RKJD

I think of those who died today. They held views on the matter, one way or the other, of our awful American problem. They watched the last event unfold and thought: More laws. More guns. Less violence. Less coverage. This, no, that, no, this, with more or less certainty or stridency. “This is the last straw.” “How can we be this way?” “It is our culture.” “Our right.” “Isn’t this the price of freedom?” “Isn’t this absurd, grotesque?” They are dead now. They and their various views on the matter, swallowed up suddenly by darkness, their loved ones maddened with grief, breaking things they’ve bought, pulling at their hair, all that undeliverable protest at the void. I think of others, alive today, soon to die, (who knows when or whom, maybe you, or me, or the him or her who’s more to you than you) who with more or less certainty hold views too that will vanish into the dark with them tomorrow, the week to come, by this time next year.

From the first movement of the live performance, there’s an obsessive, possessed, ecstatic mood to Coltrane’s playing, a sense of spiritual search and struggle. The jaunty second movement, “Resolution,” finds Coltrane playing with an exciting, keening ferocity, featuring growls and roars, shouts and shrieks of a fury unheard in the studio. Coltrane’s fast-tempo, wildly expressive solo in the concert performance of “Pursuit” is eight minutes long and includes a lengthy duet with Jones that, with its blend of unleashed energy and extraordinarily complex construction discovered on the wing, is one of most moving, most beautiful, most soul-searching moments that Coltrane ever recorded. The French performance of the final slow movement, “Psalm,” goes quickly off-text to get to the mood of the poem—augmented by the frenetic mood of the moment. There’s no need for overdubs because Coltrane was already playing in tongues, virtually multiplying himself in real time.

This is the privilege of whiteness: While a terrorist may be white, his violence is never based in his whiteness. A white terrorist has unique, complicated motives that we will never comprehend. He can be a disturbed loner or a monster. He is either mentally ill or pure evil. The white terrorist exists solely as a dyad of extremes: Either he is humanized to the point of sympathy or he is so monstrous that he almost becomes mythological. Either way, he is never indicative of anything larger about whiteness, nor is he ever a garden-variety racist. He represents nothing but himself. A white terrorist is anything that frames him as an anomaly and separates him from the long, storied history of white terrorism.

It’s counterintuitive to think of the British Museum as a happening spot, but for a long time its reading room served as a premier gathering place for London’s brainy bohemians. In the 1880s, these included radicals like George Bernard Shaw, Henry Havelock Ellis, and Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s youngest daughter. They worked there, and they talked during smoke breaks and visits to Bloomsbury tea shops. They moved fluidly between politics and the arts, deploring factory conditions as fervently as they dissected Ibsen’s plays. The reading room was a vital seedbed for such Victorian-era social-reform causes as women’s rights and trade-union organizing. It was also a pickup scene.

I’m interested in leveraging feminist thinking as a way to decenter whiteness, and to ensure that our work promotes diversity, inclusion and social justice – not just in terms of gender, but with attention to the intersecting axes of race, class, sexuality, ability and other forms of inequality, exclusion, and marginalization. I am motivated by a concern/fear is that we are so focused on collaboration as a rational and practical response to budget pressures and/or the very real need to free up shelf space that we rarely step back to look at collaborative ventures as opportunities to enact the values that matter to us.