Some Principles of the Commons

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Linebaugh’s principles made your editor rethink my attachment to “public happiness” — a phrase of Hannah Arendt’s that I’ve leaned on to evoke the excitement of (small d) democratic politics with its imperfectly human meld of egotism and solidarity.  Linebaugh isn’t an Arendt man and he’s never been charmed by her hymns for the American Revolution. Aware our first Founding slipped slavery and the “Social Question” — all the challenges arising from mass poverty and de-skilled labor due to the Industrial Revolution — he’s unenthralled by America’s standard versions of democratic practice. Per Peter, public life/happiness in this country seems a straightened thing…  

We distinguish “the common” from “the public.” We understand the public in contrast to the private, and we understand common solidarity in contrast to individual egotism.

While it’s probably wrongheaded to yearn for demos with no ego, Linebaugh’s distinction is coming through to me this morning. In my inbox today, there’s an announcement of the latest seminar aimed at (what one pale academic muckety-muck terms) “intellectual publics.” Like Linebaugh, I prefer more common things…

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Double-Play: C. Liegh McInnes & Peter H. Wood on Baseball and Color Lines

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At the world’s fair of the 1900 Paris Exposition, W.E.B. Du Bois, Daniel Murray, and Thomas J. Calloway organized the Exhibit of American Negroes to represent the history, culture, and institutions of their people. (The Paris world fair was a celebration of ruling ideas of progress intended to uphold “achievements of the past century and propel development into the future.”) The Library of Congress online archive has collected the photographs, charts and other materials curated by Du Bois et al. Looking through the files, among the images of black laborers, students, mothers, organizers, homes and churches, a picture of Morris Brown College’s black baseball team resonated with a young African American man, a century on.[1] Du Bois, or perhaps Calloway, must’ve seen how this tableau of a true team evoked more than stats or won/lost records ever could…

Your editor sent Peter Wood this photo after reading how Jackie Robinson’s example helped propel Wood on his path to writing books like Black Majority and Near Andersonville. The photo also went to First contributor C. Liegh McInnis since he’s a baseball fan with deep feelings for the Negro Leagues as well as a certain distance on Jackie Robinson and the ideal of integration.

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Levon’s Blues

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I have a few notes from years ago when Levon Helm died and I’m realizing now that I must have written them just after having taught “Sonny’s Blues.” A story that, for reasons I may get into, leaves me on the verge of tears, even in class, when to cry in front of students would embarrass me and, surely, shock them. But it has happened; it also happened that I cried in the car the morning I heard about Levon…

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Kafka’s Literary Unconscious

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An essay in last month’s Town Topics, a Princeton gazette, begins on target: “This is an anniversary year for Franz Kafka, who died on June 3, 1924—a doubly noteworthy centenary, given the immensity of the author’s posthumous presence, which suggests that if ever a writer was born on the day he died, it was Kafka.”[i] Given that “immensity of presence,” one would be hard put to define concisely its core significance. But I will attempt to get to that core by example—the core being the difficult beauty of Kafka’s writing, a beauty that is full of thought, and which has inspired, as is well known, a great variety of attempts to understand it. For Theodor Adorno, in a celebrated essay, satisfying the need to understand Kafka is a matter of life and death!

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From the River to the BBC: Carnage and Complexity in Gaza

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CNN fired a photojournalist who was embraced by the leader of Hamas.

Like many Jews, I’ve read things about the bombing of Gaza, seen things on TV, and heard things shrieked in the streets that have horrified me in starkly contradictory ways. The truth about this awful sequence of events is as hard to come by as it is complex, but the slogans mask as much as they proclaim, and the coverage does something even more ominous: it simplifies. Every day I’m glued to my TV, gripped not just by the unbearable images that the carnage has produced, but also by the stimulation of my senses, the spectacle of mass death. It’s what I’d call visceral news, which compels me to watch, and it’s all true. But it’s not the truth. That requires context, which isn’t a visual.

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Julia Sebutinde

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As soon as I heard the verdict of the International Court of Justice last week and heard the vote of 15-2 against Israel, I knew it had to be a woman. Who else could stand up to 15 men and vote with the old Israeli man?

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Stuck and Moving (“Read Mosab Abu Toha’s Poetry & Go to War-torn Gaza”)

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I have been reading and writing poetry ever since I was a boy growing up in Huntington, Long Island, not far from where Walt Whitman was born and raised, and where he founded the newspaper, The Long Islander, which published my column on high school sports. At the age of 82, I still turn to poetry more often than to newspapers for news of the world, local, national and international. Recently, I read and reread the timely and (perhaps) timeless poems about Gaza in Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, published by City Lights.

That book appeared in print at about the same time that the author and members of his family, including his wife and children—and thousands of other Gazans—were detained by Israeli soldiers. Fortunately, Toha’s wife and children were released and allowed to travel to Egypt where the poet joined them, and then wrote and published an eye-opening account of his own harrowing arrest, incarceration, and interrogation. That narrative was published in January 2024 in The New Yorker. In a short time, it has alerted readers around the world to Toha’s poetry and to his own newsworthy story.

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Talk Therapy (or Lip Service)?

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Twitter dialogue between…

Fania Oz-Salzbarger [“Mom, Israeli, Jewish, humanist, History prof. Loving daughter of Amos Oz. Tel Aviv U (BA, MA), Oxford U (D.Phil), Uppsala U (Dr. h.c) Democracy must win.”]

&

Ambassador Majed Bamya [“Deputy Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the UN, New York. Palestinian from Yaffa. Refugee. The time for freedom is always right now!”]

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Breathless

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SNCC is a non-fiction film made by Danny Lyon about his giddy time inside the “beloved community” that took down Jim Crow. Lyon, who was born wild, maps the movement of mind that led young radicals to dump (what one blissed out poet of revolutionary dawns termed) “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/Of custom, law, and statute.” (You can watch SNCC here, one tap away, at Lyon’s Bleak Beauty blog.)

Picking up on an invite from John Lewis, who’d become his friend-for-life, young Lyon stepped off from the University of Chicago to join the Southern freedom movement in 1962. James Forman, SNCC’s executive secretary, saw that Lyon’s eye might have its uses for an organization that needed to make Americans all over the country feel the struggle for Civil Rights down home. Lyon became SNCC’s first/echt official photographer. His movie’s narrative rests on hundreds of his 35mm still pictures (many of them never shown before) and a soundtrack of recordings made inside black churches in the early 60s.

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On the Road to “Black Majority”

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“Which of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies was more than half Black long before the American Revolution?” Retired Duke University historian Peter H. Wood finds that he can still stump groups of students, teachers, and parents with that question, even though it has been fifty years since he published Black Majority, his landmark study of slavery in colonial South Carolina. Today that book is taking on a fresh new life and proving more pertinent than ever.

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“…and Cleveland’s Cold”

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Townes Van Zandt. “Pancho and Lefty”

I became aware of Cleveland when Lou Boudreau played shortstop and my Aunt Sylvia, who, to my six-year-old eyes, was really neat, perversely rooted for the Indians against her hometown Braves. I liked Marion Motley and Mac Speedie (good names!), when they came along a couple years later too, but I hadn’t thought much about Cleveland since. I certainly hadn’t registered it as a petri dish for disintegration and despair, capable of occasioning both vicious protest and futile resignation, from which would arise a musician capable of pinning lunch meat to his chest, blowing his nose in a slice, and eating it.

Then Aaron Lange’s Ain’t It Fun: Peter Laughner & Proto-Punk in the Secret City landed.

SPLAT![1]

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Last Hour of Every Angel

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I

…If you were a goddess, Xylea said, what goddess would you be? She paused to think for a second. If you were a goddess, you’d be the goddess of beauty and illusion…
…That haunted me, for some reason. The reason was that my life had, without my noticing, been drained of reality, or the pretense to reality. I was a celibate, anhedonic whore (let’s say a depressed whore). Sex itself meant nothing to me, having become mere performance, empty enchantment. I fell in love with ghosts, or people who soon became ghosts, whose names I no longer remembered shortly afterwards.

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Sturdy New Acquisitions

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Forgive me if I’m committing the sin of self-promotion, but I’d like to add an annex to my piece last month about the MET’s class-focused New Acquisitions show. There’s a trio of music videos—with soundscapes evoking hoods all across the world—that could have added a contemporary flash to that MET show.

“Ghetto Phénomène” Houari’s Le Chant des Ra ta ta—with its bass pace, main string riff, and Houari’s amped but unvocodered voice—was a constant on my Marseille rap playlist. Yet I didn’t realize the song was more than just catchy until I watched the video.

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The City and the Commons: A Story for Our Time

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The essay posted below is the one that brought Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! home to your editor (who morphed into a “New York City man” many years ago). Linebaugh’s case for “commonizing” the city seemed fresh and audacious, though he almost lost me when he invoked the panopticon. (Bentham? Again?) But Linebaugh wasn’t content to reheat Foucault’s leftovers.

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A Dylanist’s Diary (“sugar and salt/ if you never listen to the basement tapes/ it’s your own damn fault”)

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Originally posted here in 2016… 

11/7

My monthly income is $500. I just spent $130 of that on the newly released Dylan Basement Tapes. My daddy thinks I’m no good with money.

They haven’t arrived yet so I’ve been listening to the bootleg of those 6 CDs I bought in ‘93 in NYC. One thing now occurs to me—this is boy music. It’s like a frat party of geniuses. It’s a lot of fun to be invited.

My friend in NYC and I were discussing the relative merits of the 2CD release vs. the 6CD box.  How many times do you have to hear 3 takes of “Open the Door Homer” (wherein Homer’s name is Richard)?? I explained my sense that the 2CD set is the trailer, and a damn fine one, and the 6CD set is the documentary. (I didn’t mention I already have 3 copies of 3 takes of “Open the Door Homer.”)

I’m not a fanatic nor a cultist—it just seemed obvious to me get the box. Also I was stoned when I ordered it. My daddy thinks I’m not good with money.

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Invisible Republicanism (Redux): Greil Marcus’s Negro Problem (Circa 1998)

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I published the following piece in a tabloid issue of First in 1998 and then posted it at this website after Bob Dylan released Love and Theft in 2001.  I took it down once Greil Marcus became an occasional contributor to First. In the era of Substack, though, journos’ back pages find new readers and it seems timid rather than tactful to hide “I.R.” in a memory hole.

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U.S. Telos

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The author posted this at the top of 2024, before the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary, and the E. Jean Carroll judgment, but his forecast for ‘24 is still ripe…

Three years ago today we witnessed the natural end of the Republican Party. I don’t mean a chronological end. As long as there’s FOX News and people eager to tune in, there will be the ignorance and outrage levels necessary to nurture Trumpist conservatism.

I mean end as in the Greek term “telos,” which evokes a phenomenon’s essence — its reason for being. In that sense January 6 three years ago, in its lusty dance with violent ignorance, in its recognition, however dully, that the future of Trumpism did not line up with the future of democracy, indeed demanded its overthrow, all this was the completion of Trumpism, the full Donald.

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