.

The mornings are getting lighter.
A confederate chill is in the air.
A jogger passes without nodding.

Where did the seasons go?
Where do seasons go?
Where? Where? Where?

- E. Ethelbert Miller

The OJ case comes to Iraq. The Saddam Hussein verdict is going to upset everyone. No one wins. Is the guy guilty? If the war fits we must acquit? All I know is that Iraq is now a "Bronco" of a country. Reduced to a Rumsfeld of a place where nothing grows without blood. If there is too much violence coming out of Iraq in the next two days watch for folks to turn to the return of Danny O in Nicaragua. Nothing better than an old bad guy to fight. Danny O will mean we now have another radical amigo in our midst. Look for folks to make connections between these small nations in South /Central America and Iran or Syria. I should begin conducting classes in "SpanArabic" for the troops. Who in our government is responsible for drawing dots and lines on the maps. Who is writing the term papers and policy books and just using Google for information? Sometimes folks are just looking for people who pee in their beds. Will we bomb a country if they refuse to change their sheets? North Korea might be Communist but they still might have to change their Lenin.

Oh- As soon as the television hit 24 returns to Fox the Chinese will be the new bad guys. Remember how they kidnapped Jack Bauer in the last episode? Well you just know they took him to a "secret" prison and tortured him. Right? For how long? When 24 airs in January look for the show to be nothing but a commentary on what we've been talking about the last few months. Can you imagine if 24 returns and the Democrats are in power and can't handle a new terrorist attack? And poor Jack not his normal self because of all that torture. What's a world to do? What's on the other channels? Where are we gonna run to? Where should we hide?
YIPES - is what those characters say in the cartoons. YIPES it is. Cartoons we are.

Tea?
Afternoon Tea on Sunday, November 12th from 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM to introduce plans for the inaugural NATIONAL AWARD FOR ARTS WRITING and to meet the program's administrator, Sarah Browning. Call and reserve a tea seat: 202 331-7282. All this will take place at the Arts Club of Washington.

Keep an eye on the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. They have declared "Operation Black November." Attacks continue against the oil refineries in Nigeria. Look for concerns over oil output. Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producer.

I like Michael Wilbon very much. But look what he said in today's Post. The guy wants the Redskins to play Jason Campbell. JC is suppose to be the QB of the future. Now-I've seen the kid in some of those "summer" games. It seems folks in the DC area just want to root for someone or find a savior in JC.

Wilbon says that Campbell could be the next Carson Palmer or Ben Roethlisberger. Yep- Wilbon is right. Campbell could be the NEXT Big Ben in Pitt. I've always felt that Roethlisberger was not a good QB. This year I think folks can see that. The guy is no Brady- no Peyton. So I look at Wilbon's column and then I turn to the Style section of the Post - and there is Heath Shuler trying to come back to DC as a Congressman. Remember the Heath? A hearse of a player - right? What did folks say about Shuler? This is starting to sound old or I'm getting old.

Has anyone seen Booker T. Washington? In the Washington Post (Metro Section) today there is an article about the backlog of 16,000 needed repairs for the D.C. public schools. 16,000???
Now for the joke -
The school system only has 147 maintenance workers, including 10 painters, 8 plumbers, 3 exterminators, 2 welders, - oh - and a shortage of janitors.
Didn't Noah have better help on the ark?

This is just nonsense. On Monday, kids should just report to school with paint and parents who have those old Booker T skills. One week should be set aside to simply repair the schools. No debate. No discussion. Oh - and no knuckleheads stealing the ladders. I think students should play a key role in taking care/repairing their own schools. This way they will also learn those basic skills Booker felt we needed to have. What better way to learn math, science, etc. Plus kids get physical exercise. So, while all the debate is taking place around school boards and control - just - do for self! Fix your schools and let the legal system explain why you can't. If King was here you know he would tell you some laws you just can't obey. Any law or rule that prevents you from fixing the learning space of your child - is not a just law. Oh - and don't talk to me about stepping on some labor union rights. I'm talking first aid here. Fix the DAMN schools! Don't let them bleed.

Do you really believe that Hugo Chavez is trying to influence every election in this hemisphere?
Did you ever think that Fidel Castro was responsible for every storm that hit Florida?
Geez. When will we change the playbook and simply try to end poverty in the region. No excuse. Just improve the living conditions of poor people. End drugs, criminal activity and senseless profit. Invest in people - learn to share and love. Is that too difficult? How much money and power does one person need? Greed is such a stupid beast - how sad so many of us desire to ride the animal to nowhere.

Full employment? Can someone tell me who is making all the guns and bombs that people are using around the world?? Where are the factories located? How come in some countries folks never run out of ammunition but they run out of food? Who builds all those secret tunnels around the world? Do these folks have day jobs? It's like walking down the streets of a city and seeing a poster of a missing person. Where did they go? Were they kidnapped by a serial murderer? Are the aliens here? Is there some secret portal that some folks know about? Oh- and where is Bubble Boy? Is he up for election somewhere next Tuesday? When I die I want to travel first class, but first tell me another lie this morning. Do you love me or is the sex just good?

Quote of the Day:

"I frankly haven't heard an alternative posed for how we fight the war on terror except on the offense."
-Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State

Rice knows football, so we need to look at this quote very closely. We know that defense wins championships. Right? But are we playing a game?

Here is another important quote:

"The war on terror is a battle for the future of civilization."
- Vice President Cheney

Wow. OK -so you can see we must be playing in the SuperBowl of life. All this has me feeling like Duane Thomas. Remember him?

I still maintain the speech President Bush gave after 9/11 to Congress should now be viewed as one of the most important in US history. In it Bush outlines a new way of looking at the world and fighting wars. We are now debating the issues of" how." Five years ago we were angry, afraid and let's just face it- terrorized. Many of us simply wanted to roll ourselves up in the flag and set the clocks back. We didn't have time to look at how our actions might affect the basic foundations of our society and key documents like the U.S. Constitution. We started drawing lines, profiling folks, and taking our shoes off in airports. So here we are right before another election and some of us have holes in our socks. How did they get there? Who's looking at you?
Where's your mother? Now- let's talk about your underwear. Is it clean? You never know when someone might take you to a secret detention cell. You don't want to be tortured for something you didn't know - do you?

David Catania who is running for re-election for the At-Large D.C. Council position has produced the best campaign material this year. Finally I received something in the mail that's more than a person's resume and some pictures of the candidate smiling with kids. We need to have standards in our community. If we fail to do this we will simply walk around with ink on our thumbs and fools making decisons over our lives.

A busy day. I'm trying to rest my mind. I plan to just stay home the next few days. I started reading Auerbach's ON AND OFF THE COURT while on the Metro this evening. Went by the video store and selected 3 movies for the weekend:

Lucky # Slevin
The Last Stand
Water - The Deepa Mehta film.

Peter Ascoli's book came in the mail. He is the author of JULIUS ROSENWALD: THE MAN WHO BUILT SEARS, ROEBUCK AND ADVANCED THE CAUSE OF BLACK EDUCATION IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH. I plan to do a "Windows & Mirrors" program around this book in February 2007. "Windows & Mirrors" is the series I started with Miriam Nathan and Ken Sherman at the D.C. Jewish Community Center several years ago. It's a way of doing cultural programs that focus on the shared traditions between two communties. I think W&M might be more important than the Ascension series I started in 1974.

Also in the mail was William Tecku's ROAD JAZZ! It's a small chapbook. Tecku is a poet living in Arizona that I stay in touch with.

A nice photo of jazz musician Julius Hemphill in the New York Times today. Hemphill died in 1995. He was a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet.
Bring back the "LONG TONGUES."

My son's basketball season starts next week. The exhibition game on November 9th should be a good one. It's Widener against Saint Joseph. The Saint Joseph Hawks are led by Jawan Carter -2006 Delaware Player of the Year. He holds the State All-time state record with 2, 464 points. Carter averages 29.4 points a game. Whew. My son loves to play defense...this should be fun time. Go Widener!

A wing and a prayer? Sad to see the airplane accidents in Nigeria. The last one took the life of the sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Maccido. He was the spiritual leader of Nigeria's muslims. A major loss.

Quote of the Day:

"Brazil is living a magical moment."
- Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, recently re-elected president of Brazil.

P.Anna Johnson has written her memoir AUSTRALIA YEARS. It can be obtained from the following site: www.lulu.com
Johnson was the founder of Open Hand Publishing Company. In 1986, she published my collection of poems, WHERE ARE THE LOVE POEMS FOR DICTATORS? Her major contribution however was supporting the work of Civil Rights Leader James Forman. Johnson published THE MAKING OF BLACK REVOLUTIONARIES which is a classic. Every home should have a copy of this book. So many valuable lessons one can learn about organizing.

Someone's blog will take you there:

Egypt: www.manalaa.net

China: www.zonaeuropa.com

Saudi Arabia: mystiquesa.blogspot.com

Iran: www.hoder.com/weblog

F-Man on the front page of the Washington Post today. His embracing of Cynthia Gray is what he must continue doing while in office. How do you embrace an entire city? Fenty must show compassion and love for the people who live under his leadership. Do you think F-Man will introduce the "hat" the way Evo in Bolivia had a sweater? Look for the media to do a silly story on something like this. Is F-Man wearing a "gangster" hat? Tough guy? I think he looks like a man who could be King (back in the 1950s) - remember that photo of King getting arrested?

Wil Haygood is always good. See his short essay in today's Washington Post on the friendship between James Baldwin and William Styron.

Ichiro Watch:
Ichiro won his sixth straight Gold Glove Award.

On a serious note...let's look at education in DC. F-Man takes over in January. He wants to take over the" more-troubled schools" while giving other schools that are performing well more autonomy. Let's play with just the language for a moment. Replace the word "more-troubled" with segregated. Yep -let's talk about race (and class) when it comes to education in DC. Many of the schools that are "more-troubled" are where the black kids are. It's where the buildings have not been repaired. Why? We didn't want to put money into them; especially when the Black Middle Class no longer sent their kids there. So the inheritors are the sufferers. Poor and working class people who send their kids to the nearby schools "praying" that someone inside those buildings will educate them. Many of the working black parents, work very hard and don't have time to be soccer moms and check on things. They are like my Mom. They send their kids to school to be educated. They expect the teacher and principal to do their jobs. Many of the "more-troubled" schools have lost their best teachers (supplies were gone first) and are like homes getting by on patched plumbing. You know a major leak is going to happen. You just don't know when, or hope your child isn't the one slipping on the floor because of bad grades. Oh- and the "more-troubled" schools are where the knuckleheads reside. I remember these guys when I lived back in the Bronx. They were called - yep- you guessed it - trouble makers. Now we have schools named after these guys. The trouble makers try to make every classroom and everyday a 9/11 experience. They can terrorize a classroom, a hall, a cafeteria, and 3 blocks in any direction when school is over. Are these guys learning? The only thing you don't have to worry about is one of them playing Columbine. These trouble makers tend to shoot just one or two kids - by accident - usually because of some girl friend. You've seen the movies - for 50 cents or less. These are the guys who will have to be placed in a new form of special education. Here is where I make a request for funding. Meanwhile, you just can't takeover schools and expect immediate results. F-Man needs to look at what Janey is doing. Give the guy more support for 2-3 years. Now - what are we going to measure during this time? Standard test scores? Please. So all of a sudden DC schools are going to be producing little Carter G. Woodsons. No way, that's going to happen overnight. Are we looking at a "Lost Generation" again? We might not want to use the term, but then we don't want to call the situation in Iraq a Civil War either. You - make the call. It's a difficult one, but it begins with the language. Why keep fooling ourselves? How many young people do you hear everyday - who can't talk without saying F and MF? Which brings me back to F-Man during these times of transition. How do we begin to talk to ourselves and imagine our beauty?

Another day and still no call from the Nationals. I could take them to the playoffs --just look at my resume. I've written several poems about baseball. I don't drive so I wouldn't need a parking spot outside the new stadium. How much will that save the city? OK, so the last manager was a Hall of Famer. But look at what Gwendolyn Brooks once said about my career:
"Ethelbert Miller is one of the most significant and influential poets of our time." Oh- And you have my word - I won't try to sign Barry Bonds. Now, do you believe me or Soriano?

AN UPCOMING (E)vent in New York. Please attend.

December 1, 2006

Cave Canem Legacy Conversation Series featuring E. Ethelbert Miller, interviewed by Elizabeth Alexander. They will discuss the people and events that have influenced his life and work as well as Miller’s role in mentoring emerging writers and promoting literary organizations. The New School (Wollman Hall),65 West 11th Street, New York, NY. 7 pm. Free.

OK. Apologize and put coco butter on it. We are so stupid when it comes to nonsense news. So a politician who really never says anything of importance tells a bad joke. What do comedians do?
Apologize? No, they go on trying to make you laugh. Which is what Democrats and Republicans seem to make a career of doing. We are at war and death is not funny and people do not die from telling bad jokes. Is this going to change how you vote next week? If it does you shouldn't be voting. Study the issues. Find the best person to represent you. Everything seems to be reduced to silly entertainment these days. Sometimes I feel as if Michael Jackson is hanging all of us over a balcony.

I just checked my "Things To Do" list that I made while sitting in Penn Station on Sunday. It looks like nothing has been done except catching up on correspondence. I did work on class stuff for Mason. Here's what in the pot:

- Getting back to the second memoir - THE FIFTH INNING
- Reviewing my Langston Hughes lectures
- Sending poems out to Primus St. John in Oregon
- Pull Line of March material for upcoming interview with James Early
- Contact Emory & Henry College about adding more items to their archives
- Raising money for the Vazirani studio in Vermont
- Finding the right place for my Vazirani files
- Prepare for upcoming IPS board meeting

I went down into the stacks of Founders Library (HU) and found a copy of Auerbach's ON AND OFF THE COURT. I should be able to read it in an evening. I had no idea how much this guy changed basketball until I was reading the long article in the Washington Post the other day.

Nicholas Burns the UnderSecretary of State for Political Affairs was on the Lehrer Report last night talking about North Korea. This guy is just good on television. I thought I was watching Brady throwing passes to his receivers. Burns is smart and answers questions very well. This guy should move up.

Talking about moving up - I'm casting my early 2008 vote for president right now. The only person I can see myself supporting (at this time) is former Democratic senator from North Carolina - JOHN EDWARDS. Go back and read the essay he had in yesterday's Washington Post on Uganda. Edwards is the person to watch...don't get caught by the media hype about Clinton and any young good looking black man in a suit. It's about issues and substance. It's about vision and leadership. Edwards has been trying to place issues like poverty on the frontburner. The last person trying to do this was Sen. Wellstone. Boy- do I miss that guy.

Don't wait until February to celebrate Black History Month!

If you live in the Washington DC Metropolitan Area or may just be visiting, you are invited to attend a Wreath Laying Ceremony to kick-off the introduction of the 2007 Black History Theme on November 2, 2006.

10:00 a.m., at the Historic Lincoln Memorial Cemetery 4001 Suitland Road, Suitland, MD.
This is a ASALH Program.

Wreaths will be layed at the following gravesites:

DR. CARTER G. WOODSON -Father of Black History
VAN MCCOY- composer, producer
DR. CHARLES DREW- surgeon and scientist

PLEASE SHARE THIS INFORMATION WITH ALL YOUR COLLEAGUES AND FRIENDS AND JOIN US TO CELEBRATE, AFRICANS IN THE AMERICAS.

THE 2007 BLACK HISTORY THEME IS-- FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM: AFRICANS IN THE AMERICAS.

So guess who's coming to dinner?

North Korea.

Here are other countries we need to be sitting around the table with:
Cuba, Syria, Iran...
Dialogue is the first step down the path to peace and love.
The world is too small and no nation is invisible.