Dr. Rat

Hi, my name is Chrome, and I'm a book-sniffer ... my wife claims I'm just inhaling mold, but I can't help myself! I'm one of those people who considers himself more of a reader than a book collector, but, on the other hand, I've still managed to end up with 2,000+ books (and still buying) in my "library." I don't search out early editions/printings, but if I stumble across one at a used book sale, I'll generally pick it up even if I have other editions ... I just found a first trade edition hardcover of one of Stephen King's Dark Tower books (I think vol. VI?) in fantastic condition for $5. And I got an early printing of Feather's first jazz encyclopedia, in okay condition, for $3. You ever read anything from the "Bookman" mystery series? --eric

Here's a review from Dirda, who is one of Dunsany's current champions. Might also want to check out the Dunsany webpapge A Clubbable Man Lord Dunsany's fantastic tales of Joseph Jorkens, the club storyteller, come back into print. by Michael Dirda The Weekly Standard 07/19/2004, Volume 009, Issue 42 The Collected Jorkens Volume 1 by Lord Dunsany Nightshade, 343 pp., $35 YOUNG AUTHORS typically display a brittle, cheeky glibness--or aspire to ziggurats of erudition and stylistic panache. The last thing a writer wants to be called, at twenty-five, is charming. And yet readers, particularly as they grow older, always return most happily to charming books, especially the ones they knew during their schooldays and adolescence. What did that sophisticate Noel Coward read in his last years? The Edwardian children's novels of E. Nesbit. Ask any older man or woman to choose a favorite work of fiction and the titles that come tripping from the tongue are likely to be The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Alice in Wonderland, M.R. James's ghost stories and Agatha Christie's whodunits, the voyages extraordinaires of Jules Verne and the comedies of P.G. Wodehouse. All these share a distinctive late-Victorian character, evoking a gas-lit 1895, even those set in the 1920s or later: country houses and hansom cabs, the Pax Britannica, the age-old routines of vicars and viceroys, a time of intrepid exploration by the sandy-haired into the far corners of the globe. You don't read such books so much as settle into them. Such cozy narratives may be derided as imperialist or antiquated, the stuff of sentimental fiction or of boys' adventures. But, at heart, many offer the purest form of storytelling: tales of wonder, tales of the unexpected. And few writers have been more brilliant at this game than Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany. Born in 1878 and living until 1957, Lord Dunsany is to modern fantasy what H.P. Lovecraft is to horror fiction and Georgette Heyer to the Regency romance: a major author within a minor--and often-disdained--branch of literature. Typically such genre writers, even the greatest, find themselves the object of cults rather than the subject of dissertations; their readers call themselves fans, and none of their books is ever taught in Literature 101. Yet when people ask for Something Good to Read, these are the authors that friends recommend. Dunsany's most famous novel, The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924), remains a touchstone of lyrical fantasy; in it Prince Alveric crosses into the timeless land of faery, "beyond the fields we know," to win the love of the beautiful Lirazel and bring her back to his home. Distraught, her father uses one of his last two magic runes to waft his beloved child back to Elfland. It is a wonderfully touching story of loss and yearning, and of the ultimate return of magic to our world. Though he was to publish more than sixty books of fiction, poetry, memoirs, and plays, Lord Dunsany established his reputation with his early fantasy collections: The Gods of Pegana (1905), Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908). In them he boldly outlines a new mythology and its deities, depicting the pantheon and geography of a land called Pegana in decorated, ornate prose. The style is utterly and deliberately artificial, and readers either take immediately to its musicality and languorous phrasings or find it all slightly absurd. I love this orotund Dunsany for a page or two, then tire of the twee, fin-de-siècle biblicality: "There arises a river in Pegana that is neither a river of water nor yet a river of fire, and it flows through the skies and the Worlds to the Rim of the Worlds--a river of silence. Through all the Worlds are sounds, the noises of moving, and the echoes of voices and song; but upon the River is no sound ever heard, for there all echoes die." Beautiful and atmospheric, yes; but a little goes a long way. DUNSANY eventually turned away from descriptions of the gods' realm to chronicle "little adventures at the edge of the world," many of them tales of swords and sorcery or marvels out of The Arabian Nights. The tone of The Book of Wonder (1912), for instance, is drier and more ironic--as in "The Hoard of the Gibbelins," a story that opens: "The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man." Indeed, few writers can better tantalize a reader's imagination with an enigmatic lead sentence. Try: "When the nomads came to El Lola they had no more songs, and the question of stealing the golden box arose in all its magnitude." That's from "Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men," and who wouldn't want to hear more? Like many others, this story is even further enhanced--at least in its original printing--by the unsettling artwork of the author's regular illustrator, S.H. Sime. But Dunsany also composed another kind of fantastic tale, slightly more hard-edged, with twists worthy of O. Henry. Consider "Two Bottles of Relish," which explains the grotesque reason a man who has murdered a young woman should chop down all the trees in his yard. More often than not, these later works strongly suggest a storyteller entertaining a company of listeners. His classic chess story, "The Three Sailors' Gambit," starts this way: "Sitting some years ago in the ancient tavern at Over, one afternoon in spring, I was waiting as was my custom for something strange to happen." Another, "The Three Infernal Jokes," begins: "This is the story that the desolate man told me on the lonely Highland road one autumn evening with winter coming on and the stags roaring." In such tales the voice of the narrator and the frame--a tavern, a sitting room before a hearth, a library--are surprisingly important, for they create, however factitiously, the sense that these are true memories, personal anecdotes, fragments that we might have heard ourselves, had we been there. Dunsany worked in this form most unforgettably in the reminiscences of Mr. Joseph Jorkens. Related as he sits by the fire in the Billiards Club, Jorkens's anecdotes are tall tales: adventures with unicorns and mermaids and ancient curses, accounts of giant diamonds, Martian exploration, and trees that walk. All of them are conveyed with a wistful air, in a perfectly serious tone. There's no way to prove them or disprove them. But when the night is chill and the fire burns low..."The talk had veered round to runes and curses and witches, one bleak December evening, where a few of us sat warm in easy chairs round the cheery fire of the Billiards Club. 'Do you believe in witches?' one of us said to Jorkens. 'It isn't what I believe in that matters so much,' said Jorkens; 'only what I have seen.'" And off we go. Dunsany published five compilations of these addictive stories, starting with The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens (1931) and Jorkens Remembers Africa (1934). These two make up the first volume (of an intended three) of The Collected Jorkens, a new reprinting edited by our leading Dunsany scholar, S.T. Joshi. They should not be missed by anyone who cares for marvels and mysteries, for tales of strange seas and shores. Indeed, this edition has been long awaited, as the original volumes are scarce, and some exchange hands for several hundred dollars in the used-book market, when they can be found at all. I own the first two collections, as well as the relatively common Fourth Book of Jorkens (1948), but in a lifetime of visiting used-book stores, I've never seen Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey (1940) and Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey (1954), which will presumably make up the next installment from Nightshade Press (due out sometime this year). The third volume will include stories never published in Dunsany's lifetime, making a total beyond the 127 already known. ACCORDING TO THEIR PRESENTER--ostensibly Dunsany himself--Jorkens's reminiscences have been given to the public "so that men and women to whom the Billiards Club means nothing may come by scraps of knowledge of far corners of Earth, or tittle tattle about odd customs of some of its queer folk, which would otherwise be lost with the anecdotes that were only told to help pass a dingy afternoon or to recompense a friend for the trifling favor of a large whiskey and soda." Now aged, fat, and always in need of a fresh drink, Jorkens looks back on his early years with a nostalgia born from the knowledge that, in Wordsworth's phrase, "there hath passed away a glory from the earth." Once upon a time, the world was commensurate with our dreams. But no more. "Those were beautiful times," laments Jorkens, "and we've spoiled them; we've spoiled them with too much noise and too much hurry; we've let machinery loose on them. . . . Those were quiet and happy days; a little of them remains in the corners of old gardens, where they look as though they were hiding; but not much." In the past, or at least in Jorkens's past, you could travel to Africa, or Russia, or any of the distant parts of the empire, and naturally expect to encounter the unusual. The world was a realm of marvels. Once, for instance, Jorkens found himself surrounded by African warriors who dressed--well, let him tell it: "'Eighty-five men with spears, of a tribe that I did not know, and every one of them in evening dress. . . . White ties, white waistcoats,' said Jorkens quietly. 'In fact just what you are wearing now, except that they had rather heavier watch-chains, and they all wore diamond solitaires.'" After allowing this image to take hold for a moment, the storyteller quickly adds: "'And the first thing I thought was that I need hardly expect the worst, because however nasty the spears looked, anything like cannibalism was impossible in decent evening dress, such as they were all wearing. I was wrong there.'" THAT LAST SENTENCE reveals the typical Dunsany touch. He begins with an absurd, impossible situation, builds it up, and then suddenly caps everything with another and greater absurdity, yet one that proves, somehow, almost logical. Try as you may, you never quite guess what the final twist will be. In one story a man visits a witch; she offers him a charm against thirst and a charm against drowning, and he buys the first because he plans to travel in the desert. It works, sort of--yet after weeks without rain, amid the dry sand and under the burning African sun, the poor bloke actually ends up drowned. "Drowned," said Jorkens. "He could have had a charm against drowning, for the same price, but one never knows what is in store." Still, another time, a young man falls in love with a strangely haughty and seductive woman on a Greek island, and Jorkens leads us to believe that she must be Circe. But at the last moment, we learn that she was, in fact, "a Mrs. Harbett that had lived a pretty fast life in London." Jorkens innocently adds: "You see. . . . one never knows." The question of truthfulness recurs at the opening of nearly every tale; it becomes a leitmotif, an extra barrier that the genial raconteur has to work around. When Dunsany is first introduced to the Billiards Club, he is cautioned never to believe anything Jorkens says. Later, Jorkens berates Dunsany, now his chronicler, by informing him that some people have begun likening his adventures to those of Baron Munchausen--just because a story or two is "distinctly out of the way." But so what? "I imagine you will not disbelieve it on that account. Otherwise everyone that ever told a story of any experience he'd had would have to select the dullest and most ordinary, so as to be believed: an account of a railway journey, we'll say, from Penge to Victoria station. We've not come to that, I trust." In fact, the recurrent skepticism about Jorkens's veracity keeps alive the notion that just maybe his anecdotes could be true. When inherently impossible matters are treated as though they were only unlikely or questionable, this grants them a distant plausibility. Perhaps these tales don't really disrupt the order of things, but rather confirm our deepest dreams. And on this uncertainty Jorkens builds. He does so at the least provocation; just give him an opening. Saki ends a story, "The Open Window," by saying of a character that "romance at short notice was her specialty." So is it with Jorkens. On the surface, Jorkens--like an Anglo-Saxon bard--recounts his past experiences in return for a glass of refreshment. Much is made of his taste for whiskey, and he even constructs one far-fetched tale about smuggling moonshine during Prohibition. It contains this priceless sentence: "The sun so late in the year was shining quite warmly through the glittering leaves, adding to the pangs of my thirst, and I was getting near the point when men drink water." SUCH LOW-KEYED HUMOR pervades the Jorkens stories, as in "The Showman" or "One August in the Red Sea." But the very best tales blend humor and narrative legerdemain with something more: horror in "The Walk to Lingham," mystery in "Ozymandias," science in "Our Distant Cousins," and, most often of all, lost romance, especially in "A Mystery of the East" and "Mrs. Jorkens." In such stories, any adult can feel the allure of past enchantment--for all of us have experienced broken hearts and missed chances: "Then all the loneliness came back to me, all the bleak emptiness there in the world when mystery has left it, and all the aching of my heart for magic, or whatever it is that puts a wonder upon whatever it touches, and cannot itself be described." Jorkens blames the modern era, modern science, above all modern machinery for leaching the wondrous from travel and life. In "Mrs. Jorkens" he recalls how he met, courted, and wed a mermaid who ultimately left him for the sea. He portrays himself as a down-to-earth, even unimaginative Englishman--he calls his fabulous beloved "Gladys"--who somehow just happens to discover poetry and magic amid the seemingly mundane. Yet when he recalls those encounters, the skeptical cross-examine with hard questions or mumble about prevarication. Still, do we truly prefer the drearily factual to the marvelous? "You see a woman may hold a fan for a moment in front of her face, and have a young man almost paralyzed with the mystery of what expression she is wearing behind it. She may awe them with the turn of an ankle, or the poise of her head." Ah, romance! But, as Jorkens sadly adds, "she can't do that to a man that has known a mermaid." Perhaps not. But the world, to its loss, no longer believes in mermaids. "I was miles from guessing all that idly bought ticket [to see Gladys] would mean to me. It is like that with the past; it is all gone now; gone forever with all its vastness, all its tremendous import; but it is made out of little trifles like that one-rupee ticket bought in an hour to spare, ashore at Aden. All gone now. . . . Oh, the green of those seas, and oh those sunsets and the blaze of the afterglow. I'm sure they don't shine like that now. I never hear anyone talking of it, of the thousands that pass by Aden. I know they are all gone, all those colors and lights. And nothing remains but this dark, dripping evening." Many of these wonder tales conclude on just this note, with the aging storyteller sitting quietly alone before his whiskey, staring silently into the fire, unable to shake off the wonder of the past and full of regret for what is so unaccountably gone. And so Dunsany's readers, who themselves remember the ache and allure of other days, slowly come to identify with Jorkens and to feel, if only for a moment, that same sorrow for how much Time takes away. Sunt lacrimae rerum. But then we turn the page and are off yet again: "I said to Jorkens, as I had once said before, 'What is the strangest thing you have ever seen?' And, as it happened, Jorkens remembered that I had previously asked the same question. 'I've told you,' said Jorkens. 'Yes, yes,' I said, 'the daughter of Rameses. I suppose that was the strangest thing that anyone could have seen.'" 'Oh, I wouldn't say that,' answered Jorkens." Michael Dirda, a longtime staff writer for the Washington Post Book World, is the author of the recent memoir An Open Book and the forthcoming collection Bound to Please: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books. © Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Get to reading, girlymen! --eric

William Shakespeare's great work 'Othello' gives the reader an opportunity to gain insight into the changing dimensions of world knowledge and continental change at a very important transitional period in world history. In this play the reader is confronted with the initial encounter experiences that characterized the acceleration of expanded global perceptions and exploratory individual encounter experiences as well as the dynamics of existential perception and profound geo-political realignment. The fantasy backdrop of this work acts as a kind of historical filter that probes into the pychologies and struggles of the trans-European continuum moving into the Elizabethan period ( to arrive at the 'Throne of Rationality'). It is for this reason that the character Othello takes on an added significance because the appearance of this character image-model was consistent with the expanded fantasy platform Icons (tools) of the Renaissance period. That is, the creation of the character Othello is consistent with the accelerated flow of expanded information exchange that came about through exploratory trade route evolution and world discovery in the fourteenth and fiftieth centuries. In seeking to 'experience and understand' this character it is possible to gain insight into the profound implications of cultural image- modeling constructs, aesthetic/spiritual 'vibrational' modeling constructs (beliefs) and finally geo-political (colonial expansion and notions of empire building) modeling constructs- as major categories that underline the root of modern day intellectual assumptions about the human species as well as the root of modern day image-constructs about Africa and African identity . This is not to say that the character Othello in itself has no dramatic or aesthetic quality, this is not my point at all; I see the work as one of the great theater stories of all time- but rather, the play can also be viewed as the 'O.J. Simpson' parameter of its day, in that the underside of Othello's image spoke to several different dimensions- all at once. There is the apparent play, the 'hidden' play and the symbolic connections. The character Othello and the story of Othello opens a door into 'the experiences of an era'. The continental experiences that provided the backdrop for Shakespeare's portrayal of the Othello character can be understood by 1) examining the historical documentation that provided the identity constructs for his character's imagery 2) examining the aesthetic dimensions of that information as it relates to the play 3) and finally the symbolic and political implications of this character from a composite world perspective. In the first category the character Othello cannot be understood by only viewing the particular actions of a fantasy play because this image-construct is a reflection of a much broader psychology that is consistent with the historical documentation that underlined the Renaissance period. To write this is to say that the image of Othello as an African character is connected with the early collected historical writings that sought to understand and record the 'characteristics and ways of humanity' in the various expanding trading routes that opened up in the 1550's - the worlds of the west Indies, Africa and the equator regions - especially those groups of people who were seen as different from the people recording the information . To understand this phenomenon it is important to make serious distinctions about the aesthetic nature of my inquiry, because to understand the subject of African image-modeling constructs is not to understand the motives and aspirations of Africa ( as Africans seeking to explain their viewpoint of reality- so that we could 'learn' about who they are and their world view as it relates to the changing world of the 1550's; rather the perception of Africa that had established the image-construct of European character identity have been constructed by Europeans from their own interest ( which in many cases have had nothing to do with Africa or the African psychology). The seriousness of this distinction must first be noted and addressed. Because the image-constructs of the African identity image-model in the west has a 'peculiar relationship' to Africa at best. There are three aspects of this phenomenon that interest me: 1) the historical documentation of the early contact between the English explorers and native African people and how that documentation influenced the aesthetic parameters that led to the image-model for Shakespeare's character 2) the 'terms of aesthetic definition' that allowed for the 'interpretat-ion' of that material and 3) the related complexities of this aesthetic position- in the 'real' and fantasy world. It is at this point where the genesis 'sentiments' of the African image-model can be found for it must be understood that the British acceleration into the expanded world trade markets of the fifteen hundreds took place nearly one hundred and fifty years after the experiences of the Portuguese in northern and northwest Africa. The consideration of time itself would become one of the factors that influenced the spectra of decisions by given western political powers (countries) to compete in the rush for extended political global domination. The need for expanded trading and exploration was a gradual phenomenon that redefined the parameters of intellectual and commercial speculation in the Renaissance period. No one could really foresee the implications of global world trade as a composite phenomenon in itself. By the time English explorers arrived in west Africa, during the second acceleration of sea-trade and exchange, the re balance of world political power was already in transition. The documented writings of the early British voyagers are important because it gives some sense of the 'real experience' of individual discovery in those faraway new lands-based on actual encounter experiences, as opposed to the inherited ancient Greek writings which were both factual and mythological. The actual- encounter documentation that evolved through the naval exploration experiences in the fourteen and fifteen hundreds represent a genesis source of documentation that provides a framework to study the composite global writings on Africa. This information is especially important if one seeks to understand the summation image-constructs that would come to inform fantasy characterizations of African continental people in the Elizabethan period. The initial encounter experiences that characterized the experiences of the first wave of English explorers took place before the beginning of the fifteenth century, at least one hundred and fifty years before the solidification of the Atlantic slave trade. In seeking to understand this body of information we are looking at one of the principle genesis constructs that allowed for European perceptions on African identity. Up until the fifteen hundreds, English culture relied on the documentation of the early Greeks for information about Africa and the lands of the east as well as the expanding travel documentation of the Spanish and Portuguese. The monastery to university movement in this time period would explore the early works of Horotodus and Pliny the elder and the continental expansion of European culture would see this information provide the backdrop for the expansion of an empire from the southern part of the continent to the northern land masses of Great Britain. The general tone of the early Greek writings were basically respectful of the people they wrote about, even though there was a tendency to exaggerate and fantasize about the specifics (i.e. descriptions of animals, unfounded concepts of animal origins, and 'tall tales'). This body of information has to be viewed with respect to the existing state of possibilities in that time period. Problems of geo-graphic error in the writings of the early Greeks is consistent with the limitations of exploratory technology in that period of time. Even so, the early writings of Horotodus and Pliny the elder most certainly do acknowledge the existence of Africa- even on levels that present day academicians would prefer not to think about ( i.e. Africa is the mother of Western Civilization, Africa as the birth place of mathematics and geometry, Africa as a place where new ideas always appear, and more important {to me} Africa as a place that 'is different' from Europe). The early writings would also generate the image of Africa as a mysterious land where strange animals existed within a totally different environment state. By the middle of the fiftieth century the beginning of the initial encounter documentation would make itself felt to the greater Renaissance intellectuals. The year 1555 would be an important year for geo graphical writings in Renaissance documentation as well as the emergence of scripture and philosophy as primary sub themes that would outline the psychological model for intellectual and image-model perceptual constructs. There are two books that show a confluence of Englishman notions about Africa in the sixteen hundreds that are relevant to the subject of character and aesthetic modeling; 1) 'The Gardle of Facions' by William Waterman and 2) The Decades of The New World' by Peter Martyr. Waterman's book acknowledges early Greek sources as the supreme source and authority of the early writings about Africa and the thrust of his efforts sought to reestablish and distribute that information in the 'modern' context of Medieval printing and distribution. He writes; "The Fardle of Facions conteining the Auncient maners, customes and lawes of the people enhabiting the two portes of the earth called Affricke and Asie'. Mr Waterman's approach is more akin to the spirit of story telling rather than science. Even so, his book establishes a set of themes that would be consistent with the composite writings of his countrymen, that being; a) the legend of Prester John b) the strange monsters and people of Africa c) the fabulous wealth and gold of Africa d) the heat and rain of the African continent and e) the deserts. In the book 'Othello's Countrymen' by Eldred Jones {pp. 10} Mr. Jones writes 'Personal accounts of strange people like the King of Benin must have fertilized the imagination of creative writers. This is the kind of suggestion that may have led by devious ways to a black Othello'. The voyages of Sir John Hawkins would also affect the restructural image-model of the African man. In his writings would be found a) the first use of the word 'Negro' b) first mention of contact with an African King who did not keep an immoral bargain to give Hawkin's slave at the end of an immoral bargain between the two men ( this King is reputedly the King of Mina). This historical incident is viewed as connected to Robert Peele's play 'The Battle of Alcazar (where a Negro King (Muly Hamet- known as 'The Black King' lured a young Portuguese King Sebastian, and the 'flower of Portuguese youth' into a battle in Africa- to their deaths. Richard Hakluyt's book 'Principal Navigation's would also be an important source of global information. The focus of this book would a) establish a global perspective that would influence business people, investors , traders as well as artist and poets b) Hakluyt's book established new sources of imagery and c) new background material for character development (i.e. sea fight imagery, new island scenes). The writer Lois Whitney says that 'The History and Description of Africa by John Leo could have also been a model for Shakespeare's creation of Othello. In this book can be found a) passages on the solder ship of the Moors b) their credulity c) their capacity for love d) their high regard of chastity e) their jealousy and f) the fury of their wrath. All of this information would set the tone and image parameter-spectra of the African man in English literature. The historical documentation of early English exploration in Africa is important because it clearly establishes that: 1) the English explorers initial-encounter (reception) to the inhabitants of Africa gave insight into more than any 'one zone' of information transference 2) that the base assumptions behind the recorded documentation of the explorers opens a door into the psychological reality of the English explorers as much as it describes the particulars of African reality 3) that fantasy and factual information of Africa in the Elizabethan time period would become its own 'separate category'- for European curiosity, science and entertainment (with its own set of dynamic implications for the expanded world stage). In the first category the early explorer writings clearly establishes that the African people the English explorers encountered in the early journeys were 'in the process of living their lives' and that there was also a sense of individual and group experience in the various 'native' groups they encountered. The Mandeville writings are important to establish the genesis social/aesthetic/and spiritual climate that the English sought to understand and document. Of the Numedians Mandeville writes: 'The folk that wone {live} in that country are called Numedians and they are christended ..But they are black of color, and that they hold a great beauty , and aye the blacker they are the fairer them think them. And they say that and they should paint an angel and a fiend, they would paint the angel black and the fiend white. And if they think them not black enough when they are born, they use certain medicines for to make them black withal, That country is wonder hot, and that makes that folks thereof so black' { }. This paragraph establishes one of the most central aspects to the whole question of 'applied aesthetics' and the trans/image-model of the African man. Because the initial encounter experiences of the early English travelers would contain, and in some cases initiate the iconic quality constructs of an African image model based on a premise that implies 'the most basic crime of the African is that he is not European'. To understand this phenomenon is to be confronted with how the significance of interpretation-interjections from outside the African community would be used to undermine African reality, identity and value systems. The early English writings on Africa establish eight zones of perceptual reality: 1) that the physiognomy of the African people were not beautiful in the eyes of the English 2) that the consideration of skin complexion would become a focus unto itself 3) that Africans were a particularly libidinous sort of people when compared to the Europeans 4) that there were no unified religious structures in the country and every man had his own religion ('pagan time') 5) that the African man could not be trusted to keep his word 6) that the land of Africa contains many strange beast 7) that the continent possessed magical things and the promise of riches (gold) and 8) that the African man was either a separate strain of humanity or was bestial (i.e. so-called primitive). In the first category the physiology of the African people would become a polarity tool that allowed Europeans to 'like themselves better'. A special psychological 'sentiment' would surface immediately in the early English exploratory writings- a 'sentiment' that viewed the physiology of the African as distasteful, repellent and ugly - that is to write, that the physiology of the Africans did not look Caucasian. The Oxford English Dictionary describes the meaning of black before the sixteenth century as, "Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty foul... Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister.. Foul. iniquitous, atrocious, horrible, wicked. ...Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc. Black was an emotionally partisan color... the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion.". All of these factors are involved in the summation image that formed the image-construct of the African man in the Renaissance period. In Alden T. Vaughan's book 'Roots of American Racism' he writes '... the English name for central and southern Africans came from their skin color. Throughout Europe, in fact, Africans were "blacks, ""blackamores," or "Negroes"; to the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italians, they were "negros' and "negras"; to the Dutch, they were "negers." And in each language the word for "black" carried a host of disparaging connotations. In Spanish, for examples, "negro "also meant gloomy, dismal , unfit , and wretched; in French, 'noir' also connoted foul, dirty, base, and wicked; in Dutch , certain compounds of 'zwart conveyed notions of anger, irascibility, and necromancy; and "black" had comparable pejorative implications in Elizabethan and Stuart England. { pp. 6}. The combine weight of these 'aesthetic associations' can be viewed as a kind of 'stacked deck'. The word Black could also mean dark skin- as in satanic; "black comedy"; dark, as in 'darkest Africa'. The aesthetic background information that provided the terms of meaning and value system judgments of Renaissance culture is the second category of historical modeling that influenced the image-model creation of the Othello character. The spectra of that information reflects on 1) the tenet constructs of Christianity 2) the aesthetic dimensions of color 3) the emergence of Calvinist movement 4) the 'sacrificed position' of European women 5) the separation between body and mental identities and 6) the emergence of modern scientific constructs. In the first consideration, the old and new testament established the mythical notions of Adam and Eve and their son Ham who commits the first of the 'new violations' (after the Garden of Eden experience). This concept reappears in the new testament , after the flood, where the story of Cain and Abel recounts a 'second profound violation' by Cain. In this same set of writings (the Bible) the subject of 'light' and 'Divine Providence' would actualize the image-model existence of Jesus (i.e. and his physical racial properties) would become the new God head (logos) of the trans Christian Religion. The composite solidification of the Renaissance period is important because it is in this time space where the genesis constructs of the trans-Christian movement is brought to its most elaborate extension- that is, the Renaissance period as the fulfillment of Christian mysticism and ceremony. As a spiritual logos, the phenomenon of color in Christian theology would establish the color white as synonymous with the color of the Deity and black as representative of the attributes of the Devil. And to complete this construct a concept of Divine Providence was formed as a gradient-logic construct (paradigm) that would allow for the concept of 'proximity' (to the Divine) to be isolated and measured. With this innovation it would then be possible to establish a concept that measured 'light reflected through darkness' ( 'White is the goal'!). The third category that influenced the image-model construct of the Othello character is the evolution of restructural Medieval theater. In this area of focus can be sited 1) the iconic mystical constructs of the early theater movements 2) the emergence of the Masque and its related form-state 3) the impact of the new visitors on the continent as 'visitors' of the 'Crown' and 4) the extensions of 'new continental mythologies' (from the new 'acquired lands'). The evolution of the Masque ceremonies of the middles ages can be viewed as one of the principle domains that sought to ritualize and identify the iconic and symbolic experiences ( and relationships) of Christian ceremony. In itself, the Masque and pageantry movement was a short lived movement that existed for one hundred and fifty years. The formal characteristics of this form utilized 1) dance as a nucleus of the creative experience (art form) 2) the use of applied 'blackface' and 3) the image-characterization of the Devil is portrayed as black. The extended practice of 'blackening' would enter into the more 'sophisticated court spectacles in the 1600's and even nobility would take part. Queen Anne requested the use of a 'Blacke-More' in a Masque as well. By the year 1555 the color black had been firmly positioned to represent the opposite of Christian values (and images). In this new form of pageantry the image of the 'black person' would be used to solidify 'grotesqueness' and foolery. So powerful was this imagery for the English that the Moor would become a central sub-theme inside the form; a category unto itself (i.e. the Masque of Moors). This iconic figure would lead the way in the parades that started the Masque as a transitional formal state. Mr. Jones in 'Othello's Countrymen' wrote that from the very beginning of the Masque, vague connections to African imagery can be found throughout the form, from poetic descriptions to ceremonial depiction's (i.e. dress and 'zones of exotica') and that these references would solidify into 'an African image' with the composite formal state of the Masque. John Leo book is sited by Ben Jonson in his "Masque of Blackness' work ( which was a pivotal work that would scandalize the English nobility). Leo writes, 'Pliny, Solinus, Ptolemey, and of late leo The African, remember unto us a river in Aethiopia, famous by the name of Niger, of which the people were called Nigritae, and now negro's; and are the blackest nation of the world'. The story of 'The Masque of Blackness' has a character called the King of Egypt who had a black face and was the father of Saint George'. This relationship is another example of the profound connections that existed in the ancient world. Another character of the Masque is the use of dance as a nuclear identity focus that solidifies ceremony ( and even more special, that solidifies mutable ritual logic's and fantasy symbolism). The name of this form of dance was 'Morisce' or "Morisco' which has an association with the word Moor and/or Morocco. The use of African symbolism in the Masque extended into the meta-image 'genesis associations' that gave insight into the 'spiritual essence' of the form. In the black Masque existed twelve Nymphs, Negro's, and the daughters of Niger (referring to Nigeria- 'The blackest nation of the world'. And finally, the fantasy story itself involved the challenge of whether this group of charact-ers could survive and bath thirteen nights in the ocean, and if so, 'they would gain whiteness and beauty (pp. 32). This is a gradient logic formal symbolism that extends the same formal constructs that defined the ' the closer one is to light, the nearer one is to God'. The recognition of change of complexion in time( i.e. sound/color mass recognition) as a domain of identity in itself. The use of this concept as an image- construct (icon) would accelerate and amplify the forming of the black and white Moor concept, as dramatic tools that could be used in a way that would be consistent with Christian iconography and 'dynamic motivation' (!) (?). By the opening of the decades of the sixteen hundreds there would be two established image models of the African fantasy character. The first of which is 1) the image of the villainous Moor 2) the image of the 'tawny Moor' or white Moor and 3) the arrival of Othello as a signal of 'universal adjustments'. In the first example, the character Muly Hamet in the Battle of Alcazar, Aaron in 'Titus Andronicus, and Eleazer in 'Lust's Dominion are examples of characters who clearly demonstrated the unchristian way with their 'modern behavior'. In the second category, the character abdilmelec is generally viewed as an example of a more dignified Moor (even if still capable of cruelty like the other Moors). The character Othello is an example of the universal Moor whose actions the theater go'er can relate to from a composite human perspective. Othello is presented in the story as a human being with human faults, and his 'Africanness' becomes a prism that is used to postulate universal assumptions. Even so, the play Othello is shot through with set up situations where the theater go'er is given an opportunity to laugh at the'way of the African' ( and how 'primitive they are when compared to the Europeans'). Humor becomes a layer of this construct, for throughout the play Shakespeare gives his audience 'quick vibrational slice thought flashes' - like Emilias 'traditional contempt' for Africa quickly returned without missing a beat when she discovers the truth about Othello ( this is just like the O.J. Simpson affair). The most profound use of humor in Othello for me is the scene where Othello talks to Emila after the murder of Desdamona. When she keeps repeating 'My husband? { 5. 2. 140}. Suddenly the theater go'er is laughing and crying at the same time! Shakespeare the conceptualist covers all of the primary bases of the African image-construct; take for instance 1) Iago's total contempt for Othello's intellect ( and the story back's up Iago, not Othello) and 2) the credulity of the African nature ( Iago; "These Moors are changeable in their wills'). These concepts are the backbone of the modern era. The concept of the libidinous African man was established in the early writings of the English explorers. In this concept the African is portrayed as somehow 'not natural', or maybe 'too natural' for the psychology of the early explorers. Yet when the subject of sexual dynamics comes up from the global perspective it is the Renaissance viewpoint that is called into question. This is not to comment on the documented impressions of the early explorers but rather it is important to not confuse the actual 'reality experiences' of the African people ( in the act of living in their own world and territories and experiencing that world in a way that made sense to them) with the viewpoint of pan-Christian colonialists. The writings of the early explorers really tell us more about the writers themselves rather than the African people. Wintrop Jordan in 'White over Black' writes that 'the undertone of sexuality run throughout many English accounts of West Africa {pp33}. Mr. Jordan sites as an example of this phenomenon the so-called lustful embrace of Othello were "the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor". Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (ca. 1624) referred to "an holy hermit" who "desired to see the Spirit of Fornication; and there appeared to him a little foul ugly Aethiop". There would also be much mention of the size of the African penis (and comparisons to apes and Gorillas). All of these attempts to understand the physical nature of the African man would help to solidify one component of the natural philosophy movement that would lead to the construction of 'chain of being' postulates and the emergence of Linnaean biological classification concepts. In its extended form, the European Renaissance man would find the need to 'control their sexual urges' (and make a restructural separation between mind concept of body 'affinities') and even more important, 'control their wives sexual urges'. To understand the depth of sexuality as a sub-category of Renaissance drama, and Othello in particular, one needs only to examine the text of the play. What can be said about the character Iago, who soliloquizes upon his own motives in the play; "I hate the Moor,/ And it is thought abroad that 'twixt my sheets/ He has done my office." Later in the play Iago says "For that I do suspect the lusty Moor hath leaped into my seat." But these examples are only the beginning of the 'hidden secrets' of the play. The character Iago is really voicing the aesthetic 'lessons' of the play. And when Othello finally accepts Iago's premise he begins to accept that physical distinction do matter; "For she had eyes and chose me." He then goes on to say: " Her name, that was as fresh, As Dian's visage, is now begrim'd and black As mine own face. Then the play becomes 'clearer to the point': Iago says " your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs", and later "and old black ram/ Is tupping your white ewe' and still later "your daughter cover'd with a Barbary horse." and for Brabantio, the marriage of Othello to his daughter was "against all rules of nature". Later still he says ...what was responsible for this sad change of events when he ask Othello what other cause could have brought a girl" so tender, fair, and happy' / To incur a general mock / Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom / of such a thing as thou. later after Othello had killed his wife he groans to Emilia, "Twas I that killed her"; and Emilia responds with a torrent of condemnation or , rather, of expulsive repudiation; "O/1 the more angel she,/ And you the blacker devil." Of Desdemona; "She was too fond of her filthy bargain.: To Othello: "O gull! O dolt/ As ignorant as dirt!" In this new world of rationality the women were expected to be a) loyal and obedient b) house keepers and cookers c) and to obey their husbands - right or wrong. These concepts had nothing to do with Africa. The evolution of the Othello image-construct model can also be traced to the extended fantasy materials that came from contact with the new worlds. These experiences would provide the seeds for fresh storytelling models for restructural Renaissance poetry and theater. There are three aspects of character image-modeling that is related to the Othello character that is relevant to this paper 1) the psychological nature of Othello the play 2) the psychological nature of the character Othello and 3) the significance of inter-racial union in the Renaissance period. Before the play can be approached there are several psychological assumptions that must be accepted. The first of which is; a) that the character Othello exists in a fantasy context that takes his 'inferior status' (as a human being) as an accepted fact that needs no debate (Throughout the play one is reminded of this sub-human status) b) Brabantio accuses Othello of 'black magic' in getting Desdemona to marry him right at the beginning of the play - as a way to 'acknowledge' the impossibility of natural attraction to Othello from his daughter c) four billion mentions of Othello's 'vile race' from the beginning of the play to the end. In Mr. Shakespeare's 'Othello' black characters are always apologizing for their color because Shakespeare would have us believe that an African man must naturally accept 'the perception of inferiority' when viewed from a European construct. This is true even when the African character is a Prince, as in the Prince of Morocco. How strange it is to hear a Prince apologize for his color, "Mislike me not for my complexion,/ The shadow'd liery of the burnish'd sun,/ To whom I am a neighbour and near bred." As for the character Derdamona, she is the epitome of grace, beauty and honor, even to the point of honoring her husband on her death bed- (even 'after death' she comes back to do good- 'what a lady'!). When the Othello character speaks in act 5, scene two, he helps the audience to choose between hierarchical or multiple 'correspondences (and I could relate to a guy who needs to unify 'a theme'). 'It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul;'......' Put out the light, and then put out the light;'. Othello is referring to the mystery of existence and the wonder of men, women and sex. The vibrational weight of this soliloquy frames the journey of a guy who thought he'd done everything right by trusting his 'base assumptions'. Obviously, Othello must be a fool! Because those were not the right assumptions in the first place. 'It is the cause', this is a character who has evolved in the 'man'z world' of the military where the quality of 'so-called' honor is not supposed to be questioned. Sure, it is true that the guys have always 'stacked the deck' against the women; but in this play we now are led to believe that a man's best friend and colleague would do him in ( right in the back) and 'breach' the 'code of men'. And the answer is, of course, this is the case. For Othello not to know this universal fact was a serious error. The concept of 'put out the light' has a profound Egyptian connection, for the imagery of light (and 'the cult of light') came out of 'the old country' ( and I am not referring to ancient Greece). That the phenomenon of 'light' was not perceived as 'an instinctual quality,' as opposed to a rational or meditative quality, might imply that Othello had separate from a 'relevant sensibility' ( that could have maybe increased the outcome of the play to his advantage- certainly, it could not have made the situation any worse, that's for sure). For Iago to sing; "And let me the canakin clink, clink; And let me the canakin clink. A soldier's a man; O, man's life's but a span; Why then let a soldier drink." Some wine, boys!" (11.iii. 70). Othello should have known then something was up. And what of the political social implications of the image-logic construct of the Othello character as a phenomenon that influenced the spread of extended European colonialism in the 1660's? This is a subject that can never be resolved on any one plane of inquiry; yet even so, one is left with the residue ('odor, if you will) of a very special period in human history that begs the following associations: 1) the role and aesthetic purpose of restructural theater in the Renaissance period, 2) the use of image-manipulation as the first degree of 'esthetic-realignment'(!)(?) 3) the continental route of European 'revealed' racism 4) and the esthetics' of trans-planted Christianity. In the first category, let me state my viewpoint clearly and with no complexity: I have only wonder and awe for the existence of the great Renaissance theater tradition and even more, I have benefited in my personal life from the existence of this body of information. My attempts to better understand this subject is based on the challenge of growth and change ( and 'so-called' curiosity) as well as a need to better understand the composite arena of the sixteen hundreds. The 'dynamic implications of this time period is important because the full weight of western imperialism (i.e. colonialism and slavery) would solidify as a 'cultural Identity'- that would later be translated into a cultural political process. The role of Renaissance theater in the Elizabethan theater time space is important because the theater was a component in the 'inner intellectual' life of the people - especially the nobility ( and the artists). Shakespeare most certainly recognized this relationship as the documentation makes it very clear that the poetic intellectual tradition was very much aware of the expanding news of world discovery and 'exotic curiosities'. The beauty of Shakespeare's work for me involves how he is able to take a spectrum of fantasy characters that draw on the available pychologies of their time space and make it live. In taking this position Shakespeare is in agreement with the aesthetic viewpoint of art as a reflection of composite reality. To experience the play Othello is to enter into a fantasy world that gives insight into an expanded psychological period in human history- suddenly for the first time sense the 'ancient experiences' humanity would be confronted with the existence of new people, new lands for exploration, new foods, materials as well as the first scent of secular freedom. To probe into the inner dimension of Renaissance psychology is to better understand the value systems and motivations that dictated the events of an era. The vibrational 'radiance-impact' of restructural Elizabethan theater presentation established a unique fantasy context (platform) that allowed for an expansion of formal and conceptual constructs. To understand this phenomenon is to recognize the uniqueness of a theater approach that 1) contained symbolic-spatial references 2) established demarcation zones that allowed for multiple time-space story assumptions to happen in 'real time' and even more important for this paper 3) allowed for 'real-time' response actions to take place between the actors and the audience. To experience a play like Othello would be to enter into a 'ritual contract' between the characters, story and the 'secret' celebration of the inner 'codes'. The summation 'realness' of Renaissance theater would come to provide an intellectual and aesthetic platform that commented on the changing life of a culture in transition. The dialogue in Othello tells us something about the vibrational reality of human nature and human experience. My point is this, the documentation seems to clearly suggest that the psychological fantasies demonstrated in the works of Shakespeare's work Othello were consistent with the value systems that led to the colonial experiences- but there is more. From the vantage point of three hundred years we can now view the documentation of the English as the fulfillment of the Old and New Testament writings ( that established Ham and the notion of black as evil and/or 'fallen' - leading into, after the flood, the story of Cain and Abel; leading to the concept of God as the source of all things, to the idea of Man ( not woman- but this decision cannot be blamed on Africa either) as created in the image of God, to the idea of certain sectors of humanity can be viewed as 'not as God-like as others' and as a result can be put into slavery ( or destroyed). This is not to say that any one sector can be blamed for anything- this is not my point at all. Rather, the restructurual tools of Renaissance theater would help to open the psychological 'notions and tendencies' of a culture in a way that was both unique and effective. Audiences at a given play got involved with the drama in a way twentieth century audiences sometimes fail to recognized. The Renaissance theater was a living tradition that reflected the poetics of its people. The internal social reality dynamics of the Renaissance Period cannot be separated from the composite changes reshaping world communication and travel. Emily Bartels writes in "Making More of the Moor: that 'a prime target of racism becomes not the outsider, but the insider, the population that threatens by being too close to home, too powerful, too successful, or merly too present.' I read this viewpoint as an awareness of the profound complexities that come into play when one seeks to understand an era of such magnitude. This concept also recognizes the 'boomerang' effect of cosmic time cycle and 'earth wonder'. It was one thing to erect a concept of reality that imposes an 'aesthetic-position', and another thing to live in 'that same aesthetic position'. The profound implications of the spiritual and iconic postulates of the trans-Christian movement would create a new world order that demonstrated the greatness of Europe on one hand, while at the same time create 'existential pychologies' that would also create 'restructual complexities' ( if I can write it that way). I agree with Michial Neill when he writes of a 'racialist ideology'-was taking shape within such representations alongside and 'under the pressure of ( Neill suggests) the nation's "nascent imperialism'. Neill then goe's on to write, 'When Queen Elizabeth writes to the Moslem leaders of Turkey, attempting to represent herself as the "most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kind of idolatries"- a 'signature axiom' was already 'in the works'. Nor have I meant to in any way dis-respect any particular religion - this is the 'stuff' of history'. The subject of Othello as a image-model construct that reflects on the political and social dimensions of the sixteen hundreds transcends any one domain and reflects on the internal balances on composite European expansion (and interaction dynamics). This is the time period in European history where concepts developed that discussed the proper domain and boundaries of religious control (versus religious freedom) and the character and purpose of society. That the acceleration of the slave trade would come from this region of people in this most 'epiphanial time' cannot be dismissed as inconsistent with what appears to be a most unique aesthetic disposition. In the play Othello, the character Desdamona has shocked the whole world by marrying a black general. Somehow the nature of this 'shock' is connected with the seemingly 'impossibility' of a Caucasian woman having an attraction to a black man- and with the abundance of literature written in that time period, it is easy to see why African men were viewed as bestial and 'smelly'. But what is one to think when reading about the life of Olaudah Equiano and the works of the Freed African blacks in the seventeen hundreds; 'He married an English woman in 1792, and one of their two daughters lived to inherit the sizable estate he left at his death on march 31, 1797'. Evidently in less than a hundred years there are records of interracial marriages - unless poor Miss Equiano was the only English Lady of her generation to marry an African man. This is not only the case for the English but applies to the whole of Europe in transition (and later, the Americas). Not to mention the profound sexual experiences of the European explorers in their new encounters. I write this not to point fingers at the Europeans but only to state that the existence of different kinds of people on a planet is not an intellectual construct that involves only one dimension (where someone can agree and not agree with the 'fact' of a peoples existence'). The works of William Shakespeare are important because it documents the dynamic complexities that were in the air, and it hints at the undercurrent nature of the human species. To write that the play describes a racist people and a racist culture is to mis-read the challenge of theater and fantasy. In the end, we do know this about Othello: 1) even though he is a great general he can never afford to 'not watch his back'. 2) that the concept of friendship and alliance can be complex 3) that by killing his wife whatever the character says as justification will make us hate him even more 4) that Othello's last lines of the play 'mean nothing' (because there can be no symphethy for a murderer 5) that Iago's wife Emile is a hero type character who I still hate, because at her heart.... she is a racist 6) that Desdamona took the wrong time to play handkerchief games with her husband 7) that no matter his success in the military 'a nigger is still a nigger' {taken from 'Roots' (smile) } 8) that if a woman marries someone her father disagrees with, no good will come of it (?) 9) that five hundred books can be written about whether or not their relationship was consummated- but it was always clear that they were 'moving in that direction' - either way, their union continues to fascinate us and 10) that maybe Othello should have stayed in north Africa and not changed his name to O.J. Simpson. --Anthony Braxton

Rat types like my grandfather. What? there's something wrong there? or should I say "Waht?" You knew what I meant, right? (Right up there with the dog ate my homework) --eric

That's a good one! Another live recording I really enjoy... Very intimate, and I love the vibes Duke gives off. I liked this record a lot, too. I've also seen critics who have trashed it. Never quite got that. --eric

I'm really enjoying Davis's arco playing (amongst all the other pleasures of that group). --eric

We don't fit the jazz demo! We should eb at elast ten years older on average. --eric

Books. I'm not really the collector type in the classic sense. I don't care if a book is a first edition, but I like to have a lot of them on hand in case I'm snowed in for a few years, which is always a possibility up here. So I've got a thousand or so sitting out and a few hundered more in boxes. Science, urban studies, novels, philosophy/critical theory are well represented. --eric

What's the general opinion on Paquito D'Rivera's clarinet playing -- those he plays it only on Cuban folklore/pop that I know of. --eric

Good idea! I grew up on Randolph Street in North Philadelphia, which was a sort of hinterland between the white ethnic neighborhoods (Irish/Polish) to the east and black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods to the west and south. So my street was a mix of all three elements. The house directly across the street from us had a big Puerto Rican extended family living there, presided over by a gandmother who was on the front stoop A LOT and used to yell at me in Spanish when she saw me getting out of line on the street. There was a lot of salsa music going on--I imagine Palmieri and teh Fania All-Stars and the like, but I was too young to tell then. I remeber two of my great frinds were the children of a mixed race couple down the street, who I think were attending Temple--I was very sad when they moved away. At one point when I was young, we moved from one house to another in the neighborhood and we rented our former house out (while we tried to sell it) to a bunch of "hippies" as my parents called them. My Dad hated Nixon and the war intensely, so he was generally sympathetic. (My Dad helped teach me to read by letting me read Watergate coverage to him out of the newspaper). When we sold the house and they moved out, they gave me a specially painted sled. (Red with flowers and all kinds of "hippie" stuff! For most of my youth I was embarassed to use it!) I can remeber his pulling his 1966 Beetle over to the side of the road to celbrate Nixon's resignation. I also remeber crashing my bike when I was around the corner on sixth street, and a team of Puerto Rican mamas coming out to patch me up and return me home. A memory that I often call up whenever someone condemns eveyone who lives in a certain place. To an outsider sixth street would have been a dangerous slum, I suppose. But it was my neighborhood, complete with good neighbors. Eventually I got beaten up a few times--there was a lot of territorial fighting going on between white, Puerto Rican and black youth gangs, and your skin color was more than excuse enough to get knocked around. And my siblings had definitely felt the bad effects of living in a chaotic and violent neighborhood, so my parent decided to move out to a more stable and exclusively white neighborhood. It was safer, but my parents often complained about a decline they saw in the quality of their neighbors. North Philly had the worst: criminals and bullies and utter neglect, but our new neighborhood had none of the best--people pulling together, generosity of spirit, liveliness. I look back on it now as moving out of a world dominated by the street into a world dominated by television. I had a pretty rough transition. --eric

That the one that just got issued on CD a couple of years ago? --eric

Yay! -eric

There should be a choice for "deceased." --eric

OOOOOH, I guess if you read the whole thread you'll see that it kinda came around to talking about different dysfunctionalities of the board in general, and then I hijacked that slight turn to make a point about something that had been bothering me, amply demonstrating that you can post anything anywhere and not worry of there's actually a forum for it or if you're in it. So it was sort of a performative argument that we don't need a proliferation of fora. The foregoing was facetious. and I hope I've spelled that right, --eric

How old is that in France? 37? Coincidentally, that's my age. --eric

I'm usually not a big fan, but I occasionally get a strong hankering for Sad Night in Harlem. Bit sentimental and all, but very affecting. --eric

As with jazzypaul's previous example, I've heard that somewhere before. Where did you get that from? I know that Desmond (unfortunately) never got around to writing his memoirs. Has Brubeck done much writing about his years with P.D.? Don't know about Brubeck, but someone is writing about Desmond: talkin 'bout Paul

I was looking for something else and stumbled on this blast from the past. I have been diggin' on Ben Sidran lately. His last album gets played once or twic a day of late, and always seems to bring just the bit of bounce and attitude needed. Nick's Bumps is the name of the album. I don't know how it might sound straight through, but one song at a time I'm diggin it. --eric

OOOOO OOOOO Cornelius: point well taken. Yeah, we've got some gaping holes that need addressing, and your method is certainly the way to go in addressing them. Any suggestions where penny-pinching music lovers can go and get the goods quick, easy and cheap? --eric

Well, yes, I can see your point about creating and thinking about creating, and how the thinking about has just gotta be put aside at some point. I know what you mean about being free to create and free to appreciate. An artist ahs got a lot of his/herself hanging out there, and that merits respect. My point in pursuing some of these points in general is that I really, truly worry about what I consider to be the good stuff in our culture, stuff that's richer and/or more complex than pop culture usually turns out. One of these is what we all call jazz. And my sense is that in a lot of different ways, the "structural" end of the music--venues, record labels, the terms commonly used amongst critics and fans, the contexts in which the music gets consumed, etc.--a lot of these structures are sick (organically dysfunctional?). You've thought about a lot of this stuff, I know, because you beat me to the punch on some of my complaints in a couple of these threads. But when I look at this situation, I see one hope for salvation: the artists starting to ask some probing questions about the reigning assumptions about what jazz is, who it's for, and how it gets listened to. You might say "Well artists have been doing that this whole time!" What I'd say is Jazz has been very strongly concerned with things like legitimizing itself as "art" at just the time that the HMS Art hit the iceberg. So now, just when society seems to have decided that art as opposed to entertainment is just a lot of guff, jazz has finally won its long battle to be seen as art. There were good reasons for the struggle to be accepted as art, but now I see the victory as a pyrrhic (sp.?) one. Now the "free" you speak of is essentially a freedom not to question one's assumptions--it isn't a freedom from assumptions. It isn't making one's mind empty and hailing up Jesus on the Mainline. In a lot of cases, the assumptions are outdated and non-viable. It's not a time when we can afford just let our assumptions be free. We gotta change them. I'd prefer if artists and people who really care about this sort of music participated actively in that process rather than letting it be done to them as the audience (which is quite old) begins to die off, as the arts center gigs dry up, as "jazz" increasingly becomes synonymous with "stuffy," and/or "pretentious." Old battles they may be, but I'll make the statement more strongly: JMc may be an asshole, but I have yet to see the response to him that doesn't boil down to "JMc is an asshole." People generally may have fought over this issue, but I'm afraid they haven't thought over this issue a whole lot. Someone complimented you on your comments at the end of the aesthetics thread--it wasn't because you were repeating stuff he'd read a thousand times before. I think this is a pretty serious topic. I say let's have a look.

Lionel Hampton session? --eric

What I was actually thinking about when I wrote that was an experience when I was at Rutgers and there was a tenor quartet in, I don't directly recall who was playing, I could find out, but as I remember it they were fairly prominent. Not Sonny Rollins, but . . . Anyhow the audience looked to be heavily populated with older male faculty, a lot of music faculty, I suspect, But anyhow the saxophonist just went off with the quotes, usually of pretty simplistic stuff--Pop goes the weasel, salt peanuts, caravan, and one or two other things I didn't recognize. The audience was pleased, I have to admit. I really felt like it was some kinda nostalgia trip, there was so much effort expended on trying to establish this context of reference points and so little, I felt, to performance in the here and now, I realy felt cheated. At the time I was just getting into jazz in a big way, so I suppose my expectation were high, and I was disillusioned. I later saw Benny Carter and the way he related to the audience felt completely different--very open and welcoming, and he explained the context of the works he presented, it didn't come off as this hermetic sort of thing. Even though I didn't dig some of the music, I was deeply impressed. It got me re-illusioned, I guess you could say. But, I guess, I don't have many examples to provide for you that you can go and listen to. I'm sorry about that. I'll give it a little thought and see if something springs to mind. --eric

Ahh, one wonders why someone who felt this way would feel compelled to post to the thread in question? And to follow it up by visiting other threads and discouraging people from responding to what I posted and offering hostile commentary himself. The explanation, I think, comes up a bit short. And I repeat that I am not fishing for an apology or anything. But I would point to Chuck Nessa's behavior in regard to my posts as . . . searching for a word . . . problematic. I think that there's a fundamental dishonesty when someone argues that this is a 35-year-old fight that's old and boring; while b) being unable to resist posting on those same subjects, actively discouraging others from engaging in discussion, and insulting the person who brought up the old, boring topic to begin with. Personally when I run into something I think of as an old boring issue, I ignore it and move on to something I find more enlightening or more to my liking. Clearly this 35-year-old fight is, at least for some people, far from over and far from being "old news" just yet. Anyhow, as I explained in the initial post, the issue was interesting to me because though it had been fought over and over and I had read a lot of what people had to write on the topic, very little really got said. And even if it had, is there something inherently wrong in rehashing a discussion that's already been had? Say, re-arguing Plato's points about the role of art. I don't think there's any sin in it. And how often do you think anything here is all-new? Discussion is kinda like music--it inevitably involves a lot of repetition. Chuck is obviously a man of strong feeling, and I respect that. He damn well hates John Mc. He pretty actively dislikes me. That's cool with me. I am a man with a different set of strong feelings and a completly different way of presenting them. That's alright, too. I being as I am could never have accomplished what Chuck has. But differences exist in what people think and how they feel and that one of the reasons one has a discussion board is for these differences to have some play so long as no one gets hurt. I don't think the impulse to stamp out differences is one we ought to encourage or ignore. The whole "old news" line is just not facing up to what really went on there. --eric

I do not have the Desmond set, though it sounds like something I ought to have here at the radio station. Certainly such a purchase could be justified, don't you think. If you were a listener, wouldn't you want your station to have this set. Yes, I think you would, wouldn't you . . . --eric