A few weeks ago I went to Alice Walker's lecture at Georgia State University. She is quite a character and someone who can be greatly learned from. One of the first things that I was anticipating before we arrived was, "What is she going to be talking about?" She didn't have any recent publishings to my knowledge.
Well when she began to speak she immediately answered my question. She said, "I'm going to talk about me." Which makes sense. Beyond that, though, she began to talk about her life and perception of our most recent history, which I found very fascinating. She claimed to have retired from her writing career, even though most of her lecture consisted of readings from the blog she constantly writes in.
In a way, hearing from her blogs was more rewarding to me than reading any of her books. They are first-hand, immediate accounts of her views, not necessarily of civil rights anymore, but of modern whereabouts that she records her thoughts on. For example, she writes a lot about her chickens. Forget equality of race! "Why did the chicken cross the road?" she says, "to bring us both to the other side." She tells us of her experience communing harmoniously with 12(?) chickens that roam her backyard. She also blogged a beautiful poem in memory of Michael Jackson and talked about the present hardship of American farmers and the troubles with technological development.
What is interesting to me about the idea of Alice Walker blogging is that we get to listen to her mind develop as society does. To be honest, I almost expected her to talk about things that happened 50 years ago, but it was very impressive to me that her perception updated as the world did, and she sees some of the problems that occurred 50 years ago tumble down the line into 2010.
Alice Walker's blogs are an account of her continuous thoughts, like a journal or a blueprint of her mind, that is so easy to learn from. I never realized the benefit of blogging, but apparently it can be just as valuable of a historic artifact as classic literature.
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I so wanted to go to that! Do you have the link to the blog about Michael Jackson? I'd love to read it!
ReplyDeleteit was really good! I can't find it on the internet.. it's titled "Saint Michael" I think. But I found a little article about her speech and it says "Reading her own poetry, Walker continued to focus on the disorder in the world and provided hope for a better tomorrow. Explaining how difficult the passing of Michael Jackson was for her, she read “Saint Michael - Lover of Animals and Children.” Describing Jackson as a “slave on the plantation of fame,” Walker spoke of him, as well as others, as saints who suffered to provide us with a moral education. “A part of grief is realizing that they suffered to teach us something,” she said."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.gsusignal.com/living/alice-walker-speaks-of-love-and-compassion-1.2231616