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.

Modris Eksteins reviews Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond in the LRB:

In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much to say about the creativity of the moderns but surprisingly little about their negativity. He conceives of Modernism in older terms as principally an intellectual and artistic grouping bent on liberation rather than as a broader frame of mind distinguished by ballooning malaise and irony. While he shies away from definition because of the contradictory manifestations of Modernist effort – how does one reconcile Thomas Mann and Andy Warhol? – he can’t help but see the Modernist instinct as essentially an affirmative urge. Two-thirds of the way through his book, Gay states bluntly that ‘liberalism’ was the ‘fundamental principle of Modernism’.

But whose liberalism is he talking about? Surely not the free enterprise aspirations of the beastly bourgeoisie. Nor can he be referring to the socially conscious progressivism that arose in the later 19th century and urged a politics of compassion, moderation and compromise. In fact the heyday of Modernism, from roughly 1890 to 1930, corresponded to a mounting crisis of liberalism, in both social thought and politics. The two dispositions, Modernism and liberalism, were if anything adversarial. Modernism was all about destroying restraint, pushing to the edge, living life dangerously. Modernism was an extremism of the soul in an age of extremes. Gay makes little mention of the role of illness, abnormality and neurosis in the Modernist mindset.

If you enter the search terms “Norman Mailer” and “hammer” on YouTube, you will be directed to a clip titled “Norman Mailer vs Rip Torn—on camera brawl.” Click on the link and an amazing series of frames rolls across the computer screen: Torn, the accomplished and respected actor, bonks Mailer, the novelist and trailblazing New Journalist, over the head with a hammer, drawing blood. The two men tussle on the grass, grunting and cursing. Then Mailer bites Torn’s ear half off in retaliation.

Four of Mailer’s children (three of them under the age of 10) can be heard screaming and crying in terror as Mailer’s fourth wife, Beverly Bentley, bursts into the frame, shouting obscenities at Torn and smacking him repeatedly in the head.

It’s the horrifying climax of Maidstone, Mailer’s third experimental film, which was released in 1971. He called it “a guerrilla raid on the nature of reality.”

more from Vanity Fair here.
Hammer here.

Although he is one of the most important American photographers of his generation, Lee Friedlander remains an enigma. Born in Washington in 1934, he came to prominence in 1967 in the “New Documents” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which featured his work alongside that of Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus.

All three photographers were inheritors of the documentary photography tradition. This genre of photography began during the 1930s, when image-makers such as Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott were inspired to document the Great Depression’s bleak and shocking counter-narrative to the American Dream. Influenced by the ideas of modernism, these photographers focused on the gritty, unromantic, quotidian detail of the world around them.

Arbus’s illuminations of social misfits and Winogrand’s wide-angle snapshots of edgy, agitated crowd scenes clearly belong to this genre of social reportage. Superficially, Friedlander fits in there too. With a repertoire of subjects ranging from street scenes to nudes, self-portraits and factory workers, he has spent decades documenting the warp and weft of the American vernacular.

more from FT.com here.

“To leave is romantic, to return is baroque.” -Anton LaVey

There are only so many ways to riff on the image of the World Trade Center. That was true before September 11; it remains true today. You can do the math: add a tower, remove one, take both away. A lot of people fantasized about getting rid of them, long before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or whoever dreamt of using airliners to do the job, though the actual circumstances of the WTC’s destruction were not quite what they had in mind. Party Music, an album by the Marxist hip hop group The Coup, had to be postponed in late September 2001 because the original cover art featured group members, DJ Pam the Funkstress and Raymond “Boots” Riley, a fake detonator in hand, the Twin Towers exploding overhead. They had worse timing than most, but they were far from alone.

In death as in life, the creation of Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki has served as a twin engine of fantasy.

more from Bidoun here.

..

Don Arturo Says:
Victor Hernández Cruz

When I was young 
there was no difference
between the way I danced
and the way tomatoes
converted themselves
into sauce.
I did the waltz or a
guaguancó
which everyone your rhythm
which every one your song
The whole town was caressed
to sleep with my two-tone
shoes
Everyone
had to leave me alone
on the dirt or on the wood
They used to come from far
and near
just to say look at Arturo
disappear.

..

From The Boston Book Review:

James Baldwin isn’t much commented on these days, but for a few years in the early 1960s he lit up the cultural landscape like a bolt from the heavens-a prophet of the decade’s black liberation struggle who became one of the most widely read African-American writers in this country’s history. In his essays and novels, this one-time teenage preacher, with a gospel of recognition, responsibility and redemption, evokes an unprecedented response from white America. In his writings Baldwin trenchantly demonstrates the necessity of recognizing our sins: not just racism, but our refusal to really know other humans, to accept differences, and to love.

It was a gospel he continued to preach to the end of his life, in a multifarious stream of novels, plays, essays, reviews and interviews. The early ’60s were his historical moment because that was a time, a brief window, when the possibility seemed alive, rather broadly among both white and black, that such a redemption might actually come to pass. But as American racism revealed itself to be a structure that would not move half a millimeter without being forced, and as the struggle against it assumed more militant or nationalistic forms, Baldwin was left, not exactly behind- for he closely followed and mostly supported the turn to militancy-but with a message that seemed increasingly irrelevant.

That’s the brief, capsule, story-or one of them. Despite the unavoidable necessity he faced of grappling with the realities of racism, Baldwin resisted categorization as a black writer: He was, he always insisted, an American writer. He was also a man whose unashamed sexuality and second novel Giovanni’s Room (1956) presaged the gay liberation movement. Characteristically, Baldwin would not class himself as either a gay novelist or even as gay: What he was about, he’d say, was being open to love, no matter what the form or gender. His was a fascinating personality: gregarious, mercurial, witty, alcoholic, confrontational, intimate-legendary for his parties, his unreliability with appointments, his personal grace and magnetism, his stormy rages and his gracious apologies. Through it all, though, he always came across as real; what he confronted people with-whether charming, angry, needy, benevolent or profound-was always Jimmy.

Growing up very poor in Harlem, convinced of his own ugliness, small and shy, Baldwin was nurtured by his mother, and by some of his school teachers, who provided an avenue of escape through reading-particularly one Orilla “Bill” Miller, of whom Baldwin said that it was “certainly because of her, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really managed to hate white people.”

In his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin describes his own experience with this “dread, chronic disease” of the victim: “There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood-one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it.” 

It was the need to save himself from the fate of becoming furious, embittered and of no use to himself or others, that led Baldwin, some six years later and with $40 in his pocket, to flee America for Paris. Always lucky, or gifted, in the contacts he was able to make, and to lean on, Baldwin was welcomed to the city by Richard Wright, whom he’d sought out when the older novelist was still living in Brooklyn. And he did blossom there, seeking and finding, or defining, his own identity as a writer and a lover of other human beings-and also forming the chaotic style of existence, the constant drinking and search for companionship as well as the habits of financial irresponsibility and disordered working conditions that were to continue to characterize his life.

Go Tell It On the Mountain (a novel centered in a ghetto church such as that in which Baldwin had for a time found a salvation), Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni’s Room-in these novels and essays of the 1950s, Baldwin forged a place for himself on the American literary scene, refusing to be categorized as a “Negro author” (the latter novel, indeed, contains no black characters), but rather as a writer of great sensitivity and critical intelligence who wrote out of his personal, including his African-American, experience. But, in a new book of essays (Nobody Knows My Name, 1961), a new novel (Another Country, 1962), and the culminating Fire Next Time (1963), he soon surpassed merely personal expression to become prophet, moralist, preacher and an epicenter of American cultural upheaval.

Baldwin’s essential message was simple, and very much of its time. America did not have a “Negro problem” (as it was often called then), but a white problem, which consisted in the inability of those who built their identities on being white to face up to the realities either of American history or of their own bodies, feelings and selves. The problem, in other words, is one of white identity, which requires the projection of unacceptable facts and desires onto an alien other, and a solution is possible only through acceptance and love.

Baldwin left an important legacy-not so much of works and accomplishment (although he left those too) as of struggle and quest. Through the ’70s and into the ’80s, (he died in 1987) Baldwin continued to write (although with diminished output), continued to be an important literary figure. The most important aspect of James Baldwin’s life and work is his unrelenting attack upon some of the more crucial and perennial problems of human social life, basic questions which revolve around dichotomies like politics and morality, love and power, the personal and the political.

Yeats thought one had to choose between “Perfection of the life, or of the work.” Baldwin wrestled with this conundrum (for he was much committed to his personal relationships with others), but also with the contradictions between art and politics and between the particular demands imposed by his identity as a black man, and more general ones imposed by simply being human. Perhaps he broke himself on these rocks and achieved no final synthesis, but his profound and honest struggle is exemplary and full of lessons in these days of debates and dilemmas concerning multiculturalism, identity politics, the possibilities of social change, and the role of artists and intellectuals.

(Note: In the early and mid-eighties, I could arguably be considered a James Baldwin groupie as I tried to attend as many of his public readings as possible.)

From The Guardian:

Has there been a Booker to better Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children? That’s the question the Man Booker prize are posing on the 40th anniversary of the literary award. In 1993 Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers on the prize’s 25th anniversary but now, 15 years and 15 winners on, he is in danger of losing his crown.

The Best of the Booker is a one-off award which will, ultimately, be decided by the public. A panel of judges, including the broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and John Mullan, professor of English at UCL, and led by the biographer and critic Victoria Glendinning, will select a shortlist of six titles from the 41 novels that have won the prize. The discrepancy between the number of winners and the number of years arises from the fact that the award has twice been was shared: between Nadine Gordimer’s The Conversationist and Stanley Middleton’s Holiday in 1974, and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger in 1992.

More here.

Over at The Smart Set, Morgan Meis on Obama’s The Audacity of Hope:

If platitudes had weight, Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope would be impossible to lift off the table. Still, it’s a good book. By the standards of “writings by politicians” it’s in the top percentile. You read it and you like the man. You read it and feel that he has managed somehow to be both a skilled politician and a genuine human being. He writes, for instance, about what motivates politicians to run for office and to continue doing so:

Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts for the behavior of politicians, however. There is a companion emotion, perhaps more pervasive and certainly more destructive, an emotion that, after the giddiness of your official announcement as a candidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and doesn’t release you until after Election Day. That emotion is fear. Not just fear of losing — although that is bad enough — but fear of total, complete humiliation.

Those lines are indicative of the book’s overall tone. They are disarming in their honesty on one hand, but calculated in the end for being so. Will anyone think less of him for admitting the role of fear in a politician’s life?

Jennifer Schussler in the New York Times:

Popular books applying Darwinian logic to everything from religion to dating to dealmaking may fly off the shelves, but attempts to apply evolutionary theory to literary analysis tend to make novelists, English professors and other humanist types break out in hives.

So I was interested to receive a copy of William Flesch’s new book, “Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Compenents of Fiction” (Harvard University Press), blurbed by no less stout a guardian of the humanistic tradition than Harold Bloom as a “fresh account of the workings of high literature.”

More here.

Women’s application of makeup is an update of the Narcissus myth. One cannot apply it — or at least not well — without looking in a mirror. The self-reflexive gaze required has elements of the lover’s gaze: Eyes and lips are focal points and demand the most attention and care. Thus, applying makeup is a ritual of self-love, a kind of worship at the shrine of the self, though it can also reflect insecurity and even self-loathing. At its best, it is an exercise in self-critique, and, if you’ll permit me to be grandiose, a path to existential understanding. Like all great human efforts at improvement, makeup is “over-determined,” weighted down with multiple, often contradictory meanings.

more from The Smart Set here.

“For me, the paint is the person.”[1] “I’d like to think that I had in some way caught a scene rather than composed it, so that you never questioned it.” “I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie.” By his own account, Lucian Freud is a painter who reaches after truth and substance. And for many today, the claims he makes hold good. To treat him as “the greatest living realist painter” has now become commonplace. Robert Hughes gave Freud that title in 1987,[2] the point at which he started to acquire an international renown.

For much of the four preceding decades, he had been a somewhat marginal figure on the art scene, even in his own adopted hometown of London. Twenty years onward, however, the world lies at the feet of the still-active octogenarian. It’s not just that his work is deemed to give new force to the age-old equation between the bodies we look at and the marks we make. His persona—that of a loner and a gambler, trailing, in Hughes’s description, a “long and labyrinthine” sexual history—lends itself to the equally popular pairing-off of high artistic achievement with bohemian recklessness.

more from The NYRB here.

The Coens form a conspiracy of two—industrious, secretive, amused, and seemingly indifferent to both criticism and praise. Early in their careers, they gave detailed interviews, but in recent years they have discussed only specific and relatively trivial matters concerning their movies, avoiding comments on larger meanings or anything approaching a general intellectual outlook. This strategic reticence—the avoidance of art talk—is solidly in the tradition of American movie directors’ presenting themselves solely as pragmatic entertainers. But the Coens have gone further into insouciance than any old-time director I can think of. In the opening titles for “Fargo” (1996), they announced that the movie was based on a true story, though it wasn’t. “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) begins with a title stating that the movie is “based upon ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer,” which they later claimed they had never read. From the beginning, they’ve been playing with moviemaking, playing with the audience, the press, the deep-dish interpreters, disappearing behind a façade of mockery.

more from The New Yorker here.

From Books and Writers:

“And, curiously, he felt that he was something, somebody, precisely and simply because of that cold threat of death. The terror of the white world had left no doubt in him about his worth; in fact, that white world had guaranteed his worth in the most brutal and dramatic manner. Most surely he was was something, in the eyes of the white world, or it would not have threatened him as it had. That white world, then, threatened as much as it beckoned. Though he did not know it, he was fatally in love with that white world, in love in a way that could never be cured. That white world’s attempt to curb him dangerously and irresponsibly claimed him for its own.” (from The Long Dream, 1958)

Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His grandparents had been slaves and his father, Nathaniel, who was an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, left home when Richard was six. Wright grew up in poverty, staying often at homes of relatives. His mother, Ella Wilson, was a schoolteacher; she moved with her family to Memphis, where she found employment as a cook. In 1915-16 Wright attended school for a few months, but his mother’s illness forced him to leave. He attended school sporadically, lived in Arkansas with his aunt Maggie and uncle Silas, who was murdered, and in Mississippi. In his childhood Wright was often beaten. However, he continued to teach himself, secretly borrowing books from the whites-only library in Memphis. “My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety,” he later wrote in his autobiography BLACK BOY (1945).

Wright worked at various jobs, among others as a newspaper delivery boy and as an assistant to an insurance agent. His spare-time jobs enabled Wright to buy schoolbooks, pulp magazines, and dime novels, all of which he read avidly. At the age of fifteen, he wrote his first story, ‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre’. It was published in Southern Register, a local black newspaper. Wright attended junior high school in Jackson, Mississippi, and graduated in 1925. From 1925 to 1927 Wright lived in Memphis, where he worked for an optical company.

In 1937 Wright moved to New York City, becoming editor of Daily Worke , and a later vice president of the League for American Writers. In 1938 Wright published UNCLE TOM’S CHILDREN, a collection of stories of Southern racism, which was reissued in expanded form two years later. The story ‘Fire and Cloud’ was given the O. Henry Memorial award in 1938. Uncle Tom’s Children helped Wright to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to devote his full time to writing.

Wright was named in the late 1930s to the literature editorial board of New Masses, and was denounced by the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities investigating the Federal Writers’ Project. In 1940 Wright’s Native Son became an instant best-seller. In some bookstores stock was sold out within hours; the novel sold 215,000 copies in the first three weeks. Many white Americans saw Bigger Thomas, the central character, as a symbol of the entire black community, and Wright later stated that “there are meanings in my books of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the paper.” Wright used in the book a 1938 criminal case involving a black youth, Robert Nixon, who killed a white woman.

For the most part, the book was rendered in the present. Wright was an avid filmgoer and he explained that “I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger’s story was happening now, like play upon a stage or a movie…” In the first film version, directed by Pierre Chenal, and adapted by Chenal and Wright, the author himself acted the role of Bigger Thomas. Wright spent three years on the project. The film was a disaster. The 1986 version was directed by Jerrold Freedman and adapted by Richard Wesley. Oprah Winfrey was in the role of Bigger’s mother. “The second adaptation even goes so far as to eliminate Bigger’s murder of Bessie, in order to reinforce the idea that Bigger is a mild-mannered victim, thus robbing the story of any controversy, and dialectic, and any philosophical significance. It also robs the story of the complexities of gender relations between black men and black women that are touched upon by Wright.” (from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, 1999)

The protagonist of Native Son is a young black man in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who lives in a one-room apartment in Chicago’s South Side Black Belt, with his mother, his young sister, Vera, and younger brother, Buddy. He is hired by a wealthy family named Dalton as their chauffeur. Mr. Dalton gives money for social welfare, but at the same time owns the rat-infested building in which Bigger lives. The rhythms of Bigger’s life are “indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger – like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force.” The family’s free-thinking daughter Mary befriends him – with her he visits Communist headquarters, where she meets her boyfriend Jan Erlone. Mary has had too much drink. Bigger carries Mary back to her room. When her blind mother enters the room, he accidentally smothers her. In panic, he burns the body in the basement and attempt to implicate Jan. Mary’s bones are discovered and Bigger also kills his own girlfriend, Bessie, to cover his tracks. He is captured and in the jail Bigger feels for the first time a sense of freedom: “Seems sort of natural-like, me being here facing that death chair. Now I come to think of it, it seems like something like this just had to be.” He is then condemned to death and faces his destiny unrepentantly, affirming that ‘what I killed for, I am!’ Yet in prison he also comes to terms with the need for a common brotherhood. The last third of the book is largely a speech given by Boris A. Max, a party attorney, in Bigger’s defense at his trial. Wright clearly used Max to convey his own Marxist assessment of the racial situation in the United States. The speech is also based on Clarence Darrow’s defense of Leopold and Loeb. Wright’s leftist friends were troubled because the Wright did not view Bigger’s fate from an exploited worker’s perspective. During the 1950s, the widespread fear of communism incited by the Cold War and McCarthyism led to the diminished popularity of Native Son. The sexually explicit scenes were removed from the Book-of-the-Month Club publication and Thomas did not show such obvious interest in the white character, Mary Dalton.

In 1944 Wright left Communist Party. He spent the summer of 1945 as an artist-in-residence at the Bread Loaf School for writers in Middlebury, Vermont, and then went to France with his wife and 4-year-old daughter. During his years in France, Wright spent much of his time supporting nationalist movements in Africa. In 1953 he travelled in Africa, gathering material for BLACK POWER (1954), and witnessing the rise of the Pan-African movement. Among his other works in the 1950s were SAVAGE HOLIDAY (1954), about a white man caught in a web of violence, THE COLOR CURTAIN (1956), about Asia, PAGAN SPAIN (1957), a travel book of a Catholic country full of contradictions, and WHITE MAN, LISTEN! (1958), a collection of lectures on racial injustice. Wright’s last short story, ‘Big Black Good Man’, which originally was published in Esquire and was collected in EIGHT MEN (1961), was set in Copenhangen and dealt with prejudices. THE LONG DREAM (1958), a novel set in Mississippi, had a poor reception. Its sequel, Island of Hallucination, set in Paris, was not published. “Everything in the book happened, but I’ve twisted characters so that people won’t recognise them,” said Wright to his agent. AMERICAN HUNGER, a sequel to Black Boy, appeared in 1977.

Wright distanced in the last years of his life from his associates. He suffered from poor health and financial difficulties and grew suspicious about the activities of CIA in Paris – in which he was right. Wright’s plans to move to London were rejected by the British officials. In 1959 he began composing haiku, producing almost four thousand of them. Wright died nearly penniless at the age of fifty-two in Paris, on November 28, 1960. At his request, his body was cremated and his ashes mixed with the ashes of a copy of Black Boy. Wright’s daughter Julia has claimed that her father was murdered. Upon his death, Wright left behind an unfinished book on French West Africa. His travel writings, edited by Virginia Whatley Smith, appeared in 2001.

From Scientific American:

For all their sophistication, computers still can’t compete with nature’s gift—a brain that sorts objects quickly and accurately enough so that people and primates can interpret what they see as it happens. Despite decades of development, computer vision systems still get bogged down by the massive amounts of data necessary just to identify the most basic images. Throw that same image into a different setting or change the lighting and artificial intelligence is even less of a match for good old gray matter.

These shortcomings become more pressing as demand grows for security systems that can recognize a known terrorist’s face in a crowded airport and car safety mechanisms such as a sensor that can hit the brakes when it detects a pedestrian or another vehicle in the car’s path. Seeking the way forward, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are looking to advances in neuroscience for ways to improve artificial intelligence, and vice versa. The school’s leading minds in both neural and computer sciences are pooling their research, mixing complex computational models of the brain with their work on image processing.

More here.

   W.H. Auden would be 101 years old today.

   Musee des Beaux Arts
   W.H.Auden

   About suffering they were never wrong,
   The Old Masters; how well, they understood
   Its human position; how it takes place
   While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
   How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
   For the miraculous birth, there always must be
   Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
   On a pond at the edge of the wood:
   They never forgot
   That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
   Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
   Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
   Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away     Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may       Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,     But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone     As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green     Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen     Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,     had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. ..