By Diann Blakely
If you haven’t yet seen “Visualizing the Blues,” the exhibit currently running at Memphis’ Dixon Gallery and Gardens, it might be worth making a trip to the Bluff City to take part in a corresponding three-day symposium Nov. 2-4. The exhibit itself has admirable range, covering photography in the rural Deep South from Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and William Eggleston to Huger Foote (Shelby’s son), Maude Schuyler Clay, and Birney Imes. Clay, whose Delta Land was reviewed in the Scene last year, will have a local show this coming February at The Parthenon.
Many widely known blues critics will serve on the symposium’s various panels: Scott Baretta, editor of Living Blues magazine; David Evans, author of Big Road Blues; Peter Guralnick, author of Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues & Rock ’n’ Roll; and Howard Stovall, director of the Blues Foundation. The keynote speaker will be William Ivey, the former director of Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, who currently serves as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. A stellar cast, indeed, and one that shines all the more brightly for the inclusion of octogenarian Albert Murray, the cultural critic, memoirist, and novelist who became lifelong friends with Ralph Ellison during their undergrad days at Tuskegee. Murray was among the first to limn the blues’ influence on American culture as a whole, and many of his ideas were developed and refined by his correspondence with Ellison, which has recently been published under the title Trading Twelfths.
Less popularly known, but equally important, are the younger and/or more scholarly cultural historians slated for the symposium’s various panels. Berkeley’s Leon Litwack, who penned the preface for Without Sanctuary, the collection of archival lynching photographs and “postcards” reviewed in the Scene this past June, will undoubtedly posit some of the hardcore historical ugliness that underlay the blues. Jon Michael Spencer, whose The Blues and Evil, a compelling mytho-religious study published by the University of Tennessee Press, will surely bring much to the panel entitled “Culture of the Spirit”; Princeton University’s Albert Raboteau, author of The Invisible Institution: Slave Religion, will join him on this panel.
Both the content and the structure of the symposium—which includes music on Thursday and Friday nights, a tour and reception at Memphis’ Civil Rights Museum, a photography workshop, a talk on the exhibit by curator Wendy McDaris, and optional excursions to the Mississippi Delta—promise to result in a truly cross-cultural, cross-racial, and cross-disciplinary event. Furthermore, the combination of specificity and breadth indicated by the schedule means that substantial offerings will be on hand for the musicologist, the cultural scholar, the socio-racial theorist, the photographer, and the art historian, as well as the most casual blues fan. The “Visualizing the Blues” exhibit continues through Dec. 31. To register for the symposium, call (901) 761-5250 or visit http://www.blues.org.
Powers of observation
Eleanor Taylor is the dedicatee of “History, Weather, Loss, the Children, Georgia,” perhaps the most heartbreaking poem in What Was Lost (Counterpoint Press, $21), Herbert Morris’ first collection of poems in a decade. “History...” typifies Morris’ style, one born of enormous attention to detail, a lifelong exploration of the meditative possibilities of the lyric poem, and the Jamesian belief that the artist must strive to be one upon whom nothing is lost.
Through a photograph of FDR and Eleanor taken in Warm Springs, Ga., in 1938, Morris brings us closer and closer to a gap, a pain-racked distance between the two people that cannot be bridged. Were we not inexorably drawn to this gap by his considerable gifts for pacing and mise-en-scène, we’d surely be seized with emotional cowardice and flee before the poem reaches its conclusion. “To claim they are seated here together,” begins Morris’ last, 22-line independent clause, with Roosevelt’s “wholly crucial failure / to reach, say, for her hand, somehow to take it, / to touch her and, in touching, touch himself, / or look, or smile, or once, once, whisper to her / intimacies any man might well whisper / on the brink of the heartbreak of the Thirties / ...would be nothing less than a fabrication.”
A poem, like any other artistic creation, is “a fabrication” spun from real life; what can seem lost in the devotion to such fabrication is life itself.
But the most painful loss that Morris mourns is the loss of time itself. Morris’ poems are very long, and as they unfold—slowly, carefully, with observations of minutiae (so to speak) nearly painful in their chronicling—in duration, readers come to realize the wreckage induced by our own invention: digital time. We no longer “have the time” to notice most things as small as the hands in old newspaper photos, which means we no longer “have the time” to look—with Morris’ care, attention, and unblinking eye—at our world or at each other. Praise be to this master poet, as well as to Counterpoint Press, part of the Perseus Book Group, one of the few publishing mergers that has resulted in continuing support for poetry.
Morris is among the just-announced winners of the 2000 Lannan Literary Awards, which come with a cash prize of $75,000 and a great deal of prestige that, in this case, is thoroughly deserved. It says something deeply unflattering about our culture that Morris, who published three critically acclaimed books in recent decades, had difficulty finding a taker for What Was Lost, which is already being described as his career’s best work.
Well-observed
The Dixie Chicks are among Ron Rosenbaum’s passions, joining an extended circle that includes Shakespeare, about whom the New York cultural critic writes better and more deeply than any living American academic scholar; little-known Southern comic novelist Charles Portis, whose books Rosenbaum single-handedly campaigned to get back in print; “rave-mom poet” Ann Magnuson; and various human incarnations of the mystery of evil.
Indeed, Rosenbaum’s post-Columbine column, “Pearl Jam and Littleton: The Theodicy of ‘Last Kiss,’ ” which ran in The New York Observer, offered the most intelligent and ideology-resistant views of the student massacre that I read anywhere, in part because he has a poet’s mind: He not only resists the ease of conventional explanations, but he is also “able to amalgamate disparate experiences,” as T.S. Eliot put the matter. Rosenbaum’s intelligence and erudition are dazzling, as readers of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil already know. The writer’s new collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune (Random House, $29.95), which includes his pieces on the above subjects, sets a new standard for cultural affairs journalism. (The Dixie Chicks piece is stellar.)
Keep up with Rosenbaum’s “Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms” online via the Observer’s Web site: http://www.observer.com.
Indeed, Rosenbaum’s post-Columbine column, “Pearl Jam and Littleton: The Theodicy of ‘Last Kiss,’ ” which ran in The New York Observer, offered the most intelligent and ideology-resistant views of the student massacre that I read anywhere, in part because he has a poet’s mind: He not only resists the ease of conventional explanations, but he is also “able to amalgamate disparate experiences,” as T.S. Eliot put the matter. Rosenbaum’s intelligence and erudition are dazzling, as readers of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil already know. The writer’s new collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune (Random House, $29.95), which includes his pieces on the above subjects, sets a new standard for cultural affairs journalism. (The Dixie Chicks piece is stellar.)
Keep up with Rosenbaum’s “Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms” online via the Observer’s Web site: http://www.observer.com.
