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Bio-Sketch
Mackie J.V. Blanton, a pro bono advisor and
group leader to the Gestalt Psychotherapy Institute of New Orleans/New
York, was an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of New
Orleans, Department of English, and an Associate Dean of Student Life
for Multicultural Affairs. Having written essays in linguistics,
poetics, scientific and technical discourse, Louisiana dialects, and
Sufi and Hasidic sacred language, his current research is in subtle body
mysticism and in sacriture, i.e., the practice of and the study
of sacred discourse and sacred study as categories of a
psycho-hermeneutic phenomenology. Mackie has traveled extensively, since
1964, in North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Europe, and Asia Minor. Presently
(May 2007), Dr. Blanton is teaching in Turkey.
buyurun7@yahoo.com
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Did I say that I still plan to go to Iznir? I was supposed to
leave yesterday but I've postponed my departure to the 20th. I
need time to buy some clothes, but also to continue clearing the
land as much as I can. Linda and I think it makes a lot of sense
for me to proceed as usual just because for us, fortunately,
life will be somewhat as usual, even if
it will again become so slowly.
UNO is setting up offices and courses at LSU;
so she will be needed there. She will more than likely commute
to Baton Rouge from Covington, or from her Cousin Patty's home
in Houma, or from Patty's apartment in the French Quarter. There
is very little that we can do but sit and wait for insurance
agents. After they make their estimates, we can hire local crews
to clear away fallen trees in Covington and, if it comes to
that, to bulldoze our home in New Orleans. So life needs to go
on.
Eh La Bas
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I made it to my apartment, where I
unburdened myself of my satchel and laptop and took the
elevator back down to the ground floor and out once
again onto the street. I took an academic journal from
my study to read because I had decided to stroll over to
Cinar (The Oak Tree), my new favorite coffeehouse.
Among people milling about aimlessly or rushing past one
another with purposeful, determined, pinched faces, I
sauntered my way through Grand Park just opposite my
apartment building, toward its main entrance opening on
to where Cinar was. This was going to be my way of
dealing with earthquakes, I thought. I won’t panic
against the worrying newness of all of this, I told
myself. I would just quietly find a table near a window
where sunlight would be streaming through dusky
off-white curtains and I would read, and concentrate
intently on what I was reading, an essay on the center
of Western Marxism of the 1930s, the Frankfurt School of
Critical Theory.
I immediately ordered baklava with
tea and bottled water. In Turkey, when you order
baklava, you don’t just get one piece as a single
serving; you get five wonderfully syrupy squares. I
soon learned, weeks before earthquake time, to savor and
to devour them all, slowly, especially while pouring
over tracts of intellectual history and literary
theory. There I sat, until dinner time. Later, I went
off to a restaurant for an evening meal and returned
afterwards for more of Cinar’s baklava, even though I
had promised myself weeks before that I would have the
pleasure of this great dessert only once a week, on
Sundays. But here I was, on the Monday of my first
earthquake ever, having a single serving of five
perfectly inviting pieces twice, as my way of contending
with earthquakes and consoling myself!
After Katrina
Table
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How could I be sure I was not simply
projecting my own flitting, fretful internal reality on
to these poor hungry street mongrels? Plato was right
after all, I realized. We can’t ever really hope to
capture the ideal moment, the ideal found object, in our
artful amateur moments. For through our senses all was
nothing but mere imitation, never the real thing. The
single lens reflex of Plato’s mind had captured a truth
greater than any subsequent teaching. No teaching could
ever hope to imitate it and any teaching that opposed it
would lack an eternal, perspicuous rationality. A
photograph or slide was no true ideal form, but only an
arbitrary, artificial structure ritualized endlessly by
an academic or artful searching down here below;
endlessly missing the mark, a mere approximation, a
representation at least thrice removed from Heaven.
Make pictures. Take pictures.
What’s the difference?
Can you see what I am getting at?
Why should I take photos of people, places, and things;
of faces, landscapes, and cats; of monuments, ruins, and
a dead bird between a hound’s teeth – when, as Plato
taught us, these photos will be merely mimetic,
imitative of the real, when the real itself is only
apparently real, since it also, being earthbound, is
imitative of ideal forms veiled from the human eye and
touch and taste and smell? But then there is the more
immediate question: Why should I take photos of anything
in which I see only apparent beauty, a beauty that
hurricanes and earthquakes will destroy, transforming
them into another kind of mimetic, though sorrowful,
apparent beauty? It’s the mere apparentness of even the
sorrowful that makes the sorrowful beautiful.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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1960
1965
1970
1975
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 20 January 2012
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