Angela Robson in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Hardly a family in East Timor was untouched by the Indonesian invasion in 1975. In the occupation, a third of the nation may have died from bombing, starvation and systematic killing (1). This is besides the forced displacement of most of the population and widespread evidence of rape, torture and other human rights violations. It is the worst massacre, per head of population, in recent history, comparable to Cambodia under Pol Pot and to Rwanda.

In one of the first investigations into mental health in East Timor, carried out by the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) in 2000, 75% of the population had experienced a combat situation and more than 33% had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); 20% believed that they would never recover from their experiences.

Mira Martins da Silva says that the combination of “occupation and conflict, and the consequences of not addressing PTSD, have resulted in persistent anxiety and mistrust, which we’re now seeing being unleashed on the streets of Dili. We get a lot of female clients who suffer from stress and trauma as a result of violence in the home, or public violence. They don’t talk about it generally with other people and so the anxiety bubbles up in other ways. For boys, it’s OK to show their anger, to get involved in gang violence, to engage in revenge.

Why are videos of drunken people so compelling?

On YouTube, “David Hasselhoff Intoxicated” has been played three million times. It shows Hasselhoff, the 56-year-old pop star and “Baywatch” idol, as he reclines shirtless on a hotel-room floor, fumbling with a badly composed hamburger. “This is a mess,” he grunts. “I’m lonely.” Much of the commentary from YouTube viewers concerns that elusive, mayonnaise-slicked burger. Smashed and disfigured, is it revolting? Or does Hasselhoff’s runaway desire for it make it tempting?

More from the NY Times Magazine here.
David Hasselhoff piss drunk here.

The news of Fischer’s death on 17 January had spread far and wide, but no one beyond the burial party had any notion that the controversial, Uncle Sam-hating, Jew-bashing former world chess champion was already underground until four the next afternoon, when the neighbour who had been present, Gardar Sverisson, phoned a friend to let him know. So closely held was the secret, so hastily arranged the funeral, that even the Lutheran priest whose church this was did not get to hear about it until after the event; even Fischer’s American brother-in-law (the first husband of his dead sister) did not know about it, which was especially galling since he had flown in from America for the funeral (and for a cut of Fischer’s €2m fortune), oblivious to the fact that the ceremony was taking place at the very moment his plane from New York touched down. Nor had Fischer’s most loyal Icelandic friend, Saemi Palsson, been told.

Palsson, a local hero in Reykjavik about whom a film is being made, told me he was saddened not to have had the chance to pay his last respects to his old friend yet he agreed, as did half a dozen people I spoke to in Iceland who had known Fischer, that this was just the way the dead grandmaster would have wanted it. ‘He distrusted everybody, he hated the media and he was so secretive that none of us knew until now, after his death, that Myoko Watai was his wife,’ Palsson said.

more from The Observer Magazine here.

The inability of so many talented émigrés to feel “at home anywhere” is not hard to understand. Virtually every artist who arrived in America with a substantial reputation found himself cut off from the sources of his self-esteem. The most advanced European techniques, in stage design or film editing or music composition, were usually too advanced for American audiences, who in the 1940s were still not completely free from their old inferiority complex about the Old World. What America offered instead was a great reservoir of democratic energy and commercial opportunity, which the Europeans’ snobbery and ingrained elitism made it impossible for them to access.

Which is not to say that none of them tried. Of all the varieties of frustration documented in “Artists in Exile,” the worst might be the frustration of those émigrés who tried earnestly to fit in, only to find that compromise meant losing the qualities that had made them great artists in the first place. Indeed, if Mr. Horowitz often sounds disgusted with the Americans of the period, who couldn’t appreciate the treasures they were given, he is equally condescending toward a figure like Kurt Weill, who remade his acrid Berlin style in the image of “American informality, egalitarianism, and eclecticism.”

more from the NY Sun here.

Painting constitutes by reconstituting bits of material. In Julian’s plate paintings, the broken shards of china are the carriers of the marks that reconstitute the sitters’ likenesses. At their best, these works are neither decorative nor purely “scenic” but have the freshness of something coming into being as we observe it, a quality that speaks to the phenomenology of the seeing eye and of the self finding form. Similarly, in The Diving Bell’s cinematography, Julian reconstitutes Jean-Do’s visual field not just through the direct correspondence between the shot and the character’s monocular gaze but by using the material of cinema as freely and spontaneously as he did his smashed plates. Commercial cinema is a recalcitrant medium. While a camera is capable of recording the minute shifts of light on a wafting curtain, which is to say immediacy, a movie set is a terribly difficult environment in which to locate these sensations, making Julian’s achievement all the more remarkable.

As with other painters of his generation, Julian’s aesthetic has always been about the freest and most surprising juxtaposition of images and an ability to see images and pure form as part of the same continuum. What set his work apart was his use of a fragmented, physically demanding surface, which gave his version of free association a kind of flickering, tentative quality that insists on the materiality of the painting. In this new film, we can feel the same aesthetic impulses at work. It flickers too. The gorgeous light that passes through the window and makes Jean-Do’s curtains glow is the artist’s material. Subjective experience and narrative come together in his movie’s astringent and luscious gaze.

more from artforum here.

From Scientific American:

You know those no-guilt diet drinks you chug by the gallon, and the fake sugar you dump in your coffee to stay trim? Bad news: a new study suggests that artificial sweeteners may actually make it harder to control your weight. Psychologists at Purdue University’s Ingestive Behavior Research Center report that nine rats given yogurt sweetened with no-cal saccharin ended up eating more and gaining more weight and body fat than eight fellow rodents given yogurt containing plain old glucose (a simple sugar with about 15 calories per teaspoon, the same as table sugar). Study authors Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson speculate the reason is that the faux sweetener messes with the brain, fooling it into revving up the body’s metabolism in anticipation of a never-to-come calorie load.

Typically, they say, the taste buds, sensing something sweet, signal the brain to prep the digestive system to gear up for a caloric onslaught; when the expected sugar jolt (extra calories) fails to materialize, the body gets rattled and has trouble bouncing back and regulating appetite when other food is available. As a result, rats eat more or expend less energy than they would have had they had the real thing. “The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharin can lead to greater body-weight gain and adiposity [fat] than would consuming the same food sweetened with a higher-calorie sugar,” the authors write in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience. They say that other artificial sweeteners—aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame—could have a similar effect.

More here.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

……………Gwendolyn Brooks

a tribute by: Rita Dove, Poet Laureate of the United States

How does one begin to convey the influence Gwendolyn Brooks has had on generations-not only writers, but people from all walks of life? How can one describe the fiercely personal connection her poems make, how chronicle her enormous impact on recent literary, social, and political history?

There is a tradition in the black church: we call it Testifying. It is the brave and humbling act of standing up among one’s family, friends, and neighbors to bare one’s soul, and to bear witness by acknowledging those who have sustained and nurtured the testifier along the way.

Here, then, is my testimonial honoring Gwendolyn Brooks:

Standing in front of this literary congregation as a grown woman, a woman who has entered her 40s, I feel very strange thinking that when Gwendolyn Brooks was awarded the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for “Annie Allen,” her second collection of poems, I was not even, as people used to say then, “a twinkle in my daddy’s eye.”

I was born two years after Gwendolyn Brooks, as the first Black writer ever, had received this highest honor in American letters. And it wasn’t until 17 years later, when as a gawky adolescent I spent the whole of a muggy midwestern summer combing the local library shelves for something that might speak to me-that the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks leapt off the pages of the book in my hands and struck me like a thunderbolt. These were words that spoke straight from the turbulent center of life-words that nourished like meat, not frosting. Yes, I was struck by these poems, poems with muscle and sinew, poems that weren’t afraid to take the language and revamp it, twist it and energize it so that it shimmied and dashed and lingered.

From that summer on I read everything by Gwendolyn Brooks that I could get my hands on: First I went back to her early books, “A street in Bronzeville” (1945) and the Pulitzer volume “Annie Allen;” then there was “Selected Poems,” which came out in 1963, followed by “In the Mecca: poems in 1968” and “Riot,” published in 1969, the same year she was selected to succeed Carl Sandburg as Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, a position she still holds. And most recently I admired her “The NearJohannesburg Boy and Other Poems” (1986) and “Blacks,” collected poems, published by the Third World Press in 1987.

Gwendolyn Brooks also ventured successfully into prose. “Maud Martha,” her moving novel, came out in 1953. The autobiographical remembrances and reflections “Report from Part One” and “The World of Gwendolyn Brooks” were both published in 1972, and in 1980 “Primer for Blacks” appeared. But Gwendolyn Brooks not only spoke loud and clearly through her books; she made herself heard on numerous disc recordings, in trenchant interviews and through books about her life and creative work. Honors for her outstanding achievements include, besides the Pulitzer Prize and poet laureate position, grants and awards from the likes of the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

As someone who, as a Black child, was educated in a literary tradition that seemed to have little use for my existence except as a caricature or in servitude and who, as a young person, came of age in a society where the discourse of the melting pot effectively translated into: “Disappear into the mainstream or Else,” I know that Gwendolyn Brooks was among the few who gave me the courage to insist on my own story. And though I never dreamed of following in her footsteps as far as the Pulitzer Prize, her shining example opened up new possibilities for me and generations of younger artists.

Thank you, Gwendolyn, for your invaluable contributions to changing the face of our world. 

BIOGRAPHY

The African American poet Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born June 7, 1917, to Keziah and David Brooks in Topeka, Kansas. Later that year the Brooks family moved to Chicago, where her two siblings were born. Brooks’ mother discovered Gwendolyn’s gift for writing when she was seven. She promptly encouraged this talent by exposing the girl to various forms of literature. Her parents, however were very strict and she was not allowed to play with the kids in the neighborhood. As a child she lacked the sass and brass of the other girls in her class and became very isolated. As a result, she made few friends while in school. When Brooks was at home in her room she often created a world of her own by reading and writing stories and poetry. Due to her lack of social skills she became very shy and continued to be shy throughout her adult life. After graduating from high school she went on to Wilson Junior College and graduated in 1936. Her early verses appeared in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper written primarily for the black community of Chicago. In 1939 she was married to Henry Blakely and they had two children, Henry junior and Nora Blakely. In 1945 Gwendolyn Brooks’ first book entitled A Street In Bronzeville was published. In 1949 Annie Allen (a loosely-connected series of poems related to a black girl’s growing up in Chicago) was published and received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950, becoming the first African American to receive this prestigious award in poetry. In 1953 Brooks’ first novel is published Maud Martha. In 1963 she published Selected Poems and secured her first teaching job at Chicago’s Columbia College. In 1967 at the Fisk University Writers Conference in Nashville, Brooks met the new black revolution. She came from South Dakota State College, which was all white, where she was received with love. Now she had arrived at an all black college where she was now coldly respected. After this trip Brooks says that she is no longer asleep she is now awake. After 1967 she became aware that other blacks feel that way and are not hesitant about saying it. She appeals to her people for understanding and is more conscious of them in her writing. In 1968 she published her next major collection of poetry, In the Mecca. The effect of her awakening is noticeable in her poetry. Brooks is less concerned with poetic form, and uses mostly free verse. In 1968 she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois and was also the first African American to receive an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 1976. Since then, Gwendolyn Brooks has gone on to receive over fifty honorary doctorates from numerous colleges and universities.   She has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. In 1990 she became professor of English at Chicago State University. Ms. Brooks died at the age of 83 Sunday December 3, 2000.

(Note: I felt deeply honored just knowing that for 8 years, I lived and breathed in the same city, Chicago, as the grand Ms. Brooks and was heartbroken when she died)

..
Palpar
Octavio Paz

Mis manos
abren las cortinas de tu ser
te visten con otra desnudez
descubren los cuerpos de tu cuerpo
Mis manos
inventan otro cuerpo a tu cuerpo

Touch

My hands
open the curtains of your being
clothe you in a further nudity
uncover the bodies of your body
My hands
invent another body for your body

Translation by Eliot Weinberger

..

In the week before he left his public school to go up to Cambridge for his medical degree, J G Ballard reports:

My last act … took place in the basement kitchen in North B house, when I skinned and then boiled a rabbit. I was determined to expose the skeleton, wire it together and use it as a combined mascot and table ornament. I filled the entire building with steam and a disagreeably potent stench. The housemaster came down to stop me, but backed off when he saw that I was on an intense mission of my own. Why the rabbit skeleton was so important I can’t remember.

There, compressed, is a quintessential chunk of Ballard. In tone, it is delivered as you might a cheerful reminiscence on the Parkinson show. There’s a dance of humour about it, too: you probably can’t really fill an entire building with steam by boiling a rabbit, and you’d expect the smell to be more or less agreeable, but the mad-scientist hyperbole is tickling.

more from Literary Review here.

Over at the Immanent Frame, Joan Scott discusses these issues against the backdrop of the lifting of the ban on headscarves in Turkey.

In Turkey there is now a great deal of controversy about proposed revisions to the constitution that would include lifting the ban on the wearing of Islamic headscarves in universities. Many commentators have taken this to be an ominous sign of the intention of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, who represent the Justice and Development Party (AKP), to undermine Turkey’s secular republic in the interests of establishing an Islamist state. In Turkey, as elsewhere in Europe, the headscarf has become a symbol not only of political Islam, but of the oppression of women. When, in 2004, France outlawed the wearing of headscarves in public schools, for example, it was in the name of secularism and gender equality. The two were taken to be synonymous.

History, both in France and Turkey, contradicts the claim that secularism guarantees equal rights for women and men. The French secular state long denied women the right to vote and its civil code enforced male prerogatives over women in families until well into the twentieth century. The Turkish republic (a one-party state until after WWII) was inspired by the French republic (although it gave women the vote in 1934, ten years before France) and it modeled its penal code on Italy’s. Until that code was revised in 2001 (with the support of the AKP), women were defined as men’s property and rape was considered a violation of a male property-holder’s right. Ideas about family honor resting on the control of women’s sexuality are not unique to Islam, nor are they foreign to secularism.

The sharp opposition between the secular and the religious is a distortion of historical reality. 

It seems to me that with arXiv, PLOS, (thanks to Sean Carroll for the corrections) and other online systems, it was just a matter of time. In the NYT:

Publish or perish has long been the burden  of  every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish  —  on the Web, at least  —   free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.

“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

{H/t: Maeve Adams]

Over at Politics and Culture, Amitava Kumar and Micahel Ryan edit a special issue on Rotten English.  Here’s an excerpt from Dohra Ahmad’s book Rotten English, in the issue:

One day as I was compiling material for this anthology, I sat in a train station in Jamaica, Queens reading Paul Keens-Douglas’s poem “Wukhand” when an older man sitting next to me began to chuckle.  “That’s just how we talk back home,” he said, pointing at the page.  “I never saw it written down before.”  This collection consists of two and a half centuries of writing that had never been written down before, of authors codifying previously untranscribed speech patterns. Keens-Douglas’s poem opens boldly in the voice of a Trinidadian day-laborer addressing a potential employer with the plea “Sah, gimme a wuk nah.  Ah lookin ole but ah strong.”  Other selections capture the speech of convicts and child-soldiers, bluesmen and housemaids from Mississippi to Scotland to India.  But more than that, Rotten English consists of literary works of extraordinary originality, power and beauty.  The poem that amused my train-platform neighbor employs a spectacular range of literary techniques, weaving among direct address, personification, Biblical reference, and a good deal of humor.  Like Keens-Douglas, all of the other authors contained here forge vernacular language into poems, short stories and novels that captivate readers with their artistry.

What would once have been pejoratively termed “dialect literature” has recently and decisively come into its own.  Half of the novels that won the Man Booker prize over the past twelve years are in a non-standard English: the British Commonwealth’s most prestigious award honors passages like “It ain’t like your regular sort of day” (the opening line of Graham Swift’s Last Orders) and “What kind of fucken life is this?” (the persistent refrain of DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little).  The reading public has been just as approving, eagerly devouring works like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Junot Díaz’s Drown.  Many vernacular novels, Walker’s own as well as Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, have become acclaimed movies.  This success is by no means limited to fiction; vernacular poetry has flourished in venues like the Nuyorican Poets Café and HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.  The aim of this collection is to represent that literary florescence, along with the earlier works that anticipated and enabled it.  Rotten English celebrates the stunningly unanticipated ways in which English has changed as it grew into a global language.

Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse’s defense (sort of) of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Rowan Williams doesn’t need me to defend him, having, presumably, better placed and more powerful friends (one in partiuclar). But here goes anyway. One of my several Anglophile (and this one a rare Episcopalian) in-laws just sent me (approvingly) this piece from the Sunday Times, and added the following, rather lovely if a little unlikely, quote, recommending a different version of multiculturalism from that which he takes the Archbishop to be committed (which, I gather from googling, comes from Mark Steyn):

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee”—the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

‘’You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

Let us take the Archbishop’s supposed treason first. The Archbishop’s actual speech, has been available for days. And the World at One transcript is here. So it is surprising that journalists like Ms. Marrin have been able to get away with what seem like wilful mireadings and mishearings.

Stanley Fish over at his NYT blog Think Again:

The responses to my column on Hillary Clinton-hating have been both voluminous (the largest number in the brief history of “Think Again”) and fascinating. The majority of posters agreed with the characterization of the attacks on Senator Clinton as vicious and irrational, but in not a few posts the repudiation of Hillary-hatred is followed by more of the same. Lisa (No. 17) nicely exemplifies the pattern. She begins by saying “I agree that there is a rabid nature in the manner in which numerous conservative groups attack Hillary Clinton,”, but in the very next sentence she declares that “most of Hillary’s reputation is well earned” and then she spends nine paragraphs being rabid. A significant minority of posters skipped the ritual disavowal of hatred and went straight to the task of adding to it.

These Clintonphobes said things like “there’s nothing to like about her”(394) and wrote at length about her clothing, her voice, her laugh, her arrogance, her “countless plastic surgeries” (an inference it would seem from the fact that at 60 she still looks good), her insincerity, her stridency, her ambition, her love of power, and her husband. In their view, the hatred they expressed was not irrational at all, but was provoked by record of crimes and character flaws they are happy to rehearse. Their mirror image on the left objected to my saying that President Bush fills the same role for liberals that Clinton fills for her detractors. No, no came the protest.

From The New York Times:

Artful persuasion depends on eye contact, but not just any kind. If one person prefers brief glances and the other is busy staring deeply, then it may not matter how good the jokes are or how much they both loved “Juno.” Rhythm counts. Voice cadence does, too. People who speak in loud, animated bursts tend to feed off others who do the same, just as those who are lower key tend to relax in a cool stream of measured tones. “Myself, I’m very conscious of people’s body position,” said Ray Allieri of Wellesley, Mass., a former telecommunications executive with 20 years in marketing and sales. “If they’re leaning back in their chair, I do that, and if they’re forward on their elbows, I tend to move forward,”

Psychologists have been studying the art of persuasion for nearly a century, analyzing activities like political propaganda, television campaigns and door-to-door sales. Many factors influence people’s susceptibility to an appeal, studies suggest, including their perception of how exclusive an opportunity is and whether their neighbors are buying it. Most people are also strongly sensitive to rapport, to charm, to the social music in the person making the pitch. In recent years, researchers have begun to decode the unspoken, subtle elements that come into play when people click. They have found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.

More here.

..

………………………………………………………….
………………………………………………………….
The Shirt
Robert Pinsky

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes–

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers–

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

The Triangle Fire
More

..

Rest at pale evening…
A tall slim tree…
Night coming tendrerly
Black like me.
(from Dream Variations, 1926)

James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri. His mother was a school teacher, she also wrote poetry. His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, was a storekeeper. He had wanted to become a lawyer, but he had been denied to take the bar exam. Hughes’s parents separated and his mother moved from city to city in search of work. In his rootless childhood, Hughes lived in Mexico, Topeka, Kansas, Colorado, Indiana and Buffalo. Part of his childhood Hughes lived with his grandmother. At the age of 13 he moved back with his mother and her second husband. Later the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Hughes’s stepfather worked in the steel mills. During this period Hughes found the poems of Carl Sandburg, whose unrhymed free verse influenced him deeply. After graduating from a high school in Cleveland, Hughes spent a year in Mexico with his light-skinned father, who had found there a release as a successful cattle rancher from racism of the North. On the train, when he returned to the north, Hughes wrote one of his most famous poems, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. It appeared in the African-American journal Crisis (1921). As an adolescent in Cleveland he participated in the activity of Karamu Players, and published in 1921 his first play, THE GOLDEN PIECE in 1921.

Supported by his father, Hughes entered in the early 1920s the Columbia University, New York. For the permanent disappointment of his father, Hughes soon abandoned his studies, and participated in more entertaining jazz and blues activities in nearby Harlem. Disgusted with life at the university and to see the world, he enlisted as a steward on a freighter bound to West Africa. He traveled to Paris, worked as a doorman and a bouncer of a night club, and continued to Italy.

After his return to the United States, Hughes worked in menial jobs and wrote poems, which earned him scholarship to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. According an anecdote, Hughes was “discovered” by the poet Vachel Lindsay in Washington. Lindsay was dining at the Wardman Park Hotel, where Hughes worked as a busboy, and dropped his poems beside the Lindsay’s dinner plate. Lindsay included several of them in his poetry reading. It prompted interviews of the “busboy poet”. Hughes quit his job and moved to New York City.

In 1929 Hughes received his bachelor’s degree. Hughes emphasized the importance of African culture and shared Du Bois’s belief that renewal could only come from an understanding of African roots.

“My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?”
(from ‘Cross’)

In several of his poems, Hughes had expressed with ardent voice sociopolitical protests. He portrayed people, whose lives were impacted by racism and sexual conflicts, he wrote about southern violence, Harlem street life, poverty, prejudice, hunger, hopelessness. But basically he was a conscientious artist, kept his middle-of-the road stance and worked hard to chronicle the black American experience, contrasting the beauty of the soul with the oppressive circumstance.

Wear it
Like a banner
For the proud –
Not like a shroud.
(from Color, 1943)

In his later years Hughes held posts at the Universities of Chicago and Atlanta. The poet also witnessed that doctoral dissertations already begun to be written about him – the earliest book on his work appeared already in the 1930s. Hughes never married and there has been unrelevant speculations about his sexuality. Several of his friends were homosexual, among them Carl Van Vechten, who wrote the controversial novel Nigger Heaven (1926) – Hughes had recommended the choice of the title – but several were not. Hughes died in Polyclinic Hospital in New York, on May 22, 1967, of complications after surgery. His collection of political poems, THE PANTHER AND THE LASH (1967), reflected the anger and militancy of the 1960s. The book had been rejected first by Knopf in 1964 as too risky. Hughes’s own history of NAACP appeared in 1962; he had received a few year’s earlier the NAACP’S Spingarn Medal.

Hughes published more than 35 books, he was a versatile writer, but he hated “long novels, narrative poems”, as he once said. Although the Harlem Renaissance faded away during the Great Depression, its influence is seen in the writings of later authors, such as James Baldwin, who, however, criticized Hughes’s poetic achievement. From the late 1940’s through the 1950’s Hughes revised under pressure his poems- may of them became less tough.

Matti Friedman in the Chicago Tribune:

Underneath the homes and ragged streets of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan lie the remnants of a glorious Jewish past: coins, seals, a water tunnel hewn by a Judean king 2,700 years ago, a road that led to a biblical Temple.

But archaeology is hard-wired into the politics of modern-day Arab-Israeli strife, and new digs to unearth more of this past are cutting to the heart of the charged argument over who owns the holy city today.

Israel says it’s reconnecting with its ancient heritage. Palestinians contend the archaeology is a political weapon to undermine their own links to Jerusalem.

Lying on a densely populated slope outside the walled Old City, the area is known to Israelis as the City of David, named for the legendary monarch who ruled a Jewish kingdom from this spot 3,000 years ago. It is the kernel from which Jerusalem grew.

But Silwan is in east Jerusalem, which Israel captured from Jordan in 1967 and which Palestinians claim for the capital of a future state.

Palestinians and Israelis are trying again to negotiate a peace deal, one which must include an agreement to share Jerusalem. The collision in this neighborhood — between Silwan and the City of David — encapsulates the complexities ahead.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Sughra Raza. Rhinebeck Afternoon.

Painting: acrylic on canvas, 2004.

Digital photograph January 26, 2008.

Thanks to Gerald and Stephanie Kufner for their help in staging the shot.

In the Guardian:

The book-writing machine works simply, at least in principle. First, one feeds it a recipe for writing a particular genre of book – a tome about crossword puzzles, say, or a market outlook for products. Then hook the computer up to a big database full of info about crossword puzzles or market information. The computer uses the recipe to select data from the database and write and format it into book form.

Parker estimates that it costs him about 12p to write a book, with, perhaps, not much difference in quality from what a competent wordsmith or an MBA might produce.

Nothing but the title need actually exist until somebody orders a copy. At that point, a computer assembles the book’s content and prints up a single copy.

Among Parker’s bestselling books (as ranked by Amazon.co.uk) one finds surprises.

His fifth-best seller is Webster’s Albanian to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 1.