The writer, producer, and Bessie Smith biographer Chris Albertson has died at the age of eighty-seven. The New York Times has an obituary.
Chris was a generous person in the world of music. His blog Stomp Off! (still online) offered remarkable stuff from his archives: interviews with Bessie Smith’s niece Ruby Walker, recordings of the Duke Ellington band at a benefit concert hosted by Jackie Robinson, a Charles Mingus television appearance. (Alas, some of the audio and video files appear long gone.) I read everything, linked to a number of posts, commented on occasion, and am now surprised to see that Orange Crate Art appears in a Stomp Off! list of “cyber stops.” I wish I’d known so that I could have said thanks.
Thank you, Chris Albertson, for all your contributions to music.
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Chris Albertson (1931–2019)
“The Sudden Departure”
“When a small town loses 100 people in just a few hours, kids come home to find their parents missing”: “The Sudden Departure,” reported by Lilly Sullivan, is a story from the April 19 episode of This American Life.
The situation
From “Viktor Orbán’s War on Intellect,” by Franklin Foer, in the June Atlantic. David Cornstein, a longtime friend of Donald Trump, is the United States ambassador to Hungary:
When I asked Cornstein about Orbán’s description of his own government as an “illiberal democracy,” the ambassador shifted forward and rested his elbows on a table. “It’s a question of a personal view, or what the American people, or the president of the United States, think of illiberal democracy, and what its definition is.” As he danced around the question, never quite arriving at an opinion, he added,
“I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has, but he doesn’t.”
A lost work by Raymond Roussel
Raymond Roussel had confidence. From David Wallace’s review of Roussel’s The Alley of Fireflies, a long-lost unfinished novel, now available in English, translated by Mark Ford:
Suddenly, he was overcome by a realization that he was a great genius. “I was the equal of Dante and Shakespeare,” he told his psychologist. “I felt glory.”I’ve begun reading The Alley of Fireflies and just hit the little statue filled with frozen wine. What the review doesn’t mention is that the mold for the statue is three centimeters tall and takes the form of Voltaire’s Pangloss dressed as Ceres.
Perfect Sluggo
[“Don’t Mess with Ernie.” Zippy, May 9, 2019.]
Yes, Sluggo is saying that he’s perfect. And that Zippy’s lines and circles are “irregular and messy.” And: “In a fight between messy & perfect, Sluggo always kills Zippy!” See also this 2012 panel: “Nancy plus Sluggo equals perfection.”
Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)
[Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy rune six days a week; Bill Griffith’s Zippy, seven.]
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
From “Stalin as Linguist — II”
In 1985, the poet Tom Clark wrote an essay titled “Stalin as Linguist” for the publication Poetry Flash. The essay, about (so-called) language poetry, was thoroughly negative. And it paid particular attention to the work of Barrett Watten. In a follow-up essay, Clark wrote about Watten’s response:
Watten reacted by composing a two-page, single-spaced, indignant, “not-for-publication” communiqué to Poetry Flash. The letter demanded redress of grievances and threatened a boycott by advertisers. Attached was a list of people to receive copies. The list was almost as long as the letter itself. It contained the names of language school sympathizers with influential positions — institutional poetry administrators, reading coordinators, publishers, book distributors, bookstore owners and employees, university teachers, gallery representatives, etc. From these people and from others in the language school’s local rank and file, Poetry Flash received a flood of letters. A selection appeared in subsequent issues of the paper. Several correspondents, such as Robert Gluck of the San Francisco State Poetry Center, charged me with “red-baiting.” Joe McCarthy was evoked more than once, as were the “mau-maus” (by [Ron] Silliman, though that letter never made it to print).I doubt that 1980s Poetry Wars will be of immediate interest to many OCA readers. I’m sharing this passage as one more bit of the Barrett Watten story, a bit perhaps unknown to present-day faculty and students at Wayne State University, where Watten has filed complaints against two students who have filed complaints against him. The Poetry Flash incident suggests a pattern of retaliation against perceived enemies that goes far back.
All of this suggests that despite its dedication to the ideal of criticism as equal in importance to creative work, the language school has a very thin skin when it comes to taking criticism.
Tom Clark, “Stalin as Linguist — II.” First published in Partisan Review (1987). In The Poetry Beat: Reviewing the Eighties. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).
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May 15: One of the students has been cleared. And, she says, students have been told to keep mum about Barrett Watten.
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May 30: The story has made it to The Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s behind the paywall, but this link appears to work, at least for now: “‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.” An excerpt:
For decades, faculty members in the English department at Wayne State University knew Barrett Watten had a temper. A tenured professor who specializes in the language school of poetry, Watten is an intense figure with a brooding passion for his work. Standing at over six feet tall, he also possesses an air of natural authority — in classrooms, committee meetings, and personal interactions. When that authority is seemingly questioned, according to current and former colleagues, Watten snaps.The Chronicle reports that eighteen of Watten’s colleagues in the English department have asked that his graduate faculty status be revoked and that his office be relocated outside the department.
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June 5: Wayne State’s Graduate Employees Organizing Committee has issued a statement about the university’s investigation.
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November 26: Barrett Watten has been removed from teaching and advising at Wayne State.
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December 11: The Chronicle of Higher Education has more. My favorite bit:
Colleagues previously told The Chronicle that [Watten] was known to launch into profanity-laced tirades that were made all the more ominous by his imposing physical stature. Watten sees such critiques as rooted in a misunderstanding of his approach to his discipline. “I teach the avant-garde, and am challenging in class. All supposedly good things,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle.Related reading
Barrett Watten Records (Accounts from students, colleagues, poets, scholars)
[The title “Stalin as Linguist” is a phrase borrowed from Watten’s book-length poem Progress.]
Writing at the British Library
An exhibition from the British Library: Writing: Making Your Mark. Scroll all the way down and you’ll see links to four online features, which in turn have links to seven more features.
And: the BBC draws on the exhibit to tell the story of handwriting in twelve objects.
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
The Barrett Watten story
“This is a collective effort to gather stories of official and unofficial complaints against and accounts of interactions with Barrett Watten”: Barrett Watten Records. Barrett
Watten, poet and academic at Wayne State University, is having a moment.
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November 26: Barrett Watten has been removed from teaching and advising at Wayne State.
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December 11: The Chronicle of Higher Education has more. My favorite bit:
Colleagues previously told The Chronicle that [Watten] was known to launch into profanity-laced tirades that were made all the more ominous by his imposing physical stature. Watten sees such critiques as rooted in a misunderstanding of his approach to his discipline. “I teach the avant-garde, and am challenging in class. All supposedly good things,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle.A related post
From “Stalin as Linguist — II” (Watten’s response to a critic of language poetry, 1985)
VDP’s “Tabu”
The Silver Lake Chorus has recorded an unreleased Van Dyke Parks song, “Tabu.”
Related reading
All OCA Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)
