Why We Have Martin Luther King Day

Smoky Robinson, Def Poetry Jam:



From an amigo in Maryland:

[ "Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a view that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. In an interview conducted for Playboy in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of $50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups. He posited that "the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils".[77]:365–7 He presented this idea as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor, but clarified that he felt that the money should not be spent exclusively on blacks. He stated, "It should benefit the disadvantaged of all races" " ]

Wonderful Martin Luther King birthday party yesterday, Uptown.  Five different gumbo, from five different contributors, each one distinct from the others, each equally delicious.

Among other highlights of this wonderful gathering, we met the daughter of one of the song writers for Harry Belafonte's album, Calypso.  Note, this is the first album to ever have sold a million copies.  He was also the first sex symbol to emerge from the folk music trend.  El V had memorized all the music and the words on Calypso by the time he was five.  History.  It lives.  We speak with it every day.

When Corporations Are People ... Meet Serial Killer, Mitt the Ripper!

Watch this video from the Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC, released Jan. 14, 2012.


A friend speculated last week, "If personhood begins at conception, does a corporation become a person when the first idea is scrawled on the cocktail napkin."

So, is Colbert executing intellectual property theft? It's a long, windy, twisty, sticky road we travel when embarking on this personhood begins even before conception!

Harry Belafonte, *My Song*, and Langston Hughes, *The Big Sea*

Harry Belafonte published his memoirs, My Song, in September. Now that el V has gotten to read it too, there's been someone with whom I talk about it. With many friends visiting this means we both talk about it. It turns out that they, like many of the readers and reviewers of the book are surprised to learn -- or, had forgotten -- that Belafonte was such an activist, who, in a very large way, helped bankroll the Civil Rights Movement of the 60's and 70's. But My Song isn't only about himself. As Mr. Belafonte described during his time with Smiley and West on the program this last weekend, he was prompted to do this book because Marlon Brando died without doing one, and hardly anybody knew how much he did for the Movement and other Civil Liberties causes -- thus documentary, Sing Your Song, that Belafonte made for HBO, that aired back in October.

Now that el V's been able to read My Song too, I've had someone to talk with about it, which brought to mind Langston Hughes's autobiography-memoir, The Big Sea. The two artists are a generation and a half apart. Langston Hughes was born in 1902, Belafonte in 1927. They both grew up poor, they both worked extensively in theater, they both were all their lives activists for equality and civil rights. There's a photo in Belafonte's book with him and Langston Hughes together. They were both very good looking. Belafonte's noted for his Caribbean roots. Hughes spent significant periods in Mexico when he was young, as his birth father emigrated there.
I discovered Langston Hughes around the same time I discovered Harry Belafonte, while a girl on the farm: Hughes, in a poetry anthology, Belafonte on a Caribbean Christmas album, singing "The Borning Day."


Mr. Belafonte's book didn't get that much attention upon publication. Some reviewers were overtly were hostile and dismissive of both him and the book, because of his "liberal" stance, his activism, for his "paling around with dictators like Castro and Chavez." They said he was sexist because he's had three spouses in the tradition of very successful show biz people have memorably done, at least in his generations (successful female entertainers of the era married several times also). The hostility of these reader-reviewers reminded me that reader-editors of Hughes's The Big Sea (1943) -- his publishers hated his Harlem Renaissance section, declaring it far too long, overblown, filled with all these names and events that nobody cared about. Finally Carl Van Vechten intervened and insisted the section remain, just as Hughes had written it. Not long after this section was recognized for the brilliant piece of writing it is, everyone's favorite section. It has become an invaluable primary source for cultural, political and art historians. This may well be the fate of My Song.

Harry Belafonte

What brought Harry Belafonte to my consciousness was a song, of course.  A Christmas song, on a Christmas album of Caribbean Christmas songs that I played over and over and over as a child, entranced not only by the lyrics, but by the individual words themselves.  This song was "The Borning Day."  Even now, the verse that brought tears to my eyes every time I heard it, make my eyes fill. Harry Belafonte understood what it is to be poor. He's never forgotten.

Mary and the baby hungry

Yes, we know what hungry be
So we bring them peas and rice
And a little ginger tea
Only pigeon peas and rice
A little ginger tea


Mary thank us with her eyes
She poor the same as we
She poor the same as we


Mary and the baby lonely
Lonely is not good to be
So we sit awhile and chat awhile
To keep them company


Stay awhile makes the baby smile
Pass the time of day
When we see how pleased they be
It make us glad we stay
So glad that we could stay

Mary and the baby weary
Oh, we know what weary be
So we make a bed and pillow for their head
With down from the muhow tree
Only down from the muhow tree


To rest them soft and good
We feel bad this was all we had
We do the best we could
We do the best we could

Mary and the baby rest easy
We go away and let them be
On hush tip toe and voice kept low
We look up and see
Stars of hope shine in the sky
To mark the baby's birth


Seemed to say it's borning day
Of better times on earth
Of better times on earth

The marks of poverty are constant hunger, isolation without privacy, exhaustion -- and yet, still hope. O gods ....
 
There was no way that girl could know back then that one day she would meet Harry Belafonte, and thereafter, occasionally spend time in his company. Mr. Belafante singing "Borning Day" was the first gateway to the Caribbean for her, sparking her imagination, but she never dreamed that in the future she'd be there often, see the poverty, the joy, the fun, the beauty of the Caribbean for herself.

Mr. Belafonte's 87 now.  He's written a book that speaks to what he's seen and experienced over his lifetime of artistic achievement and political activism, particularly on behalf of the poor and powerless.  He was motivated to finally do this book because his dear, dear friend, Marlon Brando, died without doing so, and Belafonte is one of the remaining who know all the wonderful things Brando did too, for the poor and the powerless.  What the people did with whom he's worked closely during their lifetimes, from Martin Luther King to Sidney Poitier, to Marlon Brando and others of that generation of entertainment celebrities, is the subject of his book, along with his own political education.
 
My Song: A Memoir (09/2011), written with Michael Shnayerson, is more than worth reading, particularly for his account of growing up poor in Jamaica and Harlem.  It's full humor too.  The book is the second part that fills in all he couldn't include in his documentary, on Brando and others, Sing Your Song (HBO, 10/2011)
 
Last fall. when Occupy Wall Street here had a weekend of panels and so on with the activists of the Civil Rights era of the 20th C, Mr. Belafonte was present and an active contributor. Today, Smiley and West gave Mr. Belafonte their whole radio program to talk of his response and ideas about what's going on now.  He was as inspiring on the radio as he is in person.

Where My King Cake At?

Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas!

Yum -- and Puerto Rico rox today! Woo.

And now it's official -- Mardi Gras comin' Babeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

What Time Is It?

Winter Time.

In the past serious winter did arrive in Manhattan generally on New Year's or the next day.  In Manhattan of 2012 it arrived last night.  Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

It's also the month when so many friends from elsewhere come to Manhattan for business, for a break, for fun, for whatever.  It's also the month we're always pinched due to unemployment, which doesn't return until the end of the month.  It's become a regular part of the yearly cycle.

The first out of town friend arrived December 24th.  He comes then and goes up state to teach a klezmer music camp.  This year it got cut short because the primary benefactor died.  The funeral and memorial were over New Year's.  We're seeing him tonight. Yesterday we received 4 phone calls and 3 e-mails from people coming in, scheduling the meet-ups.

So we may be broke but we are wealthy in friends.

With friends you are always, in the end, bottom line, A-OK!

In the meantime I have duvets, comforters and blankets and throws galore.  And a space heater.  Because when the temps fall below freezing here, the buildling's furnace doesn't provide any more heat than its long-ago programmed times to provide heat.  So it's daymed cold in here most of the time then, unless I'm cooking.  Which I did for hours yesterday.  I finally made that long-postoned moussaka.  It took hours!  Which is why there is nothing more cozy than making food in the good old wintertime.

2011: Foxessa Read 11 Books

(+ many, many more, but these reflect the most significant theme of all my reading, the endless expressions of violence that is the history of us .... )

Gordon, Lyndall.  (2010) Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds. Viking. 

Emily Dickinson’s poem “My Life Had Stood – A Loaded Gun” can be found here. A short series of essays on the poem by various American poets can be found here.

This is an American tale of emotional violence and a desperate quest for upward social mobility, during which homes became battlefields of the heart, littered with casualties. The book’s apt title comes from Emily Dickinson’s poem, # 764:

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -

In Corners - till a Day

and concludes:

For I have but the power to kill,

Without - the power to die –

Gordon conveys the excitement with which women readers and writers of the day greeted the emergence of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Dickinson’s letters describe how much she anticipated each new work by these women, as when she sought out Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte immediately upon its publication. She requested that Emily Bronte’s poem, “No Coward Soul Be Mine” be read at her funeral, but she squarely agreed with Charlotte Bronte’s famous rejection of Jane Austen: “The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood . . .”

The book’s presentation of the cultural and social matrices that formed the characters of Dickinson and her community are impressive, as in her account of the effect of the second Great Awakening upon Dickinson: she would not be saved, though the pressure put on her to do so made her so ill she had to leave school. Dickinson was as reclusive as the Brontes and Browning, and Gordon carefully describes the homes, gardens, and landscapes of Dickinson’s Amherst, with details from primary sources and her poems. But Gordon’s somewhat sensationalist central subject is the affair between Emily Dickinson’s puritanical, patriarchal brother, Austin, and the gorgeous home wrecker, Mabel Loomis Todd. 

Austin and Emily’s grandfather had founded Amherst College, and like his father before him, Austin served in the powerful position of college treasurer. He married Emily’s best friend, whom she called ”my soul mate”: the cultivated, vivacious Susan Huntington Gilbert, a highly regarded hostess to a long list of accomplished, famous and important friends who helped make Amherst one of the centers of New England’s intellectual and academic life. Though Dickinson never showed the largest portion of her work to anybody, Susan was permitted to see many of her poems, and some were written about her.

Enter the antagonist. In contrast to the socially prominent, financially secure Dickinsons, the enchanting Mabel Loomis Todd grew up in poverty,  Her husband, David Peck Todd, was a morally careless adventurer-astronomer. A charming, conniving seducer and an early advocate of what was then called “free love,” he did well from his wife’s long affair with Austin, who obtained for him Amherst college positions at levels beyond his professional qualifications. The part of the book that tells this story is founded upon a great deal of speculation, the sort that makes for splendid historical fiction. However, for a non-fiction study, there’s so much “it could have been,” “it might be,” and “perhaps,” that a researcher would need to take care in using this work as a source.

The economic and emotional destruction of the affair between Austin and Mabel was carried down through at least three generations, and split literary and Amherst communities. At one point in her struggle to get Austin to acknowledge her publicly as his true life partner, Mabel Loomis Todd requested in a letter that he kill Susan. Fortunately, Austin was too dumb -- or too smart – to understand what she wrote, and never responded to the letter’s request, at least not in writing, or any other way, as far as we know. Mabel succeeded in pushing Susan out of Austin’s life, at the price of being socially outcast by the community she’d expected to lead through Austin. She never married Austin, who died in 1895; Susan outlived him.

However, Mabel made her fame and fortune from the poetry of Austin’s deceased sister Emily, claiming both poetry and poet. Although Mabel never met Dickinson, or  read any of Dickinson’s poems until after the poet’s death in 1886, she conned the greater number of Emily’s poems out of Austin and Emily’s sister Lavinia after Lavinia discovered them. Mabel never returned them, and, in a brilliant career move, went on to edit the poems (their first publication was in 1890), while constructing a persona for Emily as the White Dove of Amherst, which has plagued Dickinson’s image ever since, though Dickinson was no demure pigeon. It was the great era of the traveling lecturer, and Mabel toured, reading Dickinson’s poems while garbed in white, as “her” Emily supposedly read them to her. The grab of both poet and unpublished poems alienated Mabel's former ally, Austin and Emily’s sister Lavinia. Austin’s son hated her, and legally fought Mabel’s possession of the family land Austin had gifted Mabel’s husband.

Speaking as a reader who argues with books as she reads them, I wonder how much to trust Gordon’s understanding of Dickinson’s inner life. Oddly, she believes that Emily Dickinson had no interest in the subjects of slavery, abolition or the Civil War. But was there a person alive in the entire country who didn’t think about the Civil War, all the time, while it was going on? * Emily Dickinson was a politically informed adult. Her father was a congressman, and she lived in an intellectually active, abolitionist atmosphere at a time when the Civil War was devouring and mangling the young men of every town and family in New England. Not only is Dickinson’s work marked by its variety of images of, and addresses to, Death, she employed frequently the imagery of the same Civil War army weaponry illustrated in newspapers and publications of the day. 

Writers write what they know, and Emily Dickinson knew what the people around her felt, and she knew what she saw. For Dickinson, who lived in the years before, during, and after the Civil War, violence in all its forms was as familiar as the garden path between her house and Susan’s. 

_________________________

* Other than Nathaniel Hawthorne, that is, who carried on a many-year sulk fest that everybody else wouldn't let him ignore it because they thought and talked and wrote about it all the time!

Here follows a short list of some of the other most interesting books I read this year. All of them are about America, violence and money too.

Lemay, J.A. Leo. (1991). The American Dream of Captain John Smith. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville and London.

Lukács, Georg. (1938 – 1962 -- 1983). The Historical Novel. University of Nebraska Press.

Remini, Robert V. (1977) Andrew Jackson Vol. I: The Course of American Empire 1767 – 1821. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. NY, and Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition 1998.

              “               (1981) Andrew Jackson Vol. 2: The Course of American Freedom 1822 – 1832. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. NY, and Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition 1998.      
                “              (1984) Andrew Jackson Vol 3: The Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. NY, and Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition 1998.
*Note: These volumes are no longer in print and available only through dealers.

Simmon, Scott. (2003). The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Slotkin, Richard. (1973) Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600 – 1860. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown.

              “             (1985) The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800 – 1890. Atheneum, New York.
              “             (1992) Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier In Twentieth Century America. Atheneum, New York

White, Edward G.  (1968) The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister. Yale University.