2015 CCCC Chair's Address
2015; National Council of Teachers of English; Volume: 67; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1939-9006
Autores Tópico(s)Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media
ResumoAin't No Walls behind the Sky, Baby! Funk, Flight, FreedomEditor's note: This is a written version of the address that Adam Banks gave at the CCCC Convention in Tampa, Florida, on Thursday, March 19, 2015.Funk is dead is what they said, while sitting around cheating at pool.Their bags were bagging and they weren't bragging; to tell the truth they were looking real cool.Now they were choked up tight in their white on white, their cocoa brown fronts were down. They wore candy striped ties that hung down to their flies, and they sported gold dust crowns.It was the 15th frame of a nine-ball game and they all stood digging the play.With an idle shrug they suddenly dug a strange cat moving their way.He was a medium built cat with a funny time hat, he looked about 5 years old.He wore a messed up vine and he needed a shine, and he shivered as if he was cold.To all the other guys, they surmised this dude was some ordinary flunky,But to the well trained eyes of how the Mothership flies, you could tell the mutha . . . was funky!That verse, from George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic's 1993 song Martial Law, links up at least three different generations of Black oral tradition, as it is a version of the folktale titled either Hip Bud or Billy Bud, but it also provides a poet in one of my favorite movies (Love Jones) with the opening lines of his poem as he tries to court photographer Nina Mosely. But as another character in the movie says over their own game of pool, Let me break it down so it can forever and consistently be broke. Can I do that? Can we dispense with the pretense of the scholarly paper for a minute so I can do that?I ask you for permission to do that because my message this morning is not a scholarly one, even though it is about our scholarship. It's not even particularly deep, though it is about deep things. And I don't want to use this moment to pretend to speak for the organization in any way, this organization where I learn far more from the gifts and commitments you bring than I can pretend to offer. All I have is my vision of what we do. And that vision, everything I think about who we are, the best of what we do, and who we can be, comes down to three words: Funk. Flight. Freedom. Actually, George Clinton's protege Bootsy Collins says it even better than George did.The sky is not the limit! Ain't walls behind the sky, baby, so we just gonna fly on and reach for the stars, if you know what I'm talkin about. That line is from an interview with Bootsy Collins, who has one of the greatest slow jams I know, Bootsy 's I'd Rather Be with You. Many of you already know that funk and soul music are primary spaces through which I enter this thinking, teaching, and serving work that we do. But beyond the thousands of songs that rotate through my various digital devices and the hundreds of vinyl albums I listen to at least sometimes and the untold numbers of songs I experience because of my friends' Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, and Spotify posts, it is this one song from that space bass player from Cincinnati that has stayed with me. Through all our conference events and conference calls, through all the officers' email exchanges and in-person exchanges, through all of my walking time, coffee shop time, and library time, even through all of my own internal flights about ways I might escape this moment, I keep coming back to Bootsy, to I'd rather be with you.Part of that is truly because I would rather be with you-because there is no other academic discipline I would rather be part of than composition. But more than that, I think that this song is the one that wouldn't let me go in all of my thinking about this moment because of its reminder-no, its insistence-that there are no limits, that we need to fly on and reach for the stars, that renews me in a moment when I so need renewal. Bootsy 's song brings together the three themes I believe can guide us as we respond to the call to risk and reward that our program chair has chosen for us: Funk, Flight, and Freedom. …
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