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E-NOTES: WHEN THE NEWS IS NOT ENOUGH. THE BLOG OF E. ETHELBERT MILLER
Saturday, April 12, 2014
JAZZ
The Historical Society of Washington, D.C.'s 'Washington History' celebrates Jazz Appreciation Month with a special issue on jazz in D.C., edited by Dr. Maurice Jackson of Georgetown University and Dr. Blair Ruble of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
From the Editors, by Blair Ruble and Maurice Jackson
“Seventh Street, Black D.C.’s Music Mecca” by Blair Ruble
“Great Black Music and the Desegregation of Washington, D.C.,” by Maurice Jackson
“Washington’s Duke Ellington,” by John Hasse
“Interview with William Brower,” by Willard Jenkins
“Jazz Radio in Washington, a memoir,” by Rusty Hassan
“Legislating Jazz,” by Anna Celenza
“Researching #DC Jazz,” by Mike Fitzgerald
Three poems by Ethelbert Miller
“Seventh Street, Black D.C.’s Music Mecca” by Blair Ruble
“Great Black Music and the Desegregation of Washington, D.C.,” by Maurice Jackson
“Washington’s Duke Ellington,” by John Hasse
“Interview with William Brower,” by Willard Jenkins
“Jazz Radio in Washington, a memoir,” by Rusty Hassan
“Legislating Jazz,” by Anna Celenza
“Researching #DC Jazz,” by Mike Fitzgerald
Three poems by Ethelbert Miller
Friday, April 11, 2014
LaCasa
I was at 1448 Irving Street yesterday; that's where the construction is taking place for the new men's shelter LaCasa. My poem "Men Made Strong By Love" will be included in a mural designed by the artist Michele Goosby. The project is being coordinated by the DC Department of General Services.
Everything should be completed this summer.
Here is my poem:
MEN MADE STRONG BY LOVE
In the center of our hands we hold our lives
lifted from the harvest of our years.
We are men not hardened into stone
but made strong by love.
We are brothers in number
providing shelter in our arms and hearts.
We are stars at night
men who change the world when daylight comes.
We shine forever-
our souls ablaze with hope.
- E. Ethelbert Miller
Michele at LaCasa yesterday:
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Everything should be completed this summer.
Here is my poem:
MEN MADE STRONG BY LOVE
In the center of our hands we hold our lives
lifted from the harvest of our years.
We are men not hardened into stone
but made strong by love.
We are brothers in number
providing shelter in our arms and hearts.
We are stars at night
men who change the world when daylight comes.
We shine forever-
our souls ablaze with hope.
- E. Ethelbert Miller
Michele at LaCasa yesterday:
Thursday, April 10, 2014
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THE NEW E AT HOME
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It's amazing how pets can change your life. I've been having fun with Eden everyday.
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E-News
Working on a mural project for the LaCasa men's shelter. Yesterday I finished the draft of the poem that will be on the wall. Will make a site visit this afternoon.
My friend Joanna Chen (from Israel) is reading at The Writer's Center this evening.
Working on my Sterling Brown talk that I'll present at the end of the month.
I watched the Nats last night. Good to see Harper getting out of that slump. If he starts hitting this team should get off to a good start. Still not happy with Soriano as the closer...
John Cole (director of the Center of the Book at the Library of Congress) sent me a copy of THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AND THE CENTER FOR THE BOOK: Historical Essays in Honor of John Cole. Cole is a great guy. Fun working with him on the George Washington Libraries Development Advisory Council.
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| John Cole |
ALLIANCE FOR NEW MUSIC-THEATRE PRESENTS THE VACLAV HAVEL PROJECT, MAY 7-18
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA – This spring, Alliance for New Music-Theatre presents The Václav Havel Project – a double bill that pairs the irreverent Unveiling, one of the Czech playwright’s most popular plays, with the world premiere of Vaněk Unleashed, a hilarious companion piece of original music-theatre by D.C.’s Maurice Saylor and Susan Galbraith. The two works will be performed at Artisphere’s Black Box Theatre (1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington) from May 7 to 18, before traveling to the prestigious Prague Fringe Festival at the end of May.
Unveiling features a bourgeois couple entertaining their friend, dissident playwright Ferdinand Vaněk, who discovers in one evening that the world has grown into a slippery and chaotic place in the time since his political imprisonment. Vaněk represents the dramatic alter ego of the playwright, who observes society around him, enduring painfully funny angst in his alienation. The play also explores issues of integrity, morality and responsibility.
Vaněk Unleashed is a uniquely American response to the beloved central character of Unveiling, following in the tradition of playwrights Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard, who also paid tribute to Havel by incorporating Vaněk into their works. In Vaněk Unleashed, audiences will find Vaněk still struggling with issues of the slipperiness of identity as he careens imaginatively between prison and the more terrifying and absurd world outside. Comedic and entertaining with a tuneful and quirky score, the piece takes its performance style from two popular American art forms: the American musical and silent screen comedy, especially the work of vaudeville and silent film comedian Harry Langdon. It was said of Langdon that his film persona seemed to have been dropped to earth without a set of instructions. The same could be said of our man Vaněk.
Creative Team
Miřenka Čechová is an actor, performer, choreographer and director from the Czech Republic who directed Unveiling. Vaněk Unleashed was composed by Maurice Saylor and written and directed by Susan Galbraith. Saylor is a D.C.-based composer and performer with special affinities for vocal, chamber and silent film music. His scores often showcase an interest in unusual combinations of instruments and blur the boundaries of style and genre. Founder of the Snark Ensemble, his music has been performed at the John F. Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art. Galbraith is a playwright, librettist, director and performer who serves as President and Artistic Director of Alliance for New Music-Theatre. Trained as both an actress and dancer, she has directed and performed in repertory theatre, new plays and experimental crossover forms of dance-theatre.
Ticket Information
Performances will be held May 7, 8, 14 and 15 at 7 and 9:30 p.m. and May 11 and 18 at 2 p.m. Tickets, which are $30 ($20 for students and groups), are available from www.newmusictheatre.org or 202-966-3104.
Music, Post-performance discussion and Photo Display
On May 7-8, Vaněk Unleashed will be accompanied by live music from the Snark Ensemble, whose members have composed and performed more than 30 silent film scores, treating audiences to a blend of boogie land jazz and musical slapstick comedy. Post performance discussions will allow audience member to share their ideas and interpretations of Václav Havel and these works. The production also will be accompanied by a photographic essay exhibit by Oldřich Škácha, a close friend of Havel and photographer who closely documented his life as a dissident.
About Václav Havel
Václav Havel (1936-2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician who was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first president of the Czech Republic (1993–2003), having masterminded the bloodless Velvet Revolution. He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, which have been translated internationally.
About the Alliance for New Music-Theatre
Founded in 1996, the Alliance for New Music-Theatre is a nonprofit performing arts organization committed to the creation, expression and appreciation of music-theatre in all its forms – cabaret, musicals, opera, plays with music, and multi-media works. Funding is provided by generous individuals, foundations and corporations.
For more information, visit www.newmusictheatre.org, or connect with us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AllianceNMT.DC or on twitter, @allianceNMT_DC.
About Artisphere
Artisphere connects artists and audiences through an eclectic mix of thought-provoking arts programming. It is managed by Arlington Economic Development and supported in part by the Rosslyn Business Improvement District and others. Directions and parking information is available at www.artisphere.com.
Wednesday, April 09, 2014
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Tuesday, April 08, 2014
The Scholars
Will spend time preparing for my next television show - The Scholars.
My guest will be Maurice Jackson - history professor at Georgetown University.
We will be talking about the history of jazz in Washington, D.C.
Tape date is April 23rd at UDC-TV.
My guest will be Maurice Jackson - history professor at Georgetown University.
We will be talking about the history of jazz in Washington, D.C.
Tape date is April 23rd at UDC-TV.
POET LORE
The new issue of Poet Lore is out.
Sad to look at the memorial page (139) and see the list of voices now silent:
Kofi Awoonor
Amiri Baraka
Wanda Coleman
James Emanuel
Maxine Kumin
Sunday, April 06, 2014
This new book includes my tribute to the poet Wanda Coleman.
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Saturday, April 05, 2014
PUSHKIN
How many times have I passed Pushkin? Yesterday I stopped and took his picture. We should have celebrations in front of this statue. Will the poets step forward?
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| Photo b Ethelbert |
Pushkin Statue
The first U.S. memorial to Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin was erected at The George Washington University in September 2000. “This statue will serve as a great inspiration to our students who are drawn to the elegance, wit and lightness of Pushkin’s language and the accessibility of his imagery,” former GW President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg said when the memorial was installed. The statue is found at 22nd and H streets, NW.
The first U.S. memorial to Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin was erected at The George Washington University in September 2000. “This statue will serve as a great inspiration to our students who are drawn to the elegance, wit and lightness of Pushkin’s language and the accessibility of his imagery,” former GW President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg said when the memorial was installed. The statue is found at 22nd and H streets, NW.
Bert's Lament - Bert's Blues
All those Andy Shallal signs around town remind me now of "Bird Lives!" How long will we have to wait to change the politics of DC?
I still believe in transformative politics. Time to work on changing the narrative of this city.
How many people didn't vote for Shallal because they thought he couldn't win?
Who told us Bowser was the best candidate? Who? Who? Who?
I feel like a blues singer in Afghanistan - a hostage in Ward 4.
I still believe in transformative politics. Time to work on changing the narrative of this city.
How many people didn't vote for Shallal because they thought he couldn't win?
Who told us Bowser was the best candidate? Who? Who? Who?
I feel like a blues singer in Afghanistan - a hostage in Ward 4.
Friday, April 04, 2014
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Today's selection - from The Bohemians by Ben Taroff. In today's fast changing world, where the way movies, music, and books are distributed and sold is constantly changing, it is worth noting that it has been changing continuously throughout the last two hundred years. The books of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) were sold by subscription to the emerging middle class that was his most important audience. And Twain and other authors of his day were rarely able to make a living just from writing books. In fact, he made most of his money from the lecture circuit, booking the largest lecture hall in a city and then boisterously promoting and selling tickets to his lecture. Twain changed American literature. He was a voice from the West -- Missouri, Nevada and then San Francisco -- and thus had more easily escaped the cultural shadow of Europe. Although he had first gained national fame with the short story "Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog," his first and most successful book was The Innocents Abroad, a confident expression of America's ascendance:
"The Innocents Abroad sold 82,524 copies in its first eighteen months, earning [Mark] Twain $16,504 in royalties -- or more than $217,000 in today's dollars. It would be his biggest best seller by far, the book that gave him a permanent place in the culture. Reviewers loved it. Even the [highly influential] Atlantic Monthly approved. 'There is an amount of pure human nature in the book that rarely gets into literature,' wrote the magazine's assistant editor, William Dean Howells. '[E]ven in its impudence it is charming.'
"The Atlantic's support was a bit surprising, considering the book was an attack on everything it stood for. ... The Innocents Abroad was a bullet in the heart of America's literary establishment. It began with how the book was sold. It was published by subscription, which meant that traveling salesmen went door-to-door peddling it to consumers. This was a popular way to sell cookbooks and Bibles, but no self-respecting literary writer would ever dream of distributing his work this way. The polite thing to do was to put your book on the shelf and wait for it to sell, not run into people's houses demanding they buy it. "Subscription publishing had ancient roots -- Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington had both worked as book canvassers -- but it flourished after the Civil War. The rapid growth of railroads enabled salesmen to travel farther and faster. Elisha Bliss's American Publishing Company belonged to this new generation of subscription houses, enlisting agents to trawl for customers throughout the country. 
"Twain loved the model. It let someone of his unorthodox talents bypass the gatekeepers of traditional publishing, and gave him a more direct route to his core audience: the middle class. His readers were doctors, lawyers, businessmen -- the rising bourgeoisie of the new industrializing nation. They didn't care if subscription publishing lacked high-culture cachet. They wanted to satisfy their growing curiosity about the rest of the country and the world. TheQuaker City sightseers [in Twain's book] came mostly from their ranks. The Innocents Abroad was their story.
"Upscale Americans had been going to Europe for decades. But in the years after the Civil War, as transatlantic travel became cheaper, a new kind of creature began crossing the ocean en masse: the Middle American. He didn't have the polish of his predecessors. He spoke atrocious French and mangled the pronunciation of foreign names. Faced with the glories of Europe, he wavered between headscratching incomprehension and enraptured reverence for things he didn't understand -- 'old connoisseurs from the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a fresco and a fireplug,' as Twain put it. Worst of all, he had an insatiable need for souvenirs. In Egypt, Twain spotted a relic hunter crawling up the Sphinx, hammering a memento off its face. 'The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.'
"The familiar spectacle of watching one's fellow Americans make fools of themselves in a foreign country -- Twain captured it perfectly. But parody wasn't his only point. There was pride too. Like him, these bourgeois barbarians were emissaries of a newly confident nation that had just passed through the bloodiest war in its history. America was coming of age -- and the moment was ripe for an Oedipal reckoning with its Old World roots. Twain didn't go abroad to swoon over a superior civilization. On the whole he found Europe and the Holy Land dirty, dilapidated places, trapped in the past. Even their most cherished treasures often failed to impress. Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper was a 'mournful wreck,' he wrote; like much else he saw on his journey, it had grown decrepit with age. The lesson of The Innocents Abroad was that Americans should stop venerating the corpses of dead cultures. Their barbarianism was infinitely preferable to the decadence of a region well past its prime. They belonged to the country of the future: an innovative, economically ascendant nation with a style all its own. ...
"The Innocents Abroad proclaimed America's liberation from the Old World, its prose suggested the form that freedom might take." 
The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
Author: Ben Tarnoff
Publisher: The Penguin Press HC
Date: Copyright 2014 by Benjamin Tarnoff
Pages: 176-178
 If you wish to read further: Buy Now |
Refraining is not Enough | April 4, 2014
Whenever we find fault with others, whether through anger, contemptuous certainty, self-righteousness, or gossip, it is often based in fear. We may not be aware of our fears, but when we look deeply, we may discover the fear of rejection, loss of control, of unworthiness, or the fear of disconnection. But refraining alone is not enough—by itself it is just behavior modification—and it is neither healing nor transformative. Only through uncovering and consciously entering into the deep hole inside, welcoming the fear with curiosity and compassion, can we ultimately reconnect with the basic wholeness of our true nature.
—Ezra Bayda, “Gossip
Thursday, April 03, 2014
THE TIME IS NOW BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE
OK..
Here is my list of things I should consider not doing or joining:
Rodeo
Circus
Marching band
A church choir
Bowling league
Cooking class
Black romance book club
Republican Party
NRA
Here is my list of things I should consider not doing or joining:
Rodeo
Circus
Marching band
A church choir
Bowling league
Cooking class
Black romance book club
Republican Party
NRA
Thursday, April 10, 6:30 PM
Poet and critic Rigoberto Gonzalez will deliver a lecture titled "Latino Poetry: Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition". This event is free and open to the public. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Hispanic Division and presented in partnership with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Location: Montpelier Room, James Madison Building (sixth floor)
Contact: (202) 707-5394
Poet and critic Rigoberto Gonzalez will deliver a lecture titled "Latino Poetry: Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition". This event is free and open to the public. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Hispanic Division and presented in partnership with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Location: Montpelier Room, James Madison Building (sixth floor)
Contact: (202) 707-5394
I gave a talk on Langston Hughes today at the Washington Metropolitan OASIS (in Bethesda). A fun good time. Wonderful people. A number of Andy Shallal supporters. Maybe the majority of progressive people in the area live outside DC. A number of people knew my work by way of NPR.
I'll be reading some of my poetry on NPR on Wednesday, April 23rd at 11AM. Tune into the Diane Rehm Show. I'll post a link on the 24th.
When I came back home the first flowers were blooming in my front yard. Gosh - what a wonderful sign. This has been a tough year - a tough week. My first wife (Mikki) called and told me her mom died. The sadness in her voice made me want to hold her close - no matter how many years of separation between us. In her last note this afternoon she said "grief is an odd and unpredictable thing."
Somehow we survive and continue loving.
I'll be reading some of my poetry on NPR on Wednesday, April 23rd at 11AM. Tune into the Diane Rehm Show. I'll post a link on the 24th.
When I came back home the first flowers were blooming in my front yard. Gosh - what a wonderful sign. This has been a tough year - a tough week. My first wife (Mikki) called and told me her mom died. The sadness in her voice made me want to hold her close - no matter how many years of separation between us. In her last note this afternoon she said "grief is an odd and unpredictable thing."
Somehow we survive and continue loving.
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| Photo by Ethelbert |
Please share the information below:
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Did the Shallal campaign for mayor of DC change the landscape of DC politics?
What strategies did the campaign pursue? What was successful? What failed?
How progressive is the progressive DC community?
What funding obstacles did the Shallal campaign have to overcome?
What role did the media play in getting the Shallal message out to the community?
Is DC ready for a dialogue on race, educational reform or income inequality?
Should Andy Shallal run again?
The above are just a few of the questions we will discuss on April 28, 2014
Time and Place:
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
Conference Room
1-4 PM
1112 16th Street, NW
Suite 600
(202) 234-9382
E. Ethelbert Miller
Board Chair/ IPS
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Quote of the Day
Businessman Andy Shallal added style and substance on issues throughout the campaign but couldn't break out of the pack.
- Tom Sherwood
The Northwest Current
- Tom Sherwood
The Northwest Current
Wednesday, April 02, 2014
ANOTHER E
Another E moved into the house yesterday.
Eden.
Here she is falling asleep while I write poetry.
So much for the spoken word...
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Eden.
Here she is falling asleep while I write poetry.
So much for the spoken word...
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Disappointed in DC
What should I say about the election results?
It's going to be difficult for me to vote in the upcoming November election.
Where is the progressive politics in DC?
How does one build an effective campaign and organization?
Stay tuned.
It's going to be difficult for me to vote in the upcoming November election.
Where is the progressive politics in DC?
How does one build an effective campaign and organization?
Stay tuned.
Tuesday, April 01, 2014
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