14th Blogiversary

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Fourteen years ago, on February 27, 2005, I began blogging at J's Theater. I was regularly reading the blogs of friends and writers, artists, political commentators, and others I'd never met but felt a desire to be in conversation with, and so I started this blog. I viewed it as a creative and cultural space, with far less emphasis on politics and responsive to the news cycle--which has sped up incalculably more these days now that Facebook and Twitter have taken off--than it has assumed at various points. More than anything, however I wanted it to be a site where I could try thoughts and ideas out, imperfect as they might be, without the usual concern of perfection or even the struggle, customary as well, to get them into print. (My entire writing career has entailed a struggle to get my work into print.)

From writing about poetry and poets, like Jay Wright, as I did in my first post, to my life and experiences at the university (which has become a new university over the years I've blogged), to reviews of books and films, to snippets about Black history, art and culture, and history, art and culture over all, to translations from Portuguese, Spanish, French, and, I sometimes am amazed to admit, Dutch and German, to posts about rugby, track and field and other less popular (in the US imagination, at least) sports, my iPhone and iPad sketches, and on and on, J's Theater has provided an ideal space for me to explore, (mostly--haha!) pressure-free, as I see fit. It also has served as a site of documentation at times for cultural activities, and especially was so during my decade in Chicago, which wasn't even a decade ago but feels like a lifetime has passed between then and now.

I've repeatedly debated whether to keep blogging or to quit. One great frustration after the earliest years (2005-2008 or so) was the sharp drop off in comments, which were for a while replaced by spam, which disappeared (thanks, Blogger?), only to reappear in recent years with a vengeance. It thankfully is very easy to delete these days, but that requires its own dedicated attention. Far more pressing were my academic responsibilities, which have grown to include 12-month administrative duties that devour more mental space and energy than I ever imagined. I don't think it's any surprise that before this year, 2014, the first year I became a department chair (acting during that year) and 2017, just before my last sabbatical, saw the fewest posts. It was not for lack of interest, but time and vigor.

Not so long ago, we were told that blogging was dead. No one blogged, everyone had moved to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And Tumblr, which was and is a blogging platform that in essence mostly deprioritized words. (It also has banned not just pornography, but nudity in general, that's another matter.) And Instagram, which is all pictures (for the most part). And Snapchat, of course. Now there's Tiktok, and other walled gardens. One thing I loved and still do about blogging (though to its credit, Twitter also is almost fully public) via Blogger, WordPress and similar sites is that whatever you published was and remains visible to all; a private company does own this platform, but the blog remains more a public square-style venue than many other options out there. For good and ill, of course. The dazzlingly brilliant Kegur'o M, who continues to blog at Gukira: Without Predicates, is a stellar example of the good that can come from a blogger at the top of their game.

But that public aspect is one that I cherish, and one reason I hope to continue blogging. I also wish some of my old blogging friends, many listed on the blogroll to the right, and other bloggers I never interacted with but who've given up blogging, would start up again. No shade against Medium, but before ideas are fully polished, why not bounce them off readers on a blog? You can always--well, so far--revise as you go.

Around the Horn (Other Bloggers & Blogs)

It has been eons since I posted links to what other blogs and bloggers on my blogroll are up to, so here are some links to current blogs J's Theater readers might want to check out.

At Gukira: Without Predicate, Keguro reminds us that this year marks the 50th anniversary of Paulo Freire's landmark text The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and notes that he will be blogging about it roughly once a month for the rest of the year. Anything Keguro blogs about is worth reading--and his essays on New Inquiry are no less brilliant--so I highly recommend checking back as he thinks through and theorizes, with the deepest and deftest touch, in relation to contemporary education in Kenya.

In The Public Gardens: Poems and History, writer Linda Norton shares excerpts from her forthcoming work Wite-Out. Here's a tiny quote:

In New York for a reading of Pressed Wafer authors. Went up to 125th and bought a black slip at H&M and had an over-priced lunch at a place where the eggs tasted like disinfectant. Then on to the Schomburg where, years ago, I worked on the Marcus Garvey papers. I visited an exhibit of WPA photos and eavesdropped. I left as it was getting dark. I’d heard that Harlem had become gentrified and white, but I saw very few white people up there. The trees were bare and I had all the haunting feelings about architecture and oncoming winter that I had when I lived here. Feelings I don’t have in California.

Definitely check out the rest of Linda's new project.

EJ Flavors, a blogger I've been following since before this blog existed (he was on it back in 2002), has a February mix (Cupid's Hunt) that you can download and listen to, if you want a little (more) love in the air.

coldhearted scientist وداد has an eyeblink of a post on labor, linked to another, that will become a collaborative article for the Academe blog.

Poet Mom is blogging again, and I'm glad she is.

Poet Harmony Holiday, at nonstophome, features a poem about Al Sharpton, among other treats.

Shigekuni is someone I learned about via that often deafening public forum known as Twitter; I immediately found his tweets intriguing, and he doesn't disappoint. Writing in several languages (German, English, among others), blogging about literature and the arts, brimming with engaging quotes, it's a blog I make a point to visit especially around Nobel Prize time. (I still have not written my post about this past year's Nobel laureate, Briton Kazuo Ishiguro.) His most recent post takes a peak at a 1967 dictionary of American slang. "The Mokers"....

Poet Guillermo Parra translates a prose poem by Antonia Palacios, from her 1989 collection Ficciones y affliciones.

At Heatstrings, the blog by poet and scholar Aldon Nielsen, you can find photos from the recent Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture after 1900. I have heard this is a conference to attend, so perhaps I will figure out a way to be there one of these upcoming years. As Aldon's photos show, some pretty superb writers and thinkers (I see Nourbese Philip, Nathaniel Mackey, etc.) did make the trip.

Edward Winkleman, whose blog appears under my Art Blogs links, writes about virtual reality and augmented reality/mixed reality, touching upon artists who are now using in their work. (I have a secret fear that eventually masses of us will be lying in dark rooms, immobilized by VR and a soma-like drug, as the overlords run amok--or even more so than they already are.)

Gukira on Claudia Rankine's *Citizen: An American Lyric* & "microaggressions"

A week ago I posted about two standout examples of literary criticism, a young Barack Obama's super-concise reading of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and Frank Kermode's extraordinary disquisition on the word and concept of "shudder" in that and other works by Eliot and a range of authors. Neither is exactly a model of traditional literary criticism, which brings me to another stellar example, at Gukira: With(out) Predicates, the brilliant Keguro Macharia's thought-site (to call it a blog barely does it justice).

In his January 19, 2016 post "microaggressions," Keguro shows what another approach to critical writing about literature might look like, exploring Claudia Rankine's highly lauded 2014 collection Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf) with a level of discernment, analytical brio and lyric verve that marks all of his writing. I won't try to summarize the piece's argumentation except to say that it takes one on a journey both into Rankine's book and into the aesthetic, social and political discourse surrounding it. He begins by pointing out that the book "circulates as an aesthetic object that documents microaggressions," and then continues:

The “micro” in microaggressions suggests the low hum of noncatharsis Sianne Ngai taught us to call “ugly feelings.”

Nothing explodes. 

Nothing releases. 

An archive builds. 

We are far from anger, far from rage, far from the demands created by the word racism.
Instead, we are in the world of microaggressions, the world of archive building, the world of opportunities created by the aesthetic object to engage in a dialogue on race or a conversation on race, in which we are encouraged to share our stories of racialization, of being marked by race, singled out, unseen in our particularities and embedded within histories we did not create and do not want to own.

Learning from Fanon, we scream that we are not our histories. 

Frantz Fanon is only one of many figures he thinks with--alongside, to, and through--beginning with Elizabeth Alexander and Barack Obama (whom he also critiques). As importantly, Keguro historicizes and defines the term "microaggression," so ubiquitous these days, in order to show what it means--what meanings emerge--from, around and because of the circulation of an "aesthetic object that documents microaggressions." The (current) aesthetic object that documents microagressions--in American society. Is much of the extant criticism about the book about the book or about the discourse that surrounds it--"the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing and not the myth that surrounds it," quoting, as he does Adrienne Rich? 

As I note above, this essay--in the truest sense of the world,  a trying out of thought, an attempt to think into and through ideas--concludes on a powerful note. I'll quote it:

I conclude this writing a week after Obama’s State of the Union speech, on the Monday designated this year as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I am arrested by the question of lag, caught by the duration of the pause. The “micro” in “microaggressions” might describe the lag that one must overcome—that return to the untime of unmaking, that disembedding from the human that one overcomes but does not overcome. How long is that pause? How is it measured? What happens in that pause? 

Chester Pierce names that pause as where the cumulative takes hold. What accretes in the pause, and how? A model of resilience reaches for the grit in the oyster, the pearl-making potential of adversity. Recall, the much-lauded Citizen is the aesthetic object that documents microaggressions. White space can be a pause. Pauses are cumulative. Something accumulates in the pause. How long is that pause? How is it to be measured? How does one measure pauses as they accumulate? How does one evaluate the pause that is considered an aesthetic object? 

how does one live—how can one breathe—in the pause

This is one dazzling example of how one thinks--in the pause.

Gukira on Kangemi & Westgate

Businessman Abdul Haji crouches near an elephant
sculpture in the mall during the attack
(© Goran Tomasevic / Reuters / REUTERS)

There are probably very few people who could approach the tragic Westgate Shopping Mall attack and, with insightful brilliance link it to other events in Kenya as well as to a broader understanding of disposability as Gukira does here, so in case you have not headed over to his site, below is a small snippet, and here's a link to the full post: "two places."

Following the Kangemi demolitions, many Kangemi residents protested the government’s actions. They blocked roads, set tires on fire, raged and mourned. They mourned that their lives were so disposable; they raged that their livelihoods had no value. With very few exceptions, Kenya remained silent. These were not lives worth valuing. A death in Kangemi is not worth mourning. 

Reports indicate that president Uhuru Kenyatta was personally affected by Westgate—a nephew and his fiancée were killed. Photographs from Westgate have traveled across the world. We know names and faces and occupations and relationships.
*
Who will grieve with the mourners?
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For the past few months, I have been thinking about disposability, about its reach and grasp and ever-expanding power. And while I continue to learn from Judith Butler about whose lives are grievable, about who is deemed worth grieving, thinking about disposability leads me to ask about killability. 

To be disposable is to be ungrievable. Not to merit grief or thought. We have other words for this: acceptable losses, collateral damage. Yet, disposability is not passive, not simply a category into which we place the ungrievable. Instead, it is a hungry logic and practice. It becomes ever-more voracious as it eats. 

Copyright © Gukira 2013, All rights reserved.