Face of the Bass

The other thing about those anti-Jewish poems of Baraka's is that he's clearly trying to provoke a response there. He was probably feeling empowered by radical, violent imagery at that time. My only point in this thread is that those poems should not define his whole output, and that he later repudiated them. Whether people want to say that his lines in Somebody Blew Up America show he's still an anti-Semite at heart is up for them to decide. I don't think he is.

Sorry, I thought I remembered your extremist anti-choice stance of some years ago as coming from an R.C. perspective (the same era as your support for the Iraq war). Ah, no more extremist than your anti-theism.

I was making a compressed statement about the assumptions and agendas underlying all aesthetics. Were you familiar with Baraka's work in your earlier right-wing Roman Catholic extremist incarnation, and if so, how did you view it then? I have never in my life been a "Roman Catholic extremist." Despite a childhood's worth of indoctrination, I've never been a devout Christian of any kind. I first became aware of Amiri Baraka's poetry in the 1990s, when I was studying poetry as an undergraduate at George Washington University. I was ambivalent on his work at that time. Like everybody else paying attention, I followed the 2002 controversy over Somebody Blew Up America and thought his conspiratorial musings were embarrassing, although I don't recall thinking it was anti-Semitic. Not long after that, around 2003 or so, I read Blues People and loved it, and started reading his jazz criticism. I was also vaguely familiar with the Dutchman though had not read it or seen it performed. It is only in the last year or so that I've thought about him seriously, after coming across a book of his selected poems at a used book store in Georgetown. In the last week I've read Home (the essay Cuba Libre is fantastic), and in the last two days I've started reading his autobiography. The first chapter, on his childhood, is very well written. IMO anyone who calls him a mediocre writer, regardless of their political orientation, doesn't know what the fuck they are talking about. What I most admire about Jones is that he is very mercurial...it's all out there in the public record at this point. Allen can continue posting anti-Jewish poems he wrote in the 1960s to his heart's content, but those don't necessarily describe at all where he is at now. The man has been a public intellectual for the last 50 years...his journey is far more fascinating than all the nice, refined boring poetry that usually gets championed by the literary classes.

"Another important aspect of the anti-Semite tag is my opposition to Zionism. In my view...Zionism is a form of racism. It is a political ideology that hides behind the Jewish religion and the Jewish people, while performing its negative tasks for imperialism. A favorite game of Zionists is to drop the label "anti-Semitic" on anyone who opposes Zionism or upholds the Palestinians' right of self determination....For here is a people with the murders of millions of their brothers and sisters still fresh in their memories who now function as imperialist watchdogs in the Middle East." --Amiri Baraka, in 1980, over 30 years ago.

That's good, because if you felt otherwise it might jeopardize your standing in the post-colonialist academic left. Fuck off. The next time you come up with an original thought, trying writing a post longer than one sentence.

Also, anybody who wants to figure out what's in Baraka's mercurial soul when it comes to Jews had best read his 1980 essay, "Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite."

I'm reading his autobiography right now...the first chapter is brilliant. In the spirit of some above, I say fuck anybody who says fuck him. So yeah, fuck off. My understanding is that Baraka later repudiated the anti-Semitism found in his black Nationalist period, after he became a Communist. In my book he's one of the best American writers of the last half-century, when you take in his whole output, from the Beat period to the Dutchman and the Slave to Cuba Libre and the Home essays to his autobiography and of course, his writings on jazz. Other writers could only dream of being so versatile and influential in so many areas. Also, dismissing the historical animosities that have existed between African Americans and Jews by comparing them to Nazis and Jews is repulsive. But again, that's just me, and as the spirit of this thread now says, fuck everybody who disagrees with me.

Do you consider it a good poem? Not really. It's obviously more intended as spoken word than as written literature...I think parts of it are good and parts of it are bad.

The whole poem? Or just those words? Yes, but it works both ways. Anti-Semitic people sometimes try to take cover by claiming they are only anti-Zionist, and at the same time pro-Israeli people sometimes try to paint people who have legitimate disagreements with Israeli policy (or with Zionism in general) as anti-Semites. It may be a fine line between the two that gets abused on all sides all the time, but it does exist.

I don't think Amiri Baraka is anti-Semitic. I think he's anti-Zionist and also a conspiracy nut, and in this particular case (the belief that 4,000 Israelis were told to stay home that day) those two things combined to cause him to write something very stupid.

1. Anita O'Day 2. Billie Holiday 3. Patricia Barber

Coincidentally enough, this week I've been reading a book of Baraka's essays from the 1960s, Home. The more I read of his work the more I like him. What I like is that he's rough around the edges, somewhat unpredictable, with an amazing grasp for language but always a little bit off from what you might expect. Some of the essays are forgettable but a few of them burn with a ferocity that is rarely found in American literature. I also love the way he tears into the black middle classes and other black writers of that time, especially James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. I also don't really have any problem with "Somebody Blew Up America." I think the charges of anti-Semitism are vastly overstated. I think he's incorrect to dabble in 9/11 conspiracy theories but that doesn't bother me so much. Most of the stuff chronicled in the Controversies section of his Wikipedia page strikes me as much ado about not very much. But that's just me.

I just want all that research and passion that he put into the topic to come through more clearly in his writing, which is why I wish he had allowed for greater editorial intervention. I get that he has strong opinions on his writing, but as a writer and editor myself I find myself trying to "clean up" parts of the book as I'm reading it, which makes it more difficult for me to really immerse myself in the writing.

Here is a video of Baraka reading the infamous "Somebody Blew Up America" with Rob Brown on saxophone.

From what I've read so far it has the makings of a very good biography. I just wish it had had more editorial intervention to cut out the neologisms and some of the extraneous material that gets in the way of the flow of the narrative. But the research is top notch and much of the writing is very good.

Exactly, saying Euram and Afram doesn't change anything...it's just putting different labels on the exact same categories. It does nothing to challenge the categories themselves.

So does that mean that, for instance, when describing the Khoikhoi people of Southern Africa we should call them "Hottentots" when referring to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries? Language is about power, most precisely the power to define. If we were to follow your proposed rule then we would have to define subjugated peoples by the words picked by the people that were oppressing them.

The refusal of the university press he had a contract with to accept those coinages was among the chief reasons he left them and decided to publish to book himself. Pullman would say (indeed, IIRC, has said) that his desire to change common usage (or at least make it clear where he himself stands politically on this topic) was essential to the whole project. He does, after all, again IIRC, see prevailing racial assumptions-attitudes, etc. impinging directly and perniciously on Powell's life throughout, and no doubt feels that it would be morally wrong for him to step back from the present-day consequences-implications of that view, as though that socio-political "story" effectively ended with Powell's death. Rather, he wants to make those connections to the present unavoidable. Yeah, that was a disastrous error, I'd say. When reading, all the use of afram or euram does is require me to make the necessary substitution. It's a bit like saying "the n-word" instead of "nigger," as Louis C.K. has pointed out in a brilliant sketch.

His racialist views are part of what makes him a great writer.

Baraka is one of my favorite writers. The fact that he and I disagree on some aspects of music doesn't impact that at all. If I wanted someone who always agreed with me, I'd just dictate my opinions into a tape recorder and then play it back while driving.

Why do people consider this to be one of Mosaic's best sets? Isn't most of this music available elsewhere? My problem is that I've come to learn that I'm just not a big Count Basie fan. I tried to be, but I'm just not. And that's the way it is. Oh well.

Sent email on: Howard McGhee Complete Savoy & Dial Masters $13

Man, if only people would get this worked up about things that actually matter in this world. What a difference it would make.

Not necessarily.

That would disqualify pretty much every kind of African American music there is, including hip hop, funk, soul jazz, free jazz and on and on and on.