america adrift

I’m a word freak – one of those teachers that can get excited about a single paragraph in Pym, or get tangled up in runon sentences when talking about the rhythm of Ralph Ellisons prose. And I will inflict spoken word versions of Whitman (or Kenneth Burke for that matter) to who ever gets in the firing line. All this because from the deeply personal level to the interpersonal and collective, the narratives we produce are all inter-connected and reproduced in an attempt to close the gap between experience and meaning – or to quote Burke, who put it more elegantly: Literature is equipment for living.

I’m also a jazz freak – if you’ve ever met one, you’ll know what that means… I will try to refrain from endless lists of personal favorites and jazz anecdotes. But I do use jazz as a way in to those narratives. As a model of epistemology, creating and disseminating knowledge through dialogue and appropriation. In my work I’m currently focusing on the way narratives are formed around jazz in the US and elsewhere, constructing national as well as transnational identitities. More will follow from me on this.

As for Spaces, I am intrigued by those in between – between the words, the notes, between the notes and the words, and just those between…