Mic Check: Hip Hop Evolves

Saturday, October 28 2 pm.

Join us for a gathering of important, provocative voices: Ta-Nehisi Coates, William Jelani Cobb, Natalie Hopkinson, Natalie Moore and moderator Esther Iverem. Together they will survey and assess the future of hip-hop, perhaps the most important cultural movement of our time. The panel will discuss how hip-hop defined the aesthetics of a generation, the uses and limits of a hip-hop identity (especially regarding black masculinity), and the intersection between arts and activism. We expect a deconstruction done with love and respect.

Ta-Nehisi Coates was once obsessed with Franz Fanon. Now he covers business for Time magazine. Go figure.

William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College, a contributing writer to Essence magazine and author of the forthcoming To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic.

Co-author of Deconstructing Tyrone, Natalie Hopkinson is a Scripps Howard doctoral fellow at the University of Maryland-College Park, where she is also a visiting professor of journalism. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and two small children.

Moderator Esther Iverem is founder and editor of SeeingBlack.com, which is dedicated to Black critical voices on arts, media and politics. Also a poet, her most recent book is Living in Babylon and a collection of her reviews, essays and interviews on Black film, We Gotta Have It, is forthcoming.

Co-author of Deconstructing Tyrone, Natalie Y. Moore is a freelance journalist who has worked for the Pioneer Press, the Detroit News, and the Associated Press. An adjunct instructor of media studies at Columbia College, she lives in Chicago.

All events take place at Vertigo Books unless otherwise indicated. All are welcome to attend our readings but if you wish to have a book signed, it must be purchased at Vertigo Books, rather than at a competitor. Vertigo Books7346 Baltimore Ave. College Park MD 20740301-779-9300www.vertigo-books.com

Facts:
Today 80 percent of America's beef is slaughtered by 4 companies.
Today 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by 2 companies.
Today 30 percent of the milk is processed by just 1 company.

Not a good day for DaBert. Fighting a cold and a body that's weak. Still I'm doing better than the Redskins. Right? Just check my old E-Notes. Where did this team think it was going this year? Playoffs?? How can a team with no future hall of famers get to the SuperBowl? Not this year or next. What's wrong with the team? The defense- stupid. These guys can't stop the run and can't cover the deep pass. Hello. Good-bye. Is there anyone on the Redskin defense you have to look for before the ball is snapped? Nah. Oh- and Portis is OK. But he's not the great runner. The great runner carries your team. You don't" look" to him to carry the team. It's understood. If you play the run you can stop Portis. Now if this guy can't run against the Colts it will simply prove my point again (and again). The Colts should put 45 points on the Skins and I'm not a Peyton fan. At 2-5 the season will be over. Folks will be fired. Gibbs is a nice guy so you feel for him the way you feel for Frank Robinson. But Gibbs might not be the coach for this team. Oh- and folks keep talking about a 600/700 page playbook for the offense as if they need to go to Oxford to play football. What's that about? The Redskins are an average team. They can't beat Philadelphia, New York or Dallas...so where can they go? Last place this year is my prediction.

Baseball? Yes - the media got its Tigers, Tigers, burning bright. Notice how sports is helping the old cities like Boston, Chicago and now Detroit. The media loves happy stories because they love their ratings before they love covering important news. So we start cheering for the New Orleans Saints and maybe they make the playoffs. But how many people will watch the game in a FEMA trailer? Why should Reggie Bush help us forget about George Bush? I must be missing something here. Is there a fumble somewhere and no one is telling us?

Quote of the day:

"And last night, after everyone had gone on home. I stood naked on my front porch and howled like an old coyote and the old coyotes, beautiful and crazy, howled right back."
-Sherman Alexie

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 Nibir K. Ghosh and Afaa Michael Weaver. Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, Agra College, Agra (India) and is the Chief Editor of Re-Markings. He was a Senior Fulbright Fellow, 2003-2004.







Weaver is a poet and playwright. In 1998 he was a Pew Fellow. From 1997 to 2000, he was editor of Obsidian III. He has studied and taught in Taiwan and China as a Fulbright scholar. Weaver has studied Taijiquan for twenty-six years and is a Dao disciple of Shifu Huang Chien Liang. He is a holder of an endowed chair at Simmons College, where he is the Alumnae Professor of English. Weaver is the author of nine collections of poetry.







# 1
GHOSH


In an impressive function held recently in the city of the Taj Mahal, the noted Hindi poet, Padmashri Neeraj released the Tenth grand issue of Re-Markings, the biannual journal of research in English that I edit and publish from Agra, India.

In a short span of five years the journal has gradually evolved as a useful guide to the ever-expanding frontiers of human experience. It has not only provided a perfect platform for addressing specific issues and concerns central to the human predicament in a hostile world but has also been instrumental in creating a powerful climate of opinion to enhance the understanding of our relationship to time, clime and space.

I distinctly remember how, when we launched Re-Markings in March 2002, friends, well-wishers and detractors had warned us about the dangers of extremely high infant mortality rate that beset academic journals in India. Drawing strength and sustenance from the huge reservoirs of trust and faith created by patrons, contributors, subscribers and admirers, this humble enterprise has succeeded in leaving its indelible imprints on the shifting sands of time.

Responding to Re-Markings, Charles Johnson, the recipient of the National Book Award, has observed: “All in all, with its impressive global range and vision, and especially the international writers included, Re-Markings is magnificent, critically and creatively.” Re-Markings offers a panoramic view of the kaleidoscopic range and variety of incisive critical response to British, American, African, Canadian and Indian literatures. Special Sections based on specific events, issues and themes have been a regular feature of Re-Markings.

It is perhaps a happy coincidence that Re-Markings, like the equinoxes, appears in March and September each year. The vernal and the autumnal equinoxes set the globe in perfect gravitational balance and become the harbingers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn. I am optimistic that Re-Markings will continue to offer, through a clockwork precision of the biannual event, the hope and cheer that one finds in the songs of Spring and the music of Autumn. The Gita says: “Every surface derives its soil from the depths even as every shadow reflects the nature of the substance.”

I am optimistic that Re-Markings will find effective sustenance in what it has to offer.

Early this week my friend Chandran from Hyderabad sent me the text of the Presidential Address that W.H. Auden had delivered at the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom at Bombay in March 1951. The text brought home to me, an ardent Auden admirer, how Auden could successfully convey through his characteristic simple poetic statements the quintessential reality of the many facets of human freedom. He may have stated in despair that “poetry makes nothing happen” but he was always against ivory-tower poets and artists.


As an instance I would like to quote a few lines from Auden’s address that I have mentioned above. Auden states: “Perhaps as long as artists exist doing what they like, they remind people who govern of what they do not like to be reminded, that the government are people and not numbers.”


In a world where the oppressor is continually on the look out for new reasons and devices for silencing dissent, Auden’s approach to the relationship between politics and art can certainly start “healing fountains” in the deserts of the heart.




# 2
WEAVER

The Quiet Car

In the Acela Express Quiet Car, cell phones are not to be used, and conversations should not be audible. We sleek along at a high speed, so high it seems we are not on the tracks or are not moving at all. We enter the rapid transit silence.

I am taking the train to NewYork for the 10th Anniversary celebration of Cave Canem, the first annual retreat for black poets, poets in the western hemisphere who are the descendants of African people,the majority of whom where brought here as slaves during the Middle Passage. Sitting on the train, I have not heard the news that a Yankee baseball player has died in the crash of his small plane into an apartment building on Manhattan's upper East Side. His flight coach has passed away with him.

The train ride reminds me of the silence we seem to be entering in America, as the machinery of conservatism and global enterprise glazes us over with a web of things that hide the reality of the world. More and more it seems a risky enterprise to break the silence.

The train arrives in the rain. At first I try to stand in the taxi line at Penn Station without an umbrella, but I surrender and go back in the station to buy a slick Staples brand umbrella with a push button. Then I go back to the line in the rain. Everyone waits in order and with a quietness that is surprising.


It is Wednesday night, and I head to dinner with Jim Hatch and Camille Billlops
in their SoHo loft. We have chicken soup and play with puppets. Much of life should be more about play. The silence is getting too serious. After dropping off a framed copy of an interview I did in Beijing last year for the Cave Canem silent auction, I go to lunch with a friend from Taiwan who is at Columbia University doing research. We walk through the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and it is a beautiful day in New York, prelude to the evening reading by winners of Cave Canem's annual poetry prize.

I sit with Elizabeth Alexander in the audience. Elizabeth and I were the first faculty at Cave Canem, invited there by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1997, the year before I was named Cave Canem's first Elder.


The reading is a wondrous joy, and Elizabeth and I sit together in appreciation and admiration, whispering celebration to each other. The 10th anniversary celebration takes off like the high speed train, and things begin to whir into a music that makes everything around it a silence. Nothing else matters except this gathering, and the moments gather in depth as they fly.


I have lunch with Honoree Jeffers, Cherise Pollard, and Herman Beavers in the restaraunt under the Empire State Building. We laugh so much and so loudly that I don't want it to end, and now and then I am amazed to recognize that we have spun everything around us into a silence. We seem to have a power.


It is Friday the 13th, and it is the day of the big faculty reading. Those of us who have taught at Cave Canem over the years will read, and it is alphabetical, which means that Elizabeth and I do the bookending that we usually do. She is the first reader, and I am the last. We are fifteen in number and are supposed to take seven minutes each, but I know we wll have church, and church will run overtime. So I begin to draft a series of plans for giving the benediction.


I think of Sterling Brown's "Chant of Saints" and begin to make a list of poets, writers, and activists, most of whom have passed away.We get the word from the building service crew that we are way overtime and that if we don't conclude, we will be concluded by a shutdown of power. I pass the word to Cyrus Cassells and Tim Seibles, who are on either side of me, to let them know I will have to make a quick ending. Patricia Smith is speaking, and as she finishes I get up to do what I must do as Elder, surrender the ego to the better welfare of the community and culture.


My phrasing here is to invoke the gentle reminders Sonia Sanchez has been giving us over the last two days, to remember our responsibility to the world, the world which is under the giant hand of a power that wishes to bear down on us with silence that is malevolence. After reading just two short poems of mine, I begin my Chant of Saints by saying we must honor the Black ArtsMovement. We are given just enough time to finish and file out slowly. It is a chilly walk down the seven blocks to my hotel....but I am not alone.


*************************************************************************

Listening to the soundtrack from CarWash. Whew...what year was that?

I might try and find some music by Matthew Shipp next week. I need a pair of new ears.

I met Marian Bennett this afternoon. A nice woman running for Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner (4A04). We had a short chat about the needs of the neighborhood. I told her I felt a tree policy and more lights on the streets would be good for our little blocks. I'll might vote for her next month.

Wal-Mart are you sick?
Here is their new policy:
Any employee with more than 3 unauthorized absences in a 6-month span will be disciplined and those with 7 will be fired.
Any employee who is absent 3 times during a 6 month period and doesn't call their 800 number can be fired.

Ecuador picks a president Sunday. Will it be Correa?

Somebody is always making a profit.
Insurance companies are projecting record profits as high as $60 billion one year after Katrina.
Hmmm. We could name quite a number of people who are not living in trailers.

On page 5 of the New York Times today there is a picture of a soldier in Iraq checking a coffin at a funeral for explosives. If you needed a reason why God shouldn't answer our prayers - here it is. Folks dead and knocking on the doors of heaven with bombs. If I was an advisor to God I would use this as an excuse to cutoff diplomatic relations with mankind. Folks will be blowing up heaven if we let them in. And you want to know why Babylon is in Iraq?

Ban is in. He will become the 8th secretary general of the U.N. in 2007. He listed his priorities as reforming the organization, meeting development goals established in 2000, establishing human rights, confronting terrorism, slowing environmental degradation and curbing the spread of AIDS.

Quote of the day:

"...modesty is about demeanor, not about vision and goals. It does not mean the lack of commitment or leadership. Rather it is quiet determination in action to get things done without so much fanfare."
-Ban Ki-moon, the next U.N. Secretary General


Dead at 67 - Johnny Callison, baseball player.
I was at the All Star game in 1964 (Shea Stadium) when Callison hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth inning to defeat the American league. He hit that baby off Dick Radatz (Red Sox). Another childhood memory. Callison had one of those great throwing arms like Clemente.


Well the Kim Roberts show will be on television tomorrow. She is the second stripper in the Duke rape case. This is the type of woman you don't want to meet at a homecoming party.
Bling Bling. Do you really want to watch 60 minutes tomorrow? Why can't we wait for a jury to decide the case?

Saturday morning. I'm heading over to Woodrow Wilson High School to give the keynote speech at their annual Humanities, Arts and Media Academy (HAM). The theme this year is "Humanities: Passion and Profession."

NOT JAMES BROWN BUT PERCY SLEDGE- WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN.


Baltimore, MD (BlackNews.com)

Men waking "singing in hieroglyphics" the sweat from their love making creating a new Nile? Is this possible? To restore black love is as challenging as rebuilding the pyramids. Personal Passion is a poetry and photography collaboration that is symmetry between the visual art and the written word. Of course the women are beautiful, and distracting, however "Personal Passion" is also a mirror to encourage the reader to love and celebrate the erotic.

Black women have not always been proud of their bodies, so Personal Passion is then a walk to freedom. Let's begin with the lady with cuffs. You look at her holding them in her left hand. Do you want to play with her? Or is this a reminder that perhaps many of our men [and women] are outlaws?

Personal Passion, by Jesse Sharpe, brings together photography and poetry (phoetry). One is therefore directed to the image and the metaphor. It is seductive, and the visual connection between the poetry and the photography is not only moving, but requires the reader to look from the photograph to the poem for explanation.

"The poems included in Personal Passion have a fragrance to them. It's a combination of incense and flowers. The sensual tone captures a degree of moisture and one assumes all the wetness is from two bodies and not one."
- E. Ethelbert Miller, poet and literary activist. Director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University.

From a woman's point of view:
Personal Passion is remarkable book of poetry and erotic photography. Jesse Sharpe and his colleagues are able to capture the beauty and sensuality of the women and the tenderness of the men. The work is a journey of love and passion.- Carolyn Johnston, Prof. of American History at Eckerd College

All those who have reviewed this collaboration agree, the best advice is to purchase a copy and to become immersed in it. Personal Passion is such a tasteful tribute of phoetry (photography and poetry) to women, that it is deserving of a both golden quill and golden frame.

Jesse Sharpe is a native Washingtonian (D.C.), and now writes now just a stone's throw away in Maryland, that is if you don't catch him writing on the city's subway. The sequel to Personal Passion, Mannerizmz is due to be released in January 2007.

His other books include Hurry Home (war chronicles), a collection of love poetry in the midst of war; Menfolk Talk'n, poetry and a short story lamenting the destruction of young black boys; Foreplay (hands gliden'n ovah me), erotic poetry; and an amazing children's activity workbook - My Afri-bets Learning Book - that combines poetry, vocabulary building, Swahili, cutting and pasting as well as handwriting practice in one book.

Personal Passion, as well as the author's other books may be ordered online at www.sharpebooksonline.com or from bookstores and other online sources. Email Jesse Sharpe at sharpesolutions1@comcast.net or contact him at 240-375-6033 for reviews, book signings, or more information.
CONTACT:Jesse SharpeSharpe Solutions240-375-6033sharpesolutions@comcast.netwww.sharpebooksonline.com

JUST SAY N.O.

The video is narrated by Danny Glover.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtRWOjh1XF8

Africa in the news and on the big screen. Madonna adopting a little one. People having their babies in Africa -and as the 21 st Century continues - it looks like the beginning of "Into Africa" instead of Out of Africa.

What will they wear on Halloween?

It seems almost everyday someone "steals" police uniforms in Iraqi and then goes out to do harm to others. Gunmen in police cars and uniforms stormed the office of an Iraqi satellite television channel in Baghdad on Thursday.
The death toll in Baghdad has more than doubled since summer.
Everyday must be Friday the 13th in Iraq.

Quote of the day:

"The major issue is the idea that civilizations must clash. I disagree with that. My life is a testimony to the fact that civilizations can combine gracefully and Harmoniously if you have a desire to do so. Turkish history, and my books, shows that this coming together is possible.
Turkish culture is made up of East and West."
-Orhan Pamuk

I finished reading Patricia Smith's TEAHOUSE OF THE ALMIGHTY on the bus last night. There were 6 poems that I enjoyed reading and will share with my students at Mason later this term:

"Building Nicole's Mama"
"Listening at the Door"
"Hallelujah With Your Name"
"Scribe"
"Women Are Taught"
"Running for Aretha"

Patricia's poems about her son are always priceless.

Early morning...walking across the HU campus to work. It's HomeComing. The campus is filled with tents and it's partytime ( again). The HU HomeComing is much bigger than when I was a student. I guess that's a good thing. I'll walk around later today and see if there's a sign that says Save Darfur! Should I remind someone?

There's an interesting article in the District Chronicles(Oct 12-18) by Hazel Trice Edney. It's about Wal-Mart and the African American community:
$1 million grant to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation for scholarships and internships for black students
$5 million grant to the National Urban League
$1.5 million to the United Negro College Fund
The question raised in the newspaper article was whether Wal-Mart(the giant retailer) was trying to "buy" the silence of its critics. Wal-Mart has come under criticism for some of its employment practices. What do you think? What should we do?
Jesse Jackson was quoted as saying they were trying to "throw money at us." Hmmm...I found that curious. I always thought there was a pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow.

And he was Black and use to wear silk:

LARRY NEAL CONFERENCE:

October 19-20, 2006Brooklyn CollegeOctober 21, 2006Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This conference is designed to restore to the cultural repository the record of and critical response to Larry Neal (1937-1981), poet, playwright, and essayist whose moral vision, intellectual independence, activism and scholarly integrity remain a model and inspiration for future achievement.

The presentations will bridge a substantial gap in the current scholarship on the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s by documenting the centrality of Neal as a founding theorist of black American cultural studies.

Neal's commitment to creativity and activism provides an early model for critical interdisciplinarity, attesting to the interrelated nature of music, drama, literature and folklore.

For further information contact:http://english.rutgers.edu/conferences/larryneal/

What's going on at the Center of the World?

Sunday, October 29 at 2 p.m. The Writer’s Center is pleased to host a celebration of the Washington area’s thriving small press community. Editors of several literary journals and book publishers will share anecdotes. This will be an informal gathering and celebration, not a formal panel discussion on the State of Literature. The editors, we're sure, will have some good stories. The program will include writers and editors from Bogg, Dryad, Gargoyle, Gival Press, Minimus, Passager, Potomac Review, Pretend Genius, WordWorks, Washington Writers' Publishing House, and WordWrights!
At the Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD 20815. Free admission and light refreshments. For more information on this and other programs, please visit our web site, www.writer.org, or call 301-654-8664.

Yep - We knew this because we write E-Notes. We just don't bet on the horses (or baseball).


Turkey's Orhan Pamuk Wins Nobel Literature Prize
By Bunny Nooryani

Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, accused last year of insulting his nation's identity, won the 2006 Nobel literature prize for writing about the interplay and conflicts between different cultures, the Swedish Academy said.

Pamuk's works are published in 34 languages and include the novels ``Snow,'' ``The White Castle'' and ``My Name Is Red.'' In awarding the $1.4 million prize, the Stockholm-based academy said on its Web site that Pamuk, 54, ``has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.''

In January, a Turkish court dropped charges that Pamuk had insulted his nation's identity when he said the country persecuted Armenians during World War I. His prize adds to pressure on Turkey, coming on the same day that France's lower house of parliament adopted a law punishing anyone who denies that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks amounted to genocide.

The European Union says Turkey's refusal to acknowledge that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred during World War I clouds the nation's bid for membership. Turkey says both sides suffered losses in the war and denies that it was genocide.

Born in Istanbul to a secular middle-class family, Pamuk has said he experienced a shift from a traditional Ottoman family life to a more western lifestyle while growing up. He studied architecture and journalism in Istanbul and was a visiting researcher at Columbia University between 1985 and 1988.

`Social Commentator'
``In his home country, Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator even though he sees himself as principally a fiction writer with no political agenda,'' the academy said.
Pamuk was the first author in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, author of ``The Satanic Verses,'' the academy said. He also took a stand for Yasar Kemal, a fellow writer in Turkey, when he was put on trial in 1995.

``While recognized as a great author and novelist, many people in Turkey will think this Nobel prize has a lot to do with politics and overshadows his writing,'' said Suat Kiniklioglu, who heads the office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, in Ankara, Turkey, an association supporting trans-Atlantic relations and initiatives to strengthen democracy.

Pamuk was among the frontrunners for last year's Nobel prize, even as the legal case against him was going through the courts. The charges arose after Pamuk told the Swiss daily Tages-Anzeiger newspaper in February 2005 that Turks were afraid to talk about the death of 1 million Armenians.


Political Limelight
``Pamuk was in the political limelight last year, but it's better this way, since it becomes an award for his literature as much as for his politics,'' said Julian Loose, Pamuk's U.K. editor at publisher Faber & Faber.

His first novel ``Cevdet Bey and His Sons'' was published in 1982 and describes the development of a family over three generations. His second book, ``The House of Silence,'' which was translated to English in 1998, uses five different narrator perspectives at a family gathering to show social chaos as different extremist groups battle for power.

Pamuk's international breakthrough came with ``The White Castle,'' a novel set in 17th-century Istanbul that shows how ``our ego builds on stories and fictions of different stories,'' the academy said. The book was originally published in Turkish in 1985 and translated into English in 1992.

``Personality is shown to be a variable construction'' in the novel, the academy said. ``The story's main character, a Venetian sold as a slave to the young scholar Hodja, finds in Hodja his own reflection. As the two men recount their life stories to each other, there occurs an exchange of identities.''

Violent Fundamentalism

In the English-speaking world, ``My Name Is Red'' was Pamuk's breakthrough title, published in translation in 2001. An exhilarating detective story set in a time of violent fundamentalism -- Istanbul in the late 1590s -- it turns on a controversial book, commissioned in secret by the Sultan.
Though the text celebrates the glories of his realm, the Sultan has requested figurative, European-style illustrations. It's this that makes the book such a dangerous undertaking. When one of the artists disappears, a suspenseful tale of love and deception develops, a philosophical mystery as much as a whodunit.

``Snow,'' Pamuk's novel about the tensions between Turkey's Islamists and staunch secularists, was picked by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books of 2004.
Published in Turkish in 2002 and translated to English in 2005, ``Snow'' weaves two love stories with the clashes between Islamists and the secular military in Turkey's eastern-most city, Kar. The book came under intense criticism from both secular and Islamic intellectuals, many of whom called it ``agitating.''

Writers Prosecuted

Turkey has, over the past year, prosecuted about 80 writers and intellectuals for criticizing state policy. While many of the cases have ended in acquittal, the EU has warned Turkey to alter laws curbing freedom of expression or risk a halt to its membership talks with the bloc, which began last October.

While Pamuk escaped punishment, ethnic Armenian Hrant Dink in July received a six-month suspended jail sentence after he made similar comments about the killings of Armenians.
``There's an endless struggle in Turkey between the writer and the political powers,'' said Dogan Hizlan, a Turkish literary critic and a writer for Hurriyet newspaper. ``That was true before Orhan, and it will be true after him.''

The literature prize was first awarded in 1901 and recent previous winners have included Harold Pinter (2005), V.S. Naipaul (2001) and Guenter Grass (1999). It was created in the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swede who invented dynamite. The award is formally handed over at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
The Swedish Academy, which picks the winner on behalf of the Nobel Foundation, was founded in 1786 to develop the Swedish language. The academy keeps nominations for the literature prize secret for at least 50 years.
To contact the reporter on this story: Bunny Nooryani in Oslo at bnooryani@bloomberg.net .

Congrats to poet Nathaniel Mackey. His book SPLAY ANTHEM is a finalist for the National Book Award. Good to see him getting wider recognition. Hambone Lives!

Prof. Greg Carr (Howard U) was kind enough to pick-up a copy of James Spady's THE GLOBAL CIPHA. Spady continues to do that groundwork that surpasses what many black cultural institutions are doing. I call it the tradition of J.A. Rogers, Schomburg and Harold Cruse. Just do the work without the committee and the excuses. Spady should help Iverson- maybe his research can bring a championship back to Phillie. Sometimes it's difficult to get your hands on what Spady is doing. The guy was always mysterious. Here is a mailing address where the books must be kept: Black History Museum Publishers, P.O.Box 15057, Philadelphia, PA 19130.

In the mail today was Elizabeth Macklin's translation from the Basque of Kirmen Uribe's MEANWHILE/TAKE MY HAND. This is a new Graywolf Press book. The last time I was in New York, Macklin and I shared a beer in an Irish pub and talked about this book. Good to see it out.

Also in a package was LOVE IN TIME OF OUTRAGE a forthcoming novel from John Hatch.
Hatch is out in California. Contact: circulation@2ndsightbooks.com.
His characters are Catherine and Felipe. Black/Mexican romance during the Harlem Renaissance...

So the president says we are not going to attack Korea. Whew...now I can get my clothes out of the cleaners tomorrow.

It's amazing how casual we have become about attacking countries. It's no longer thinking about the unthinkable. Let's attack Syria. Let's attack Iran. Let's attack Korea. What's next?
So many countries broken. Every place reduced to a Haiti - after such promise. When will man be given back his sight?

I came home from Busboys with 3 books of poetry:
TEAHOUSE OF THE ALMIGHTY by Patricia Smith
BUFFALO HEAD SOLOS by Tim Seibles
FIRST INDIAN ON THE MOON by Sherman Alexie

Nothing I can do but read and write.
I could disappear without a trace tonight. Do you remember those days when the dogs lost your scent?