BLK History Month

If Black History Month is not
viable then the wind does not
carry the seeds and drop them
on fertile ground
rain does not
dampen the land
and encourage the seeds
to root
sun does not
warm the earth
and kiss the seedlings
and tell them plain:
You’re As Good A Anybody Else
You’ve Got A Place Here Too

by Nikki Giovanni
from Quilting The Black-Eyed Pea
Harper Perennial, 2002

Blake Smith in The Ideas Letter:

Michael Denneny, the recently deceased co-founder and co-editor of the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street , gay newspaper New York Native , and the gay publishing line at St. Martin’s Press, Stonewall Inn Editions, began his recently published collection of essays On Christopher Street  with a quotation from his mentor, Hannah Arendt:

“Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world and speaking with one another about it are basically one and the same.”

Denneny’s career as a gay cultural activist was a way of putting into practice Arendt’s thought as condensed in this citation. Across writings collected in On Christopher Street, which range in date from the beginnings of the magazine in 1976 to just before his death last year, he grounded his view of gay culture and politics in her work. Yet the importance of her example for their emergence—and of her philosophy to a key moment in the rise of what we now call “identity politics”—remains almost totally ignored in the field of gay history and in the ever-growing number of academic and popular reappraisals of Arendt. It is hardly known that her thinking and milieu were vital elements in intellectual matrix of the American gay movement.ⁱ

From academic and popular genealogies of gay identity and gay politics, whether written by progressive academics or conservatives pundits like Jamie Kirchick or Chris Rufo, readers could be forgiven for mistakenly believing misunderstanding that it was “radical” post-structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler who supplied that movement’s theoretical legitimation, resisted all the way by “mainstream” “assimilationists” (who are often portrayed by defenders and critics as anti-theoretical voices of “common sense”). Such genealogies misunderstand Foucault (who was much closer to the positions of Arendt and Denneny, an early champion of his, than to Butler and today’s “woke” activists)ⁱⁱ—although this is a subject for another essay. Moreover, they obscure the deep, and deeply Arendtian, thinking behind the cultural and political work that brought gay male life towards the center of American consciousness.

More here.

Marius Sosnowski in LA Review of Books:

IT HAS BEEN 12 years since Christopher Hitchens left us. After his spirited showing in the 20th century, the first dozen years of the 21st were something of a reinvention. While Hitchens 2.0 may have left a trail of rubble in his wake, his books remained no less resolute than what had gone before: the vital study Why Orwell Matters (2002); the world-famous polemic God Is Not Great (2007); the best-selling and magisterial memoir Hitch-22 (2010); the compendious and ever-entertaining essay collection Arguably (2011); and his last feint from the edge of death, Mortality (2012). Still, it’s the belligerent terms of his late-in-life split from the Left that has threatened to eclipse a career dedicated to combating tribalist thinking, and fighting to illuminate the difference between what is and what is purported to be. One can’t help but feel a void, a conspicuous silence emanating from the direction of the Wyoming Apartments in Washington, DC, from which his rapier-like perceptions could have added something useful, even necessary, to the understanding of all that has followed.

Now, Twelve Books has published A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration, a welcome gathering of 23 mostly uncollected pieces he wrote for the London Review of Books (the volume was released in the United Kingdom in 2021 with an LRB-highlighting subtitle). With the exception of the opening essay, “The Wrong Stuff: On Tom Wolfe,” from 1983, and the closing one, “11 September 1973: Pinochet and Britain,” from 2002, everything herein dates from the 1990s, that thoroughly wacky and jaunty time everyone sorely misses. Hitchens is in memorable form here; his essays range from tackling P. G. Wodehouse, the First Gulf War, and the prevalence (nay, importance) of spanking to Britain’s social order, to the trouble with Bill Clinton, an almost sympathetic (or as close as Hitch could get to sympathy for a royal) portrait of the misunderstood Princess Margaret, and an evisceration of the United States’ charismatic hero JFK (and the comically jowly goons that followed in his presidential wake)—all while displaying the author’s characteristic impatience with courtiers, apologists, and tiresome bellends.

More here.

Helena Cobban in Boston Review:

Just days before October 7, President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, was radiating confidence that Washington had effectively brought all of West Asia’s long-roiling conflicts under control. Washington could now, he believed, accelerate the pivot of attention, forces, and funding toward what had long topped Biden’s agenda: containing Chinese power in East Asia. Then came the Hamas-led attack on Israel and Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. By late January, Sullivan was flying to Bangkok to plead with top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi for help in defusing the sharp, Gaza-spurred conflict that had erupted in the globally vital waterway of the Red Sea. (Wang politely blew him off.)

Over the past four months, the United States has become increasingly isolated on the world stage. In October and again in November, the United States vetoed resolutions at the UN Security Council that called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza on the grounds that they did not condemn Hamas. Then, on December 12, a special session of the UN General Assembly—where no country has veto power—voted 153 to 10, with 23 abstentions, in favor of a ceasefire resolution that made no mention of condemning Hamas. Those supporting the resolution included the BRICS group of nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), nearly all the other nations of the Global South, and some West European states, including France and Spain. The only states that joined the United States and Israel in voting against it were Austria, Czechia, Guatemala, Liberia, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, and the tiny countries of Micronesia and Nauru.

More here.

Bruno De Conti , Pedro Rossi, Arthur Welle, and Clara Saliba in Phenomenal World:

In December 2023, Brazil began presiding over the G20. The one-year presidency, which will culminate in the annual summit being hosted in Rio de Janeiro in November 2024, is the third of four terms from the global South—following Indonesia in 2022 and India in 2023, and preceding the already decided South African presidency in 2025. When India’s Narendra Modi formally handed over the presidency to Brazil last November, Lula announced three priorities to “place the reduction of inequalities at the center of the international agenda: (i) social inclusion and the fight against hunger (ii) energy transition and sustainable development in its three aspects (social, economic and environmental) and (iii) reform of global governance institutions.” The proposals were well received internationally; now is the time for concrete agendas to build toward the November summit.

Though the Brazilian government’s proposals are progressive, the G20’s multilateral dialogue continues within the context of international institutions that long predate it—reflecting the balance of global economic power in the middle of the twentieth century. Forged after World War II, institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, now undergird an international governance system that does not represent the tremendous changes that have occurred in the world economy since the fiscal rules they prescribed in the 1970s. Dominated by countries whose economies represent a shrinking share of world production and trade, these institutions reproduce asymmetries of power over the subjects of multilateral diplomacy—which are today indispensable for mitigating global climate change and extending social protections over the world’s economically and socially vulnerable populations.

The increased weight of the global South among countries making up the G20 indicates a changing balance of forces within the group—and shows how the moment is conducive for a shift in strategy. The group’s last summit in New Delhi illustrated the enhanced importance of the global South. Under the Indian presidency, this group of global South countries had at least two major victories representing the shift towards multipolarity: the absence of a unilateral position on the war in Ukraine and, more importantly, the inclusion of the African Union (AU) as a permanent member of the group.

More here.

Hephzibah Anderson at The Guardian:

Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s 2010 breakout novel sought to interrogate its titular puzzler, How Should a Person Be? It’s become a continuing quest, but over the course of a career that now finds her publishing her 12th book, she’s also asked readers to consider again and again another question: how should prose be? Pairing philosophical inquiry with formal experimentation, she’s drawn inspiration from sources as scattered as reality TV, the I Ching and chatbot utterances, expanding our thinking about structure, character and the boundaries between fiction and memoir.

Both lines of investigation are furthered in this latest work, her most radical yet. It began when she decided to upload 10 years of her journal writing – 500,000 words in all – to an Excel spreadsheet, which ordered her sentences alphabetically.

more here.

Harmeet Kaur in CNN:

Blackface isn’t just about painting one’s skin darker or putting on a costume. It invokes a racist and painful history. The origins of blackface date back to the minstrel shows of mid-19th century. White performers darkened their skin with polish and cork, put on tattered clothing and exaggerated their features to look stereotypically “black.” The first minstrel shows mimicked enslaved Africans on Southern plantations, depicting black people as lazy, ignorant, cowardly or hypersexual, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). The performances were intended to be funny to white audiences. But to the black community, they were demeaning and hurtful.

One of the most popular blackface characters was “Jim Crow,” developed by performer and playwright Thomas Dartmouth Rice. As part of a traveling solo act, Rice wore a burnt-cork blackface mask and raggedy clothing, spoke in stereotypical black vernacular and performed a caricatured song and dance routine that he said he learned from a slave, according to the University of South Florida Library.

Though early minstrel shows started in New York, they quickly spread to audiences in both the North and South. By 1845, minstrel shows spawned their own industry, NMAAHC says. Its influence extended into the 20th century. Al Jolson performed in blackface in “The Jazz Singer,” a hit film in 1927, and American actors like Shirley Temple, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney put on blackface in movies too. The characters were so pervasive that even some black performers put on blackface, historians say. It was the only way they could work – as white audiences weren’t interested in watching black actors do anything but act foolish on stage.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

Liz Fields on PBS:

The mesmerizing performance from Academy Award-nominated actress and singer Andra Day in “The United States Vs. Billie Holiday” has revived interest in the hauntingly beautiful and controversial song “Strange Fruit,” which Holiday first popularized in the late 1930s. The film details the numerous ways in which the US government terrorized the singer over her performances of the song right up until her untimely death in 1959, but it does not cover the unusual origins of the song, which was originally written as a poem by a Jewish American teacher from the Bronx, who was also a member of the Communist party.

Abel Meeropol, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants, taught English at Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx for 17 years before turning to music and motion pictures, writing under the pen name Lewis Allan. Meeropol was very disturbed by the persistence of systemic racism in America and was motivated to write the poem “Bitter Fruit” after seeing a photo depicting the lynching of two Black teens in Indiana in 1930. The poem was published in the journal The New York Teacher in 1937, and again later published in the Marxist journal, The New Masses, before Meeropol decided to turn the poem into lyrics and set it to music.

After that, Meeropol began to perform the song at several protest rallies and venues around the city along with his wife and African American singer Laura Duncan. The song first came to Holiday’s attention when she was working at New York’s first integrated nightclub, Café Society in Greenwich Village. Holiday was hesitant at first to sing it because she didn’t want to politicize her performances, and was (rightfully) concerned about being targeted at her performances. But the positive audience responses and frequent requests for “Strange Fruit” soon prompted Holiday to close out every performance with the song. Ahead of time, the waiters would stop serving so there was a deathly silence in the room, then a spotlight would shine on Holiday’s face and she would begin to sing:

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/ Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze/ Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees…”

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

Callibrations

A blue whale’s heart rate is calculated at 37 beats
per minute. Measurement is described as intense,
involving extensive coordination. Descent
into the ocean and the pressure a human body
is subjected to is an additional atmosphere, twice
as much as human lungs are used to. A man holds
his breath for eleven minutes. Depths complicate,
compress and shrink the air-containing spaces
in body and brain. Oxygen starvation feels like
euphoria, like experiencing something miraculous.
It takes two seconds to pump the 220 liters of blood
a blue whale circulates with every heartbeat. There
cannot possibly be a larger animal, the heart cannot
grow fast enough for a greater creature to survive.
A woman holds her breath for nine minutes.
The sensation of rising. Water, water, sunlight,
air. A pulse in the ears. The astonishing
violence as breath fills her lungs, her heart.

by Molly Fuller
from Able Muse

Philip Goff in IAI:

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. It is the view that the basic building blocks of the physical universe – perhaps fundamental particles – have incredibly simple forms of experience, and that the very sophisticated experience of the human or animal brain is rooted in, derived from, more rudimentary forms of experience at the level of basic physics. Panpsychism has received a lot of attention of late. The world of academic philosophy has been rocked by the conversion of one of the most influential materialists of the last thirty years, Michael Tye, to a form of panpsychism (panprotopsychism) in his latest book. And the main annual UK philosophy conference held a plenary panel on panpsychism this year for the first time in its history.

Much of the attention has been critical, which is as it should be when it comes to matters on which there is little consensus. Among the recent critics are two leading theoretical physicists: Sabine Hossenfelder and Sean Carroll, who argue that panpsychism is incompatible with what fundamental physics tells us about the building blocks of the universe. However, these objections rely on a misunderstanding of what panpsychism is. Panpsychism is not a scientific theory in competition with physics, and therefore not incompatible with it. It’s rather a philosophical interpretation of the claims of physics.

More here.

Leah Jones in Yahoo News:

Throughout cinematic history, legendary Black actors have shattered barriers and pioneered new standards of excellence through their groundbreaking work on screen and off. Their compelling performances not only entertained audiences but also, reshaped the landscape of storytelling by destroying tired stereotypes and introducing more authentic narratives. These icons possess a rare, enduring star power that has resonated across generations. They continued to thrive not just through one great role, but through delivering consistently pioneering performances over decades. Their influence extends beyond Hollywood, as they open doors for future generations of young black actors and actresses through activism and advocacy. This list celebrates 18 of these transformative Black actors who redefined stardom by leaving an indelible mark on entertainment. They are ranked by the breadth of their impact both on screen through their iconic roles, as well as through enduring contributions to the industry. While each legendary figure stands alone in their artistry, together their collective work moves the needle on diversity and inclusion in monumental ways that continue inspiring today.

Denzel Washington

Denzel Washington has been regarded as a paragon of acting excellence throughout his decades-long career. He was born on December 28, 1954, in Mount Vernon, New York. Washington’s acting career began with his Broadway debut in A Soldier’s Play and a starring role in the popular television medical drama St. Elsewhere. His big-screen breakthrough came in the 1980s, marking the start of an illustrious journey in Hollywood.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

Brown Circle

My mother wants to know
why, if I hate
family so much,
I went ahead and
had one. I don’t
answer my mother.
What I hated
was being a child,
having no choice about
what people I loved.

I don’t love my son
the way I meant to love him.
I thought I’d be
the lover of orchids who finds
red trillium growing
in the pine shade, and doesn’t
touch it, doesn’t need
to possess it. What I am
is the scientist,
who comes to that flower
with a magnifying glass
and doesn’t leave, though
the sun burns a brown
circle of grass around
the flower. Which is
more or less the way
my mother loved me.

I must learn
to forgive my mother,
now that I’m helpless
to spare my son.

by Louise Gluck
from New American Poets
David R. Godine, 1991

Jonathan Anderson at Artforum:

In the end, Faith in Art offers neither comprehensive views of these artists nor definitive conclusions about the religious bearings of their work. Nor is it concerned with establishing these artists’ faithful (or unfaithful) adherence to particular religious traditions—indeed, “none was religious in any conspicuous way.” Rather, Masheck seeks to show how “they believed that art had something formative to say about the possibility of a new, more humane society, by a faith ultimately based on scriptural, and sometimes surprisingly theological, intellectual formations.” This effectively pries open the critical histories of these artists, such that reducing these formations to either “materialism” or “spiritualism” becomes untenable.

A thread running throughout Masheck’s chapters is his intuition of a deeply dialectical reasoning among these artists—one in which the overcoming or (sur)passing of religious positions results not in their elimination but in their incorporation into further syntheses. Competing Hegelianisms thus play throughout the book, as Masheck criticizes modernist historians for being “insufficiently dialectical about religion,” insofar as they presume religion to be irrelevant or “inadmissible” (à la Krauss’s “Grids”) rather than complexly sustained in larger dialectical patterns.

more here.

John Last at The New Atlantis:

Brown bears once roamed widely across Western Europe. But already by the Middle Ages, hunting and habitat degradation had pushed their populations to the east and north. In the Alpine region of Italy, at times with the backing of the state, brown bears were hunted nearly to extinction — by the mid-1990s, just four were counted in the region around Trento, where Papi was killed.

For the past twenty-some years, however, an E.U.-funded program called Life Ursus has imported brown bears to Northern Italy to boost the region’s number of breeding pairs, taking candidates from its eastern neighbor Slovenia, where forests less pressed upon by human activity are still capable of sheltering a reasonably healthy bear population.

Though the program has undoubtedly succeeded in its aim — the brown bear population is now estimated at over 100 in the region — it has not been without controversy.

more here.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Evolution is sometimes described — not precisely, but with some justification — as being about the “survival of the fittest.” But that idea doesn’t work unless there is some way for one generation to pass down information about how best to survive. We now know that such information is passed down in a variety of ways: through our inherited genome, through epigenetic factors, and of course through cultural transmission. Chris Adami suggests that we update Dobzhansky’s maxim “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” to “… except in the light of information.” We talk about information theory as a subject in its own right, and how it helps us to understand organisms, evolution, and the origin of life.

More here.