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Clarence Major
(1936- ) Clarence Major, poet, novelist, and
painter, was born in 1936 in Atlanta, Georgia. He received
a B.S. from the State University of New York and a Ph.D. from
the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities.
His books of poetry include
Configurations: New &
Selected Poems, 1958-1998 (1999); Parking Lots (1992);
Some Observations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of
the Century (1998);
Surfaces and Masks (1987);
Inside
Diameter: The France Poems (1985);
Symptoms and Madness
(1971);
Swallow the Lake
(1970); and Fires That Burn
in Heaven (1954).
He is the author of more than eight novels including
Dirty
Bird Blues: A Novel (1996);
Painted Turtle: Woman with
Guitar (1988);
Fun and Games (1988);
Such Was the
Season (1987);
Emergency Exit (1979), and
Reflex and Bone Structure (1975).
Recent prose offerings included Trips: A Memoir (2001)
and Afterthought: Essays and Criticism (2000). he is also
the editor of many anthologies and books such as
The Garden
Thrives: Twentieth-Century African American Poetry (1995);
Dictionary
of Afro-American Slang (1994); and
The Dark and Feeling:
Black American Writers and Their Work. Among his many honors
and awards are a Western States Book Award for Fiction, a
Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a National Council
on the Arts Fellowship. Clarence Major is Professor of English
and Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis
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All-Night Visitors
(1969) Major's
first novel, originally published in an expurgated edition in 1969, is
finally presented intact. The disturbing story, which details the
struggles of a young African American man, is filled with "violence,
sex, and rage, and Major's graphic descriptions are not for the
squeamish."—Library
Journal
A new, unexpurgated edition of the 1969 Olympia Press novel that made
Major (Dirty Bird Blues, 1996, etc.) a big name in Maurice Girodias's
dirty-book pantheon. A classic autodidact, Major was one of those very
bright young men of the 1950s who had read their way through Rimbaud
long before they’d discovered Shakespeare or heard of Homer; this
defiant opus, judging from its style, seems like the work of someone
whose idea of the novel begins with Henry Miller and ends with Jean
Genet. The book describes the experiences of Eli Bolton, a black Vietnam
vet badly traumatized by the war and utterly disdainful of the white
society he has returned to in America. A great part of the story takes
shape as a succession of Bolton's rants, mostly concerned with his
various conquests: the voracious Anita, the idealistic Cathy, the
intellectual Eunice. Long descriptions of what Bolton does with Anita
and Cathy and Eunice ensue, along with interpolated recollections of
Vietnam and life on the streets in Chicago and New Yorkall written in
the kind of interior patois that even Allen Ginsberg got tired of
eventually (``Yeah, all kinds of battle fatigue monkeys strolling around
here, bad shots hitting psychological maggie drawers all day long; I
just get tired tired I keep a big funky headache all the time; lately I
ain't said nothing to nobody but Dossy O, that's Cocaine which is the
way my man keeps himself together''). Major offers reflections on race,
politics, and society, but these are ultimately as pointless as the
basic narrative and yet less interesting. As fresh and exciting as an
old Red Foxx routine, this is a good period piece for '60s junkies who
don't take themselves too seriously.
—Kirkus Reviews
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| Vietnam #4
a cat said
on the corner
the other day
dig man
how come
so many of us
niggers
are dying over there
in that white
man's war
they say more of us
are dying
than them peckerwoods
& it just
don't make sense
unless it's true
that the honkeys
are trying to kill us
out
with the same stone
they killing them other
cats
with
you know, he said
two birds with one stone
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Vietnam
he was just back
from the war
said man they got
whites
over there now
fighting
us
and blacks over there
too
fighting us
and we can't tell
our whites
from the others
nor our blacks
from the others
& everybody
is just killing
& killing
like crazy
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Blind
Old Woman
spots on black skin.
she is dry.
how time, how she waits
here
in her dingy wool,
shabby
the fingers on her cup.
so frail, a woven face,
so oval
such empty charity. how
she remains
so quiet, quiet please.
how the cup shakes, and
it is not straight,
nothing
is.
She does not sell candy
nor rubber
bands. like the blind
man
at the other end. of the
silence. the sounds
of one or more pennies
in the bent up tin. up
her canvas stool
at the end of the
shadows.
how they return before her,
through these 1960
Indiana streets.
as she shuffles into
street sounds.
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John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
/
A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
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Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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An Interview With Clarence Major
By Alice Scharper
I lived in
Colorado for twelve years, teaching at the
university, and I spent a lot of time in the
Southwest and on the Navajo reservations. I became
accustomed to the culture, and absorbed a great
deal. Essentially, the novel came from another
route. I had been fascinated with the Zunis for a
long, long time because of their history. There’s a
mystery there. No ones know, for example, where
their language comes from, for one thing. They may
be the descendant of the Aztecs; that’s one theory.
But I was especially interested in their rebellious
nature, and in their resiliency. Anyway, I had
enough distance so that I could look at them as I
would look at something under a microscope. There
was a kind of structure, a kind of system, that was
attractive to me. So I did the research, which took
a couple of years, and I took my previous character
and changed her a great deal.
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She
evolved into Painted Turtle, but she
became a very different kind of person,
though she retained the sadness—but she
also lost a lot of the despair; although
Painted Turtle has some despair, she’s
triumphant. She transcends her
condition, and she has much to deal with
but she doesn’t give up. . . .
Shame is an essential element in all
human experience, I think. I used to
think of shame as a Judeo-Christian
phenomenon, but as I learned that it’s
universal, that shame and guilt seem to
be motivating factors in the formation
of a great many systems of thought,
feeling, religious expression.
I’m
reminded of a poignant scene in the
novel [Painted
Turtle: Woman with Guitar],
where Painted Turtle is
riding the bus to Albuquerque and a
young blond girl is sitting in the seat
next to her. The girl turns to Painted
Turtle and asks her, “Are you Indian?”
and Painted Turtle says, “Yes.” The
little girl then asks her, “Do you live
in a tepee? Do you wear moccasins? Do
you dance?” The young girl has her
particular set of assumptions about the
world of the Indian, and Painted Turtle
is sealed off from the world of the girl
because of those assumptions. And
Painted Turtle is shamed as a result of
not being able to bridge that gulf
between her culture and the girl’s. I
think that’s one of those unfortunate
things that gets in the way of seeing
how we are all essentially, at the
deepest level, the same, except for our
cultural differences. What happens is
that the cultural differences become,
somehow, more visible, rather than the
equally significant universal elements.— Poets
& Writers
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Clarence
Major is a poet, painter and novelist who was
born in Atlanta, Georgia (1936) and grew up in
Chicago. In his early twenties he started publishing
his own literary magazine, Coercion Review,
which featured poets and writers such as Henry
Miller, Kenneth Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
As a teenager he was influenced by the monumental
Van Gogh Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings at the
Art Institute of Chicago, February 1-April 16, 1950.
After a stint
in the Air Force, two marriages, children, and two
divorces, he left the Midwest and moved to New York.
His first novel, All Night Visitors, was
published in 1969 and his first collection of poems,
Swallow the Lake
(1970) was published the following year. Major
briefly worked for Simulmatics as a research analyst
before turning, in 1967, to teaching.
First, he
taught in Harlem at the New Lincoln School, in a
summer program. He later taught modern American
literature courses and creative writing workshops in
universities. Although he had shown a few paintings
in group shows at Gales Gallery in Chicago during
the 1960s, his first solo exhibition of paintings
was at Sarah Lawrence College in the library in the
early seventies.
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During this
time he was also giving public readings of his
poetry. He served on the editorial staff of several
literary periodicals and wrote a regular column for
American Poetry Review. He was the first
editor of American Book Review. He read his
poetry at the Guggenheim Museum, the Folger Theater
and in universities, theaters and cultural centers.
He joined the
Fiction Collective in 1974. Major edited High
Plains Literary Review for several years. On a
State Department sponsored trip in 1975 he was a
participant at the International Poetry Festival in
Struga, Yugoslavia, where he read his work with
Leopold Sedar Senghor and other poets from around
the world. In 1977, with John Ashbery and other
poets from various countries, Major read at the
Poetry International in Rotterdam, Holland. Although
he had been painting all along, after moving to
California in 1989 he showed his paintings more
frequently in galleries.
In 1991 Major
served as fiction judge for the National Book
Awards. In 1987 he served twice on the National
Endowment for The Arts Awards panels; and in 1997-98
he served as judge for the Pen/Faulkner awards. He
has judged state sponsored literary contests in
Ohio, New York, Washington, Colorado and California.
self-portrait
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Major is
professor emeritus of 20th. Century American
Literature at the University of California at Davis.
His literary archives are in the Givens Collection,
Anderson Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts,
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.— Wikipedia
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Mockingbirds at Jerusalem
(poetry
Manuscript)
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 3 April 2010
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