Notes toward definition, part one.
The nearest dictionary to our desk is a red hardcover copy of Webster's New World College Dictionary. A reach, a grasp, a flipping of pages, and we encounter, between "Negroni" and "Negrophobe," a definition.
In "John Dewey, Albert Murray, and an Aesthetics of the Blues Idiom," Nathan Hill notes that Albert Murray once said "Beneath the idiomatic surface of your old down-home stomping ground, with all of the ever-so-evocative local color you work so hard to get just right, is the common ground of mankind in general." What we hope readers find here is that which we hope to get just right, which is what's common with everyone everywhere.
Hoping to embody this role, transcending mere faddishness and moddish fandom, we begin our labors.
posted in articles on July 14, 2003 5:31 PM | t (0)
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