Mohsin Hamid in Time:

It has been some time since I was as happy as I was on the night after Pakistan’s Feb. 18 general election. Mine was perhaps a reckless joy, temporarily distracting me from the very real troubles that Pakistan faces. But as I spoke to friends and acquaintances, both here in London and in my hometown of Lahore, I realized that the sense of euphoria I was feeling was widespread.

Pakistan is sometimes described by the international media as the most dangerous place on the planet. That has always seemed to me to be an irresponsible exaggeration: there are other countries whose citizens are far more likely to die of violent causes. But certainly Pakistan is a troubled land, suffering from illiteracy, poverty, terrorism and the bite of rapidly increasing prices, especially of food. The Feb. 18 election has not solved those problems. Yet Pakistanis are justified in allowing themselves a sigh of relief. Indeed, the entire world should be breathing a little easier now, for Pakistan suddenly looks a lot less frightening than it did.

More here.

I Know a Man
Robert Creeley

As I sd to my

friend, because I am

always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for

christ’s sake, look

out where yr going.

Leonard Bernstein set Broadway on fire in 1957 with “West Side Story,” a jazzed-up version of “Romeo and Juliet” in which the Capulets and Montagues were turned into Puerto Rican Sharks and American Jets. It was the most significant musical of the postwar era — and the last successful work that Bernstein wrote for the stage. His next show, 1976’s “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” closed after seven performances. For the rest of his life he floundered, unable to compose anything worth hearing.

What happened? Stephen Sondheim, Bernstein’s collaborator on “West Side Story,” told Meryle Secrest, who wrote biographies of both men, that he developed “a bad case of importantitis.” That sums up Bernstein’s later years with devastating finality. Time and again he dove head first into grandiose-sounding projects, then emerged from the depths clutching such pretentious pieces of musical costume jewelry as the “Kaddish” Symphony and “A Quiet Place.” In the end he dried up almost completely, longing to make Great Big Musical Statements — he actually wanted to write a Holocaust opera — but incapable of producing so much as a single memorable song.

more from the Wall Street Journal here.

Actual Czechs are eminently practical, nothing magical or mystical about them, as befits the people who drink the most beer in the world. Their most curious feature, which they keep to themselves and of  which the tourists know nothing, is a collective sense of  humor. Consider Jára Cimrman, by popular opinion the greatest Czech who ever lived. A few years ago a Czech TV channel asked its audience to name the most beloved native son. Jára Cimrman came first, ahead of Václav Havel, founding president Masaryk, and the Emperor Charles IV. Even the fact that Cimrman was explicitly disqualified in advance did not hurt his chances. This year, when a popular Internet site angled for an alternative to the current President Václav Klaus, Cimrman, disqualified again, came second. An obvious handicap was the fact that he was allegedly last seen alive in 1914.

Jára Cimrman is, of course, a fictitious character, the brainchild of a small group of writers and actors. In the Czech version of Wikipedia he is introduced as “one of the greatest Czech playwrights, poets, musicians, teachers, adventurers, philosophers, inventors” and many other things. Some of his achievements include inventing the Paraguayan puppet show, almost becoming the first man to reach the North Pole (he apparently missed it by seven meters), and conducting a voluminous correspondence with George Bernard Shaw, who never deigned to respond.

Well, that’s funny enough, but the most striking thing about Cimrman is the favor he has found with his people.

more from Poetry Magazine here.

The Academy Award nominees are a worthy but scattered bunch this year, and anyone who confidently tells you they know what’s going to happen is not to be trusted. I, by contrast, make a bid for your confidence by openly acknowledging that my guesses are entirely uneducated, and you could probably fare well by betting against them in your office Oscar pool.

The good news is that, with a few exceptions, the Academy seems to have screwed up less than usual. 2007 was a very strong year for film, and the Oscar nominees do a solid job of reflecting this. If there’s a major complaint to be made this year, it’s with the abstruse rules that govern eligibility in certain categories–in particular, best score and best foreign-language film. In the former category, Jonny Greenwood’s stunning, vital, utterly original score for There Will Be Blood was deemed ineligible for containing too many bits of music not written for the film, ensuring the ludicrous outcome that by far the best score of the year is not even nominated. The foreign film category is an even sorrier sight, with the year’s most celebrated offerings (Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days; Persepolis; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Lust, Caution; La Vie En Rose; The Orphanage; etc.) not making it, for one reason or another, to the “short list” of nine films from which the five finalists were chosen. (The foreign film rules, which are particularly convoluted, are explained here.) I’d especially like to put in a plug for Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which I saw too late to include in my end of the year list, but would have belonged near the top. It is a marvel of cinematic intimacy, grim and unsparing yet not without hope. If The Lives of Others, the 2006 spellbinder about life behind the Iron Curtain, captured the institutional oppressions of totalitarian rule, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days captures the ways in which it turns people into their own oppressors.

more from TNR here.

In the summer of 2003, as part of that year’s Lincoln Center Festival, members of the public were offered a guided walk around selected New York sites, beginning on Roosevelt Island and ending in the Chrysler Building. As they proceeded from site to site, they were invited to keep an eye out for angels. And at certain sites they did indeed get to see angel-actors, some with wings, some without, some gazing into the distance, some sleeping. At other sites there were merely traces of past angelic visits: feathers, for example.

The event was the brainchild of the British theater director Deborah Warner. In its first version, dating back to 1995 and as yet sans angels, it was set in a huge abandoned nineteenth-century London hotel; its goal was to evoke ghostly presences from the building’s past. In 1999 Warner presented a revised version with angels added. For the angels, said Warner, she was indebted to Rilke. “There’s a wonderful quote from Rilke which says that angels are uncertain if they are walking amongst the living or the dead.” In 2000 the revised version was exported to Perth, capital of Western Australia.

Responses of participants in the Angel Project varied widely. According to some, the presence of otherworldly beings changed the nature of their gaze, aestheticizing their view of the city. Others dismissed the project as mere Disneyfication, exploitation of a millenary craze for angels. Yet others were deeply moved. “They cried a lot,” said Warner, looking back on the 1999 London performance. “We put angels up at the top of the empty floors of the Euston Tower watching over London. And again, people’s response, terribly, terribly emotional. I think it’s about loss of innocence.”

Among visitors to the 2000 Angel Project was the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, in Perth to take part in the city’s arts festival. Nooteboom’s novel Lost Paradise, published in the Netherlands in 2004, draws heavily on recollections of that visit, as we shall see.

more from the NYRB here.

From ellafitzgerald.com:

Dubbed “The First Lady of Song,” Ella Fitzgerald was the most popular female jazz singer in the United States for more than half a century. In her lifetime, she won 13 Grammy awards and sold over 40 million albums. Her voice was flexible, wide-ranging, accurate and ageless. She could sing sultry ballads, sweet jazz and imitate every instrument in an orchestra. She worked with all the jazz greats, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole, to Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman.

Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Va. on April 25, 1917. Her father, William, and mother, Temperance (Tempie), parted ways shortly after her birth. Together, Tempie and Ella went to Yonkers, N.Y, where they eventually moved in with Tempie’s longtime boyfriend Joseph Da Silva. In 1932, Tempie died from serious that injuries she received in a car accident. Ella took the loss very hard. After staying with Joe for a short time, Tempie’s sister Virginia took Ella home. Shortly afterward Joe suffered a heart attack and died, and her little sister Frances joined them.

Unable to adjust to the new circumstances, Ella became increasingly unhappy and entered into a difficult period of her life. Her grades dropped dramatically, and she frequently skipped school. After getting into trouble with the police, she was taken into custody and sent to a reform school. Living there was even more unbearable, as she suffered beatings at the hands of her caretakers. Eventually Ella escaped from the reformatory. The 15-year-old found herself broke and alone during the Great Depression, and strove to endure. Never one to complain, Ella later reflected on her most difficult years with an appreciation for how they helped her to mature. She used the memories from these times to help gather emotions for performances, and felt she was more grateful for her success because she knew what it was like to struggle in life.

In 1934 Ella’s name was pulled in a weekly drawing at the Apollo and she won the opportunity to compete in Amateur Night. Ella went to the theater that night planning to dance, but when the frenzied Edwards Sisters closed the main show, Ella changed her mind. “They were the dancingest sisters around,” Ella said, and she felt her act would not compare.

Once on stage, faced with boos and murmurs of “What’s she going to do?” from the rowdy crowd, a scared and disheveled Ella made the last minute decision to sing. She asked the band to play Hoagy Carmichael’s “Judy,” a song she knew well because Connee Boswell’s rendition of it was among Tempie’s favorites. Ella quickly quieted the audience, and by the song’s end they were demanding an encore. She obliged and sang the flip side of the Boswell Sister’s record, “The Object of My Affections.”

In the band that night was saxophonist and arranger Benny Carter. Impressed with her natural talent, he began introducing Ella to people who could help launch her career. Fueled by enthusiastic supporters, Ella began entering – and winning – every talent show she could find. In January 1935 she won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House. It was there that Ella first met drummer and bandleader Chick Webb. Although her voice impressed him, Chick had already hired male singer Charlie Linton for the band. He offered Ella the opportunity to test with his band when they played a dance at Yale University. “If the kids like her,” Chick said, “she stays.”  Despite the tough crowd, Ella was a major success, and Chick hired her to travel with the band for $12.50 a week.

During this time, the era of big swing bands was shifting, and the focus was turning more toward bebop. Ella played with the new style, often using her voice to take on the role of another horn in the band. “You Have to Swing It” was one of the first times she began experimenting with scat singing, and her improvisation and vocalization thrilled fans. Throughout her career, Ella would master scat singing, turning it into a form of art. In 1938, at the age of 21, Ella recorded a playful version of the nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” The album sold 1 million copies, hit number one, and stayed on the pop charts for 17 weeks. Suddenly, Ella Fitzgerald was famous.

Perhaps in search of stability and protection, Ella married Benny Kornegay, a local dockworker who had been pursuing her. Upon learning that Kornegay had a criminal history, Ella realized that the relationship was a mistake and had the marriage annulled. While on tour with Dizzy Gillespie’s band in 1946, Ella fell in love with bassist Ray Brown. The two were married and eventually adopted a son, whom they named Ray, Jr.

At the time, Ray was working for producer and manager Norman Granz on the “Jazz at the Philharmonic” tour. Norman saw that Ella had what it took to be an international star, and he convinced Ella to sign with him. It was the beginning of a lifelong business relationship and friendship. Under Norman’s management, Ella joined the Philharmonic tour, worked with Louis Armstrong on several albums and began producing her infamous songbook series. From 1956-1964, she recorded covers of other musicians’ albums, including those by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart. The series was wildly popular, both with Ella’s fans and the artists she covered.

“I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them,” Ira Gershwin once remarked.

Ella also began appearing on television variety shows. She quickly became a favorite and frequent guest on numerous programs, including “The Bing Crosby Show,” “The Dinah Shore Show,” “The Frank Sinatra Show,” “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Tonight Show,” “The Nat King Cole Show,” “The Andy Willams Show” and “The Dean Martin Show.” Unfortunately, busy work schedules also hurt Ray and Ella’s marriage. The two divorced in 1952, but remained good friends for the rest of their lives.

On the touring circuit it was well-known that Ella’s manager felt very strongly about civil rights and required equal treatment for his musicians, regardless of their color. Norman refused to accept any type of discrimination at hotels, restaurants or concert halls, even when they traveled to the Deep South. Once, while in Dallas touring for the Philharmonic, a police squad irritated by Norman’s principles barged backstage to hassle the performers. They came into Ella’s dressing room, where band members Dizzy Gillespie and Illinois Jacquet were shooting dice, and arrested everyone.

“They took us down,” Ella later recalled, “and then when we got there, they had the nerve to ask for an autograph.”

Norman wasn’t the only one willing to stand up for Ella. She received support from numerous celebrity fans, including a zealous Marilyn Monroe. “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt,” Ella later said. “It was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the ’50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”

Outside of the arts, Ella had a deep concern for child welfare. Though this aspect of her life was rarely publicized, she frequently made generous donations to organizations for disadvantaged youths, and the continuation of these contributions was part of the driving force that prevented her from slowing down. In 1987, United States President Ronald Reagan awarded Ella the National Medal of Arts. It was one of her most prized moments. France followed suit several years later, presenting her with their Commander of Arts and Letters award, while Yale, Dartmouth and several other universities bestowed Ella with honorary doctorates.

By the 1990s, Ella had recorded over 200 albums. In 1991, she gave her final concert at New York’s renowned Carnegie Hall. It was the 26th time she performed there. As the effects from her diabetes worsened, 76-year-old Ella experienced severe circulatory problems and was forced to have both of her legs amputated below the knees. She never fully recovered from the surgery, and afterward, was rarely able to perform.

On June 15, 1996, Ella Fitzgerald died in her Beverly Hills home. Hours later, signs of remembrance began to appear all over the world. A wreath of white flowers stood next to her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a marquee outside the Hollywood Bowl theater read, “Ella, we will miss you.” After a private memorial service, traffic on the freeway was stopped to let her funeral procession pass through. She was laid to rest in the “Sanctuary of the Bells” section of the Sunset Mission Mausoleum at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, Calif.

 

From The Guardian:

If Hanif Kureishi’s new novel has a fault, it is that its secondary characters are often so full of life that they upstage the principals and this is a fault for which most writers would cheerfully kill. The hero, Jamal, is not only in a reflective profession – he’s a Freudian analyst – but also at a stage of midlife limbo. He’s still involved with his 12-year-old son Rafi (‘We touch fists and exchange the conventional middle-class greeting, “Yo bro – dog!”‘), but on terms of armed truce at best with his estranged wife, Josephine. No wonder the eye of the reader, that magpie, is drawn to Jamal’s rough diamond of a sister, Miriam, overweight and much pierced (‘parts of her face resembled a curtain rail’), reigning over the semi-criminal disorder of her council house, as she starts a relationship with her polar opposite, Jamal’s prissy yet wild intellectual friend Henry, a famous lapsed theatre director. From one point of view, she is the supreme distillation of various brands of bad news into a single prospective partner. On the other hand, as ‘a Muslim single mother with a history of abuse’ who has few taboos and ‘sees straight to the centre of things’, she’s practically perfect.

In addition to his practice, Jamal has a reputation as a writer of case studies, presumably of an Adam Phillips variety, aphoristic and philosophical (‘Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear?’). Paradox comes with the territory, since the territory is the human mind, secreting paradox incessantly. At one stage of his past, for instance, Jamal wanted to be with a woman he didn’t want, a seemingly heartless television producer, out of mourning for lost love.

More here.

Over at bloggingheads.tv, John Horgan and Joshua Knobe discuss experimental philosophy.

In the TNR, Amartya Sen and Niall Ferguson debate Ferguson’s Empire. Sen’s original piece:

When the East India Company undertook the battle of Plassey and defeated the Nawab of Bengal, there were businessmen, traders, and other professionals from a number of different European nations already in that very locality. Their primary involvement was in exporting textiles and other industrial products from India, and the river Ganges (or Hughly, as it is more often called in that part of India), on which the East India Company had its settlement, also had (further upstream) trading centers and settled communities from Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Prussia, and other European nations.

Being subjected to imperial rule is not the only way of learning things from abroad, no matter how necessary such learning may be. When the Meiji restoration established a new reformist government in Japan in 1868 (which was not unrelated to the internal political impact of Commodore Perry’s show of force in the previous decade), the Japanese went full steam into learning from the West, sending people for training in America and Europe, and making institutional changes that were clearly inspired by western experience. They globalized themselves voluntarily. They were not coercively globalized by others. The shaking of India, too, could have come in non-colonialist ways.

Ferguson’s response:

I quite agree, and have said myself, that any assessment of the costs and benefits of British rule in India needs to make the counterfactual(s) explicit. No one claims India would have stood still if there had been no 1757. With all due respect, however, Professor Sen’s counterfactual of “Meiji India” lacks plausibility. Though I have often heard it argued, the notion seems to me utterly far-fetched that India could have adopted the Japanese route to economic and political modernization.

Sen again:

am glad that Ferguson agrees that India would not have stood still even in the absence of British conquest. But then he says: “Sen’s counterfactual of ‘Meiji India’ lacks plausibility.” “Meiji India”? But that surely is an idea of Ferguson’s, not mine. What I had, in fact, said was: “It is not easy to guess with any confidence how the history of the subcontinent would have gone had the British conquest not occurred. Would India have moved, like Japan, toward modernization in an increasingly globalizing world, or would it have stayed resistant to change, like Afghanistan, or hastened slowly, like Thailand?”

Even after overlooking that misattribution, it can, however, be asked whether Ferguson should be so sure that India could have done little of the kind that Japan did.

Gil Greengross reviews Rod Martin’s Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach in Evolutionary Psychology (you just know that sexual selection is going to be in there):

Due to the complexity of the topic, it is not surprising that hundreds of theories, varying in specificity, have been offered to explain humor. Evolutionary explanations are no exception. Although it is widely accepted that humor has an evolutionary origin, how it evolved and what evolutionary purpose it served is far from clear and is heatedly debated (Gervais and Wilson, 2005; Polimeni and Reiss, 2006). No one has yet proposed a comprehensive theory of humor, and a unitary theory may not even exist, as different aspects of humor may have different origins and purposes.

Take, for example, one of the most common explanations for the adaptive function of humor, known as the “false alarm” theory. The idea gained recent popularity after it was put forward by the famous neuroscientist Ramachandran, although it was known for at least two decades (Chafe, 1987; Ramachandran, 1998). This theory holds that when facing an ambiguous event, laughter serves as a signal to other members of the group that the perceived threat or anomaly is in fact unimportant. Using a stereotyped vocalization such as laughter helps others to determine the non importance of the event. Thus, they should not allocate energy towards it. Whereas this theory has intuitive value and can explain certain aspects of humor (for example, why laughter is contagious), it is not hard to find examples that do not quite fit. One of the open secrets among humor researchers is that most laugher comes in response to trivial comments. Despite the tendency to focus on analyzing jokes, they comprise only a small portion of what humor is. Thus, the importance of humor in a social context goes far beyond the narrow definition that the “false alarm” theory seeks to explain.

But the social aspect of humor is only one lens through which it can be viewed. As Martin notes, a complete understanding of humor also involves developmental, cognitive, personality and other aspects as well.

While the NYT has certainly had and has many, many Pravda moments, it’s not wont to surrender to the scurrilousness of yellow journalism, which is why the story of a possible affair between Senator McCain and Vikki Iseman seems to have incensed readers and the media alike (regardless of the two anonymous, former aides that seem to corroborate the story). Certainly, the innuendo of an affair in a story about influence peddling was clearly a lightning rod. The NYT editorial board on the reaction to the story:

Did The Times Violate Its Standards on Anonymity?

Q. Why did The New York Times not follow its own most-recently publicized rule on sourcing in its stories? As I understand the policy is that The New York Times will only use unidentified sources as a last resource and if it needs to do so it will at least give a reason why these sources have to remain anonymous. This article in The New York Times did neither. Why?

— Guillermo Martinez, Miami

Q. There are numerous unnamed sources and a large number of “staff” or “campaign” officials who are quoted or used as references in this story. Has The New York Times exceeded good judgment by having absolutely no named individuals corroborating this story? What procedures did the editors use to ensure that these stories were not the work of a small number of individuals who conspired to embarrass Mr. McCain or The New York Times?

— Frank Baitman, Baltimore

A. We have received lots of questions on the use of anonymous sources in the story and these two are representative of many of them.

It is always preferable to have named sources in stories. In 2003, The Times appointed a standards editor to the masthead, and tightened its standards for anonymous sourcing in 2004. In the case of our McCain story, Times standards were followed and senior editors knew the identities of the sources for the story, who provided detailed and consistent accounts about their concerns about the senator’s relationship with a Washington lobbyist. On many important stories, especially on controversies involving Washington politics and policy battles, sources request anonymity for different reasons. Some fear retribution, including loss of their positions. Some are motivated by a desire to share sensitive information that they deem in the public interest but fear disclosing their identities for a variety of reasons. Others have less selfless reasons.

Hovering on the margins between high-school history-textbook glory and the ever-expanding empire of American amnesia, Jacob Riis still tantalizes us with his evocative do-gooder example. The Danish-born Riis (1849-1914) immigrated in 1870 to America, leading a hand-to-mouth existence in the first few years and sometimes sleeping on the streets, before finding himself as a journalist.

As a police reporter for the New York Tribune, he learned the seedy side of urban life, exposing the pollution of the city’s water supply and championing small parks and playgrounds. He wrote a campaign biography of Theodore Roosevelt, who called him “the best American I ever knew.” Indeed, Riis’ 1901 autobiography, “The Making of an American,” was a bestseller, an exemplar of immigrants entering the melting pot and becoming useful citizens. But he is best known today as a pioneering muckraker for his hair-raising account of tenement poverty, “How the Other Half Lives”(1890), and the stunning photographs he took to illustrate those overcrowded conditions. He is also credited with inspiring the passage of legislation banning the suffocating “dumbbell” air-shaft design and promoting livable housing for the poor.

more from the LA Times here.

Robert Creeley (1926-2005) was one of the darker poets of his generation, and also one of the best. He experienced hardship early on, losing his father, and also his left eye from an accident, by the time he was 5. The death of his father, a doctor, straitened the family’s circumstances. But the character of his darkness probably has more to do with New England — Hawthorne’s “grave and dark-clad company” — than anything else. It’s a severity of outlook that underpins the work of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, as well.

In Creeley’s poetry the bleakness often finds its expression in a tortured self-regard, an almost panicked need for engaging experience, usually interior experience, by enacting it in language, syllable by syllable, line by line. One often feels while reading his work that if there is any misstep, any syllable or stress put wrong, not only the poem but its maker will either go up in flames or disappear down a black crevasse. This is the drama of Creeley’s defining work, and that drama never feels calculated or inauthentic.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: “Soppy.”

The person to begin with is my maternal grandmother, Nellie Louisa Scoltock, née Machin. She was a teacher in Shropshire until she married my grandfather, Bert Scoltock. Not Bertram, not Albert, just Bert: so christened, so called, so cremated. He was a headmaster with a certain mechanical dash to him: a motorcycle-and-sidecar man, then owner of a Lanchester, then, in retirement, driver of a rather pompously sporty Triumph Roadster, with a three-person bench seat in front, and two bucket seats when the top was down. By the time I knew them, my grandparents had come south to be near their only child. Grandma went to the Women’s Institute; she pickled and bottled; she plucked and roasted the chickens and geese that Grandpa raised. She was petite, outwardly unopinionated, and had the thickened knuckles of old age; she needed soap to get her wedding ring off.

more from The Guardian here.

Poem inscribed on the walls of Waterloo station, London

Eurydice
Sue Hubbard

I am not afraid as I descend,
step by step, leaving behind the salt wind
blowing up the corrugated river,

the damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half remembered moon.

Already your face recedes beneath the station clock,
a damp smudge among the shadows
mirrored in the train’s wet glass,

will you forget me? Steel tracks lead you out
past cranes and crematoria,
boat yards and bike sheds, ruby shards

of roman glass and wolf-bone mummified in mud,
the rows of curtained windows like eyelids
heavy with sleep, to the city’s green edge.

Now I stop my ears with wax, hold fast
the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear.
Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair.

You turned to look.
Seconds fly past like birds.
My hands grow cold. I am ice and cloud.

This path unravels.
Deep in hidden rooms filled with dust
and sour night-breath the lost city is sleeping.

Above the hurt sky is weeping,
soaked nightingales have ceased to sing.
Dusk has come early. I am drowning in blue.

I dream of a green garden
where the sun feathers my face
like your once eager kiss.

Soon, soon I will climb
from this blackened earth
into the diffident light.

Orpheus and Eurydice

—

From The Academy of Achievement:

…….

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.       (Inaugural Poem, Jan 1993)

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was only three and she was sent with her brother Bailey to live with their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. At age seven, while visiting her mother in Chicago, she was sexually molested by her mother’s boyfriend. Too ashamed to tell any of the adults in her life, she confided in her brother. When she later heard the news that an uncle had killed her attacker, she felt that her words had killed the man. She fell silent and did not speak for five years.

Maya began to speak again at 13, when she and her brother rejoined their mother in San Francisco. Maya attended Mission High School and won a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School, where she was exposed to the progressive ideals that animated her later political activism. She dropped out of school in her teens to become San Francisco’s first African American female cable car conductor. She later returned to high school, but became pregnant in her senior year and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son, Guy. She left home at 16 and took on the difficult life of a single mother, supporting herself and her son by working as a waitress and cook, but she had not given up on her talents for music, dance, performance and poetry. In 1952, she married a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos. When she began her career as a nightclub singer, she took the professional name Maya Angelou, combining her childhood nickname with a form of her husband’s name. Although the marriage did not last, her performing career flourished. She toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 1954 and 1955. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and recorded her first record album, Calypso Lady (1957).

She moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and took her place among the growing number of young black writers and artists associated with the Civil Rights Movement. In New York, she fell in love with the South African civil rights activist Vusumzi Make and in 1960, the couple moved, with Angelou’s son, to Cairo, Egypt. Angelou and Guy later moved to Ghana, where she joined a thriving group of African American expatriates. She met with the American dissident leader Malcolm X in his visits to Ghana, and corresponded with him as his thinking evolved from the racially polarized thinking of his youth to the more inclusive vision of his maturity.

Maya Angelou returned to America in 1964, with the intention of helping Malcolm X build his new Organization of African American Unity. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and his plans for a new organization died with him. Angelou involved herself in television production and remained active in the Civil Rights Movement, working more closely with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who requested that Angelou serve as Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His assassination, falling on her birthday in 1968, left her devastated. With the guidance of her friend, the novelist James Baldwin, she found solace in writing, and began work on the book that would become I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book tells the story of her life from her childhood in Arkansas to the birth of her child. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1970 to widespread critical acclaim and enormous popular success. Seemingly overnight, Angelou became a national figure.

President Clinton requested that she compose a poem to read at his inauguration in 1993. Angelou’s reading of her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” was broadcast live around the world. Since 1981, Angelou has served as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The list of her published works now includes more than 30 titles. These include numerous volumes of verse, beginning with Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Die (1971). Books of her stories and essays include Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now (1993) and Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997). She has continued the compelling narrative of her life in the books Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1987) and A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002).

From The Boston Globe:

“Global citizen” Adil Najam has gone from sharing a Nobel Prize to starting a blog where Pakistanis can share views peacefully

Aboard a Pakistan International Airlines flight bound for Logan Airport 16 years ago, Adil Najam sat in his seat and thought, “What have I done? Why would I leave all that?” Sports reporter, TV talk show host, national environmental expert, Najam was a celebrity in the south Asian nation of 165 million by his mid-20s. “I was quite happy there. Pakistan was good to me,” said Najam, now living in Boxborough with his wife and three children. Rather than riding his good fortune, he was off to MIT for the more secure but seemingly staid pursuit of an engineering degree.

 

But instead of vanishing into technocratic anonymity, Najam, 42, has emerged as a rising star in the international environmental movement, earning a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and other scientists on an international climate change council, while also becoming a go-to expert on the Muslim world for NPR, CNN, and other news outlets. Most recently he has reentered the political debate in Pakistan with his blog Pakistaniat.com, which has become a must-read for Pakistan-watchers as the nation, a critical American ally in the war on terror, simmers with political violence heading into national elections today.

Those who met Najam when he first arrived in Boston in 1992 recall a tall, well-spoken, but humble figure. “He was active in student groups, and I could see the leadership qualities that he had,” said Barry Hoffman, Pakistan’s honorary consul general in Boston. “Whenever I have distinguished visitors, I always try to make a point that they meet Adil. He’s wise, he’s articulate, and he makes me look good.”

More here. (Note: Thanks to Dr. Atiya Khan)

In Words Without Borders Forum:

Andrzej Franaszek is a literary critic and cultural editor of the Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. He is the author of Ciemne źródło (Dark Spring), which discusses the subject of suffering in the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert (the second edition will be published later in 2008). He is also working on a biography of Czesław Miłosz. He lives in Kraków.

CYNTHIA HAVEN: First of all, thank you for your insightful talk at Columbia University on November 26: “‘I will oppress you with my strange love…’ The Friendship of Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert: fascination, disillusionment, and bitterness.” That’s quite a title. Could you summarize briefly the relationship of these two poetry giants?

ANDRZEJ FRANASZEK: I’m afraid it’s rather a long story. Herbert and Miłosz got to known each other during Herbert’s first trip to the West in 1958. They met in Montgeron near Paris, where Miłosz had been living with his family. Miłosz broke with Communist Poland in 1951, choosing an émigré status in France.

Miłosz was 13 years older, and at that time, his intellectual biography was richer—as a young man he identified himself with the pre-war leftist radicalism but soon was disappointed in utopian ideologies. These positions did not annihilate his antipathy to the capitalist way of life and his strong criticism of pre-war Poland. After WW II, he had a sort-of romance with the new government, but in 1951 broke with it. For Herbert pre-war Poland was almost the Arcadia of his youth, which was deluged by historical cataclysm. Unlike Miłosz, he judged the postwar reality completely, or almost completely, negatively.

Margot Badran in Al Ahram (via signandsight.com):

Zanan (Women) has been at the forefront in debates on women and gender within the framework of an egalitarian interpretation of Islam and for examining women’s experience in Iran and their contribution to society. From the start Zanan has had a dual existence: in Iran and in the world. Zanan ‘s news and views spun around cyberspace so fast it was clear it was onto something: gender equality and gender justice within Islam– exactly where much of the world thought it was missing. Now Zanan has been summarily shut down by authorities in Iran.

Zanan was founded in 1992 by Shahla Sherkat, a seasoned journalist and magazine editor. From 1982 she had served as editor of Zan-e Ruz (Today’s Woman) a publication of the state-run Kayhan publishing house before being pushed out in 1991 along with a number of others. They went on to found and write in independent publications and came to be known as the new religious intellectuals. Sherkat, the only woman among them, had already begun to bristle at Zan-e Ruz ‘s conservative line (that she had been originally hired to develop). By the time of her dismissal she was eager to start her own independent journal on women and gender. She pulled together, marshaled minimal resources, and created Zanan.