Thanks, Marvin, I am deep into the Parables. I am looking at the construction of the book. I see that you have shortened it. I found your parable of the lecture at the California College of Arts helpful in that it presented a brief response to what your parables are. I have taken about fives pages of notes, many come from Parable of Imagination. That was masterful in your insight into the role that the educational system play in the suppression and the oppression of those on the margins, particularly black youth.
I'll try to keep the review short (500 words or so) but we'll see. I am still making myself pregnant. I have been skipping about in the text, which may indeed be advantage for the reader you have in mind. But I wanted to see how you constructed the work. I see that most of the pieces were written between January and April of 2010. But you also have pieces from 2008 and 2009, and pieces published in 1970 and 1973. I do not know that you called them "parables" at the time.
I am still meditating on the whole notion of "parable" and "fable." I checked the dictionary definitions. I have yet to read the fables. I have read at least one of the dialogues. I will get to the one on "bitch" sometime tonight. I remember the parable of the man who talked to cows. That was indeed humorous.
In any case my present task is to finish reading the last four or five parables. I am now on the Hoover piece and your experience with the FBI. You are rare indeed: to have been steeped in all of that and lived to the tell tale, and to tell it as boldly as if you were still there. As Gore Vidal pointed out in writing his memoir, Memory is piled upon memory upon memory, and so we remember our memories for we tell them through filters of life, knowledge, and years and years of intellectual and other experiences.
But the thing is that so many who lived through the experiences of the 60s and 70s are living other lives, lives of the status quo, lives that they owe to the company store. You may in this incarnation of Marvin be the only revolutionary of the 60s an 70s who is struggling as ever for a "revolution of conscious and society" in the present. I have looked at some of the material from the 50th anniversary of SNCC and other civil rights veteran. Their memories do not inform their present.
Of course, Julius Lester may be an exception. He was always a man of the Imagination. But I have not kept up with his novels. Some of them however seem quite to the point, though I do not know how he resolves the conflict that continues, or exactly who his audience is. As you may know he is now a Jew.
In any case, your Call for a Renaissance of the Imagination is exceedingly important. What seems most important is that you never cut yourself off from the lumpen (the dopefiends, the hustlers, the workers), those who have tragic relationships with their lovers and children, those who can’t afford a $100 an hour psychiatrist. It is indeed important that you point out the deficiency of health care in our communities and how everything is commodified in the interest of the few.
Your "classroom/clinic" has kept you grounded to the realities of racial oppression. Many racial activist have sold their souls and become wheeler/dealers of the powers that be. A few went into city and state government, like Marion Barry and courtland Cox, and Ivanhoe Donaldson, and Julian Bond and John Lewis. Many are union execs, and on the leash of their whites bosses. Union execs are part mafia/part political hacks of the Democratic Party. Obama can kill a million spy on hundreds of millions and they will die for Obama, rather than the common man, woman, and child. Of course, like any sane conscious person Obama is preferable to Romney and Tea Party. But to die for Obama is to lose the way of ethics in defense of humanity.
Well, what I am trying to say. I am deep into your Wisdom, in your thought, thinking and construction of a literary work that is quite post-modern, an interactive text that would not have been possible before the invention of the web, as indicated by your dialogues.
My only comparison to what you have done is Jerry Ward's "The Katrina Papers." Of course, his book is grounded by the destruction of an American city, New Orleans , and the tragic destruction of his own home and much of its contents, including papers, records, tapes and other personal items.
But of course, your work is grounded by your Academy of the Corner, and your daily contact with the ongoing tragedies of our people. Those stories are told in your parables. I thank God for a Marvin X, a Plato Negro.
I will try to have a review of the book by Wednesday.
Loving you madly, Rudy
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