Sparrow 1 (October 1972)

“Perhaps the most familiar of all the literary small presses, Black Sparrow began life with the money John Martin got from selling (for $50,000) his collection of modern literature, which he had purchased over a period of fifteen years (primarily through trading the collection of more classical books he had inherited from his father). The first six publications of the press were broadsides (five of them by Charles Bukowski, who was published by the press until its closure in 2002). The first book was Ron Loewinsohn’s L’Autre. In an essay included in Brad Morrow and Seamus Cooney’s Bibliography of the Publications of the Black Sparrow Press (1981), poet Robert Kelly assesses the press that printed so much of his own work: ‘How much of these past two decades is represented in the Black Sparrow checklist? How much of it is still in print? What are…

Good Morning!

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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

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“We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.”

– Pablo Neruda

The following statement was released by leading professional associations.

The statement says:

Joint Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism and American History

We, the undersigned associations and organizations, state our firm opposition to a spate of legislative proposals being introduced across the country that target academic lessons, presentations, and discussions of racism and related issues in American history in schools, colleges and universities. These efforts have taken varied shape in at least 20 states; but often the legislation aims to prohibit or impede the teaching and education of students concerning what are termed “divisive concepts.” These divisive concepts as defined in numerous bills are a litany of vague and indefinite buzzwords and phrases including, for example, “that any individual should feel or be made to feel discomfort Ed, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological or emotional distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.”…

Black on Maroon (1958)

“In 2012, a Russian artist calling himself Vladimir Umanets wrote his name and the words ‘A potential piece of yellowism’ in black marker on the corner of Mark Rothko’s 1958 canvas Black on Maroon. The damage to the painting, housed at the Tate Modern since 1970, was substantial, and it turned out to be one of the museum’s most challenging restoration projects, as well as one of its most successful — ‘far more successful than any of us dared hope,’ said Tate director Nicholas Serota. The painting went back on display in May of 2014. Due to Rothko’s layered technique, the painting’s ‘surface is really delicate and it turned out that most of the solvent systems that could dissolve and remove the ink could potentially damage the painting as well.’ Patricia Smithen, the Tate’s head of conservation, told The Guardian. The video above from…

Timothy Snyder, an authority on totalitarianism, draws a straight line in this article that appeared in the New York Times from Stalin’s efforts to purge history of negative facts about the Soviet Union to the current mania among Republicans to control the teaching of American history and censor shameful facts in our history.

Professor Snyder reminds us of Stalin’s brutal campaign to crush Ukraine, where nearly 4 million people died, most from starvation, after their crops were seized.

He writes:

Ukraine was the most important Soviet republic beyond Russia, and Stalin understood it as wayward and disloyal. When the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine failed to produce the yields that Stalin expected, his response was to blame local party authorities, the Ukrainian people and foreign spies. As foodstuffs were extracted amid famine, it was chiefly Ukrainians who suffered and died — some 3.9 million people in the republic…

Archie Shepp and Jason Moran

“Let My People Go: a truly symbolic title… It is the refrain from the most famous Negro spiritual, ‘Go Down Moses’, dating from the days of slavery, and in 1853 it was the first one to be edited as sheet music, ten years before Abolition in the United States. Massively evangelized in the 19th century, the African slaves quickly identified with the Hebrews who, according to the biblical legends they were taught, had rebelled thanks to their faith and had fled from Egypt where they had been enslaved. Other ancient spirituals are more like laments, such as ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ (another song on the album), but in a condition of servitude a lament is not far from a revolt. These two songs became world-famous in the 1920’s, thanks to the great singer/actor Paul Robeson, a champion of the civil…

A while back, I read a vitriolic article in a rightwing publication that expressed contempt for the public schools and congratulated Betsy DeVos for trying to cut federal funding for schools.

The article asserted that public schools are “garbage” and the government should slash their funding. A major piece of evidence for the claim that money doesn’t matter was the failure of the Obama administration’s School Improvement Grants program, which spent more than $3 billion and accomplished nothing. The evaluation of SIG was commissioned by the U.S Department of Education and quietly released just before the inauguration of Trump. The report was barely noticed. Yet now it is used by DeVos acolytes to oppose better funding of our schools.

The wave of Red4Ed teachers’ strikes in 2019 exposed the woeful conditions in many schools, including poorly paid teachers, lack of nurses and social workers and librarians, overcrowded classrooms, and…

“Call him Melville. He picks his way through the rubble, skirts along charred walls, climbs over a roof beam here, steps on a windowpane there, bits of glass scraping underfoot like the screak of winter snow. He moves through interconnecting alleyways as through the maze of a Moroccan souk, sheer-sided as a prison perimeter, buttressed by fire-blackened metal uprights. A ladder much too short to scale a particular wall leans its lacquered wood against the pitted limestone, scored and scraped by tortured ghosts. A vacant lot in the 13th arrondissement, it looks from above like a concrete maze ringed by three- and four-story buildings. The surrounding dilapidation, the washing hung from the windows, mark the precincts of his ‘cobbler’s stall,’ as he liked to call his movie studio. Only the outer defenses of the fortress are left, tracing the rue Jenner and the rue Jeanne d’Arc, a ghost…