I was very excited when I found this posting on the internet. I am a poet and I have looked up to Amiri Baraka for over twenty-five years. He’s one of my heroes. My favorite piece is “The Death of Nick Charles”. I would give anything to discuss that poem with him or even just to hear him speak.

Although I do not know Mark Nowak’s works, I am impressed by his credits. Further, I was also born in Buffalo, New York and I have lived here most of my life.

Please give me any and all information I would need to attend the May 19 event. It would mean a great deal to me.

Sincerely,

Lynn Ciesielski

Thank You,
Lucy Ellis

In thinking about the terms of your very stimulating conversation about inside and outside, confinement and liberation, the following occurs to me–which may simply be a clarification for myself of what you guys have already said: ‘inside and ‘outside,’ are, as Rachel points out in her first blog entry, modernist categories, in fact, I would say, the foundational categories of modernity. I am thinking here of Descartes’ cogito, which was his real legacy to all modern European thinkers from Hobbes to Marx: the ‘I think’ constitutes, for him, subjective interiority. In the argument he develops in the “Meditations on First Philosophy,” ‘I think’ is the first certainty, the ground of knowledge, experience, and identity.

But paradoxically, that very starting point for Descartes’ reflection (it is his first principle) is also what makes it impossible for him to ever reach any conclusion about the outside: his own body, other bodies, etc…

Interiority is always a prison, precisely because of the way it divides itself from the outside. There can never be a bridge between inside and outside, or at best that bridge can only be an illusion, as Descartes’ non-sensical theory that the pituatary gland is the gate between soul (inside) and body (outside).

Perhaps that is why Stein’s project in “The Making of Americans” is so fascinating–because taking Descartes’ project against the grain, she begins with the inside but all the while treating it as an outside (Americans) which she is trying to escape. In this way, one might say that Stein is the last modernist, trying to respond to Descartes’ challenge by so complicating and blurring the boundaries between inside and outside as to make them collapse.