and the new JMWW is out.

and Jane Priddy writes about Lorrie Moore writing about the Huck Finn censorship dust-up.

and Wyndham Lewis goes all:

Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.

–Martin Luther King, Jr. (28 August 1963) Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C

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Rejoice! It’s January but I left the house! You know what got me to do this? Only the best reading you could find in New York City: Gary Lutz opening for Robert Lopez. Hot damn. It’s true.

Winter does this to people, especially in any grey city; I mean it makes them suspicious of outside. I know I am. I ran into Sasha Fletcher and we confirmed it; both of us are suffering through the season. It’s almost as bad as Christmas.

But if ever there was a reading during which it was easy to hold good posture, it was this one. When was the last time it was not only easy, but enjoyable to sit up so straight? I am not even sitting up straight right now, though I try. Gary Lutz read from a work-in-progress called Divorcer, which was full of the kinds of things I enjoy: Confused people failing to get away from each other; the phrase “duffel bag”; the following sentence: “All you can ever do with people is back out of them.” We had a great time listening to Gary.

Robert Lopez read all of my favorite stories from his new collection, Asunder. I thought that was true until I got home and looked at my copy again and realized I can not pick favorites in that book. The narrators of Lopez’s are hypnotically unwell. Getting in their little worlds made me feel like maybe January isn’t so terrible after all: For one thing, we’re all laughing, and for another, I am not as unwell as some.

The audience (one that was packed in close and featured glasses) listened well and laughed frequently. Way to go, you all. Good work paying attention. See you in the springtime or at the next thing that warrants stomping through ice.

I prefer reading a book to listening to a book. Even when I’m driving, I prefer reading a book to listening to a book. I once drove eight hours, from Pensacola to Lake Wales, Florida, while reading Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This horrified everyone who cared about me. This was before the days of education about texting and driving. I was doing a two-year stint as a traveling salesman of a sort (I peddled eighth-rate university educations), which was great for seeing the country. Most of the country I saw was country I saw after I arrived at a place. The bulk of my out-of-Florida driving was on interstate highways, and they all look the same. My in-Florida driving was on two-lane roads I came to know the way you know the neighborhood roads that lead to your house. It got boring, I mean, and I was in the best phase of a reader’s life — that time when you have discovered that there is a vast literature available for you to read, but you haven’t yet read most of it.

Something happened, though. I traded my father a car for a pickup truck. The pickup truck had a manual transmission. I wasn’t very good with the stick shift. The first time I took it out on Highway 27, I stalled it at in intersection. The light turned green, and I tried to go, but I blew it. A man in a tiny white car rammed into my back bumper. It wasn’t a high-impact accident, but his wife was nine months pregnant. She was okay, but I had nightmares for a week about killing other people’s babies. There are other kinds of accidents, my wife said. What if you had been going fifty miles per hour? What if you had been reading? READ MORE >

Instead of doing a gotcha search on Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” I recommend that its critics read it. They will find that Twain’s Jim has more depth than the parade of black male characters that one finds in recent movies, theater and literature, who are little more than lethal props. Jim is self sufficient, capable of fending for himself amidst dire circumstances, cares about his family, is religious and has goals. He is one of the few characters in the book with any kind of integrity.

In a time when blacks were considered by some to be little more than brutes, Twain has blacks communicating with one another through complicated codes while the whites commit such violence against the slaves and each other that the feuding between two families is such that only a few male members remain. Twain uses the same aggressive satire to expose the hypocrisy of the slave owners.

The fact that a critic has taken to tampering with Twain’s great work is another sign that the atavistic philistinism that has taken hold of our politics and culture has found a place in academia.

Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal (which has suddenly become a friend of literature in the last two years. Who would have thought the Wall Street Journal would be running pieces by Ishmael Reed? It’s a thing worth celebrating.)

1. Art is not the sublime descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and sexuality. It is the production of an infinite subjective series through the finite means of a material subtraction.

2. Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone.

3. Art is the process of a truth, and this truth is always the truth of the sensible or sensual, the sensible as sensible. This means : the transformation of the sensible into a happening of the Idea.

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