In Memoriam: James Richardson & Steve Jobs

I received a message yesterday from a friend, the great poet Honorée Jeffers, letting me know that another very fine poet we both knew, James Richardson, had passed away. I did not know James well, but been acquainted and his work for over two decades, and followed what he posted on the Cave Canem Foundation's Fellows' listserve avidly. His messages, critiques and commentary and our occasional direct exchanges showed that in addition to possessing the gifts of wit, critical acumen and an exuberance in everything he did, James knew a great deal about poetry and poetics. He also had written a dissertation comparing understanding of the Diaspora in fiction by Jewish-American and African-American writers. James taught at several different institutions, including Kennesaw State University, Morehouse College, and Phillips Academy, as well as most recently at his alma mater, Hampton University. He passed away shortly after suffering a heart attack. James leaves his sisters and extended family, including his students, colleagues and friends. Write poetry wherever you are, James, and keep on teaching.

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Steve Jobs (Vibe.com)

So extensive are the online tributes about Steve Jobs (1955-2011), the late co-founder of and chief impresario behind Apple Computers that I have nothing to add, except this: since college I primarily worked on Apple computers. I wrote both of my books, and am writing new ones, in addition to almost every poem, short story, play, translation, essay, letter, student critique--everything that I have not penned or penciled--and all these blog posts on one. (I had forgotten until coming across the mention in an online copy of my high school yearbook that "many" of my wealthy high school classmates had Apple II or III computers at home, and I was one of the yearbook's co-editors, so I certainly read that copy even if I didn't write it. I was still using a typewriter back then.) C will remember my beloved little SE30, the first Apple computer I ever owned, which I bought with the proceeds of the first major award I received, which was the only way I could afford it, and that machine was easily worth countless times its purchase price. It was invaluable. Every Mac I've purchased since has been as well.

As I've shown more than once on this blog, I have also drawn hundreds (I think it's now upwards of 350) images, figurative, abstract, semi-cartoon, what have you, on an Apple product (my iPhone and iPad). I have designed moving gifs and web pages, made microfilms and edited videoclips, and even tried my hand at admittedly dreadful musicmaking on an Apple computer. I have taken thousands of photos, produced thousands of tweets, sent thousands of emails, on Apple products. This blog is even accessible from a app(lication) available on Apple products. My debt to Steve Jobs is immense and grows. He did not just create a successful company, but rethought how we interact with technology, which is to say, rethought and reshaped how we live. Right now, I am sitting in a café, reading short stories by my undergraduates and graduate students, and know without even querying them that many were produced on Apple computers. Near me six people are working on Apple's Macintosh computers; four are listening to music, podcasts, or who knows what on iPods or iPhones. This would mirror any cafe across the US.  Past the large picture windows, shaded by ecru screens, a thickset man bops down the street, Apple headphone wires descending from his ears into this pocket. It is almost impossible to think that just 10 years, iPods didn't exist; just 7 years ago, there were no iPhones; and before January 2010, while there were tablet computers, there were no iPads. Now their purchase is both becoming an educational mandate and provoking political scandals.

Apple Computers would not have existed without Jobs, but it might have listed on towards irrelevance had he not returned to its operations in 1997. Even when he'd left the company and during all the years he was associated with it, right up to these last few weeks, it has been his vision, coupled with the genius of countless engineers, marketers, manufacturing workers, support staff, and customers, that have produced the remarkable creations issuing regularly from its offices and factories. Thank you, Steve Jobs, and your imprint and those of all associated with Apple will remain on my work, as it will on many others, for time to come.

C's New Apps, Cooking, Sound Machines & More

Back in July I'd written that C had created and debuted his first app, the fashion-forward, informative MBF TrendTalk, for the MBF consulting company and its site.  (The next New York Fashion Week is coming up in a little over a month, so it's an app to have if you want to be on top of things.) Since then he's been working steadily on new apps, and his company, CAC-IT has since introduced several new free or very affordable apps that are either available or will soon be via the iTunes store.

The second was C's Holiday Kitchen, a holiday cookbook for the iPad, featuring some of his delicious, failsafe holiday recipes, ranging from the staples like roast turkey, apple and sausage stuffing, collard greens, and homemade cranberry sauce, to desserts like coconut cake and sweet potato pie, to dinner rolls you cannot mess up nor stop adding to your plate.  He has since updated this app and introduced an iPhone version, C's Holiday iKitchen, which is now also available on iTunes.  I recommend trying out the cranberry sauce if you've never made it before; it's so simple it will shock you and you'll never want to go back to canned cranberry sauce again.

Two of his newer apps are in the Apple pipeline: the first is my favorite of all, the Soundbox Celebrator, which is a virtual iPhone sound machine for the holidays, sporting events, and anytime you want to punctuate your thoughts and comments with loud audio accompaniment.  It includes a variety of sounds, including an air horn, church bells, and my favorite, the vuvuzela, as well as a stately version of "For Auld Lang Syne," with the lyrics in case you're too blitzed to remember them.  I hate to admit it but had this been available when I was in high school, I very well might have been expelled as a result of it! (As it was, we had to make do with Bic pens, spitballs, and a laughing machine, which nearly sent my elderly German language teacher into apoplexy, but that's another story....)

The second is a lifestyle and travel app for Monaga, covering the the full range of LGBTQ life and activities in the Dominican Republic and more. The app will feature links to Monaga's main page; the legendary Monaga blog; and a Monaga-designed map showing gay and tourist highlights for Santo Domingo-area travelers.  As Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest might say, it will ensure travelers know where to find "the booze, beaches, and boys!" As I said, it's in the Apple pipeline as well, and should debut quite soon.

Since I don't have the skills to program more than simple html these days, I'm very impressed by all of this, and I urge you to check these out if you're interested, and check with iTunes or CAC-IT's site to see what apps C is devising down the road, or to inquire about getting your own.

Animations

Slowly but surely I'm learning new tricks with the iPad I inherited. In addition to drawings, I've now figured out how to create little animations, something I used to do years ago with a Gif builder program, though those ran on a continuous loop and were really images, whereas these are mini-movies, something I've wanted to create since I was small. They're crude, but I'm just learning how to use the software. Here are four: "Paul's World Cup"; "Music"; "Catness"; "Butterfly" (the very first one I did). Enjoy!

Paul's World Cup

Music

Catness

Butterfly

Congrats to C: First App, TrendTalk, at iTunes Store!

I finally can announce it: Congratulations to my partner C (CAC-IT!), whose first official iPhone/iPad/iPadTouch app, for MBF TrendTalk, is now available for free download at Apple's iTunes store!

This customized project required a tremendous amount of work, but C accomplished it, and now everyone with access to iTunes and three of Apple's best-selling products will be able to stay on top of the worlds of green fashion and design, by following one of the world's leaders in this area, MBF Trend Consulting!

Here's what the TrendTalk app looks like on the iTunes store:

And here's the link for you to download the app for free:



Click on the link to download and urge everyone you know to download it as well!

Bloomsday + Congrats to the Grads + Buffett's Giveaway + Krugman/Cassandra

It's Bloomsday! "STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air..." and you know, or know of, the rest. (If not, you can find the entire, remarkable novel, Ulysses, one of the greatest ever written in the English or any other language, here.) You can hear Joyce himself reading from it here, at Bedeutung Blog.

To commemorate today there's the annual Lilac Bloomsday Run, as well as the Bloomsday Festival in Dublin and elsewhere. Apple, steadily gaining a reputation for prudery regarding its iPhone and iPad applications (and the anti-porn comments of its founder-guru), has decided to reinstate Throwaway House's Ulysses Seen app, created by which it had previously censored because of its depiction of partial nudity (an imagined goddess's breasts, Buck Mulligan's penis, egads!)

I haven't seen this app, but given how the entire novel ends, I wonder if that was bowdlerized too. To Apple's credit, they also reinstated a graphic novel version of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, which features a strip of a male couple kissing, after having heavily censored it.  Something tells me neither Joyce nor Wilde would have been surprised.

^^^

The university's graduation doesn't officially occur until this weekend, but final grades are posted, so I think I can post without caution:

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THIS YEAR'S GRADUATES IN THE UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE CLASSES OF 2010!

Some of the seniors (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and lit scholars writers all) at the annual Bowling challenge (fiction won, creative nonfiction finished second, and I bowled with poetry this year). Congratulations to all the graduating senior major and minors, and to the other undergraduate students finishing up this week that I taught (including those in the Conceptual Art/Writing class--you were great!), advised or worked with over the last few years!

Congratulations also to one of my graduate fiction thesis advisees, Roya Khatiblou, whose magnificent manuscript received a 2009-10 Distinguished Thesis Award! It was exciting to work with Roya, and with the other graduating fiction students I advised this year, whom I'd also taught in the past, Jennifer Companik and Wendy Schoua Musto.

Lastly, to all the students in the novella class (The Theory and Practice of Fiction, Winter-Spring), congratulations on finishing your novellas! It was a huge, speeded up, often stressful undertaking, and you accomplished in 4 1/2 months what it takes many writers a year or more do but you've all completed your little books, and deserve praise for having done so!

Back from Break + Prototype iPhone Blog App + Tea Party Teabaggers 101

Spring break came, I left the grid for a bit (including, amazingly for me, Twitter), but now the new quarter is set to begin. I am teaching two classes: one is a continuation of the advanced fiction writing-novella class (Theory and Practice of Fiction), and the other is a brand new experiment, an advanced creative writing class, Concepts of Conceptual Art. I'm charged up about both; the novella class's first half-quarter went pretty well, I thought, and all of the students produced what approximated the beginning of a long work (long short story/novella) by the end of the quarter, so now they'll be refining these and extending this work to create something that is or approaches a novella. Our final reading is Don DeLillo's curious, powerful novella, Pafko at the Wall, which he originally published as a folio in Harpers in 1992, but which he later incorporated as the prologue to his greatest novel (in my opinion), Underworld (1997). After DeLillo, it's on to their work exclusively.

With the Conceptual Art class, there isn't enough time to explore all the theorists, artists, and movements I'd hoped to, so we'll start with a bit of background, moving from Idealism (Plato) to Formalism (Aristotle, Kant), then look at Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, Marcel Duchamp (+ Dada and Surrealism), and Clement Greenberg, one of the chief formalists against whom many of the American conceptualists were reacting, and then explore conceptual music (Cage, Finer, Reynols), conceptual art and performance (Situationists, George Brecht, Alan Kaprow, Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, Sol LeWitt, etc.), and finally conclude with conceptual writing (Warhol, Stephens/Nathanaël, Philip, Goldsmith, Mesmer, and Lewis Obadike + Obadike). Things aren't as schematic as this appears, and I will be including some theorists like Lucy Lippard, Rob Fitterman, perhaps Benjamin Buchloh, etc. I also am going to have them create a number of projects, ranging from event scores to a durational project. I hope it'll be as fun for them as it's been for me to conceive the class. Tomorrow, too, I hope to perform Cage's 4'33" for them as part of our opening discussion.

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Just a glimpse of something really cool: C, who's doing development projects with his new company, created a prototype iPhone app of this blog, pictured below. It's not available for downloading yet, but I've been playing with and testing it since he created it, and it works really well.  Doesn't it look cool?  I'm looking forward to him creating many more.


Prototype app of my blog on my iPhone

Screenshot, from my iPhone (JTs is the prototype app)

Recent Events from Around the Horn

Over the last few months, weeks or days I've been following a few stories from afar. These include:

The riots by and attacks on undocumented African migrant workers in Rosarno, Calabria, southern Italy (photo at left, EPA). The workers, paid almost nothing for their work and living in slave-like conditions outside the town, protested by rioting after a Togolese immigrant was shot at, with a pellet gun, by an unknown gunman or gunmen. A number of the immigrants, as well as many locals, were injured in the subsequent conflagration, which rocked the streets of Rocarno. Some locals beat the protesters with tire irons, and another tried to run over an immigrant with a bulldozer. (Rosarno is just across the Straits of Messina and up the Italian coast from where C and I were in Sicily.)

Update: The Africans have either fled or been out of the town to immigrant detention centers, and locals are celebrating. According to the New York Times, the mafia are suspected culprits.

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The deadly attack by separatists against the Togolese soccer team, in Cabinda, an oil-rich breakaway region of northwestern Angola (that I have written about in some of my fiction, strangely enough), just before the start of the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament, which has not been canceled. (The World Cup will take place in neighboring South Africa later this year.) Three Togolese have died, and eight members of the team have been injured in the attack, in which separatists machine-gunned the Togolese buses as they were passing through the area. Team captain and international star Emmanuel Adebayor, pictured above, was not injured but was badly shaken along with the rest of his teammates. Bizarrely, the CAF (African Football Federation), along with Angola's president Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, are saying that tournament games will still be held in the Cabinda region.

Update: The Togo team has, unsurprisingly, withdrawn from the tournament, which will neither be postponed nor canceled. According to NBC Sports, "In a telephone interview with AP on Sunday, Tiburcio Tati Tchingobo, minister of defense in the self-declared Federal State of Cabinda, denied his Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda forces, or FLEC, were responsible for the ambush. He said that whoever was responsible was sparked by a level of frustration that could lead to more violence."

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Unde the current economic crisis the funding situation for higher education is increasingly grave at a number of institutions, especially public ones, which has led some academic officials to push for increased privatization and neoliberal policies. Faculty and students have not taken it sitting down.

-Faculty members were on strike at Oakland University.
-UC Berkeley faculty and students led a 3-day strike that faculty and students across the UC system signed onto and the Governator's threats against California's once trend-setting system are being taken very seriously.
-Students at UC Santa Cruz occupied a building to protest tuition hikes and budget cuts.
-Protesters occupied a building at San Francisco State University.
-Graduate students went on strike at UIUC.
-There is a New School in Exile site to address ongoing problems at the New School University

In addition, students at the University of Maryland protested the ouster of a popular diversity official; Howard University students protested slow paperwork that has led to problems; University of Pittsburgh students protested the G20 summit taking place in their city; and students and faculty at the University of Vienna have protested funding and other issues, sparking solidarity protests across Europe.

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This drama about Harry Reid's reported comments on Barack Obama's candidacy. Though inartfully stated (off the record, no less), I don't think Reid was being racist nor was he incorrect, and certainly I had heard many black people I know say similar things. ("Negro dialect" is a bit antiquated, though, Senator Reid.) Seriously and unfortunately for me to put it so bluntly, but if Obama spoke even like Jesse Jackson, say, and were dark-skinned, I think he'd have had a harder time as a candidate. I should add, however, that I think the larger issue of Americans' increasing comfort with politicians of color, especially black and mixed-race politicians, and Obama's political and oratorical skills, cannot be understated, and it's a tribute to the American people that we took a tremendous leap throughout the 2007-8 primary season and, most importantly, in November 2008. As to where it's gotten us is another question.

Update: Of course now the GOP's chosen and currently out-of-control minstrel, Michael Steele, is trying to exploit these remarks. As did Liz Cheney this morning. I say consider these rancid sources; no more needs to be said.

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Commercial real estate in New York is finally meeting Great Recession reality. There are "920 football fields" worth of office space sitting unused. Meanwhile, as I witnessed all fall, longtime stores and restaurants (including the 92-year-old Café des Artistes and Manhattan's oldest soul food restaurant, The Pink Tea Cup) are being shuttered because landlords refuse to lower rents or cut deals. New York has been through this scenario before: some refuse to learn.

Also, the Stuyvesant Town boondoggle has collapsed. What was to be the transfer of Manhattan's largest pocket of middle-income housing into the hands of the luxury market is now an official FAIL. My questions include what is going to happen to the 20,000 tenants now?

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Buy me, I'm going to be better than the rest!

Apple very well may be launching yet another pace-setter with its iSlate (iTablet?), which is allegedly slated to appear on January 27. There are all sorts of predictions about what its specs are, what it'll look like and what software it'll possess, and though it's unlikely I'll be getting one anytime soon, both because I usually like to wait until Apple gets these things right, cool as they always are, and because I can't afford another new gizmo, I am dying to see one up close. By which I mean, pick one up, play with the screen, and be mesmerized by yet another offering from the Apple product family. Given the suggested debut date of this delightful device, I'll have to go to the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue before my graduate class that night to inspect one, though something tells me that store will be more mobbed than it usually is. That is, if it really does appear in Apple Stores that day. We can hope, can't we?