Posted on: November 29, 2008
Muddy Waters
A confluence of factors, almost like Delta streams, has me thinking about the Delta Blues and Chicago Blues and the man who did the most to electrify them, Muddy Waters (1913 - 1983).
A new movie due out next week, Cadillac Records, tells the story of a truly revolutionary period in American music. Chess Records was pivotal in bringing great Blues and R&B legends like Etta James, Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters to a larger audience, and is the subject of the film. The brothers Chess — Leonard and Phil — recognized the commercial potential for a wide array of musical genius, and helped set the table for Rock N Roll. The new film stars Beyonce Knowles, Jeffrey Wright and Adrien Brody:
Cadillac Records
Retrospectives provoke us. Send us. Bring new rounds of revaluations. They often create new patterns of influence, new hierarchies of debt and payback. Listening to a recent Fresh Air, a repeat…
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Posted on: November 25, 2008
Belle Côte Wharf. Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Photo by Doreen LeBlanc
We have new poems from Doreen LeBlanc and an essay from Sean Howard on tap. Both authors hail from Cape Breton, though Doreen splits time between Nova Scotia and Massachusetts now. This is her first publication, and we look forward to more poetry from her in the future.
Sean’s work brings together a host of subject fields — psychology, philosophy, linguistics, science, poetry and poetics — to startle us into reading new bridges, new metaphors between them.
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I have some of my own poetry on display in Private, an international review of photography and text. You can see them by clicking here.
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Posted on: November 25, 2008
Poetic Implications: Synchronicity and The Language of Meaning
A Personal Reflection by Sean Howard
Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Cape Breton University
November 2008
A few months ago, I began work on a project I’ve been putting off for over a year: an account of my time in the clutches of what Jungian analysts call the ‘puer aeternus’ complex, or neurosis; an inflated sense of the self as a precious, creative but foredoomed ‘eternal youth,’ destroyed, to quote Jung’s colleague Marie-Louise von Franz, by a chronic “unadaptedness,” which “frequently results in early death”[1] if not shaken off by the sufferer’s mid-twenties - the age, incidentally, I told myself as a teenager that I (like two of my heroes, Shelley and Keats) would die. After struggling through a long, difficult section on the central dilemma confronted (and shirked) in the complex - ‘how to truly be yourself,’ or ‘how to not be someone…
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