Body and Soul: Redux

As we continue the Book of Richard, we find these words:

"...but even after obeying, after killing, they still ruled him.  He was their property, heart and soul, body and blood; what they did claimed him sleeping and waking; it colored life and dictated the terms of death."

The easy thing to do with this passage, even all of Native Son, is to run the critique of the gangsta stance, from the first time we sang about a gun going rooty-toot-toot on a rekkid 'til Ice Cube defined a good day.  But that'd be easy, and therefore incomplete.

So instead we observe that the passage reminded us of our versionology of "Body and Soul."  We are taking careful, slow steps up to a few posts on the way music makes meaning in the Book of Richard, and we are uncertain that this passage belongs in those posts.  Nevertheless, the dialectic is obvious, just as it is when we read through tropes of visibility in Native Son and imagine tropes of invisibility that loom so large in the Book of Ralph.

Let us begin by observing that the passage cited offers important political nuance to the approaches to the lyrics we posted back in the day.  In light of this, we think we should come back to the material and consider the place of the citizen in the song.  We should also consider how Dunbar/DuBois, as ancestors concerned about the masks that dual civic status places on citizens, informs the versionology, however indirectly.

As we go, we will, of necessity, observe that the Book of Richard proposes, of necessity, a totality that is belied by the simple historical proof offered by the example of "Body and Soul." This is the same topic we have been addressing in our recent readings in the Book of Langston.  Freedom is demonstrated when we defy the expectation that we'll repeat ourselves, that we'll be consistent.

What We're Hearing: Street/Opera

Woke up this morning, devilin' on the mind.  As we listened to the Geto Boys, we came back to the crossover tension of the streets.  It's one of those Xeno's paradoxes, dig?  The closer you get to the other side, not matter which way you're going -- to the unnaground or to your piece of the pie -- you still have an infinite distance to traverse.  It's like that, and that's the way it is.

So as we listened to the boys our mind deviled over to the book of Langston.  No one has mastered the details of crossing over better.  And we blew the dust off of Street Scene.  We'll have much more to say over @ the blue light in the near future.  But just hold the big crux for a minute: how far from the street is an opera?  how close to real is the street?

Another Place to Take a Slow Start

The more time we spend w/ the book of Langston, the more we turn the pages of other books as well.  And so the book of Paul.

We Wear the Mask


We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
    We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
    We wear the mask!

This is what we mean when we say, "near-tragic, near comic lyricism," bro.

The Hardest Part

In our readings in the book of Langston, we're finding some basic patterns (blue light, red light): the brovah's a multimedia artist, not just a literary figure; his attachment to the modernist narrative is less of his own making and made more of the wishes of his more literary readers who want to habilitate him into a more literary form; his understanding of the visual and musical arts is very much his own, and not one that anticipates our present understandings; and then there's the whole trope of simplicity.

Up 'til now our work has mainly focused on the multimedia artist and his fascinating career-long effort to be a songwriter and a director of musical theatre/opera.  We're gonna keep working this (even while we begin to spread out a little).

But at the center of his work is the remarkable poem cycle, performance script, book as artifact, enactment of the dozens, commentary on music, &c., Ask Your Mama.  We've been running up to this work slowly because it would be so easy to get less out of it than we could (many already do that routinely).

For today, let's just note that he placed at its center the most important of musical references: W. C. Handy's "Hestitation Blues."  We've begun to pull together the versionology of this masterwork and will begin posting appropriately in the near future.  Here let's note scribble up three fast note:

1) There is something about Handy and American modernism that we want to pursue.  He's his own book.  He's a gigantic ancestor.

2) This is one of those songs that has been reworked so many times that it has become a fabric of its own.  We have so much more to learn of these songs.

3) Langston uses the song to compose up a conjuring way in Ask Your Mama that is both obvious and can be studied forever.

Footnote on Yesterday's Footnote

So as we're woking on a deeper breath about Langston's Randy Weston collabo, Uhuru Afrika, we find this note that only adds to the case we were making in yesterday's shorter observation:  "He also helped to prepare two television shows.  In one case for the CBS series "Look Up and LIve," he narrated a gospel concer with the 120 voice Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir ("In a gospel church, when they ride on th eglory train of song," nobody is ashamed, or afraid of being carried away").  On th elocal ABC program "Expedition New York," he talked about "A Poet's Harlem."

'S just what we were saying.  There's all of these artifacts that the book of Langston is full of more than writing.  We are not up to writing him off as grinding this.  We're always looking for the man's conjuring way, and suspect we'll find it here, too.

In Re: Yesterday's Notice on Langston @ the Blue Light

We are inspired by our reading in the book of Langston* to move out in two directions:  1) we want to stay close to the primary sources, because what is said about Langston and what he accomplished are not always in each others' earshot and we think respect for ancestors means that you can hear them call you; 2) we know that his existence in print is not all that is written in the book, and that he left behind a body of music, radio performances, television performances, and ephemera that compose a way of knowing the world that exceeds our way of knowing Langston.  We want to know that excess.

Our attention span is long, and moves in widening gyres, but the center has held for 35 years, so we have faith that we will circle back on this subject from time to time.  But we must remark at this moment at how thin the record really is.  And this in spite of the Missouri Project, which at least gathers the operas and gospel plays, and treats the children's literature as a part of his literary oeuvre.  Or the summaries like the ones @ the poetry foundation, which boil down to a a writer's cv.

We find the Langston Hughes papers @ the Johnson library intriguing, but wish they'd get some graduate student by the scanner and share more.  The Schomburg Center shows off its stuff in the same parsimonious and teasing manner (we don't want to hate, ever, but the fact that Schomburg, one of the pre-eminent archives in the wide world, is still boasting about the choice for frames in its html layout is sad admission to the state of affairs).  The Library of Congress puts him on the list of noteworthy February 1 occurances.  Designed as lockers full of papers, these places cannot really be held accountable for being what they aren't, but we should remark that one thing missing is the sense of Hughes as an artist who cared about what the moving image or performed words and music.

Therefore, we will make it one of our missions to circle back on this aspect of Hughes's work from time to time. We suspect that since the internets are not miraculous enough to bring all of these materials to us, that we will have to show up.

::  pours a little liquor on the ground  ::

-----------

First, like Pops, he exceeds critical efforts to describe him in terms of genre or media.  Langston Hughes worked opportunity, not "the novel," or "poetry," or "autobiography."  It is in this light that we should make a conscious effort to explore all of the objects in the archive.  You can see this, as we have noted before, in R&'s most excellent record of the poet's life, where apparently trivial tasks, like making the musical Simply Heavenly, spill way more ink on his pages than making the book Montage of a Dream Deferred." 

Manifesto of Sorts

Found while reading the book of Langston.  Hermes, master of the crossroads, works in the library and points you to other volumes.

Guinea
Translated by Langston Hughes


It's the long road to Guinea
death takes you down.
Here are the boughs, the trees, the forest.
Listen to the sound of the wind in its long hair
      of eternal light

It's the long road to Guinea
where your fathers await you without impatience.
Along the way, they talk.
They wait.
This is the hour when the streams rattle
      like beads of bone.

It's the long road to Guinea.
No bright welcome will be made for you
in the dark land of dark men.

Under a smoky sky pierced by the cry of birds
under the eye of the river
     the eyelashes of the trees open on decaying light.
There, there awaits you beside the water a quiet village,
and the hut of your fathers, and the last ancestral stone
     where your head will rest at last.

What We're Reading

Have you forgotten your nobility?
Your talent to praise the Ancestors, the Princes
And the Gods, neither flowers nor drops of dew?

1.) Stumbled upon while reading from the book of Langston, and a reminder of why whe should study these gospels so closely.

2.) Reminds us, in the converse, of brilliant lines by KRS-One.

Do I Got a Promise Face?

The primary point of Todd Marten's excellent review of Kanye is that the show was good, that Kanye was great, and that it is OK to love Kanye again (in spite of balled up critical remorse for MBDTF).  You should read it, and if you have doubts about Kanye, especially because he isn't street enough or unnagound enough, feel free to get over 'em.  You got better things to hate than something that will be recognized for its durable greatness a couple of decades ago.  Sh*ts all about what hiphop, what the blues is all about.

In the mean time, Martens develops the metaphor of theatricality a) even though it is too obvious and b) fumbles it by imagining a moment of truth when "the West broke the wall between the artist and audience."  He should know better.  This is all part of the show.  We learned this way back in the Shakespeare times.  We also learned it way back in the Fanon times.  All honesty is a mask.

All of this adds into our work in the book of Langston.  As we read about his struggles to fins a place on the stage (and simultaneously outta the books and off the streets), it affords more to our deepening overstanding of his fundamental greatness...

Making Sense of Langston's Music

Maybe the biggest irony of the R& Hughes biography is how much ink is spilled describing his efforts at making musical theatrical performance on the one hand, and how little  is spent on his efforts making poetry.  We will only note today that this allure, this devilish temptation to walk away from poetry as such, is one of the most distinctive aspects of the Hughes career.  As we think of Hughes as a lifelong artist, we associate this with some powerful biographical tropes: crossover (and all of the big mojo that compound word carries on its back), money making (yes, yes), the mixing of sacred and profane, the lwas Mami Wata and Papa Legba, &c.

Crate Diggin': Langston 1

The aura of the original, from over @ the LoC.  

What We're Reading: the Book of Langston

Cf. over @ the Blue Light.

What We Mean When We Say...

...Weary Blues or Ask Your Mama.

We think much on Ellison's definition of the blues, and &sad's observation that it is an assertion on which much of the 20th century's interpretation of African American literature/culture rests. When we read Professor Santos's wrap up of Hughes in her section of The Cambridge History of American Literature (it is an unfair but true observation that she sits the brother at the back of her bus), we hear both of them whispering in our ear. But it's bigger than that and what she says is true, so we'll put id down here.

[It]...opens up all of the contradictory meanings that are the high-water mark of Hughes's poetry: on the one hand, the half hopeful, half threatening tension between the aspiration of African Americans to their rightful place in culture -- which they, too, help to shape with their specific contribution; on the other hand, the racism that prevents the dominant culture from fully acknowledging African American specificity as a vital part of itself. What this acknowledgment implies is the recognition that the American white poet, no less than the black poet, is also sandwiched [where was your editor on this verb choice?] between two worlds. To speak of the pressure of two worlds, "white" or "black" (regardless of whether such categories continue to be at all operative), or male and female, popular and erudite, political and aesthetic, old and new, or even "real" and "mythical," is ultimately to point to the variety of experience that informs all poetic performance worthy of the name.

Our addition to this thought is less burdened with the need to strike up a phenomenology of poetry, or even the blues, but it still depends on what we have learned by thinking down those lines. Ellison's reading of the blues is correct: it is the mediation of opposites and the joyful realization that that's it. This is the substance at the end.

We're all so digga digga do by nature.

Never Can Say Goodbye

W/ all of this Odd Future buzz coming f/ the south, we think it is time to wonder where the next future will come from. They were stealing our attention with promises of fresh for the last 6 months: stunning freaky blues shouting, multi-media attacks, blues roundhouse lefts and hiphop uppercuts to the jaw. and we'll take that beating again and again, whenever it is offered, because follow this tune, been following it since we shuffled onto this mortal coil. But the haters have begin to get it. They are now all talking about a shift in the industry and fresh, raw spirit alive in "the digital cloud," and getting note for their place on the cover of traderags twice in three ¶s in one self-admitted traderag. Trough every intention they could call their own, they have been claimed as the next course in the 175 year-long meal of great black music being enjoyed by the Culture Industry.

"OK, I'm reloaded." And so it ends as it has ended so may times before.

Our coffee was disrupted this morning to thunder and hard rain, unfamiliar even in these swampy parts. Surrounded by flash and rattle we put down the Langston Hughes, which we've been holding off and on for the last six weeks or so and thought about what was on the box. Roland Kirk has been telling us that our future is our history (and vice versa) long since before he passed. He brings a gravedeep groove and the endtimes promise that the blind can see. Brovahman was an orchestrator in that great post-Ellington style of Mingus and Byard, all about charting the free work of many on a common direction. And above all, he could play anything, all at once.

We imagine that Tyler becomes the orchestrator. and that, learning from the tradition of other great signifying devils, pulls together a wolfgang cover of "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor" OK?

What We're Hearing

Weill, Hughes and Rice, Street Scenes: Sprawling drama of crossing back and forth. Hughes, persistently underestimated by most who take a moment to consider him, is actually a huge synthetic force, a center of gravity defined not by weight, but it's opposite.

Yes, yes, ya'll.

B/t/w: if you can't see the connection w/ our 3/12 post, then go buy some new eyes, mang.

Resources

As we read R&'s big Langston books, we've been thinking about the availability of primary sources. For starters, try here @ Yale. There's also an reasonably good source @ the Poetry Foundation. We're saddened, tho, that we are coming up dry at Penn Sound and the Electronic Poetry Center.

Just Biting

We were seeking someone else's wisdom to guide us this morning, and though we found it, we also found teacake stories hiding in the cut. We resist the temptation to hate, one way or the other because teacake stories are always full of unresolvable grievances, and offer this found wisdom instead:

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?

Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,

in that grey vault. The Sea. The Sea

has locked them up. The Sea is history.

Mainly in triplets, the St. Lucy poet then tells a story that echoes much of our recent thinking on the powerful figure of the ocean that has transported us recently. We find the figure in the voices of many thousands gone, from Phillis Wheatley to Langston Hughes, the saints who help us find our way on this long road.

Then came the white sisters clapping

to the waves progress,

and that was Emancipation --

jubilation, O jubilation --

vanishing swiftly

as the sea's lace dries in the sun,

but that was not history,

that was only faith,

and then each rock broke into its own nation;

From there he patiently builds a counterstory to the poem's three page narrative just concluded:

then came the synod of flies,

then came the secretarial heron,

then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas

and bats like jetting ambassadors

and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges

examining each case closely,

and the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks

with their sea pools, there was the sound

like a rumor without any echo

of History, really beginning.

We're not sure what to make of the not resolve at the end, but we take it for the not resolve that it is. In the meantime (which is the period that matters), we find ourselves attracted to the way Walcott has animated the natural world -- in the fashion of the griot -- with human characteristics. Let's leave it at that and come back to it. Wind that back.