The New York City public school system is currently experiencing the debilitating, convulsive fits of an existential crisis, a crisis exacerbated by its physical enormity, impersonality and utilitarian orientation. Blackberries and Black Students represents a rather impressionistic account of this crisis as it is objectified in many predominantly black schools in New York City. Personifying this crisis is an emaciated centralized bureaucracy of politicians-cum-educators; a cadre of abysmally inept, inexperienced administrators with little or no pedagogical experience; demoralized teachers who often lament their premature loss of intellectual idealism; uncooperative parents whose socializing efforts are at best perfunctory and indulgent; and a population of maladapted students whose worldview is shaped by an afrocentrist (multiculturalist) orientation that routinely romanticizes and exculpates much of their rebelliousness and recusant, anti-intellectual behavior.

MERMAIDS ON NEPTUNE is an impressionistic interpretation of some of the cultural and social behaviors (and literary events and memories)which Coney Island evokes. No other amusement park comes nearly as close to Coney Island's if only because Coney Island is defined by more than the presence of its iconic rides. Coney Island is the symbolic aspect of culture objectified: it transcends generations and historical circumstance, and defaces all ethnic, political and cultural boundaries.