Joshua Tree 2018

We are on a three year rotation for desert camping right now. Death Valley National Park, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and Joshua Tree National Park. Each has its charms, and each represents a different face of the desert.

Death Valley is vast, with dunes, extremes of temperature and elevation, salt flats, slot canyons, and more. Anza-Borrego is part of the Colorado (Sonora) desert, and is filled with flowers after a wet winter.

Joshua Tree is mostly the high desert - the Mojave. (Although the south part of the park is in the Colorado.)

We returned to Joshua Tree this February, and brought some friends who had never been. This time, while we revisited a number of our favorite places, we also saw some new trails. I was able to take a lot more pictures this time too - last time, my camera died midway through the trip. I was also able to use the longer zoom to capture a number of birds this time.

My previous post (linked above) has more on the natural history of the park, if you want to read further.

Here are the best of the pictures from this trip:

Ladder-backed Woodpecker

Me and the kids. 

Cactus Wren

The iconic Joshua Tree

Desert Cottontail

Looking from the high desert to the low desert.

Greater Roadrunner

 Why you should camp at Joshua Tree...

The Importance of Being Earnest (CSUB 2018)

I read and reviewed The Importance of Being Earnest about six years ago. It is definitely one of my favorite plays. However, I hand never had the chance to see it live. And then, I had two chances. I decided (because of a crazy music schedule) that I probably was not going to fit in a trip to San Diego to see it at The Old Globe (although I’m sure that production will be fabulous), but that there was no reason I couldn’t see it here in Bakersfield when CSUB did its production.

CSUB took an interesting approach to this play by switching the genders. I personally find this to be a rather useful device - it is amazing how silly many things sound when said by or about the opposite gender. (This is a pretty good way to see if something is actually true - or just cultural baggage…) In making this switch, all the names were preserved. Thus, Algernon and Jack are women - but retain their names. And likewise for every character. Pronouns were changed to reflect the gender swap, however, as were references such as “young man.” Costumes were period accurate, and were suited to the swapped genders - so big dresses for Jack and Algernon, dapper hats and suits for Gwendolyn and Cecily.

In this case, the idea of two young women acting as frivolous and rakish as Jack and Algernon is pretty revealing. If you combine it with the stereotype that young women must be pure and faithful, the whole edifice crumbles when reversed. Likewise, the lines about beauty are hilarious when applied to the pretty young men that Gwendolyn and Cecily become. Oscar Wilde was already pushing back against those gender assumptions with the play - so gender swapping both accentuates his point, and works against it in other ways.

Some lines in particular were hilarious coming from the other gender.

"Gwendolyn, it is a terrible thing for a [wo]man to find out suddenly that all his life [s]he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me? "

"I can. For I feel that you are sure to change."

Or the scenes in which Algernon keeps eating.

JACK: How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.

ALGERNON: Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.

JACK: I say it's perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances. ALGERNON: When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as any one who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.

We took the kids to this one, and reviews were mostly positive. Certainly my teen daughters understood the wit and laughed throughout. My boys loved it as well. My littlest (age 7) was a bit confused by the plot, and we had to catch her up during the breaks between the acts. She got some of it, but it was a bit over her head. However, she did love the fact that there was no curtain, so she got to see all the set changes.

Several of the cast were familiar from recent CSUB productions. Susannah Vera (Jack) was in Pippin, while Taylor Clark (Algernon) and Garrett Willis (Gwendolyn) played the lead roles in The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Phoebe Pyne (Rev. Chausuble) also had a key role in Nightingale.  Vera and Clark had real chemistry - important in this play, as their relationship is the center of the fun. Willis and Trenton Benet (Cecily) played up the silliness of stereotypical femininity. Anthony Salvador Jauregui III followed up his turn as Charlemagne in Pippin with an imperious turn in the role of Lord Bracknell.

 Top: Phoebe Pyne (Rev. Chasuble), Jessica Sanchez (Lane), Bella Becerra (Merriman), Taylor Clark (Algernon)

Bottom: Anthony Salvador Jauregui III (Lord Bracknell), Trenton Benet (Cecily), Susannah Vera (Jack), Garrett Willis (Gwendolyn), Luis Velez (Mr. Prism) 

Photo: CSUB publicity photo

Overall, the cast did a fine job - CSUB has a good theaterdepartment. The British accents weren’t bad: one of the faculty is a dialect coach.

Earnest runs this weekend and next. This is a good opportunity for locals to support our fine university and enjoy a witty comedy in the bargain.

The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward

Source of book: Borrowed from the library.

This was a random Black History Month selection - our library usually has a little display for whatever month it is, from the usual, recurring ones, to one-offs like Inventor’s Month. There were several books I could have chosen, but this one looked interesting and not too long. 

The title is a reference to James Baldwin’s pair of essays that helped spark the Civil Rights Movement - and that title was itself a reference to the traditional belief that the next time the earth is destroyed, it will be by fire. The book is a collection of essays (and two poems) on the same general topic as Baldwin’s: civil rights past, present, and future. Ward herself wrote one, and most of the others were written specifically for this book.

Because the book came out in 2016, several significant events dominate the collection: the murder of Trayvon Martin, the Ferguson killing and protests, Rachel Dolezal’s impersonation, and the backlash by whites against Black Lives Matter.

Because the styles and topics vary pretty wildly, I will just touch on a few things. The book is a good, quick read, in the tradition of essay collections. They have commonalities and differences, and thus function well as a diverse set of voices giving a window into a different set of experiences. (For us whites, at least.)

Some particular essays that stood out were these: “Homegoing, AD,” by Kima Jones, which was a lovely sketch of her family experiences. The essay by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers (with a long title) which reevaluated what we were taught about Phillis Wheatley and her husband (which turns out to have been told by someone who may well have made most of it up.) “White Rage” by Carol Anderson, the one essay I had read before, and which still explains so much about Trump’s election. “Cracking the Code,” Jesmyn Ward’s story of using DNA to explore her family tree. “Black and Blue,” by Jamaican-born Garnette Cadogan, which is an all too common story of police harassment and abuse in the United States. “Know Your Rights!” by Emily Raboteau, about the murals with the same name in New York City. “Lonely in America,” by Wendy S. Walters, in which she researches the African-american grave site in Portsmouth, Maine.

The beauty of the writing is evident. Most of these aren’t protest pieces, or political in the partisan sense. They are stories from the real lives of the writers. The experience of being black in America is story enough to be worth reading - and not just reading, but allowing ourselves to be changed by the process of empathy. More than anything else, my own journey away from right wing politics has been driven by actually listening. To quote Wendy S. Walters:

When a story is unpleasant, it is hard to focus on details that allow you to put yourself in the place of the subject, because the pain of distortion starts to feel familiar. Paying attention often requires some sort of empathy for the subject, or at the very least, for the speaker. But empathy, these days, is hard to come by. Maybe this is because everyone is having such a hard time being understood themselves. Or because empathy requires us to dig way down into the murk, deeper than our own feelings go, to a place where the boundaries between our experience and everyone else’s no longer exist.

Perhaps one of the best examples of this is the murder of Trayvon Martin. And yes, I use that word intentionally, because that is what it was. Ward, in the introduction, expresses her horror that the media failed - refused really - to say what this was. An adult man stalked and killed a minor child walking home from the store. At every possible juncture, the adult chose to escalate the situation, until the child was dead. I have teenagers. (And a 12 year old son, who isn’t always the most aware of what is going on around him. If he weren’t white, I would be constantly worried he would be gunned down by a fearful cop.) The Trayvon Martin murder is one reason I left the NRA. (It is one thing to defend against an armed burglar. It is something else to adopt “stand and fight” as a slogan. What the actual hell? This isn’t the wild west. Don’t start fights over whose sidewalk it is. Sheesh!)  It was also one significant step in my journey to a new way of thinking about race relations in America. A world where you can follow someone around, and shoot them dead as soon as you subjectively feel afraid isn’t a civilized one - it is a society that worships violence. That was how I came to realize that no, to all too many, black lives don’t matter - they are expendable. And that needs to change.

Anyway, this book is a quick read, and is a good one to hear some different perspectives. None of us can claim to have a god-like, purely objective view and experience of the world. There isn’t a “black perspective” as opposed to a “neutral” perspective, which is why the idea that any of us can arrogantly tell other people why their experience of the world is somehow invalid or doesn’t exist is ludicrous. Empathy and basic human decency require that we shut up - and listen.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Source of book: I own this.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

~John Donne (Meditation XVII)

***

It has been a while since I read any Hemingway. And when I did, I read short stories. Believe it or not, I have never read one of his full length novels. I suppose one reason for this is that, while I like his writing, his unrelenting pessimism is difficult in large doses for me. I’m not talking about the ending of a book - not all books have to end happily. I love tragedy well enough. But Hemingway reminds me of, say, King Lear or Othello in that the bleakness is pretty unrelenting. Or like Chekhov, but without the humor.

This is not to say in any way that Hemingway is a bad writer. To the contrary, his bleakness is very well written and convincing, which is why it is difficult for me. Hemingway has a modern, spare, realistic style of writing that paints clear and detailed pictures without wasting words. He lets you in on the psychology of his characters as well as anyone, and does it by showing, not telling. His streams of consciousness are astoundingly close to real life for an introvert like me, which is why (in this particular book), the most traumatic parts were the inner dialogue of Robert Jordan’s head. I would be doing the exact same thing, and it was spooky.

I also don’t want to create the impression that I disliked For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is an excellent book, with a compelling, carefully paced and plotted story, and characters you care about. I liked the book, but it took me a while, because after 30-40 pages, I had to walk away and read something else. (With a brutal concert schedule and a 500 page book, that means slow reading…)

So, about the book itself. For Whom the Bell Tolls is set during the Spanish Civil War, in the 1930s. Hemingway wrote the book in 1939-40, and based it in part on his own experiences as a correspondent during the war.

While I had a very vague sense of the history involved, my true introduction to the Spanish Civil War was six years ago, when I read The Cypresses Believe in God, Jose Maria Gironella’s outstanding novel set on the brink of the war. Back in 2012, the book was terrifying enough. After the election of a man who is for all intents and purposes Fascist, and whose rhetoric and manipulation of the dominant religion looks much like the Falange, it seems urgently relevant. Our own society, like that of Spain in the 1930s, distrusts each other, distrusts institutions, and the Right wing seems all too eager to start a slaughter of those outside their tribe.

So, it would be too much, perhaps, to expect a book about that bloody, senseless, fratricidal, and damaging war to be anything other than unrelentingly pessimistic.

Robert Jordan is a youngish American fighting with the International Brigades, on behalf of the Republic forces. Jordan is originally from Montana, but has been teaching Spanish before he was recruited as a dynamiter. The war itself is in some ways a preview of the alliances of World War Two. On the side of the Republic are the English and Americans. But also the Russians and the Communist parties in Spain. And the Anarchists. On the other side, led by Franco, are the various right wing and Fascist parties, the Catholic Church - and the Fascist parties of Italy and Germany.

[Something to keep in mind here is that Hitler and Nazism were outliers as far as Fascist regimes went. Franco and Il Duce were more typical.]

The book opens with Jordan being led by Anselmo, an old guerrilla, to a band of rebels fighting behind Fascist lines. They are led by Pablo, who is getting increasingly erratic and unreliable as the war grinds on. Or perhaps, in reality, they are led by Pilar, Pablo’s wife - and hands down the best character in the book. She is badass. As badass as they come. And psychologically interesting as well.

Jordan’s job is to blow up a bridge right before an attack launched by Republican forces. This being Hemingway, we know it will end badly in some way or another. I won’t spoil the plot from there.

Particularly interesting in the book was the interplay of Pablo and Pilar, each of which have back stories which are gradually revealed as the book progresses. Pablo has had a pretty good career in the war blowing up trains, and causing general havoc. Pilar had quite a wild youth before settling down with Pablo. Both of them hate Fascists both because of the longstanding oppression of the lower classes (to which they belong) by the powerful landowners, and because of the slaughter of civilians in their home village by Falangists. One of the most haunting scenes in the book is when Pilar tells of the revenge taken against the Falangists - the men are run off of a cliff one at a time. It is pretty brutal.

Of course, the Falangists are every bit as bad when they get the upper hand. Maria, a young woman who becomes Jordan’s lover, watched her parents get slaughtered, and is brutally gang raped, leading to her near death and near insanity before Pilar rescues her. Gironella too tells of the way that people in Spain brutally turned on each other in an orgy of violence and hate.

There were some interesting lines in the book. Hemingway explores the uncomfortable reality of bigotry - which is a problem for both sides in the conflict. But particularly for the Right, which despises both the common man the inteligenta. I found particularly interesting Jordan’s observation about how fundamentalist religion feeds bigotry and hate:

"To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy."

The first part is pretty obvious. An absolute sense of surety that one is right is indeed the calling card of both fundamentalism and bigotry of all kinds. But the second part is one that I believe is true as well. I do not think it is an accident that American Fundamentalists/Evangelicals (pretty indistinguishable these days, alas) are obsessed with sex. In my experience, believing oneself to be free of sexual impurity serves as a way to look down on everyone else. It feeds bigotry by making a person feel righteous, even as he or she does shocking evil to his or her fellow humans.

Hemingway also uses an interesting exchange between Jordan and Primitivo, a young guerrilla to make a rather apropos point about the United States - even more relevant in our present time. They are discussing the differences between society in Spain and the United States - and the relevant political questions. Why, for example, did the US maintain a republic without confiscating large estates?

Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked. 'But the big estates remain. Also, there are taxes on the land,' he said.

'But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here,' Primitivo said.

'It is possible.'

'Then you will have to fight in your country as we fight here.'

'Yes, we will have to fight.'

'But are there not many fascists in your country?'

'There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.'

Dang. Let’s see, we have had a long (and largely successful) campaign by the ultra rich in our country to largely eliminate the estate tax, and drastically lower income taxes on the wealthy. And we have had literal Nazis marching in our streets. Hmm. Maybe Hemingway was on to something there.

Also: “There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.” YES. And some of us have indeed discovered who the Fascist sympathizers in our life are too - the ones still rooting for Trump as he works to ethnically cleanse our country, dismantle our public institutions, and enrich himself and his cronies. We can see who many of you are, unfortunately.

Death is a major theme of For Whom the Bell Tolls - as the title might hint. Jordan knows his time is coming. Whether sooner, or later, death will get him. In a great scene where Jordan recalls some of the Russians he worked with, he tells of an event where Karkov ends up with some dead Russians on his hands. He can’t just leave them, because the Russians are not officially involved in the war, and he doesn’t need an international incident. So the bodies are carefully disfigured in away as to look like they were killed in a fire. That way, they are just bodies.

No one could tell from the bodies of these wounded men he would leave in beds at the Palace, that they were Russians. Nothing proved a naked dead man was a Russian. Your nationality and your politics did not show when you were dead.

That last line is outstanding. Ultimately, the nuances of our politics won’t really matter when we are corpses. (Although, if you take Christ literally, our destiny after that hinges on how we cared for others - or not.)

One more example of good writing is worth quoting.

Now that his rage was gone he was excited by this storm as he was always by all storms. In a blizzard, a gale, a sudden squall, a tropical storm, or a summer thunder shower in the mountains there was an excitement that came to him from no other thing. It was like the excitement of battle except that it was clean.

One final observation. Because of when the book was written, Hemingway had to steer clear of obscenity laws. This was thirty years before Miller v. California, which overruled prior precedent and established a new standard. As of 1940, the standard applied was essentially a Victorian one: material was obscene if it tended to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” Even as late as 1957, the court was still using a “average person, applying contemporary community standards” test for obscenity. It wasn’t until Miller that our current standard was adopted. In order to ban material as obscene, the court must find (in addition to the other requirements) “Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” If written today, For Whom the Bell Tolls would undoubtedly look different.

The most obvious difference is that Hemingway scrupulously avoids actual swear words, while making it blindingly obvious that his characters are swearing. In most cases, he just substitutes “obscenity” for whatever word he means. This is particularly amusing in cases where he uses a standard Spanish swearing formula, as in the common, “I obscenity in the milk of your ancestors!” That cracks me up every time. But, Hemingway simultaneously wrote the story the way he wanted to while thumbing his nose at the censors, who would find nothing literally offensive in the book, while pretty much every reader ever could fill in the appropriate cuss word without difficulty.

The other interesting way the book carefully skirts the censors is in its sex scenes. Yes, you could write an actual sex scene in 1940. You could mention breasts, and buttocks. But not genitals. Not directly. And you couldn’t say that they had an orgasm. Just that “the earth moved,” which has become a cultural cliche. (It was original when Hemingway used it...not so much now.) In some cases, I find the lack of graphic language to enhance the sexiness of a scene. In this case, it was more amusing because of Hemingway’s dated assumptions about gender, and the way his language is now overused. But I certainly have read worse writing about sex.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a worthy read, both for its characters and its strong writing. It isn’t the most pleasant book, but it is a good reminder of the human cost of war - and the human cost of Tribalism, which is behind the vast majority of wars big and small.

***

You don’t think I could leave out Metallica’s take on the phrase, do you? It is definitely in harmony with the themes of Hemingway’s novel.

Poems 1921-1930 by Langston Hughes

Source of book: I own the complete poems of Langston Hughes

This is my official choice for Black History Month this year.

Here is the list of Black History Month selections since I started this blog, and also some related books:

2011:    50 Years and Other Poems by James Weldon Johnson

2012:    Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

2013:    The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois

2014:     Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

2015:     Kindred by Octavia Butler

2016:   Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

2017: Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South

    And

    Black Boy (American Hunger) by Richard Wright

Other notable books by African American or African authors:

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Poems by Phillis Wheatley

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

I Greet The Dawn (Poems) by Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh by Daina Ramey Berry

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Books on Black History by other authors:

Red Tails, Black Wings by John B. Holway

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Ragtime (the Musical)

The Slaves’ War by Andrew Ward

***

I remember discovering Langston Hughes in high school, although, honestly, I cannot remember exactly which poem it was - two and a half decades tend to do that. However, I can say with confidence that it was a revelation to re-discover “Let America Be America Again” in the aftermath of election of an openly white nationalist candidate in 2016. In any case, I do enjoy Langston Hughes.

I also will be performing a song cycle by Robert Owens, Fields of Wonder, with texts from the poems of Langston Hughes, this weekend. Good stuff.

Hughes was part of the Harlem Renaissance, a great flowering of the arts among the African American community in Harlem, New York City, in the 1920s. It is interesting that this took place during the same period as the revival of the Ku Klux Klan (the “second” KKK). Causation is tricky, but it seems plausible that insecure whites felt threatened by the entry of black artists and art into the mainstream.

I have long been fascinated by the Harlem Renaissance, because of the high quality that was produced, and also the sense of community that bridged class divides within the movement. It is easy to see the influence that Duke Ellington, W.E.B Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Marian Anderson, and so many more have had on art, music, and writing throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries. Langston Hughes too was influential, and remains one of the best loved poets of the era.

I am slowly accumulating an extensive poetry collection for my own library, and as part of my poetry project, I am systematically reading poetry. In this case, I started at the beginning, with Hughes’ first decade of poems. Obviously, I intend to return and read through the rest later.

This collection is both expected and unexpected. Certainly, I expected the many poems about the African American experience - Hughes is rightly renowned for bringing the Harlen culture to life. I also expected his more lyrical and descriptive poems. What I did not expect was that quite a few would be on the topic of suicide. There are quite a few, and they are from the perspective of someone either contemplating or doing the deed. Sometimes, these are circumstantial: the speaker has suffered some heartbreak or hardship, and contemplates ending it all. Some are just the speaker’s intent and mindset. A bit chilling in many instances. Fortunately, whatever ideation Hughes had in his youth led merely to some haunting poetry, rather than his untimely death at his own hands.

The other thing I did not expect was that Hughes wrote many poems in the form of blues lyrics. These are quite good - you could set them to a 12 bar framework and they would fit perfectly in meter and mood. I’ll quote some of these.

One more thing I will mention is that Hughes doesn’t sugar coat anything. All the dark parts of our human experience are in these poems, from domestic violence to rape to poverty to despair. But there are also the positives too. Hughes is unashamed of his race, and expresses pride at the African American spirit, their experiences and hardships, and their resilience. He stands up in the face of a reinvigorated white supremacy with his head high, his gaze dead ahead, and doesn’t apologize for anything.

Here are the poems that particularly stood out.

Question(1)

When the old junk man Death

Comes to gather up our bodies

And toss them into the sack of oblivion,

I wonder if he will find

The corpse of a white multi-millionaire

Worth more pennies of eternity,

Than the black torso of

A Negro cotton-picker.

Short and sweet. We all take up our five or six feet of earth in the end, right?

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
    flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
    went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
    bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

This one is rightly regarded as one of his best. Every time I read it, it gives me a thrill.

The next one is rather uncomfortable. But true, which is why it is uncomfortable.

Liars

It is we who are liars:

The Pretenders-to-be who are not

And the Pretenders-not-to-be who are.

It is we who use words

As screens for thoughts

And weave dark garments

To cover the naked body

Of the too white Truth.

It is we with the civilized souls

Who are liars.

I love how Hughes uses multiple layers of meaning in this one. Dark garments, white truth. Truth offends us because it is too bright. It is also white in the sense of light and darkness. And “white” truth may well have the meaning of what whites believe or wish to be true, or perhaps the truth of white supremacy which has been endemic to American society since the first slave was brought here. And certainly acting “civilized” has during my lifetime served to cover some real ugliness which became obvious once the dark garments were removed.

I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

This classic was certainly one of the first Langston Hughes poems I experienced. And, for much of my life, I lived under the illusion that most people I knew agreed with it. It was quite the shock in the last two years to realize that in fact a great many people I know do not agree. And those people have dedicated a lot of political capital to ensure that America does not in fact become any browner than it is. The foundational truth that we are all America runs contrary to the goals of a shockingly high percentage of our population. I do not believe it is a majority overall, but it appears to be among conservative whites at least. That makes me sad.

But regardless, “I, Too” remains an inspiring poem to me, and I hope I live to see it truly come to pass.

In some cases, Hughes gets openly political - and in ways that would have him categorized with modern day protesters. Here is one of those:

God to Hungry Child

Hungry child,

I didn't make this world for you.

You didn't buy any stock in my railroad.

You didn't invest in my corporation.

Where are your shares in standard oil?

I made the world for the rich

And the will-be-rich

And the have-always-been-rich.

Not for you.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the church of Ayn Rand, commonly known as the modern GOP.

On a related note, this one resonates with me: it is how I feel about my former faith tradition, which appears to take its morality not from the Holy Writ, but from Fox News and Brietbart.

To Certain “Brothers”

You sicken me with lies,

With truthful lies.

And with your pious faces.

And your wide, out-stretched,

   mock-welcome, Christian hands.

While underneath

Is dirt and ugliness,

And rotting hearts,

And wild hyenas howling

In your soul's wasteland.

Because ultimately, there is no welcome. There is no use for the poor, the immigrant, the brown, or for those outside the political tribe. That much was made clear to me on my way out the door.

How about some blues? Langston Hughes wrote literally dozens of blues lyrics during this decade, any of which would be worth quoting. I picked one, but could have quoted many more.

Midwinter Blues

In the middle of the winter,

Snow all over the ground.

In the middle of the winter,

Snow all over the ground —

'Twas the night befo' Christmas

My good man turned me down.

Don't know's I'd mind his goin'

But he left me when the coal was low.

Don't know's I'd mind his goin'

But he left when the coal was low.

Now, if a man loves a woman

That ain't no time to go.

He told me that he loved me

But he must a been tellin' a lie.

He told me that he loved me.

He must a been tellin' a lie.

But he's the only man I'll

Love till the day I die.

I'm gonna buy me a rose bud

An' plant it at my back door,

Buy me a rose bud,

Plant it at my back door,

So when I'm dead they won't need

No flowers from the store.

I’m a classical musician for the most part, but I enjoy a wide variety of music. Over the last couple of decades, I have come to appreciate the blues more and more. It is no exaggeration to say that all of the truly “American” musical forms are African American in origin. Heck, no less a luminary than Antonin Dvorak, after his tour of the US in the 1890s, wrote a series of articles urging American composers to look to the music of African Americans for the true American sound. And so it was. From Ragtime to Jazz to Rock to Hip Hop, the innovation has come from there. Perhaps, as Dvorak realized, power and privilege may well be able to buy good music, but it cannot invent it. Music comes from the depths of the soul - and from ordinary people with hard lives. I am not a composer, and never will be, but I can at least take musical ideas and add my own soul to the music. And thus, I love blues improvisation. It is challenging and rewarding, and speaks to a part of me in a special way.

The blues aren’t the only music that makes it into Hughes’ poems. He was a pioneer of “Jazz Poetry,” and the sounds of the speakeasies and street music pervade many of his works. Here is an example:

Lennox Avenue: Midnight

The rhythm of life

Is a jazz rhythm,

Honey.

The gods are laughing at us.

The broken heart of love,

The weary, weary heart of pain,-

  Overtones,

  Undertones,

To the rumble of street cars,

To the swish of rain.

Lenox Avenue,

Honey.

Midnight,

And the gods are laughing at us.

I’ll finish with this short poem, which is one of my favorites.

Desire

Desire to us

Was like a double death,

Swift dying

Of our mingled breath,

Evaporation

Of an unknown strange perfume

Between us quickly

In a naked

Room.

Just wow. Sometimes a poet just speaks in a way that goes beyond the actual words of the poem. The picture, the things left unsaid, the meaning in the margins. I love this poem.

I started my Black History Month reading with poetry, and I still find that it is one of the most powerful expressions of truth and beauty and meaning. The voices of the Harlem Renaissance still seem fresh and timeless today. Langston Hughes is a good poet to start with, but there are many others. If you haven’t spent some time reading them, what are you waiting for?