Youtube: Kerouac on Steve Allen

++ Kerouac‘s note (p. 382)

What aspects of jazz Blues, Jazz, Bop, Language, Improvisation in general or Bebop in particular seem to interest Kerouac?

Bebop, Beats, Jack Kerouac

+ Hearing Kerouac

http://audibleword.net/upload/02%20-%20Medley_%20San%20Francisco%20Blues%20(Fragments).mp3

Gerald Nicosia, Kerouac as Musician- “Kerouac’s only album without actual musical accompaniment … [is] perhaps the best demonstration of the musicality of Kerouac’s art. To appreciate the genius that has gone into these readings, one should have Kerouac’s texts in fron tof him. Kerouac uses the actual printed text the way Charlie Parker would use the score of some old jazz classic, merely as a guide form which to improvise his own variations of tempo and mood and, at times, brand-new melodic flights. In Kerouac’s work, the difference between what eye records and ear hears givesa measure of how Kerouac was creating each piece afresh simply in the act of reading it aloud.”

+ Kerouac as Improviser – Even in Prose

Jack Kerouac wrote some twenty books, including novels, poetry, and memoir – not all published during his lifetime. He is most widely known as a novelist, and noted for One the Road. Though like many writers of the 1950s, he chafed at the restrictive notions of genre and form, he did lay out some aesthetic principles.

from “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”:

“PROCEDURE. Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on the subject of image.

METHOD. NO periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas – but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases) – ‘measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech’ – ‘divisions of the sounds we hear’ – ‘time and how to note it down.’ (William Carlos Williams)

. . . .

CENTER OF INTEREST. Begin not from preconceive idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion . . . .

MENTAL STATE. If possible write ‘without consciousness’ in semi-trance (as Yeats’ later ‘trance writin

g) allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so ‘modern’ language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly,

with writing-or-typing-cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich’s ‘beclouding of consciousness,’Come from within, out – to relaxed and said.”

+ Introduction to Book of Blues, Robert Creeley

Discussing Kerouac reading

SF Blues, Book of Blues: Audio

http://audibleword.net/upload/Kerouac-BookofBlues.mp3?

What kind of voice do you hear in your head? How would did you imagine them to be spoken aloud? How do you respond to hearing Kerouac’s own performing of them? In what ways does it seem appropriate to call these texts “jazz poems”? What are the jazz elements reflected, imitated, or evoked by these poems?

Listening to Kerouac reading alone or with Zoot Simms and Al Cohn, what can you say about his vocal style and the interaction with the saxophones.  How does this collaboration come across in terms of the balance between music and language (music with poetry added, poetry with music added, poetry and music side-by-side, a marriage of poetry and music)

+ Bebop and the 1950s Writer

++ Other “Beat” writers include:

Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McLure, Diane DiPrima, and Robert Creeley.

Robert Creeley – “line-wise, the most complementary sense I have found is that of musicians like Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis. I am interested in how that is done, how “time” there is held to a measure peculiarly an evidence (a hand) of the emotion which prompts (drives) the poem in the first place.”

Ted Joans

Youtube: Ted Joans “Jazz is My Religion”

Youtube: Ted Joans Scats with David Amran

Ted Joans – “. . . . the time has come to deal with the Beat generation and its indebtedness to Bird. The young people who became what Time-Life pronounced “the beat generation” grew up with contemporary jazz. Of course there was schmaltzy pop corn music nightly and daily being dished out for white America’s consumption, but wise ofays fished around in the deep dark waters of jazz. At the beginning there was only a small minority interested in poetry, jazz, and contemporary painting. But the hipsters spread the contagious words about what was really happening that had positive values.

Some of the poets often “preached” their poems, or attempted to “blow” the poem as they were playing a sax or trumpet. All these poets were on Bird or Prez. The latter was the bridge that many poets crossed into Bird’s land, thus arriving hip.. . . . San Francisco was the first place that the Beat generation started doing great poetry readings in clubs and coffee shops. It was in Frisco that Allen Ginsberg first exploded his masterpiece Howl on the world….. Back in the good/ole-bad/old days we often read our poems with jazz recordings. It wasn’t rare to see a poet walking to his coffee shop reading gig carrying a portable phonograph and an attaché case full of poetry and a few records. Bird was our main man of music, and many of us used his recordings to fly on. Jack Kerouac was the first white poet that I met that was hip to bird, ” – Ted Joans, Bird and the Beats

Youtube; Ted Joans / David Amran

Ted Joans on Charlie Parker

Beat “attitude” – Weary and Incensed?

Allen Ginsberg – Howl

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ginsberg.html

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

. . . .

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

. . . .

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.”

Bob Kaufman, Crootey Songo -

DERRAT SLEGELATIONS, FLO GOOF BABER,

SCRASH SHO DUBIES, WAGO WAILO WAILO.

GEED BOP NAVA GLIED, NAVA GLIED NAVA,

SPLEERIEDER, HUYEDIST, HEDACAZ, AX–, O,O.

DEEREDITION, BOOMEDITION, SQUOM, SQUOM, SQUOM.

DEE BEETSTRAWIST, WAPAGO, LOCOEST, LOCORO, LO.

VOOMETEYEREEPETIOP, BOP, BOP, BOP, WHIPOLAT.

DFEGET, SKLOKO, KURRITIF, PLOG, MANGI, PLOG MANGI,

CLOPO JAGO BREE, BREE, ASLOOP ERED, AKINGO LABY.

ENGPOP, ENGPOP, BOP, PLOLO, PLOLO, BOP, BOP.

1. Background

• background of author: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/ellison_r_timeline_flash.html
• 1914-1994; studied trumpet and piano as Tuskegee; published one novel and many essays on jazz; won the National Book Award.
  • status of novel: 20^thcentury work of genius
    • General trajectory: bildungsroman, the real and psychological journey from rural south, to a historically black college as scholarship student, to New York factory work, political involvement and disenchantment, to “hibernation” under ground.

_______________________________________________________________

2. Race in America: W.E. B. DuBois

• DuBois: “double-consciousness”

• “Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” (W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folks)
• and below….

• white irony: Stephen Colbert: “I don’t see race, but I do smell class. Blindfold me and I can tell you who in the room has a yacht.”
• coming to awareness of self as an unavoidably racial subject– a rite of passage for Fredrick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Barak Obama

Armstrong and the novel

Rhapsody in Black and Blue, Armstrong 1932:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUcQESVYlec

West End Blues, Armstrong 1952 (transcription and slides: ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Hbh_-IRs8

PBS: On West End Blues – pulled from Youtube on threat of lawsuit by Ken Burns.

_______________________________________________________________

Two Selections from the Novel (1952/3)
Chapter 1 was published as a short story in 1947

3. Prologue

dramatization: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cctjuE95VA&feature=related

• How does the narrator describe his invisibility? (385-6/3-4)
• What is the symbolic power of his battle with “Monopolated Light and Power”? (6-)
• Armstrong, “What Did I do to Be so Black and Blue”
  • jazz / blues as source of vision, act of resistance
  • the song
  • the discourse on time and rhythm

• Descent into Hell – the dream vision – allegory / Dante
  • orality / sermon on “blackness of blackness”
  • dialogue with the mother, singer of spirituals
• Music / Writing / Enlightenment- through music, and the compulsion towards some revelatory truth about self and world- to see music, to hear, to “make a music of invisibility” by “put[ing] invisiblity down in black and white” (by writing) (13)

_______________________________________________________________

4. Chapter 1 –

“Battle Royal” (published as a short story in 1947)

http://www.chgs.umn.edu/histories/otherness/images/dancingsamboA.jpg

• narrator’s acknowledgement of past shame (15); separate but equal
• Puzzle of the grandfather’s deathbed message, and its “danger” (16) – confusion for N.
• N’s success and graduation speech about humility as the secret to progress
• “Bring up the shines, gentlemen” (18)
  • discuss the spectacle and the distress, confusion of it as entertainment: why are they conflicted, crying, trembling? (20-21)

• Explain the narrator’s desire to speak, to be judged a good speaker – and the twisted irony of it (25)
• The speech – (29)
  • its accommodationist theme of “cast down your buckets where you are”
  • the mistake of mentioning “equality
• Final praise and the “prophetic dream” of his grandfather (33)

Concluding paragraphs of Invisible Man

_______________________________________________________________

http://audibleword.net/upload/Armstrong-BlackAndBlue.mp3

What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue

(As performed by Louis Armstrong)

I’m white inside, But that don’t help my case
‘Cause I can’t hide, what is in my face, oh!

I’m so forlorn, Life’s just a thorn,
My heart is torn, Why was I born?
What did I do, to be so Black And Blue?

How will it end, ain’t got a friend
My only sin, is in my skin
what did I do, to be so Black and Blue

Alternate, longer version with discography.

 

 

[Debut in the 1929 Broadway musical "Hot Chocolates" with Ethel Waters and Amstrong; images: dancer, scene]

 

———————————————————

Dubois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folks (1903). from Chapter One: Our Spiritual Strivings

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.   1

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,–peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards–ten cents a package–and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,–refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. . . . That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,–some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,–a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,–this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. . . . He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. . . . This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. . . .

1. Discuss: What makes it a blues?

Rowan Phillips’ answer:
“There are three foundations upon which  my understanding of the blues rests: [1] that it began as an oral art, [2] that it veers almost compulsively towards repetition, [3] and that it seeks an empathetic though not sympathetic audience — in other words. . . no matter the problem the blues is not a call for help but rather an itemization of the problem itself.  It is a desire embedded within the blues to articulate a problem without servicing it, a crux Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, labeled as ‘tragicomic.’” (Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “The Blue Century” in _A Concise Companion to 20th Century American Poetry_.)

Listen / Read

• Crossroads Blues
• Kind Hearted Women Blues

2. What “literary” qualities do blues lyrics have? Do we or don’t we see them as literature?

In-class writing: Blues lyrics clearly have some”literary” dimensions. Yet they were not immediately nor have they typically been recognized as literature. Discuss some of the challenges or barriers to including blues lyrics in the canon of literary masterpieces alongside troubador songs and Shakespearian sonnets; explain whether and why you would include them as legitimate literature.

• highly charged, expressive language
• arranged according to special conventions
• aimed at producing an aesthetic effect

Even in his 1922 _Book of American Negro Poetry_ James Weldon Johnson does not collect any blues lyrics as poems, even though he mentions the blues in his preface.  (http://www.bartleby.com/269/1000.html)

You’ll Never Miss Your Jelly

3. Harlem and Hughes – Blues, Jazz, Poetry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_Weary_Blues_1926.jpg

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) – Born in Missouri, attended high school in Cleveland, educated at Columbia and Lincoln University of PA, he travelled in Europe and Mexico while younger, but lived in Harlem, NY through the period that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance 1920s, 1930s.  During his lifetime, he published over 30 books — with an emphasis on poetry, but including novels, drama, and non-fiction.  He was and continues to be influential for the ways in which he introduced elements of African American, urban and vernacular musical culture into poetry.

Harlem
“Between 1910 and 1930, the black population of New York increased form under 100,000 to over 300,000. The mass exodus from the south had several causes: a deteriorating social climate (including an increase in lynchings), an economic depression, and such natural catastrophes as cotton boll weevils and floods. . . . By 1920, Harlem had become, as James Weldon Johnson put it, ‘the greatest Negro city in the world.’ A self-contained community of over 100,000 blacks, it was a ‘City of Refuge’ from racist attitudes …. [and] a cultural center for artists, writers, musicians, intellectuals, and various other individuals could feel free to meet, express themselves, and test their creative energies in an environment undisrupted by white America.” (Christopher Beach, _The Cambridge Introduction to 20th Century American Poetry_)

-Juke Box Love Song (381)

4. Langston Hughes “Blues poet”?

* What are some of the issues and tensions regarding the blues for Langston Hughes?
See David Chinitz, “Literacy and Authenticity: The Blues Poems of Langston Hughes”
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3299349

* Language, rhythm, and address
* Midwinter Blues
* Close reading : “Weary Blues”

5. Dream Boogie – rhythm, dialogue
* Hughes’ dialogue with musical elements, from blues but also jazz and specifically bebop.
* Montage of a Dream Deferred (the set list)
* Children’s Rhymes  * Easy Boogie
* Neon Signs

Johnson’s Preface
Read from Johnson’s preface, page 222-224, on the “oratory” of the preache, being moved by the old-time preacher’s inspired sermon…; and on difficulty of intoning them properly

¿ What is it that explains the power of an old-time preacher for Johnson?
¿Why does he feel compelled to write poems in this mode?
¿What are his reservations about language choice

The Easter Sunrise Sermon

An “old time” traditional preacher, W.T. Goodwin, “Easter Sunrise Sermon” at St. James Church, Johns’ Island, SC 1971 (302). Bio

¿ What are some of the “poetic” qualities of an oral sermon like this one that would be inspirational for a writer like Johnson?

_______________________

James Weldon Johnson / Background :

• Born 1871 in Jacksonville, FL; died 1938.
• Founded newspaper, served as school principal, admitted to bar, wrote lyrics to hit songs with his brother, and served as NAACP General Secretary, and Consel to Venezuela.
• Associated with the “New Negro” movement, which presaged the Harlem Renaissance.
• Also published the _Book of American Negro Spirituals_, a novel _The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man_, and other books.

The “New Negro” movement stressed racial price and self-reliance, full rights for blacks as American citizens and, in general, the desirability of assimilation into white middle-class culture. Another important element in the New Negro movement was the interest in the African heritage of American blacks: this heritage was held up as a source of pride and the basis for a worldwide racial solidarity. (Christopher Beech, Cambridge Introduction to 20th Century American Poetry)

_______________________

A Key Issue: Language and Liberation

• recognition of African American writers seen as progress towards fuller recognition of African American humanity and rights of citizenship; W.E.B. DuBois’ idea of the “talented tenth.”
• dialect a fraught issue:
  • tradition of minstrel shows, coon songs; parody of African American dialect

• Writers interested in folk tradition or the vernacular (common speech) had to contend with the racist associations minstrelsy; The challenge for many African American writers: how to succeed in achieving recognition, drawing upon ethnic tradition while evading racist associations.
• Johnson rejected the dialect style of his contemporary Paul Dunbar in poems like “When Malindy Sings;” (Dunbar himself was conflicted, and also wrote formal sonnets with elevated diction like “We Wear the Mask“)

• Elevation of folk materials like “Spirituals” can highlight tradition while skirting issues of racism: see “Black and Unknown Bards“

_______________________

______________________

Johnson – God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
“The Creation” published in 1918, other poems published in the mid 1920s. The volume was first published in 1928

scanned text and images

Noted for minimal use of dialect forms, but an achieved “racial” effect through the quotation and echo of biblical passages, other sermons, and spirituals (Jean Wagner, “The Experiment of God’s Trombones”).

_______________________

Discuss Performance Approaches to God’s Trombones

• Read “The Creation” aloud
• Listen to James Weldon JohnsonJWJ-Creation

¿ In what ways is the language like or unlike minstrel speech?

¿ In what ways do the poems evoke oral performance? In what ways do they lend themselves to speaking aloud?

¿ How does the appropriation of biblical messages and themes shape the poems?

¿ How does “The Creation” revise the biblical text, bringing God close to a congregation?

¿ How do the original images frame your reading; what do they depict? What do you make of the style?

(Images: Aaron Douglas.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Douglas)

• JWJ-LisenLord
• Listen to “JWJ-GoDownDeath
• Read “The Judgment Day”

_______________________

Further Note on Dialect

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/johnson/creation.htm

“As Hughes, Hurston, and Brown would all recognize, Johnson was after an idiomatic vernacular poetics, recognizing that a break with the “dielect” tradition was prerequisite to a more variously self expressive poetry. “The Creation” shows, better than anything by Dunbar, the black folk preacher as a superior verbal artist–a virtuoso word-crafter and image-maker; it recuperates precisely the sort of syncretic linguistic feats that had been a butt of humor in the minstrel show:

And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
“I’m lonely
I’ll make me a world.”

How can anyone say that such writing “only passes for ‘colored’”? This is a stanza that rives the walls of genteel dialect poetry. As Louis D. Rubin has pointed out, most convincingly, Johnson had demonstrated the possibility of moving back and forth between “formal intensity” and “colloquial informality”; just as important, the lessons of free verse are applied to make each line correspond to a breath: “Here was the flowing, pulsating rise and fall of living speech, making its own emphases and intensifications naturally, in terms of the meaning, not as prescribed by an artificial, pre-established pattern of singsong metrics and rhyme.” Gayl Jones backs up Rubin’s point with the authority of someone who has studied the matter with an eye to getting work done: “Johnson maintains the syntax and expressive language and rhythms of the folk orators and seems to presage more contemporary ways of transcribing dialect or folk speech as a self-authenticating language.”(George Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. )

Background and Introduction
Published in 1899 by Kate Chopin, who lived in New Orleans with her husband Oscar for ten years. They traveled to France, where she experienced a liberal lifestyle, but returning to American met resistance to smoking, raised skirts, walking about without a chaperone, running her husband’s business, etc.

• Open Discussion: The Title metaphor

Its suggestiveness: awakening from what, into what? Other connotations? Echoes in passages like “A certain light was beginning…” (140) and “that night she was like the little tottering … child … who walks for the first time” (150)

• Presentation: The Setting, Marital Relationship, Class Codes and Gender Roles

Most married women in Louisiana … were the legal property of their husbands. . . . [A]ll of a wife’s ‘accumulations’ after marriage were the property of her husband, including any money she might earn and the clothes she wore. The husband was the legal guardian of the children and until 1888 was granted custody of the children in the even tof a divorce. The wife was ‘bound to live with her husband, and follow him wherever he [chose] to reside.’ A wife could not sign any legal contract (with the exception of her will) without the consent of her husband, nor could she institute a lawsuit, appear in court, hold public office, or make a donation to a living person. . . divorce was a scandalous and rather rare occurrence. (Culley, Margo. “Contexts of the Awakening,” The Awakening, [A Norton Critical Edition].)

See Also - Decorum: A Practical Treatise on Etiquette and Dress of the Best of American Society (esp. page 179: A Lady’s Position)

 

When we are introduced to LP, his judgmental or overbearing attitude is pretty clear: “‘You are burnt beyond recognition’ he added…”, yet we are supposed to believe that Edna “knew of none better” as a husband. ChIII (139,140). What kinds of ideas about constraint and mobility are conveyed by the interactions of these characters?

1. - Mr. Pontellier introduced Ch.I (133);
2. - Mrs. (Edna) Pontellier introduced Ch.II (134)
3. - Reproach of the wife; “indescribable oppression”;admission that “she know of none better” ChIII (136,137)
4. - Marriage recounted: VII (143)
5. - The “mother-woman” Ch. IV (137)
6. - “folly” in her disregard for duties as a wife XIX
7. - response to her moving out XXXII (192-3)

• Group Discussion: Key Female Figures: Edna, Adele Ratignolle, and Mdm. Reisz.  

How do these three characters come to seem like “types” — and how would you describe each?  Are there ways in which they illustrate different possibilities for female subjectivity in the culture of this novel? 

1. - Edna – twenty-something, married, with children; a Protestant born in Kentucky (135) married into Lousiana Creole society (138), which suprises her with its “absence of prudery” (138); her hobby is sketching Ch. V (140)
2. - Adele Ratignolle – Ch IV. (137); (138); keeping up music on account of the children … a means of brightening the home” (147)
3. - Mdm. Reisz – CH IX (148) described, the artist performs.

• Group Discussion: Scenes of transformation: Music and the Sea

In literature, transformations often occur through journeys or challenges; frequently the “hero” achieves change through some individual effort, or perhaps through the intervention of fate.  Consider how Chopin envisions the transformation of Edna.  Who or what force seems to get the credit or blame? I

1. Chapter VI – the sea and the awakening: “a certain light had begun to dawn dimly”
2. Chapter IV – moved by piano (148-9); Chopin’s “Solitude”
3. Chapter X – suddenly swimming (149-50)
4. Chapter XI – assertion of will (152)
5. Chapter XIII – nap, and literal awakening at the island, Cheniere Caminada … native hospitality (155-6)
6. Chapter XVII – “out” on reception day (165)
7. Chapter  XXXVII – Visiting Mdm. Reisz and the playing of the Chopin “Impromptu” (173)

Group Discussion: Discourse of the Awakened “Self”

Part of the dramatic effect of this novel comes from the way in which the narrator and readers know more than Edna or, often, other characters.  Consider some of the moments where either Edna puzzles out and articulates for herself what she thinks is going on, or places where readers are shown what others (characters in the novel) think.  

1. - Chapter XVI – Edna asserting she would sacrifice her life but not her “self” XVI (163)
2. - Painting and the narrators description of her “casting aside that fictitious self” (169)
3. - Becoming an artist requires a “courageous soul” (173); Dr. Mandalet’s diagnosis (177)
4. - Explaining to Robert, she is not owned (202)
5. - Recalled to being a mother-woman by Mdm. Ratignolle (193-4); “outspoken revolt against the ways of nature”!

• Class Debate: Closing chapter – XXXIX

Thelma and Louise? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z88U915uq8

The conclusion to the novel provoked some controversy during its time.  We won’t try to completely recover the “period” response, but let’s evaluate some of the possible terms of a debate which, among other things, found the ending sent a dangerous message.  Did it sanction adultery or celebrate passion, portray escape from marriage as mental illness or critique the contrained options for women within patriarichal society?And is this ending consonant with the whole of the novel?

You have five minutes to prepare. Make an outline, select supporting quotations/references, choose two speakers. Remember, you are making a claim (or disputing a claim) about the position the novel takes — not what you would do, in the real world, if you were Edna, or Chopin writing the novel, etc.

Format
Pro: Affirmative – Argue for the claim (3 min)
Con: Cross/Rebuttal (ask questions, comment on the affirmative; nothing new) (1 min)
Con: Negative – Argue against the claim (3min)
Pro: Cross/Rebuttal (ask questions, comment on the negative) (1min)

Resolution 1:
Edna’s suicide encourages readers to develop their passion and listen to their hearts, whatever the cost.

Resolution 2:
The Awakening finally shows that the woman with a “courageous soul” cannot logically accept living within patriarchy.

Blind Witness News. Libretto by Charles Bernstein. Music by Ben Yarmolinksy

Brief NYT review

Background:
Language Writing : a 1970s avant-garde movement in American writing that calls attention to the ideological values implicit in literary conventions and envisions poetry as a space for social critique more than personal expression.  Language writing is noted for challenging texts that challenge even conventions involving syntax and grammar.

Summer/Fall 1990: Foreign affairs and war:  Provisional Irish Republican Army car bombing; Iraq invasion of Kuwait; First Liberian Civil War; East and West Germany reunified; Gorbachev wins Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, Leonard Bernstein’s final concert, the Three Tenors’ first concert, Microsoft releases Windows 3.0, and the Web is born.

Charles Bernstein (1950-)

“poetry is like a swoon
with this difference
it brings you to your senses”

Post-war American writer, theorist and most recently professor at U Penn., works frequently in collaboration with other artists; he has also written libretti for operas by Dean Drummond and Brian Ferneyhough.  His most profound influences include the philosophy of Ludwig Wittenstein, and the poetry of American Modernists William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky and Gertrude Stein. The still unassimliated syntactic experimentation of Gertrude Stein is especially echoed in Blind Witness News. Like all of these writers, Bernstein maintains a strong interest in the sound and expressivity of the spoken word, an interest further born out in his poets’ audio website PennSound.  Bernstein is primarily known, and in some circles, notorious, as a poet.  The complex intellectualism and explicit grounding in Marxist/Feminist theory of his work provokes irritation in uncomprehending, traditional reviewers.

_______________
Entree Concepts:
1. “alienation effect” – Bertolt Brecht strove to produce theater that dispelled illusions, calling attention to its artificiality, and purportedly bringing viewers into a new relationship to meaning. Distancing “prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer.”

2. “defamiliarization” – Russian Futurists (ca. 1917) and Situationists such as Guy Debord in France (1968) proposed that the spectacle of contemporary society could be punctured if the familiar were rendered strange through art. It is also associated with poetic language.

3. “detournement” – Situationist’s practice of turning, negation or derailing of the message from the customary path; especially used with reference to the subversion or satirical reworking of a prior artwork.
_______________

BLIND WITNESS NEWS, the libretto (1990)

Open Questions

1. Does the libretto use defamiliarization to call aspects of media culture, celebrity, language, and truth into question?
2. What aspects of the libretto produce an “alientation effect” in readers? and what kinds of realizations does it seem designed to provoke?
3. What are the implications of using opera as performance context for a contemporary critique of the television news? Are there elements of the news that are “detourned” to negate or derail the “message?”

The Title – Pun and Irony
Allusion to and detourning of “eyewitness news,” industry phrase (since 1959) for on-scene live report format, adopted by over 100 stations; also names the various associated syndicated music packages (derrived from the “Tar Sequence” cue from the soundtrack to the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke by Lalo Schifrin.)

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LB/0511/Lalo_Schifrin_-_Eyewitness_News.mp3
http://www.newsmusicnow.com/localmusic.html

“The Talent”:
Names, interrogation of talking heads, vacuousness and simulation of social banter

News Format:
Pathetic motif of “stay with us, don’t go away…” / “we’ll be right back”
Emptiness of content and repetition shift focus to “format”:  undermining or hollowing out the authority of media; revealing news as a media process producing us.

The rigidified, preformulated aspects of the newscast;
Scenes of the libretto mirror segments in a news program:

Libretto – Scenes: I. Opening Theme; II. National; III. Local; IV. Weather; V. Sports; VI. Closing

Eyewitness News Music Format (WABC/New York) -  Open,  Talent Open,  Topical,  Bumper,  Breaking News,  Severe Weather,  Special Report,  Weather,  Sports,  Health,  Investigation,  Sympathetic,  Election/Political,  Close.

_____________________________
POETICS – Language, Form, and Texture:

Free vs. closed verse: meter, rhyme; or linebreaks, syncopation and emphasis of spoken rhythms;
Diction (vernacular language, some esoteric terms)
Syntax: passages of non-standard syntax
Repetition
Allusions to nursery rhymes

CLOSE READING:

“Foreign Menace” (17)
How does the foreign menace evoke the timeless, tragic formula of the opera transmuted to a news program? What does it mean to “outbend the song…”?

Local news (23-24)
What kind of commentary does this catalogue of vapid incidents make? How does it render the local? Can you see this as an example of defamiliarization?

“The rate on purchase” (25)
How does this song use esoteric financial terms and interwoven syntax to detourne the financial report?

“Lets Check the radar” (31)
How does this distance us from the weather? What does it seem to poke fun at?

Audio and Video:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Yarmolinsky.html