Wuhan, China, September 2011

Reading a poem in China.

Opening line of a 2015 novel

Sally Mander acquired a nuclear weapon and promptly lost her mind.

Jeremiah Ramcat
December 4, 2011

On a criticism of a presentation of poetry

In response to Helen Vendler's review "Are These the Poems to Remember?" (New York Review of Books, November 24, 2011), Rita Dove provided civil justifications for her choices in editing The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.  Dove's "Defending An Anthology" (New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011) was, however, not accorded equal civility by Vendler's curt reply: "I have written the review and I stand by it."  Vendler owes Dove and the readers of NYRB more than a laconic sentence.  On the other hand, given what Vendler said in her review about the Black Arts Movement and Amiri Baraka, I suspect that Vendler's teeth are cracked and her locution is reduced to a whisper.

China Note

Dear Asili,


I returned from two weeks in China on October 1, and I'm still dealing with all the work I asked students to do during my absence. So, to some extent, I am in a state of delayed "recovery."

My third visit helped me to clarify much about my cultural mission, my trying to help Chinese colleagues and students develop a firmer understanding of African American literature and culture. From 2012 to 2014, I will spend two months each year in China, teaching graduate students and lecturing at a number of universities in addition to my home base, Central China Normal University in Wuhan. Even if it proves to be only a matter of form, the respect the Chinese accord me is very charming.

I have attached the PowerPoint version of the keynote address I gave on your work for "Dialog on Poetry and Poetics": the 1st Convention of Chinese/American Association forPoetry and Poetics on September 30. The convention, which was dominated by American and Chinese scholars who have a deep interest in L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, involved approximately 300 people. It pleased me to talk about your innovations, the tonal drawings in poetic form, especially given that none of my colleagues from the States had ever given much thought to the kind of creative process (dialect + vision of the inner eye and a special hearing of time + historical memory) that goes into your making of tonal drawings. They were certainly surprised when I said your major contribution to African American poetry was a "physics of existence," by which I mean experience of time/space positions not easily accounted for in Standard American English, because it lacks the reformations of verbs that you have created. I think some of the Chinese listeners got what I was talking about better than the Americans; they have a better grasp of how Tao and t'ai chi are related to the study of physics. It is essential that people hear you read/perform the tonal drawings, but I encountered a problem with the laptop and projector used for the convention. It was impossible to access the Posterous audio versions and the slides with what I had downloaded from your CD recordings did not work either. I tried to make up for the problem by reading one of the drawings, but my imitation of your voice was so imperfect. So, I feel obligated to give the lecture again when I return to China in May, to focus much more matters of science, and to actually play your readings from the CDs. I hope I can find a way to burn or rip the sound from Posterous onto a CD.

What is most satisfying for me is that your work, which is so much advanced in conception beyond the commonplace of spoken word poetry, is now known among a small numbe of people in China. Perhaps in the future I will be able to persuade one of the Chinese graduate students to write about your poetry as I continue to expand my own thoughts about it.

Stay in touch.

Jerry

Ramcat's Morning Meditation, October 21, 2011

Moses the Nubian
shall descend

Two iPads in his left hand,
a mega-blow torch
in his right

Apples of Eden
flock in his pockets

Moses the Nubian
shall melt
Arturo Di Modica's Wall Street Bull

shall melt
the art of heathens
who thought

IN GOD WE TRUST


Jeremiah Ramcat
October 21, 2011

On Digital Scholarship

                Scholars in all disciplines may acknowledge that change, both as a concept and as a practice, is inevitable.  Many of them welcome the dazzling promises of emerging technologies, for they are convinced that the creation and transmission of knowledge in a future must be digital.  Digital technology enthralls. The kind of change it promotes can have a profound, irreversible impact on methods of research, on our choices of what is valuable and what is trivial, and on our understanding of how “revolutionary “ paradigms and epistemes function in disciplines and in interdisciplinary work.  Such change can be overwhelming.  It encourages older, traditional scholars to be cautious and skeptical.  To be blunt, a few of us honestly want to know what is at present only a matter of speculation in cognitive sciences: the consequences of long-term exposure to electronic forms on the brain.  Will it be the case half a century from now that man’s higher order cognitive operations have been so altered that independent critical thinking will be minimal?

                Some of us who have not been figuratively in “arranged marriages since birth” with emerging technologies are more willing than our younger colleagues to question just how progressive are swift changes in our disciplines and in the purposes of  education.  We want to know how the romance with digital technology is related to globalization.   We want to know how the “love affair” with technology and everything digital is increasing or diminishing thoughtful, historical reflection on the formal (structural) and cultural (discursive) changes.  One colleague has warned me that expressing concern about history is a mark of my own antiquity.  So be it. Occasionally, there may be real virtue to be found in being antiquated and moral in nascent, amoral environments.

                In ancient days before the 1970s and the ascent of the theoretical turn, we spoke and wrote in the humanities of sound, perception, great issues, discrimination and sense.  Now we find ourselves in conversation with problematizing  sound, topical concerns, ideologies incapable of naming their boundaries,  sensations, and spectacle. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC) have sought to persuade us to embrace “Create Change,” an initiative which “advocates changes that recognize the potential of the networked digital environment” (see http://www.createchange.org/about/index.shtml).  If we fail to subject that potential to scrutiny, we may discover digital scholarship blindly imitating social networking. Representations “speaking to” representations might obscure the awareness that knowing the history of one’s discipline as well as one’s own historicity is endlessly significant.

                Change is inevitable.  Nevertheless, passive acceptance should be balanced with active resistance.  Scholars in all disciplines, especially those in the human sciences,  ought to think deeply about a central question that can be articulated in disturbingly plain language: is the ultimate outcome of digital scholarship the liberation or the enslavement of the human mind?

Mr. Ramcat's Afternoon Meditation

His face, transparent
as grief, is a sign:
life is hard. So too, the result
of youthful indiscretions.
Mrs. Lot favored him, flavored him,
turned him into the salt of the earth.
Commandments dissolve
in the sweat of a witness.

Jeremiah Ramcat,
August 9, 2011