Cowboy Bebop: Ralph Ellison’s Strange Jazz Geography
Reading The Blue Devils of Nada, Albert Murray’s 1996 collection of essays on jazz, the blues, and American expression, I penciled four question marks next one line.
Ralph Ellison
Obama the Ellisonian: Another Reading of the President’s Worldview
Early in the speech that Barack Obama gave last year to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” standing in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, the president asked, “What can be more American than what happened in this place?” That line deserved more attention than it got. To recap what happened there:…
Ornette Coleman and the Color of Fort Worth
One night in the summer before I left for college, some friends and I piled into a car outside a coffee house in Fort Worth’s museum district. I don’t remember how we ended up on the other side of downtown, in an east Fort Worth neighborhood that I had never seen before. Fort Worth was…
The Millennial-Gen X Rift Part II: the MFA System And A Digital Latina/o Literary Renaissance
Hector Tobar wouldn’t be the first to speculate about a contemporary Latina/o literary renaissance. That hype has been around for a long, long while. It surrounded the work of Gen X Latina/o writers beginning to publish in the mid to late 90’s and early 2000’s of which Junot Diaz is the most notable. The same…