The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 22

     Four years ago, when Prince died (on the same date that Richard Iton and Nina Simone did) a group of us held a party in his honor. I wrote about it in an earlier issue of the newsletter.

The original plan was to do it every year on April 21st or thereabouts. But life got in the way. We planned to bring the party back, had identified a venue…but then this happened.

I tried my hand at DJing live on facebook a couple of times. The setup worked well enough that I thought I could pull it off. The major thing I was concerned with was the rights to the work, DJs don’t normally have to worry about the rights to a song, but on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram that’s another story. Even a DJ like Questlove can find himself censored—I can’t share the five hour set Questlove did of Stevie Wonder, and the second day of the five day set he did of Prince, because the corporations that own the rights to the music won’t let him post it. The last thing I wanted to happen was to start a five hour set dedicated to Prince only to end it before the end of the first hour.

So listening to Questlove’s set I was reminded of an interview Prince gave with the Electrifying Mojo in 1985 or 1986, an interview I remembered hearing as a kid. And I added a “tape” of myself (because of my setup I could only DJ, I couldn’t use a microphone)….layered both with a relatively unknown Prince instrumental. And we were off. Got through about 60 songs of his playlist—I’ve about 700 or so personally out of the 4000 or so out there. You can hear most of the set on facebook, beginning here. The plan is to do it next year. Probably virtually.

….

I had the opportunity last week to see a “live” opera performance of Octavia Butler’s work Parable of the Sower, written by the daughter/mother combination of Toshi and Berniece Johnson Reagon. The elder Reagon founded one of SNCC’s freedom singers’s groups as well as the activist gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

I’ve been thinking a bit about Octavia Butler. She’s been gone more than 14 years now, but if there was ever a moment she wrote for it was this one. I’ve spoken about her before but long before Afrofuturism was even an email list she was there, writing. The Parable series (it was supposed to be a trilogy but it was so hard to write Butler wrote another series between the first and second books and didn’t live to continue it) is set in a crumbling dystopian 2024 America led by a right-wing Christian fundamentalist president and tells the story of a young woman who trying to make a path in that world, founds a new religion, and in so doing saves humanity.

Now I don’t think it quite fits the moment we’re in now. As Toshi Reagon noted in her interview—if you can get food at the grocery store, you’re not in the moment she writes about. The central character begins the story escaping her gated community because it’s no longer physically safe. She spends a significant portion of her time walking up the highway not just because she doesn’t have transportation but because the highway is the only patch of road that’s safe enough to traverse, and even this is dangerous.

With this said though, she somehow finds a way out of no way, gathering together a ragtag fellowship, spreading idea seeds as she goes.

Butler was writing about 1990s California and then extrapolating from that. Here she’s doing what most science fiction does—science fiction is on its face about the future, but really it’s almost always about the present. The great science fiction though, continues to speak to us because its themes resonate across eras rather than simply within them.

The older and younger Reagon’s weren’t the only ones influenced by her work. My friend Adrienne Maree Brown has edited both an anthology called Octavia’s Brood and a self-help-for-organizers book on emergence that clearly has Butler’s influence on it. I suspect there will be more.

….

There’ve been a range of questions about universities should move forward in this moment. Baltimore has approximately 20 universities in the region. A number of them have begun to float the idea of opening in the fall. I don’t think the science bears this out—as a colleague pointed out to me there are all sorts of design issues that have to be figured out. We now know, for example, that the air conditioning system of a restaurant caused one single infected individual in China to spread the disease to others sitting nearby. How many people could possibly be infected in a single congested stairwell while moving from one class to another?

But this isn’t really about the science, I think it’s about the tuition. A number of schools in the region can’t survive a semester or two without students, and don’t necessarily have the prestige to cause students to pay full tuition for virtual learning. Hopkins might not even have this.

I wrote about some of the issues we face. (As an aside the picture headlining the article is mine--I took it at the epicenter of the 1968 Paris Student Rebellion.) 

I didn't get around to the Freddie Gray lecture, but writing a longer piece that may appear somewhere in some form. The work continues. And in some ways just became more important.     On that note, take stock. Breathe.      Solidarity.