Richie Havens RIP

 

Richie Havens, who sung every song he knew during a three-hour opening set at the Woodstock Festival, died today at the age of 72.

Les Blank RIP

 

Les Blank, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker, died Sunday.

Roger Ebert RIP

Werner Herzog (in this conversation with Milos Stehlik) refers to Roger Ebert—a popular icon of film criticism and a real film enthusiast, for Chicago and for the entire country—as “one of the last soldiers of cinema.”

Chinua Achebe RIP

Things Fall Apart, by the late Chinua Achebe, was one of the first books I read in college. (It hadn’t yet made it onto high-school reading lists.)

Two years before I arrived at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Achebe delivered his controversial Chancellor’s Lecture, titled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Decrying Joseph Conrad as “a thoroughgoing racist,” Achebe argued that Conrad’s famous novel dehumanizes Africans, rendering Africa as “a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.”

Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrad’s great talents. Even Heart of Darkness has its memorably good passages and moments:

The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across tile water to bar the way for our return.

Its exploration of the minds of the European characters is often penetrating and full of insight. But all that has been more than fully discussed in the last fifty years. His obvious racism has, however, not been addressed. And it is high time it was!

Magic Slim RIP

 

Chicago blues guitarist Magic Slim died yesterday at the age of 75.

Said Bruce Iglauer, founder of Alligator Records, “Magic Slim was a true Chicago bluesman through and through. He gloried in the rough edges of the music. He never tried to make it slick.”

Like generations of Southern bluesmen who migrated to Chicago in the mid-20th century, Mr. Slim lived the hard life he sang about. As a child working the cotton fields of the rural South, he couldn’t afford a guitar, so he made one by taking baling wire from a broom, nailing it to a wall and coaxing a primordial music from it.

He tried the piano, but when he lost the pinkie finger on his right hand in a cotton-gin accident, he focused on guitar, playing gigs when he wasn’t working in the fields.

Poem of the day

For Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

We stood together at the top of his icy steps, without a word for once, squinting at the hill below and the tumble we were about to take, heads bumping on every step till our bodies rolled into the street. He was older than the bread lines of the Great Depression. Before the War he labored at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, even organized apprentices, but now there was ice. I outweighed him by a hundred pounds; when my feet began to skid, I would land on him and hear the crunch of his surgically repaired spine. The books I held for him would fly away like doves disobeying an amateur magician.

Let’s go back in the house, I said. Show me the baseball Sandy Koufax signed to you: “from one lefiy to another. ” Instead, he picked up a blue plastic bucket of sand, the kind of pail good for building castles at Coney Island, tossed a fist of sand down onto the sun-frozen concrete and took the first step, delicately. Again and again, he would throw a handful of sand in the air like bread for pigeons, then probe with the tip of his shoe for the sandy place on the next step: sand, then step; sand, then step. Every time he took a step I took a step, an apprentice shadow studying the movements of his teacher the body. This is how I came to dance a soft-shoe in size fourteen boots, grinding my toes into the gritty spots he left behind on the ice. I was there:

I saw him turn the tundra into the beach with a wave of his hand, Coney Island of castles for the laborers and ballgames on the radio, showing the way across the ice and down the hill into the street, where he spoke to me the last words of the last lesson: You drive.

- Martín Espada

Antonio Frasconi RIP

 

Woodcut artist Antonio Frasconi died earlier this month at the age of 93.

Mr. Frasconi did not reach this pinnacle by adhering to orthodoxies. He found inspiration in comic books as well as the old masters. He decried art education, saying the average student does not learn the pertinent questions, much less the answers. He abhorred art that dwelt on aesthetics at the expense of social problems. He repeatedly addressed war, racism and poverty, and devoted a decade to completing a series of woodcut portraits of people who were tortured and killed under a rightist military dictatorship in his home country, Uruguay, from 1973 to 1985.

 

Note: The images above are, on the left, “The Disappeared” (1981-88) and, on the right, “The Bull (My Turn)” (1952).

Steve Resnick—in memoriam

I have pasted below the text of the eulogy I offered at Steve Resnick’s graveside funeral. A web site has been set up in his memory.

Friday, 4 January 2013

It’s hard to believe that we are here to say good-bye. Standing together at his grave site, we are now “compelled to face with sober senses” the fact that Steve’s journey in this world has ended. Fortunately, our journey with him has not.

My own journey with Steve started before I even met him. I stumbled across an article he wrote in 1975, published in the American Economic Review (the last time he would be allowed to publish something in a mainstream economics journal), “The State of Development Economics.”* (If I’m not mistaken, Steve gave it in a session at the AEA meetings that also included Rick Wolff.) It was simply the best, most consistently radical critique of mainstream development economics I had ever read. And it remains so. (If I remember correctly, it was after that session that Steve was declared persona non grata by many in the discipline.)

That article is one of the main reasons I decided to attend UMass (with the intention of studying Marxism with him and others for a few years, and then going off and trying to find a job). Little did I know I was just at the beginning of a long—intellectual and personal—journey with Steve.

I won’t bore you with the details. But I consider myself fortunate: during my first semester at UMass (in 1977) I served as Steve’s Teaching Assistant for that marvelous Principles of Microeconomics course he taught for so many years (and then, in the following semester, I was Rick’s TA—what an apprenticeship for teaching those two semesters were for me!). At the same time, I was taking Steve’s European economic history course (during which we managed to make it all the way up to 1650). Then, the journal group (where we discussed that first paper of the new work Steve and Rick were doing, “The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism in Western Europe”**), the founding of AESA (the Association for Economic and Social Analysis, which continues as a vital and vibrant entity to this day), and finally the journal we had long wanted to get started (Rethinking Marxism, which is now, much to our surprise, in its twenty-third year).

None of that would have happened without Steve’s extraordinary commitment, intellectual inspiration, and dedication to teaching.

It’s that commitment to teaching I was inspired by, once again, when I saw Steve for the last time this past summer.  Once again, I drove down from Vermont and there he was at the door, with a big smile, a strong embrace, and an impatience to tell me his latest teaching story. It seems some of the medical staff learned about Steve’s work and, after talking with him, one of them even went out and bought one of his books. He couldn’t contain himself in expressing his pride (and he was, as we all know, a proud man) that, even when hooked up to the tubes that were sapping his physical strength, he was able to continue to teach.

So I left him later that day, recommitted to the teaching I’ve been doing for the past three decades, feeling grateful that for the better part of my adult life I have been on a journey in which Steve was present—as my mentor, comrade, and dear friend.

Fortunately, even as I face my grief, that journey with Steve continues—as I join many, many others in remembering and celebrating the warmth of his friendship, his steadfast commitment to ending social injustice, and his intellectual and pedagogical contributions to the rethinking of Marxism.

* Stephen A. Resnick, “The State of Development Economics,” American Economic Review 65 (May 1975): 317-22.

**Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, “The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in Western Europe,” Review of Radical Political Economics 11 (Fall 1979): 3-22.

Stephen A. Resnick RIP

It is with great sadness that I announce the death earlier today of Stephen A. Resnick.

I was privileged to be his student, colleague, coauthor, and friend.

Additional words fail me at the moment. But I’m sure I will be writing more in the days ahead about Steve’s gifts and his great legacy to the world.

Dave Brubeck RIP

One of my favorite memories of the late Dave Brubeck is his appearance at the Chicago Jazz Festival, when he shared the stage with Taylor Eigsti.

Eigsti was only 16 at the time. During the first set, the two pianists played some of Brubeck’s most famous compositions. And during the second set, they played Eigsti’s new work.

Brubeck remarked to the audience that, while at his age he had a great deal to teach, he had even more still to learn.