Jon Woodson
An innate surrealist sensibility was instilled in me during my time wandering the bomb-damaged streets of Frankfurt, Germany at the age of eight years old in 1952. I never completely recovered from being taken to see Carl Sandburg when he was performing for Negro children at the Library of Congress in about 1956. Realizing the dangerous tendencies in my personality, my parents tried to turn me into a normal person by forceful applications of baseball on the radio and brutal tennis training. Once I discovered science fiction and Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy —read at the age of fourteen—the hopes for my recovery were grim. I was sent away to a New England preparatory school at fifteen, where I suffered a further decline by discovering Beat literature and dada. I finished high school in Washington, DC, where I began to write poetry and was published in the Howard University literary magazine, Stylus, which ran a contest for high school students. At the University of Rhode Island I published poems and edited the literary journal. After earning an M.A. in English from U.R.I. in 1969, I taught at Lincoln University in the 13 College Curriculum Program (TCCCP), a massive avant garde experiment in higher education. From 1971 to 1979 I studied literature at Brown University and taught at George Mason University. At Brown University I was taken under the wing of Edwin Honig, translator of Fernando Pessoa, and I also was associated with Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. I wrote a dissertation that read Melvin B. Tolson’s poetry through the lens of Gurdjieff’s esotericism, a view that was immediately rejected by other scholars. I have since worked to explore the esoteric cast of American modernism and have published To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance(1999) an account of how Tolson was introduced to esotericism by contact with the members of the Harlem Renaissance, many of whom were writing coded esoteric fiction and poetry. I have continued to write and to publish on this topic, showing that other major figures were also involved in this tendency—James Agee, Djuna Barnes, Dawn Powell, and Ralph Ellison. I have taught at Towson University and Howard University. As a Fulbright lecturer in American Literature, I taught at two Hungarian universities in 2006. I now am at work on a series of comic novels.
“I was just trying to demonstrate to the students of Rowland University that Rowland University was not infinite. It had taken me a long time to figure out what the problem was, but one day I realized that the students at Rowland University thought that Rowland University was infinite. Infinite bookstore. Infinite fraternities and sororities. Infinite sports teams. Infinite snack shop. Infinite Homecoming. Infinite graduation. Infinite prospects.”
“They would have the use of my moist and intricate cranial recesses,the joyous bicycle rides of my uninhibited psyche, but they were goingto put me in a new tax bracket.”
“Something refused to come into focus in my thinking. Indistinctly, as though in a fog, shapes moved toward me and retreated just beyond cognition. But that getting a hold of things is the uncertainty. As the Tractatus says right at the beginning, “The world is everything that is the case.” It seemed as though the Mammy≈Divas® were just like Steve Jobs, trying to have reality bent to their own wills. Objectively, the iPhone was a muddle of mysticism and logic—breakable glass, non-ergonomic design, lousy battery life, lousy irreplaceable battery, lousy headphone jack, lousy virtual keyboard, lousy email, lousy memory, lousy lice, etc., etc, and an interface that you had to adapt to by pretending as an article of faith that no adaptation was required. The Mammy≈Divas® promised a seamless racial interface—eternal blackness ordered and majestic. They put a benign face on their lust for panoptic power. They promised to discipline and punish with pancakes.”