I am aware that many of my interests are in humans whose existence is peripheral to society. I could speculate why this is. My lifelong self image has been one of someone who is confused by the norms. Eventually I learned to dislike many of them.

While some of this can be attributed to the usual teenage adolescent and subsequent adult angst, at this age it feels more like a theme.

As a child, I know I was made to feel special. I was the preacher’s kid. There was one woman named Elizabeth who they tell me took me for nature walks and pointed out the beauty around us. I don’t remember this, but I think it might have something to do with my basic love of beauty.

But I can see how I was a spoiled kid. At Crescent Elementary in Greeneville, Tennessee, I remember being one of the smart boys. Boys, as I remember, were never as smart as the smart girls, but most of my teachers treated me as though I was smart. This definitely put me on the outside along with a definite lack of sports interest.

By the time the fam moved from a cozy segregated southern town to Flint, Michigan, a not so cozy segregated city, I was definitely someone who enjoyed being alone and not part of the group. I spent many hours alone in my Dad’s new church playing at the piano.

Somehow, I developed an interest in poetry. I can remember loving music from the get go. Popular music contained some poetry, at least for me. But somewhere in there I decided that poetry was interesting. By the time I got to high school I believed it when a teacher told me that reading poetry was more valuable and useful than reading the news.

I was on my way to being a full fledged outsider. My interest was also drawn to the arts and music of people on the outside. My only black friend in high school, George Inge, was an artist. He and I hung around with a very smart young Jewish woman, Cheryl Cohen. We were a trio of outsiders. I have lost touch with George but Cheryl is living in Southern California and we have reconnected via the Facebooger.

But what I mean to say is that I can see that the music, novels, and poetry of African Americans, the poetry and novels of Native Americans, and actually any art that is coming from someplace other than what feels like mainstream attracts me.

This mornings exercise music was the Bulgarian choirs of Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares.“

I can remember being in a CD section of a bookstore and realizing that by quitting my job at the local Catholic church my income was going to plummet. Time to buy some CDs. The 2 CD set of the Bulgarian Choirs was one. I have never regretted that. Again this morning I found their music incredibly beautiful and moving.

I come from a family of outsiders. My mother’s father was an illegitimate child who was rejected by his step father for that reason. My mother was a bit of an outsider if one looks at the vastly different way she lived her life from the way her sister and brother lived theirs. They lived on the same block along with my grandparents for most of their lives. Mom moved away and traveled all over the world and lived the life of an itinerate pastor’s wife’s. My father’s father was an irascible troublemaker in the Church of God. Both he and my father experienced being thrust on the outside of the church throughout their lives.

Although I know I have made my own way by insisting on not conforming all my life, I feel now that I have been and am still incredibly lucky to have a life that is rewarding.

Who Lost the Sex Wars? | The New Yorker

I started reading this article hoping it was going to cover how transexuals were being treated by the feminist movement. That wasn’t covered but the article held my attention by talking about the struggles of seeing people as they actually are sexually and otherwise.

I finished Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine yesterday. Maybe the point of the book or at least its title is that we lead charmed lives under the shadow of the gourd vine until we don’t.

The glossary did not reveal much to me. I had already figured out most of the phrases and words from context. I do this with Shakespeare. I try not to look at footnotes unless I have a question. Often the question I might have isn’t there in the footnotes.

I also found that Hurston’s novel had notes in the back as well as the glossary. From the notes I learned that the wonderful sermon that Rev Pearson preaches is a transcription of one Hurston heard. Specifically it was preached by the Reverend C. C. Lovelace in Eau Gallie, Florida on May 1, 1929.

In fact, the same year Johah’s Gourd Vine was published, Hurston published the sermon in Negro edited by Nancy Cunard.

In my American Library edition, there is a chronology of Hurston’s life. The chronology was more revealing than the Wikipedia article or other references I have read about her life. She struggled financially throughout her life not just at the end of it. But she seems to have maintained her art of writing right up until the end of her life, working on projects like a life of Herod and submitting articles for the Black newspaper The Fort Pierce Chronicle.

Before she and Langston Hughes had their parting of ways, they were traveling together in 1937. The chronology says that Hurston accidentally ran into Hughes in Mobile, Alabama then drives him in her car to New York. On the way, they stopped at the Tuskegee Institute and visited the grave of Booker t. Washington. In Macon, Georgia they saw Bessie Smith perform and visit her in her hotel room.

This trip seems to be an eye opening one for the city slicker Hughes. Hurston not only had a background from the south, she had pursued her career of anthropology there. In 1935 she joined Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle for a trip throughout the south. They made recordings for the Library of Congress. Afterward, the chronology adds, Lomax credits Hurston with being “almost entirely responsible for the success” of the first part of the expedition.

I was tickled to see that in 1937 Hurston suggests to the Guggenheim Foundation that it “fund a college of African-American music, with lectures by Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, singer Ethel Waters, and the tap dancer, Bill Robinson.”

What a school and series of lectures by living treasures that would have been! Apparently nothing came of it.

I also finished the Miles Davis biography, So What: The Life of Miles Davis by John Szwed. This is a fantastic look into the life of an important composer and performer. Szwed gave me more insight into Davis than I had before. He scrupulously documents comments and stories about Davis that demonstrate that he was very different from the many ways he is often portrayed or talked about. Szwed shows him in three dimensions but respectfully acknowledges the parts of any person that are impossible to know.

I’ll end with a quote from Wayne Shorter that comes from an article by Krystian Brodacki, (Jazz Forum 1/1992 (vol. 132), pp24-29)

To sum up Miles, I like to call him an original Batman. He was a crusader for justice and for value. He’d be Miles Dewey Davis III by day, the son of Dr. Davis, and at night he’s in his hard-skin suits with the dark shades and he’s doing his Batman-fighting for truth and justice. But Batman had to be a dual personality, too, like he knew the criminal mind. So Miles, whatever he did that was not criminal but like short-tempered or he cursed everybody out, and when he was younger he’d hit somebody, or like they say Miles treated some woman really bad or something like that … I would say that Bruce Wayne, the guy that played Batman, he was capable of doing that, too, that’s why he was such a good Batman… A pure person does not know what defenses to use against the Vampire!