Stanley Corngold’s evocation of his first time in Yankee Stadium reminded your editor of a Q&A with another Brooklyn boy (and friend of First). When the late Jules Chametzky was in hospice last year his son, Rob, asked him if he’d ever seen Willie Mays play when Mays was in the minor leagues. Rob recalled their exchange at his father’s Memorial…
Chasing Kareem…Becoming Kareem
Thelonious Monk with 18-year-old Lew Alcindor (soon to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in the kitchen of the Village Vanguard, New York City, March 1966. Photo by the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter.
Happy Valentine’s Day
[an excerpt from something new]
.. Yesterday, before heading over to Amal’s to get tattooed, I sent an email to Heidi that contained an email address, a password, and the contact info of three people: Benj (who’s been my editor at First of the Month since I started out as a writer), Mike, and Rebecca. I don’t mean to be morbid, I said, but I want you to have access to the account. It’s where I’m going to be sending my unpublished writing, the manuscript I’m working on, whatever I don’t release immediately into the world. If something happens to me, I want you to share the account details with these three people.
..It was one of those days where death seemed right around the corner, felt as certain as the ineluctable arrival of a new season (a secret winter within the heart of my summer), where everything felt like a prefiguration of death, a native language spoken by death, a whisper from somewhere else: from the void? Who the fuck knows?
A Woman of No Rank (Casey Hayden’s Legacy)
The late Casey Hayden, who died last month, would roll her eyes if she was remembered as a hero of the Civil Rights Movement or an initiator of Second Wave feminism, but truth is truth. Here’s something Casey wrote for First a few years ago. It seems timeless now. No surprise given who wrote it…
Dr. Hrabowski’s Higher Ed
Freeman Hrabowski III grew up in Birmingham when it was known as the most segregated city in America, but he realized early he was born free to learn. (“Heaven for me was eating my grandmother’s blueberry pie and doing math problems.”) Hrabowski’s parents and grandparents passed down the idea that education might be an end-in-itself even if black people in the South didn’t have the luxury to conceive of “pure” learning at odds with economism. Hrabowski remains a realist when it comes to schooling. He knows culture don’t butter no bread. So, he’s become the foremost proponent of STEM education for black college students by building a scholarly vehicle for upward mobility—a research university that feels homey to kids in black communities who love learning math as much he did.
Hrabowski retired in 2022 after thirty years as president of the University of Maryland of Baltimore Country (UMBC)—a school with a less than toney pedigree that under his aegis has been the “baccalaureate-origin” institution for hundreds of black Ph.D.’s in natural sciences, math, and engineering. Scores more than have been formed by Ivies—or any other elite, predominantly white institution—in recent decades.
Keeping Faith with Moses: Freeman Hrabowski’s Letter to Congress on Behalf of The National Alliance, “We the People–Math Literacy for All”
Freeman Hrabowski sent the following open letter to Congressman Bobbie Scott the day after Bob Moses died.
This Met is Mine
Manhattan’s Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery became a haven for Black Atlantic artists in the 70s and 80s. A current exhibit at MOMA chronicles work first shown at JAM and includes art by Lorraine O’Grady. The author of the following post was born long after JAM’s moment. He encountered O’Grady’s work on the campus of the University of Chicago. It launched him on a trip that took him back to the playful start of his own art-life…
I came across one of the sixteen diptychs that make up Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album—(Cross Generational) L: Nefertiti, the last image; R: Devonia\’s youngest Daughter, Kimberley—in the the Booth collection.
Action Painting (Redux)
Originally posted here in 2016.
Micro-aggressions have been on my mind lately. Easy for us white guys to dismiss, but when a cab doesn’t pick us up or someone confuses us with some other white guy they once met at a party, it doesn’t trigger an identification with the victims of 500 years of violence and oppression. We rarely take it personally. The key is identification, not identity, though it arises from identity.
Mnemonic Pantoum
Hospital, pet, concert, third grade crush.
How is it decided which memories last,
which fade like Krazy Kolor from a punk teen’s hair?
I’ll never forget the beagle shot in Daddles.
The Organization Man: Franz Kafka, Risk Insurance, and the Occasional Hell of Office Life
Most readers know Franz Kafka as the reclusive author of stories and novels that have since become monumental works of modern literature. Some readers also know him as a bureaucrat who, unhappy in his office, castigated the “hell of office life.” But few know that he rose at the end of his life to the position of Senior Legal Secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (called, after 1918, the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Czech Lands). Kafka was no Bartleby the Scrivener, no harmless office drudge. Rather, he was a brilliant innovator of social and legal reform in “the Manchester of the Empire,” which at the time of Kafka’s tenure, between 1908-1922, was one of the most highly developed industrial areas of Europe.
With These Hands
I was going to start with a question, whether it’s possible to be self-conscious about your hands, but of course the answer is yes.
Remember Clemente (Martín Espada and Richard Torres)
December 31, 2022 marked the 50th anniversary of Roberto Clemente’s death.
No Joke: Nikola and Golden State’s Mouthy Guards
Bob Liss linked your editor to the first video here after he’d written in praise of Nikola Jokic last month. Another First reader/writer, Rob Chametzky, passed on another shorter video-proof of Jokic’s physical genius. (See below.)
No Way Up
CNN headline: “Mike Pence sits alone in a corner of sadness.”
I defy anyone to read that headline and not click on the article. Nice work whoever came up with that.
It was a short article simply reporting on polls that show that, while Republicans are well acquainted with ol’ Mike, they really don’t like him. The moment Mike merely nodded toward reality and truth, he lost any chance of ever being the Republican nominee.