coldhearted scientist وداد

I

Another book I would like to reread is Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.

I think of it now because I have realized that academic writing is easier than blogging. I started blogging to jump-start academic writing, but their relationship seems to have reversed itself. This might be a sign of success.

My scholarly texts would be written more quickly, however, if I also thought about them when not actually writing them. But when I walk out in the world, I forget them. I think of the bright marine air of the Pacific that falls like dew. I think of the high peaks, and of chicken bones, Veracruz harps, eagle feathers, flutes, kazoos, trumpets.

II

At one point Reed’s character, a member of the “Jes’ Grew” movement (a psychic epidemic in which the world is taken over by the spirit of Blackness, as it was by jazz in the 1920s) says he feels “as though he can dance on a dime.” Asked what he is hearing, he says “shank bones, Jews’ harps, bagpipes, flutes, conch horns, drums, banjos, kazoos.”

It is interesting how a text can burn itself into the mind. I read the novel twenty-five years ago, and I wrote the paragraph before last without looking up the text I knew it referred to. Observe the parallels. I, too, may have been recruited into Jes’ Grew.

Axé.