Changing Tense: Thirty memento mori by Bruce Jackson

You might think a book of obituaries would be boring. Forget it! Bruce Jackson shares absorbing, and often hilarious, stories of his adventures with a cast of unbelievably interesting people. He tells a great story!

—Howard S. Becker, author of Art Worlds (1982), What About Mozart? What About Murder? (2015), and Evidence (2017).

 

Bruce Jackson has written thirty memorial essays about his many friends, ranging from famous philosophers like Michel Foucault, to stray dogs like Randolph Scott, with a host of poets in between. Everyone is singular, vivid, and worthy of remembering. Every one of them changed Bruce Jackson. Each receives a delightful, detailed portrait filled with human (or canine) eccentricity. Some are drunk, others sober. All are dead, but thanks to this book, all now enjoy a second life that will endure for a very long time. Humorous, wistful, and generous, sparkling with care and wonder for the intricate music of life, this is a book that cherishes, and is to be cherished.

—W. J. T. Mitchell, some of whose books are Mental Traveler; A Father, A Son, and a Journey Through Schizophrenia (2020); Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture and Media Aesthetics (2015), Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (1985), and On Narrative (1981). From 1978 to 2020 he was editor of Critical Inquiry.

Bruce Jackson is an American writer, folklorist, documentary filmmaker, and photographer. He is currently SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. He is author or editor of more than 40 books, the most recent of which are Robert Creeley on the Poet’s Work (BlazeVOX 2020), Deux Jours à La Ribaute: A celebration at Atelier Ansel Kiefer (Room With a View Press, 2020), and Places: Things heard, things seen (BlazeVOX 2019). Some others are Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (Harvard, 1972), “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me”: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (Harvard, 1974), and Inside the Wire: Photo-graphs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons (Texas, 2013).

His photographs have been widely exhibited. In 2017, New York’s celebrated experimental theater company, The Wooster Group, premiered a play based on his recordings of Afro-American folklore in Texas prisons, The B-Side. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post named it one of the year’s ten best theatrical presentations. A second Wooster play based on his fieldwork is now in development. In 2018, Aperture Magazine published a profile on his prison photography, by Brian Wallis, “Bruce Jackson: On the Inside.”

In collaboration with SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian, he has directed and produced five documentary films, written three books, and curated The Buffalo Film Seminars since spring 2000.

He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, was nominated for a Grammy Award, and was named an Associate Member of the Folklore Fellows by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. The French government appointed him Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and Chevalier in the Ordre national du Mérite in 2012. He has been president of the American Folklore Society, editor of Journal of American Folklore, and member and chair of the board of trustees of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 200 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-385-0