Cross-Posting: Song of Myself (Linda Norton)

CROSS-POSTED FROM FIELD RESEARCH STUDY GROUP A BLOG

Below is a reply that author, blogger and educator Linda Norton sent back in January 2018 via the FRSGA Yahoo account, in response to one of the vouchers I posted in December, which Karen Cantrell had previously responded to. The card read:

Here is her full response (note the references to an array of artists):

Song of Myself

Filmmaker, star, a doctor examining the culture—me on a walk. On the pavement, I notice an electric-blue Post-It from that batch I stole when I quit my job: “taylor * negritude * milk and you” – My dirty to-do list. I must have walked this way last week and dropped it.

In December sun, I hurry past the cathedral like it might get me. Then I saunter, Thoreau-like, sans-terre in California, and again I’m everything—the spinsters Thoreau disparaged, the turtles he saw copulating and tried to separate, the mother who saves him from civilization. Open to alms. My loneliness is like a poem by Fanny.

By this time my parka is off. In the co-op bakery when I get to the counter, the cashier is dazzled for a minute. “You look like Elizabeth Taylor.” But then he wonders if he’s right not to offer me the senior discount yet. “That’s right. Not yet.”

--Linda Norton; a response to a prompt on John Keene’s “Emotional Outreach” blog, 12/2017

Many thanks to Linda for her collaboration, and I will post most responses as they come in. Any readers of this blog should feel free to respond to the instructions above, and write a response along the lines of Linda's and forward it directly to fieldresearchgroup[AT]yahoo.com, or center your QR reader app and utilize the QR code below.

"Song of Myself," Copyright © Linda Norton, shared by permission with the Emotional Outreach/FRSGA blog, 2018.

Around the Horn (Other Bloggers & Blogs)

It has been eons since I posted links to what other blogs and bloggers on my blogroll are up to, so here are some links to current blogs J's Theater readers might want to check out.

At Gukira: Without Predicate, Keguro reminds us that this year marks the 50th anniversary of Paulo Freire's landmark text The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and notes that he will be blogging about it roughly once a month for the rest of the year. Anything Keguro blogs about is worth reading--and his essays on New Inquiry are no less brilliant--so I highly recommend checking back as he thinks through and theorizes, with the deepest and deftest touch, in relation to contemporary education in Kenya.

In The Public Gardens: Poems and History, writer Linda Norton shares excerpts from her forthcoming work Wite-Out. Here's a tiny quote:

In New York for a reading of Pressed Wafer authors. Went up to 125th and bought a black slip at H&M and had an over-priced lunch at a place where the eggs tasted like disinfectant. Then on to the Schomburg where, years ago, I worked on the Marcus Garvey papers. I visited an exhibit of WPA photos and eavesdropped. I left as it was getting dark. I’d heard that Harlem had become gentrified and white, but I saw very few white people up there. The trees were bare and I had all the haunting feelings about architecture and oncoming winter that I had when I lived here. Feelings I don’t have in California.

Definitely check out the rest of Linda's new project.

EJ Flavors, a blogger I've been following since before this blog existed (he was on it back in 2002), has a February mix (Cupid's Hunt) that you can download and listen to, if you want a little (more) love in the air.

coldhearted scientist وداد has an eyeblink of a post on labor, linked to another, that will become a collaborative article for the Academe blog.

Poet Mom is blogging again, and I'm glad she is.

Poet Harmony Holiday, at nonstophome, features a poem about Al Sharpton, among other treats.

Shigekuni is someone I learned about via that often deafening public forum known as Twitter; I immediately found his tweets intriguing, and he doesn't disappoint. Writing in several languages (German, English, among others), blogging about literature and the arts, brimming with engaging quotes, it's a blog I make a point to visit especially around Nobel Prize time. (I still have not written my post about this past year's Nobel laureate, Briton Kazuo Ishiguro.) His most recent post takes a peak at a 1967 dictionary of American slang. "The Mokers"....

Poet Guillermo Parra translates a prose poem by Antonia Palacios, from her 1989 collection Ficciones y affliciones.

At Heatstrings, the blog by poet and scholar Aldon Nielsen, you can find photos from the recent Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture after 1900. I have heard this is a conference to attend, so perhaps I will figure out a way to be there one of these upcoming years. As Aldon's photos show, some pretty superb writers and thinkers (I see Nourbese Philip, Nathaniel Mackey, etc.) did make the trip.

Edward Winkleman, whose blog appears under my Art Blogs links, writes about virtual reality and augmented reality/mixed reality, touching upon artists who are now using in their work. (I have a secret fear that eventually masses of us will be lying in dark rooms, immobilized by VR and a soma-like drug, as the overlords run amok--or even more so than they already are.)