Massachusetts angst--critcial race theory

Not long ago was the eminent archivist and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr. arrested during irregular conditions. Here was a man that was entering his home in a method suspicious enough for the neighbor(s) to contact law enforcement.

This was a black man; a man of means and affluence; but a black man nonetheless.

Fast-forward to today's breaking news. Hockey forward for the Capitals Joel Ward receives racial-slur tweets for his overtime power play that gives his team the victory over the Boston Bruins.

This was a black man; a man of means and affluence; but black nonetheless.

Don't you just love post-racial America? I certainly love its myth.

On this Wednesday, 25 April 2012 I finally break my silence to post. There is much that has transpired from within my sphere and without. I have been asked to officiate a Chicago wedding; my wife and I are shopping for a new vehicle; my classes have gone well this semester and finals week is catching up to me (and I am sure with my colleagues too).

I continue to process and to write; to process and to write. Many are the projects that have awakened my intellect but I resist for it is not yet my time. I have been (re)reading Tolstoy's What Is Art? alongside Borges' On Writing, C.S. Lewis' On Stories, Quevedo's El Buscon and Miles' God: A Biography.

Collectively, they are shaping a new tale which brings me to my mental knees. I am haunted with Bloom's anxious reminder but also defiant of Lopate's essai. Immediately, two tales like ethereal texts unfold before my eyes; the first pays for its existence in the second:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me

[...]

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? --Ralph Ellison

I'm a sick man...a mean man. There's nothing attractive about me. I think there's something wrong with my liver. But, actually, I don't understand a damn thing about my sickness; I'm not even too sure what it is that's ailing me. I'm not under treatment and never have been, although I have great resepect for medicine and doctors. Moreover, I'm morbidly superstitious--enough at least, to respect medicine [...] But still, it's out of spite that I refuse to ask for the doctor's help. So my liver hurts? Good, let it hurt even more!

[...]

We even find it painful to be men--real men of flesh and blood, with our own private bodies; we're ashamed of it, and we long to turn ourselves into something hypothetical called the average man. We're still-born, and for a long time we've been brought into the world by parents who are dead themselves; and we like it better and better.  We're developing a taste for it, so to speak. Soon we'll invent a way to be begotten by ideas altogether. But that's enough, I've had enough of writing these Notes from Underground. --Fyodor Dostoevsky

At the end of Invisible Man I wept bitterly on the entitled white steps of the Blanchard House on the Phillips Academy--Andover campus at 8:46 a.m. (Massachusetts time).

At the end of Notes from Underground I felt the urge to laugh. As Du Bois would have asserted: it is the cool logic of the Club. And there's the rub, no.

The Demiurgic: Composing Rhetorica

This oil painting features orbs and satellite design(s) in cloud formations and deep, blue black space(s); again, assisting Deus in principio et criatura ex nihilo.  

Nota Bene: the above painting has been awarded and recognized as the new cover art design for the new Introductory Composition Student Guide: "Composing Yourself: A Guide to Introductory Composition at Purdue"; moreover, a $200 prize is sponsored by Fountainhead Press. At the time of the contest, the new title of the oil painting is:

The Demiurgic: Composing Rhetorica

Oil on Canvas: Immortal Verde, Secular Sun

This oil painting uses primary yellow and shades of green to usher in the immortal, golden ratio; this is Pi: faith in chaos.

Oil Painting: the fruit of Genesis

This oil painting on canvas imbues the Genesis account:

in principio deus alongside the fruit of possibility

and was painted at home; it is part of a series of 5 which are inspired by the mimetic Hand of God and the agitation of the human condition to explore, to expect, to transgress. I hope you enjoy the image.

Grand Central Perc: a "new" cafe s/p(l)ace

I forgot how I came to find out that a new cafe had opened on Central Avenue, but here I am. The space is large enough boasting decent front window parking, plenty of seating, wireless, free art gazing on the walls, and of course a good caffeinated liquid high.

Impressively, there is no uber coffee scent and my machiatto (double shot of course) is strong and consistent on my tongue and palate. The official location is 2444 (easy enough) Central Avenue, St. Petersburg, FL 33712.

The street out front is a busy one, but GCP (if I may) allows for an escape from, to borrow from Hardy, the maddening crowd.

As I sign off and prepare to teach I am left toe tapping my Calvin Klein, cognac-colored driver slip-on to the cadence of Chapman and her "you got a fast car," and I am left to wonder: do I? Well, gotta go be someone, be someone.

The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (HFGF): an application toward an application...

The HFGF (if I may)--
is of some considerable interest to me as both an educator and a peace-lover; the foundation recognizes critical work from both the natural and social sciences and humanities which, and I quote:

promise to increase understanding of the causes, manifestations, and control of violence, aggression, and dominance

I will be applying for their dissertation fellowship award of $15,000 (US) in order to complete my doctoral thesis from Purdue University. I am comfortable, and my body is not at rest, as I am armed with the following works (in no particular order, but in a particular theme/pattern):

--Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribener's Sons, 1960).
--Hent de Vries' Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
--Rene Girard's Des Choses caches depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1978).
--Rene Girard's La Violence et le sacre (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1972).
--Valentin Groebner's Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 2004).
--Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Gesammelte Schriften: Dialektik der Aufklarung und Schriften 1940-1950 (S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 1987).

Collectively, these texts should provide me with a scaffold toward a genesis of violence and a theory toward its dissolution and containment but not its resolution; again, violence is ever-always with us and will not be erased any more than adipose cells can be eradicated. As the (medical) scientist is aware these cells, like memes of violence, can ONLY be decreased to a given capacity.

My location is a nice holding cell right across the new Dali Museum where I am also a research fellow; The Campus Grind is a fantastic site--though not quite the Widener--it remains a quaint and quiet enough interstitial s/p(l)ace. And now, let us get to it...