Kirkpatrick and a Du Bois-Washington Debate

Yesterday and the day before I went on a grand cooking venture, so today I have been using up part of the remainder of a generous bunch of mint, picking over excess parsley, and wondering at my own indefatigability evidenced by my making a potful of rice pudding sometime between lunch and dinner today.

After sleeping in I began to reread the Autobiography of Malcolm X, with an eye to using it as a source in my Moorish Science Temple essay. The Temple itself has not been mentioned so far, but perhaps its insights into the Nation of Islam might be useful. When I was a teenager I found the events in it a bit brutal and the language of the narrator very stern, nearly up until the end. I was also a little annoyed that he hinted at a great deal about the Nation of Islam but neglected particulars (good aspects, bad aspects, internal politics, etc.) — now I suspect that he simply refused to draw the FBI a map. Rereading the earlier bits now, his boatloads of just resentment are still striking. From my own perspective, I think that his still-festering wounds were poisoning him and as far as the culprits (misguided welfare workers, benevolent classmates and reform school leaders and so on who would not recognize him as his own intelligent person, etc.) were concerned it was pretty useless to point the wounds out to them in public; most of us simply aren't interested in rattling the skeletons in the closet of our conscience. As a self-portrait and as a narrative with which young readers can identify, I think his childhood as described in his autobiography works well; as a massive Yom Kippur schedule of everyone he's known, not so well.

Last evening I watched videos with Itzhak Perlman on YouTube, inspired by his visit on the Colbert Report. While clearly much prized by people who know these things better than me, I didn't think before that he had any strikingly idiosyncratic style; but his two pieces on the Report woke me up to the fact that his playing is excellent and full of character, and even if the interview was a little awkward the the music fit into the show perfectly, so now I am a convert.

During the past week I played the cembalo now and then, a thorough round of fugues and preludiums from the Well-Tempered Clavier being good fodder for a brooding mood, and I could admire again their inexhaustible character. What is kind of fun is to experiment with the very curious sound of the instrument itself, particularly with the different levers, and then to play things in an uncanny witchy way like Wanda Landowska does with pieces like something by Couperin on YouTube which frankly terrifies me a little. There is something about decadent creepiness in church-like music that makes me kind of mad for religious reasons, because I think it is like death-worship or a richly rotting waste or a pagan mass or something of the sort. Which sounds kind of Puritan, but I have not reached for any pitchforks yet; it simply means that I like finding a bit of fright but try not to go the whole hog. As for 'role models' at the cembalo, I did a search for something by Ralph Kirkpatrick since I read part of his Scarlatti biography in an autodidactic mood in the mid-2000s, besides which his name appears in some sort of advisory or supervisory capacity on some of our scores. It turned out to be an excellent idea because (at least this was my strong first impression) he has a lovely intelligence and command of detail and depth.

Regarding university, I went to my professor's office to review my exam and we came to the conclusion that I must review my grammar before the next semester. My professor and the department secretary drew up the letter which states that I have satisfactorily attended the course and its exam. Then, last morning or perhaps the morning before that, the letter came with my student identification for the next year. So everything is all set, except for my Moorish Science Temple essay, for which I have been reading a little Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, and being driven up the wall a little by Mr. Washington. One choice sample is a passage about how "backward" he finds Bushmen, while I have held much the opposite stereotype: a self-sufficient and proud group, sophisticated in their hunting techniques and their culture — how many still live in the countryside, though, I don't know. Another is his baby-with-the-bathwater claim that higher education is making young African-Americans useless; they should humbly learn and practice some craft (wheelwrighting, etc.) so that they may accumulate a little property and thus earn the respect of the white community. !!! Of course it's lousy of me to be annoyed that he isn't politically correct enough, but his opinions are clearly indicative of extensive brainwashing by the pale elite of his time, and there's no need to be so patronizing. Du Bois then ridiculed the wheelwrighting philosophy with a gunpowder momentum which made me feel rather better again.