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Donald Challenger
Profile
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Reading, listening,
& viewing
7 Prospect St.
Clinton, NY 13323
Phone: 853-3604
Send e-mail
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10 critical texts that keep talking to me
(or at least cause me useful
trouble):
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
- Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives
- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism
- Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind
- Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
- Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change
- Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue
- Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
- Michael Schudson, The Power of News
10 books scattered around the house screaming to be finished (or, in five cases, started):
- Geoffrey Becker, Dangerous Men
- Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague
- Krin Gabbard, Jazz Among the Discourses
- Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography
- Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory
- Kay Halasek, A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on
Composition Studies
- Kevin Orlin Johnson, Rosary: Mysteries, Meditations, and the Telling
of the Beads
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
- Susan Minot, Evening
- Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteeth
Century
10 less-than-obvious fictions I'm grateful for:
- Peter Carey, Jack Maggs
- John Crowley, Aegypt
- James Ellroy, White Jazz
- John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues
- Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
- Ross Macdonald, The Underground Man
- Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis
- Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates
- Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
- Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories
10 CDs stuck in my head or trying to get there:
- The Beatles, 1962-1966
- Terence Blanchard, Jazz in Film
- James Brown, Star Time
- Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
- The Last Temptation of Christ sountrack (Peter Gabriel)
- O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (various artists)
- The Raybeats, It's Only a Movie
- Talking Heads, Remain in Light
- Television, Television
- Chris Whitley, Living with the Law
10 movies I'll not squawk about seeing thrice:
- Anything by the Coen brothers except The Hudsucker Proxy
- Fearless
- Memento
- The Messenger
- Passionfish
- The Red Violin
- The Spanish Prisoner
- Time Bandits
- The Usual Suspects
- Zero Effect
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"These cats snatched up their horns and blew crazy stuff. One would stop
all of a sudden and another would start for no reason at all. We never could
tell when a solo was supposed to begin or end. Then they all quit at once
and walked off the stand. It scared us."
-- Jazz drummer Dave Tough, on hearing Dizzy Gillespie's quintet for the
first time
"The popular definitions of improvisation that emphasize only its spontaneous,
intuitive nature -- characterizing it as the 'making of something out
of nothing' -- are astonishingly incomplete. This simplistic understanding
of improvisation belies the discipline and experience on which improvisers
depend, and it obscures the actual practices and processes that engage them.
Improvisation depends, in fact, on thinkers having absorbed a broad base
of musical knowledge, including myriad conventions that contribute to formulating
ideas logically, cogently, and expressively. It is not surprising, therefore,
that improvisers use metaphors of language in discussing their art form.
The same complex mix of elements and processes coexists for improvisers
as for skilled language practitioners: the learning, the absorption,
and utilization of linguistic conventions conspire in the mind of the
writer or speaker -- or, in the case of jazz improvisation, the player
-- to create a living work."
-- Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz
"I don't know nothing. Not a damn thing."
-- Clint Eastwood in A Perfect World
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