In order to be fully creative, it is sometimes good to hear unfamiliar things, or listen to people we don’t quite understand. Different points of view can lead to insights and breakthroughs, which can then have creative results.
Sun Ra is one of those people that I don’t completely understand, but I do enjoy listening to from time to time. This week we have a rare recording of him expounding on a number of issues in an Afrofuturism lecture at UC Berkeley called Afro-American Studies 198: The Black Man in the Universe/Cosmos.
As Josh Jones of openculture.com said “Listen to Sun Ra spin his intricate, bizarrely otherworldly theories, drawn from his personal philosophy, peculiar etymologies, and idiosyncratic readings of religious texts. Hearing him speak is a little like hearing him play, so be prepared for a lot of free association and jarring, unexpected juxtapositions.”
Here’s the official Sun Ra syllabus for the class. Your paper is due at the end of the semester.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Radix
Alexander Hislop, Two Babylons
The Theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky
The Book of Oahspe
Henry Dumas, Ark of Bones
Henry Dumas, Poetry for My People
Black Fire, An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
David Livingston, Missionary Travels
Theodore P. Ford, God Wills the Negro
Rutledge, God’s Children
Stylus, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1971)
John S. Wilson, Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It’s At
Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan, Black Man of the Nile and His Family
Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, and the Law of Nature
The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (Ra’s description of The King James Bible)
Pjotr Demianovitch Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe. Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art
Frederick Bodmer, The Loom of Language. An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages,
Blackie’s Etymology
