Perspectives by Incongruity: First of the Year

by Benj DeMott

Overview

Diversity and "perspective by incongruity" dene the approach to changing times in this fourth volume of the First of the Year series. Insights come from interesting minds in unobvious juxtapositions. First's roster of irreverent—and holy!—regulars includes Amiri Baraka, Bernard Avishai, Uri Avnery, Chuck D, Diane di Prima, Fr. Rick Frechette, Donna Gaines, Lawrence Goodwyn, Roxane Johnson, W.T. Lhamon Jr., Philip Levine, Kanan Makiya, Bongani Madondo, Greil Marcus, Charles O'Brien, Judy Oppenheimer, Tom Smucker, Fredric Smoler, A.B. Spellman, Scott Spencer, Robert Farris Thompson, Richard Torres, David Waldstreicher, and Armond White.Their angles on history and history in the making are enhanced by contributions from new members of First's family of defamiliarizers such as Peter Brown, Wesley Brown, Mark Dudzic, Robert Hullot-Kentor, and Aram Saroyan.

Perspectives by Incongruity touches down in Kashmir, Haiti, South Africa, and Indonesia. There's a vital section devoted to the Arab Spring. But the volume homes in on the U.S.A. as well, digging into race and class structures of feeling (and fantasy). It means to comprehend the Obama era in real time. Music is key to Perspectives by Incongruity's offbeat truth-telling. Contributors sound off on Jay Z and Kanye West, mambo and Afropop, Dylan and Coltrane, Sun Ra and Arcade Fire. First's meaning is (as ever) in the mix.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412843119
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	01/15/2012
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Benj DeMott has written for the City Sun, the Village Voice, and various academic journals. He’s edited First of the Month, along with Charles O’Brien and Armond White, since 1998.

Table of Contents

I: Changing Times; The Woman in the Sunlight; The Great Predicament Facing Obama; Everything Is Permitted; Grassroots Nuances; Icons and Assassins; Obama in Tucson; My Father’s War; On Present-Mindedness in the Writing of History; Obama Goes Electric; Long and Whining Road; Unmasked & Magnanimous; Double Trouble; Hipsters ‘R Us; From a Notebook; II: First Draft of History IV; The Old Man and the Tsunami; Looking Backward; Whither Iraq (Redux)?; Of Venom and Hope; Libya On My Mind; A Dirty Word; III: The Vanishing American; Workingman’s Blues; Emergency Rooms & Cutting Rooms: What’s Wrong with The Fighter; America by Birth, Rockaway by the Grace of God; It Is Time the Stone Made an Effort to Flower; Norton’s Big Check; Mother Lion; Cosa de Gringos; The Efficient Romance; Hooking Up; Far from Fantasy; Estrellita’s Blackhand Side; Express Yourself; Citizen Jay-Z; A Citizen in Wisconsin; IV: Lives of Learning; Fish and Chips; Mathew Arnold, HMI; A Life of Learning; Charles Olson & Sun Ra; Sphere of Influence; How I Got My EMAIL Name; Clearing the Desk; Beatitudes; Kitten to a Kitten; Puff Peace; Burning Woman; Call It Music; Three Goodbyes; Top Ten; The Yearbook; Savoring the Roots of New York Mambo; A Community-Centered Memory; V: Trips; Passage to Kashmir; Wild Fire in the ’Burbs; Can I Get a Witness?; Mud on the Tracks; Ballad of the Last Hippie Christmas; Coasting; Distance Learning; Purple Power and the Glory; Believers; In Her Time; Massacre of the Innocents; The Shadow Knows; Contributors’ Notes

Editorial Reviews

Arresting, fractious . . . At once contrarian, ambitiously inclusive and wide-ranging [First of the Year] has attracted an extended crew of intelligent, passionate, polemical writers.” —American Book Review “First is a cultural and intellectual publication that is singularly lively, and no less strange . . . It has been compared to Partisan Review . . . But it may be time to recognize and respect First for what it is in its own right: a journal of demotic intelligence, alive to its own times, with insights and errors appropriate to those times, making it worth the price of perplexity.” —Inside Higher Education

From the Publisher