Amiri Baraka, R.I.P.

[David Gitin]

We met in the early '60s (wow, 50+ years ago). His friendship, his poetry and the magazine he edited, the records we exchanged (he turned me on to Albert Ayler's first album) formed lifelong memories. Decades later I was able to bring him to read poetry at the college in Monterey where I was an instructor. As he said in the movie "Bulworth," Be a spirit! Don't be no ghost!

Good advice. Bye, Roi!

[bluenoter]

BTW, I saw a thread at the O that claimed Roy Campbell Jr. also passed today. Does anyone know if there is any confirmation on that?

Wikipedia removed an indication that he'd died, changing "was" back to "is"---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Roy_Campbell,_Jr.

Reported death

This article had been edited to reflect that the subject had died ([1]). There are reports to that effect circulating around the internet. However, as of this writing I have not seen it mentioned in a reliable source, without which we should not make such modifications to this article. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 18:28,
9 January 2014 (UTC)

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Mixed feelings about Amiri Baraka, but R.I.P.

[hornplayer]

Thanks, Rita.

And I share your mixed feeling about Mr. Jones.

I also have mixed feelings about Amiri Baraka. But Scott... would you refer to Muhammad Ali as "Cassius Clay?" or Kareem Abdul Jabbar as "Lew Alcindor?" All three changed their names decades ago, and unless you were friends with them when they were known by their original names (and even that's a debatable reason), it shows a distinct lack of respect to use the old names. (In my humble opinion.)

[walto]

I didn't know there was doubt about Campbell's death. I retweeted a notice of that sad announcment on Twitter. It's so weird that unsubstantiated rumors like that get started.

[walto]

I guess the Campbell story was true:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/c ... um=twitter

[crawjo]

In recent years, Amiri Baraka has been a major inspiration for me, from his jazz criticism to his essays, his poetry, and his autobiography. This may sound horrible, but what I most like about him are his rough edges--the fact that his language often spills over into the ugly and the conspiratorial.

A few years ago I was walking around Washington DC and went to an old used book store I used to haunt during my college days. At the time I was really struggling to write my dissertation, and felt like in writing it I had to try to please too many people. At that time, I hadn't really made any progress at all, and felt depressed about that.

In the book store I picked up a copy of Baraka's selected poems, and read it on the car ride back to upstate New York. The language was alive, crackling, beautiful and at times ugly at the same time. It was angry. At the time this way of writing seemed very courageous to me. It still does. It is so easy as a writer to iron out all the rough surfaces, to make everything fine and perfect. But Baraka never did that: he charged forward all the time, unafraid of self-contradiction or being wrong. Reading this gave me the push I needed to write my dissertation, and so now that I am doing the last revisions to it, I feel that I owe him a tremendous debt.

There is homophobia in his work, and misogyny, and some would argue anti-Semitism as well, although I think in Baraka's case it is more anti-Zionism at play. But either way, this is supposedly the part of his work that will "taint" his legacy. I say bullshit. In recent years I've been noticing how, now that my Facebook feed is filled with liberal voices, everybody seems to believe the exact same thing. We all have the same correct political opinions, on gay marriage or the NSA or the wars or whatever else. There is a strong emphasis on conformity in liberal thought, a lot of self-policing that goes on that I think really deadens our senses. Baraka always resisted that. He was not a liberal. And that, I think, is what I love about him the most.

[crawjo]

So what you're saying is that if a large percentage of liberals have similar opinions they are simply victims of groupthink?

If so, I couldn't disagree more.

Other than that, that was a fine eulogy for a very intelligent and complex man.

I don't see it as groupthink, but rather just holding to a certain orthodoxy, and being blind to the complexities of certain problems. I'm not saying this from a conservative perspective, but from a leftist perspective. Baraka was a leftist, not a liberal.

[walto]

I'm interested in the apparent unanimity crawjo believes he is observing. Could it be, say, a 65-35 split on most major issues, with the minority a bit sheepish or something like that? And, if so, I'm wondering if that would stilll seem suspicious.

[crawjo]

Well, it's obviously not 100-0. But one thing I've noticed a lot in recent years is that there's a much stricter policing of the discourse that occurs. This is not just among liberals but everywhere. Never use the word faggot, never use the word retarded. Never suggest that being gay is a choice. Wars are terrible but military veterans are great. Anyone who opposes immigration is a racist.

There's a bunch more but I don't feel like going through all of it now. It often feels to me not that these are always deeply held positions, but rather that people are just checking off boxes. I do think that being a "liberal" and being a "Democrat," in this society, is mostly interchangeable. Or maybe it's just the ubiquity of, say, the Daily Show ethos of politics. A lot of people watch that show and basically, Jon Stewart's routine, you know it all in advance. The jokes are all there, you just keep repeating them.

The thing about it is, I hold many of the same positions (not all, but many) that liberals hold. The problem is that, eventually, the default liberal position basically becomes a conservative position, with a strong tendency towards supporting the status quo. It's why liberals, at the end of the day, are mostly useless. They'll see to it that Alec Baldwin is fired for using the word faggot, but they won't do anything meaningful to oppose or disrupt the neo-liberal order, not economically or socially or politically. Gay marriage in particular has turned liberals into the strongest supporters of family values, which are basically bourgeois, middle-brow values. It's telling that gay marriage has become the great civil rights issue of our time, rather than, say, economic inequality or the prison system. It's like the strengths and weaknesses of Martin Luther King's career just keep repeating themselves over and over again. Our society has made King (maybe along with Abraham Lincoln) into our own secular God, and that right there is more or less the whole ballgame.

So, to bring this back to Baraka, what I love about him is that he makes liberals feel conflicted, feel uneasy. Here's a guy who had a major influence on African-American letters, but so much of his oeuvre flies in the face of liberal orthodoxy, not least of which the furor that erupted over Somebody Blew Up America back in 2002. But if you read through most of his writings, as I have been doing in recent months in preparation for participating in a Baraka conference in London (I'm presenting a paper on Baraka and Sun Ra) you see that this tendency in his thought was there from the beginning, long before he became a black nationalist or a Marxist. Read his 1960 essay Cuba Libre. Read his letters to the poet Ed Dorn, and what he had to say about Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. His whole career, it seems to me, was oriented towards making liberals angry and uncomfortable. That's his greatest and most important legacy.

[crawjo]

If you think being a liberal and being a Democrat are interchangeable, You haven't been paying very much attention to the Democratic Party who don't sit much further left than Republicans did under Bush.

Obama is not a liberal, he's a conservative with a liberal leaning, or two. It's not even debatable. His record speaks for itself.

Edit: I had a longer argument here but the point I want to make has little to do with whether Barack Obama meets a definition of "liberal."

[Monte Smith]

His whole career, it seems to me, was oriented towards making liberals angry and uncomfortable. That's his greatest and most important legacy.

He's an inspiration to you and a major influence on letters but that's his greatest and most important legacy?

[crawjo]

His whole career, it seems to me, was oriented towards making liberals angry and uncomfortable. That's his greatest and most important legacy.

He's an inspiration to you and a major influence on letters but that's his greatest and most important legacy?

All those things are related.

[walto]

Thanks, crawjo, for your interesting post. I agree with much of it, but I think I see it as more of a general point about sheeple than about liberals in particular.

What I'm saying, I guess, is that a huge number of people on both sides of wherever you put the liberal/conservative are retarded, faggoty pussies. I'm a relatively high-functioning retard, myself, but I'm definitely a faggoty pussy of the first order. For example, I yelled at my wife the other day for throwing me under the bus when she told somebody we know that I'd be rooting against the Patriots. "That's like saying, 'Did you know that Walter thinks your wife smells bad?'" I whined. I don't like people to be mad at me, so I'm generally indirect and snarky and don't tell locals I hate the the Pats unless I know them well enough to do so without fear. If there weren't a secret ballot I'd probably be afraid to vote. So while I (safely) push for common ownership of economic rents, I've also managed to work for both Democrat and Republican administrations without ever telling a Commissioner who could fire me that he or she is completely full of shit--or at least I've almost always done it obliquely. The only thing that prevents me from being completely pussified is that I'm impulsive/reckless and authority-phobic. So I do/say things that are dangerous to myself not so much from principle as from, I don't know, craziness or some kind of class clown syndrome.

Anyhow, I know you're not like me in those ways--neither is Scott--and I admire you both for it. But I'm not sure that the weaknesses you point out are a liberal matter so much as a desire to fit in with this or that group, whatever it may be. Or at least not to make waves that are high enough to drown you (in their eyes).

[crawjo]

Yeah, that's fair. I'm more sensitive to the liberal side of things because that's the company I keep, especially in social media. The thing that really has changed very dramatically in our society in the last few years is the policing of language. There's a growing list of words that you just cannot say, and while I don't normally use those words anyway, the consensus on this makes me want to use them just to shock people. I mean, if I can't call someone a cocksucker without being accused of being homophobic, then what's the point of anything?

[Coda]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfaLDvvM7S4
From the same democracy now website mentioned above:

[Ron Thorne]

Writing legends Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou dance in the atrium of the
Schomburg Center.