Ask Your Mama

•  Langston Hughes's 1961 epic Ask Your Mama:  12 Moods for Jazz premieres tonight at Carnegie Hall.  Hughes was prompted to write the poem cycle

after witnessing white youths rioting at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival because the performances were sold out. Perhaps he saw the irony in the fact that whites were now fighting for the right to see black performers and sensed a shifting of old ways.

See Laban Carrick Hill's piece at Smithsonian for more.

•  I'm busily polishing up my keynote for the Conference on the Americas in Grand Rapids, Michigan this Friday and Saturday.  "From Stage to Screen:  Disciplining Borders in Real Women Have Curves" is about the differences between the stage and film versions of Josefina Lopez's text and what they might mean about sexual autonomy, spatial freedom, and the nation-state. 

Many thanks to my writing group (Barbara DiBernard, Frankie Condon, and even--long-distance since she's on leave--Amelia Montes) and my sweet spouse for all their suggestions, which have already made the talk much clearer.  I'm looking forward to seeing my old colleague Andy Schlewitz and meeting with the Latino Studies students at Grand Valley State.

•  My lovely Pine Manor student Linda Alcorace, whose piece in the L.A. Times ran last summer, is cooking with gas right now on her MFA thesis.  It's gorgeous, serious, and important, and I can't wait to see the whole thing in print.  Go, Linda! 

•  If you just can't get enough of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max tells you more.  And not to belabor a point, but

In May, 1990, [DFW] wrote to Jonathan Franzen, with whom he had recently become friends, “Right now, I am a pathetic and very confused young man, a failed writer at 28 who is so jealous, so sickly searingly envious of you and [William] Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David fuckwad Leavitt and any young man who is right now producing pages with which he can live. . . .”

No comment.  I'm just sayin'.