Richard Wright vs Sun Ra

This is only a hypothetical confrontation to have taken place in the 1950s, or posthumously in the '60s. I recently came across an untitled poem that I wrote the same day I wrote this:

UFO (Haiku for Richard Wright)

In a rootless cosmopolitan way, Wright also belongs to Afrofuturism, maybe not so much Afro-....

"I have no religion in the formal sense of the word .... I have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country except that to which I'm obliged to belong. I have no traditions. I'm free. I have only the future."

-- Richard Wright, Pagan Spain

My haiku was prompted by a conversation about flying saucers buried in Wright's novel The Outsider. Both Wright and Sun Ra were hot to escape the confines of the Jim Crow South, taking different routes. Both are admirable for different reasons. Sun Ra was a musical genius and quite a charismatic character, but having listened to his blather in person, I could only take so much. So this is what I must have been thinking when I wrote the following, to which I must now give a title in addition to some slight editing and rearrangement:

Richard Wright to Sun Ra From the Tomb

Shaking hands with the ether,
Knowing Natchez was a pile of shit
Spewn over the globe.

Faith in articulate waves
broadcast into the galaxy . . .
and not your crank etymologies
concocted in the Magic City.

Bluesman in Paris
did not settle down,
Hallucinating into the future
And abruptly cut down.

(4 August 2011)

Spinoza, distributed rootless cosmopolitan

I have written about or documented Spinoza-related materials in various cyberlocales (this one included), and it occurs to me I should link to the relevant pages on my own sites at least, because I was not certain where to place this link to an insightful document on Spinoza's rootless cosmopolitanism:

Baruch-Benedictus: From uprooted roots to root-independent ideas? by Marcelo Dascal

This essay can be compared to Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza, which was published at or near the beginning of a popular Spinoza revival of recent years. I wrote about this elsewhere, engaged Goldstein personally on the book talk circuit, and in an online forum. I do not recall where, offhand.  However, I began my blogging about Spinoza with . . . .

Rebecca Goldstein on the 350th Anniversary of the Excommunication of Baruch Spinoza

I followed this up with:

• My Yiddishe Spinoza
• Constantin Brunner (1)
• Leibniz
• October Reading Review (1):  Grossman, Neal. Healing the Mind: The Philosophy of Spinoza Adapted for a New Age

Newer entries show up in the current version of my Studies in a Dying Culture blog under the rubric Spinoza. The entries to date are:

• Leibniz’ Spinoza anxiety revisited
• Spinoza’s Semantics

There are a number of Spinoza pages on my main web site. Regardless of subject matter, they all (and also external web pages) can be accessed via my bibliography:

Spinoza & Marxism (with Basic Spinoza Web Guide)

65th anniversary for Rootless Cosmopolitans!

Today was one of my two candidates for the establishment of a Rootless Cosmopolitans Day. "Rootless Cosmopolitans" was a Stalinist code word for Jews, marking a deadly turn in the nasty anti-Semitic history of almost the entire life span of the Soviet Union. The USSR, already gripped by Stalinist paranoia in the purges of the 1930s, took an even more paranoiac ultra-nationalist, xenophobic turn following its victory over the Nazis, mimicking their bigotry, scapegoating, and destructive cultural policies (the era of Zhdanov).  This ultranationalist, anti-western campaign against "unpatriotic" "cosmopolitan" elements began in 1946 (August 14, in Pravda), and on December 22, 1948, it was specifically tied to Jews, in this speech:

A. Fadeev: "O nekotorykh prichinakh otstavanie sovetskoi dramaturgii" [On Several Reasons for the Lag in Soviet Dramaturgy], Literaturnaya gazeta (Moscow), 22 December 1948, p. 1.

And from there, it only got worse, leading to a murderous campaign against Soviet Jews terminated only by Stalin's death.

Aside from the fact that the anti-Semitic campaign is today eligible for Social Security, it remains relevant. Eastern Europe is a worse anti-Semitic sewer today than it was under Soviet rule, reverting to its prior glorious heritage. But it is also not a dead issue in the USA, for countless Americans are locked in rigid racial/religious categories and simply cannot understand, even when they are not overtly hostile, those sneaky, slippery, chameleon Jews, especially the secular ones, that elude fixed categorization. They don't understand the firmly religious/ethnic ones very well, either.

So rootless cosmopolitans, stand proud, say it loud, and fuck 'em if they can't take a joke!

My other choice for Rootless Cosmopolitans Day is July 27, on which day in 1656 Baruch Spinoza, blessed be he, was expelled from the Jewish community, thus becoming history's first rootless cosmopolitan in theory and in practice.

REFERENCES:

"From Anti-Westernism to Anti-Semitism" by Konstantin Azadovskii and Boris Egorov in Journal of Cold War Studies, 4:1, Winter 2002, pp. 66–80.

"About one anti-patriotic group of theatre critics," Pravda, 28 January, 1949, p. 3.

Rootless cosmopolitan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia