by Joshua Edwards
Headlines cycling. War, officially-forgotten diseases, hot-shot bailouts, shameless status updating, neglected continents, orchestral indie pop grandeur, absurd year-end best-of lists. It was not a good 12-month stretch for most ideals, people, or animals, it seems. I’ve spent some time thinking of possible names for this past year, and the one that rings truest is “Deepwater Horizon.” What a beautiful, grandiose construction of such simple terms. How snugly it fits our dreams gone awry, our hope misremembered! It would make a fine vintage for a Château Mouton Rothschild, perhaps best enjoyed while eating hors d’oeuvres on the set of the next James Bond film. But enough about the past and its attendant regrets. Instead of a backward glance, I’d like to speculate on the coming year, and I’ll do this with the aid of an online version of the I Ching (which I predict will enjoy a resurgence in 2011, among younger American poets at least). Below are some questions I’m curious about, followed by enticing excerpts from the I Ching replies (Richard Wilhelm translation into German translated by Cary F. Baynes into English, 1950) and my (ridiculous) extrapolations.
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by Dilruba Ahmed
I was a long-time cell-phone holdout. Even while living in Silicon Valley (or perhaps because of its fast-paced, ever-wired atmosphere), I loathed the idea of becoming “one of those people.” On the train, in the local coffee shop, and in line at the grocery store, I struggled to ignore the one-sided snippets of conversation that inevitably seized my attention and overtook my thoughts. Eventually, I embraced the cell phone for its practical purposes (What if I get a flat tire on the 101?) as well as the frivolous (Need to find milkshakes while returning from Yosemite with a caravan of East Coast friends determined to eat at In-N-Out Burger before leaving California? No problem.). While I’ve adapted to cell phone ownership fairly easily, I remain ambivalent about my use of social networking tools such as Facebook, largely because it confirms, for me, the true death of the letter.
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by Lily Brown
Since I’ve been doing a lot of readings lately, I’ve been thinking about the Poetry Reading as an antidote to the Internet. I’ve always felt ambivalent about the way that social networking sites and the Internet are used to publicize the private and to promote the self. I realize I’m in a tight spot here, as this blog entry itself is on the Internet, and may be seen by some as a means of self-promotion. I’d like to think of it, however, as an excuse to look critically at how we conduct ourselves in the world as writers and as human beings, and what role the Poetry Reading plays in all of this messiness about the public and the private.
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Growing up Motown—a special section on Motown explores how artists such as Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson grew up within Motown Records, and how the company itself emerged in Detroit to become one of the most distinctive cultural industries of the twentieth century.
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essay by Suzanne E. Smith
In the conclusion of my book Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, I described the fanfare that surrounded the fortieth anniversary of Motown Records, which included a commemorative compact disc boxed set, an ABCTV documentary miniseries, and a special Motown halftime show at the Super Bowl. The show culminated with Martha Reeves singing her signature song, “Dancing in the Street.” As I noted, “[b]y the time the song reached one of its most famous lines, ‘Can’t forget the Motor City,’ nothing seemed more forgotten than Detroit, Michigan, Motown’s birthplace.”
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