the young people's professor

Why do I always read your page way too late and miss all the damn events?

Coming Into Reality,
-Jamal

Okay, so much to post here. First, I think Yusef's position is new; at first the Creative Writing program only had two senior, distinguished fiction writers (when I was there it was my two brilliant profs Doctorow and Marshall), and two senior poets (for years Galway Kinnell, and Sharon Olds). Kamau Brathwaite (love him!) and Ngugi were in Comp Lit, and then Wesley Brown and others were based in Tisch. So Breytenbach and the others point to more money rolling in from somewhere, which I hope has also gone to some of the undergraduate and graduate programs in English, Am Studies, and creative writing.

Isaac is so sweet. Years ago he met with me and we had a lovely chat. I love the gallery work he's doing, so if you get the chance, perhaps ask him about how he relates this newer work to both the theater-targeted documentaries and the commercial projects like YOUNG SOUL REBELS, and even to the earlier collective work like PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE, a landmark film I consider central to my personal formation as a young Black s/gay/l man. Now we hardly blink at eye at the (bad) kissing on Noah's Arc, but PASSION was the first film I ever saw that featured two Black men kissing.

Let's see--Zizek; that's very exciting that he'll be there. I wonder if NYU views him as sort of replacement for Derrida, who came and performed every year for some cold cash. Does Juan Goytisolo still come every year to Spanish and Portuguese and the King JC=Colonial Spanish Heritage Center? If you can catch him, I recommend it.

Now I can't remember all of what else you wrote about it, but it looked very exciting and brought back fond memories of NYC and anti-union NYU.

Hey John,

Yeah, Isaac's newer installation material, is in my mind, even more provocative then his earlier, landmark work. Right now i'm writing about some of his newer pieces such as the magnificent installations, "True North", "Baltimore", and "Fantome Creole." What's particularly interesting to me is the ways in which "blackness" as a signifer puts pressure on our concept of the avante-garde (generally though of as this high-brow French aesthetic deriving from surrealism, dadaism, and 50s happenings). Isaac's oeurve---from Passion of Remembrance right up to his latest installaton---all speak to how black artists might use the space of the avant-garde to complicate and expand the contours of blackness in a transnational frame. I love him!

Frank, please keep me posted on your essays on Isaac's work! I'd love to read them. I agree with you about blackness as a signifier in terms of the avant-garde, and really rethought this a lot this fall as we read Gladman, Whitehead (Colson, not Alfred North LOL), Wilson Harris, Hopkinson, etc., all of whom are employing what would be read as avant-garde formal and content-based strategies, but ones in which various positions, readings, performances and stagings of different kinds of black/ness/es factor in. One effect, as one of my brilliant students pointed out with regard to both Whitehead and Gladman, was to produce new critical hermeneutics not only of Diasporic literature, but of the avant-garde itself, and avant-garde activism. Oh well, this all gets me so charged up, so write away, and peep a brotha when you feel ready! Peace, J