#albert murray

[protoslacker]

In fact, my central image is a rabbit in a briar patch, which explains everything I have written. You’re in a jam session situation where you are improvising all the time, at the same time you can improvise better if you have a rich background. I want my knowledge to sing and swing, to evoke, to put you there. Music makes what you want to move. I want my novels to make you want to walk that way, want to be that way, want to react to experiences in that way. That’s a legitimate aesthetic objective. Art is a process through which raw experience is rendered into aesthetic statement.

Albert Murray interviewed by Kalamu ya Salaam at Neo Griot. Interview: Alber tMurray On Ralph Ellison & The Aesthetics Of Wrting

[history-of-fashion]

1942 Albert Murray - Portrait of Dina Merrill

(Hillwood Museum)

[kosmik-signals]

Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison

[incipitinterpreter]

Black History Month, day 1

28 readings on 28 Black history-makers I never learned about in school

Feb 1: Albert Murray, 1916-2013

Murray profoundly influenced 20th century discourse around race in the United States, challenging theories of Black separatism and penning essays on topics such as the fundamental ways the USA's culture is intertwined with Black experiences. It's worth noting that while I refer to it that way, he emphasized calling himself an American, and didn't use "Black" or "African American."

[grandhotelabyss]

This is what I meant in my last post, and what I was predicting back in my 2014 essay on the now somewhat and justly forgotten film Her (an essay on Ulysses in disguise): the at least partial confluence of certain long-term trends on left and right toward a state-corporate merger interested in every sense in the disaggregation of the self into modular control units. Blake Smith gets at something similar here. (At the risk of vulgar criticism, the main difference between the woke and the neoreactionaries in America is a surface difference in racial politics: the woke want the coming posthumanism to be explicitly pro-black, the neoreactionaries want it explicitly anti-black, though either way it’s equally dehumanizing for sensibilities reared on the old liberalism—see, for example, Albert Murray.) The puzzle piece I haven’t yet found a place for—what I was alluding to in this darkly cryptic post—is the strange role Catholicism seems to be playing on both sides.

[fullregalia]

Elegance is the most civilized thing that a human being can do. The ultimate extension, elaboration, and refinement of effort is elegance. Where just doing it gives pleasure of itself. That's about as far as we can get with life. That's the equivalent of what Ernest Hemingway called 'the sweat on the wine bottle.' If you don't enjoy how those beads of sweat look when you pour the white wine out, and you taste it, and how your partner looks, and how the sunlight comes through--you've missed it.

Albert Murray, JAZZ (episode 5)

[weil-weil-lautre]

If you ignore this and reduce man's whole story to a series of sensational but superficial news items and editorial complains and accusations, blaming all the bad things that happen to your characters on racial bigotry, you imply that people are primarily concerned with only certain political and social absolutes. You imply that these absolutes are the sine qua non of all human fulfillment. And you also imply that there are people who possess these political and social absolutes, and that these people are on better terms with the world as such and are consequently better people. In other words, no matter how noble your mission, when you oversimplify the reasons why a poor or an oppressed man lies, cheats, steals, betrays, hates, murders, or becomes an alcoholic or addict, you imply that well-to-do, rich, and powerful people don't do these things. But they do.

Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy, 151

[universitybookstore]

Now and then someone does something absolutely necessary that you may not have even known was possible until it happens and then you can’t imagine why it hadn’t happened sooner. The great Library of America has done it again. Just added to their earlier volume of Collected Essays and Memoirs, we now have the Collected Novels and Poems of Albert Murray. An American master has finally received his due. Read Albert Murray.