Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the Virtues of Impracticality

By NOEL IGNATIEV

DEC 19-JAN 20 | Field Notes

In a lengthy review in the New Yorker of David W. Blight’s recent book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,¹ Adam Gopnik calls Douglass “the progenitor of the ‘pragmatic-progressive’ strain in American thought that led to Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.”² Douglass is an attractive figure, and it is easy to understand why he fills the need of American mainstream thought for a Black political hero now that George Washington Carver (the one Black figure in the textbooks when I went to grade school) no longer serves. But the notion of “pragmatic progressive” suggests an alternative tradition, which we might call “impractical revolutionary.” Nat Turner, John Brown, and Malcolm X come to mind as exemplars.

Nights on Prose Mountain

By Megan N. Liberty

OCT 2019 | Art Books

A new collection that captures the enigmatic prose of poet and interdisciplinary figure bpNichol. The collection appears not like a traditional collected stories, but rather a book grouped thematically by time and subject matter more so than genre or form.

MELVIN EDWARDS with Choghakate Kazarian

NOV 2019 | Art

A major figure in African-American art, Melvin Edwards (b. 1937) started as a sculptor in the early 1960s in Los Angeles before moving to New York in 1967. Known for the welded steel “Lynch Fragments,” an ongoing series that he started in 1963, Edwards’s work addresses his personal or historical experiences.

Reality by Chance

By Richard Shiff

OCT 2019 | Editor's Message

When a second observation connects to a first, it alters the sense. Whatever registers in consciousness, registers a difference—not only its own but also a difference in what came before.