For this Valentine’s Day:

In 1966, a small group of Moroccan poets, artists, and intellectuals launched Souffles, a quarterly review that would over time become at once a vehicle for cultural renewal and an instigator of efforts to promote social justice in the Maghreb. From its very first issue, Souffles was a unique experiment, a Moroccan and Maghrebi effort to liberate the country’s intellectual framework from fetid provincialism and lingering colonial complexes. It was a cri de coeur, a rebellion against the artistic status quo, a manifesto for a new aesthetics, even a new worldview. Its trademark cover, emblazoned with an intense black sun, radiated rebellion.

A decade earlier, the French protectorate of Morocco had managed to secure its independence as a kingdom while Paris concentrated on retaining neighboring Algeria, where a war of independence was just beginning. Muhammad V, Morocco’s new king and former sultan, and the unlikely hero of the nationalist movement, began to consolidate political power against the backdrop of the Cold War. Leftists battled conservatives for control of the nationalist movement, while Crown Prince Hassan maneuvered to position himself as the ultimate political arbiter of the young country.

more from Bidoun here (via Rachel Donadio at Paper Cuts).

‘I Know a Man’ seems like a good introduction to the vast opus Creeley, who died in 2005, left behind: thousands of poems, dozens of essays and interviews, a bitter novel, a book of short stories, and hundreds of pages of hard-to-classify prose. Yet ‘I Know a Man’ also leaves out much of what made Creeley notable in each of the three phases of his career: his early focus on lust and shame, the diary-like verse-and-prose books of the 1970s, and the quiet achievements in his late poems of retrospect and solitude. We recognise Creeley’s poems first by what they leave out: he uses few long or rare words, no regular metres and almost no metaphors. The young Creeley aspired to write in Basic English: ‘he very nearly does,’ his friend Cid Corman wrote, except for the slang. Creeley kept for five decades a way of writing whose markers include parsimonious diction, strong enjambment, two to four-line stanzas and occasional rhyme. What changed over his career was not his language but the use he made of it, the attitudes and goals around which the small, clear crystals of his verse might form.

more from the LRB here.

When Charles Lamb heard, in the summer of 1814, that his old friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been asked to translate Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dark masterwork Faust into English, he could hardly contain his horror. “I counsel thee”, Lamb wrote to Coleridge on August 23, “to let it alone . . . how canst thou translate the language of cat-monkeys? Fie on such fantasies!” To Lamb, the surreal banter between Faust and the mob of half-human meerkats he meets in the “Witch’s Kitchen” was a metaphor for the meaninglessness of Goethe’s work. For nearly two centuries, the literary world has believed that Lamb’s intervention was decisive, or at least that it coincided with Coleridge’s own resolution not to pursue the project. “I need not tell you”, Coleridge wrote twenty years later in his Table Talk, “that I never put pen to paper as a translator of Faust.”

Romantic scholars have long puzzled over the contradiction between Coleridge’s insistence that he “never put pen to paper” and Goethe’s own conviction that the troubled author of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was in fact hard at work on the project.

more from the TLS here.

Nineteen years ago today, Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous death sentence against Salman Rushdie, which sent him into hiding. I met him at one of his first public appearances after that and he joked that it was nice to hang out with someone who wasn’t continually saying things like “Come in, Hudson Commander,” into his sleeve! Though the Iranian government has sensibly lifted the fatwa since then, Rushdie remains in danger (two of his translators have been murdered), and each year I try to remind readers of his plight and the dangers of extremism for art, and free speech in general.

This is from Emory Wheel:

Salman Rushdie, Emory distinguished writer-in-residence, kicked off the second of his five extended visits to Emory with a lecture addressing the overlapping social and literary trends in the reading of literature.

The lecture, titled “Autobiography and the Novel,” was held Sunday evening and examined the intermingling of writers’ lives with their texts.

Rushdie began his lecture by discussing three 18th century novels that were published anonymously: Robinson Crusoe, Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travels. But these texts were still lauded as exceptional literature by their contemporaries despite the lack of knowledge about the authors’ personal life, Rushdie said.

“The personality and life story of the author was deemed not to be of any relevance to his work,” Rushdie argued. “Fiction was fiction. Life was life. Two hundred and fifty years ago people knew these were different things. This is no longer the case.”

More here. And this is from the British Sunday Times:

After hiding for more than a decade with a price on his head, the author Sir Salman Rushdie could be forgiven for objecting to a portrait that actually shows his face.

Instead of attending a conventional sitting, he submitted to a psychological test conducted at his New York apartment with a couple of Californian conceptual artists.

The result depicts Rushdie, 60, a slightly donnish, bearded figure, as a purple lobster floating before a fiery red planet, surrounded by snowflakes.

Alternatively, it provides a psychological profile of the novelist during the collapse of his marriage to his fourth wife, the model and food writer Padma Lakshmi, 37.

Rushdie faced death threats from Muslims after a fatwa was imposed on him by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s spiritual leader, in 1989, for his controversial book The Satanic Verses.

His knighthood, announced last June, prompted riots in Pakistan, and his separation from Lakshmi followed in July.

More here. And this is from All American Patriots:

Random House will publish Salman Rushdie’s new novel, THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE, a dazzling historical novel set in Renaissance Florence and the court of the great Mughal Empire.

“This new novel marks a bold departure for Salman Rushdie in terms of setting and subject matter,” comments Will Murphy, Rushdie’s editor at Random House. “It is an amazing display of his gifts as a storyteller and will undoubtedly draw many new readers to his already wide audience.”

Drawing on more than seven years of research, THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role. A virtuoso feat of storytelling that mixes political intrigue and high drama, romance and magic, Rushdie’s novel also reflects on the dangers that come when fantasy and reality grow too interwined.

More here.

..

Accordéoniste
Woody Rudin

When you’re born with the name
Hakim Matabuki,
you naturally pick up something
in childhood
for self-defense.

Some say he played with sewing kit
buttons because the boys shunned him.
Some say he fell in love
with the four buttons
on his mother’s dress,
that he used to finger
for hours on end.

I knew him when his mother
gifted him with a collection of buttons
and keys on which to play love notes,
his own talisman of sound.

When he pumped the bellows for low notes,
I pictured him gliding through a sunken ship
holding breath for minutes on end.
Soprano notes were high wire aerials,
played in the frequency of rumor
that held my ear for hours.

The boy accordéoniste,
who found that love
could reside within buttons
if you offered them
just the right touch.

..

Civil rights activist. Born July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi. After growing up in a Mississippi farming family, Medgar Evers enlisted in the United States Army in 1943. He fought in both France and Germany during World War II before receiving an honorable discharge in 1946. In 1948, he entered Alcorn Agricutural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University) in Lorman, Mississippi. During his senior year, Evers married a fellow student, Myrlie Beasley; they later had three children: Darrell, Reena, and James. Upon graduation from college in 1952, Evers moved to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he began working as an insurance salesman. He and his older brother, Charles Evers, also worked on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organizing local affiliates in Philadelphia. In 1954, the year of the momentous Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which purportedly ended segregation of schools, Medgar quit the insurance business; he subsequently applied and was denied admission to the University of Mississippi Law School. His unsuccessful effort to integrate the state’s oldest public educational institution attracted the attention of the NAACP’s national office. Later that year, Evers moved to the state capital of Jackson and became the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. As state field secretary, Evers recruited members throughout Mississippi and organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations, and economic boycotts of white-owned companies that practiced discrimination. He also worked to investigate crimes perpetrated against blacks, most notably the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy who had allegedly been killed for talking to a white woman. As early as 1955, Evers’ activism made him the most visible civil rights leader in the state of Missisippi. As a result, he and his family were subjected to numerous threats and violent actions over the years, including a firebombing of their house in May 1963. At 12:40 a.m. on June 12, 1963, Evers was shot in the back in the driveway of his home in Jackson. He died less than a hour later at a nearby hospital. Evers was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, and the NAACP posthumously awarded him their 1963 Spingarn Medal. The national outrage over Evers’ murder increased support for legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Immediately after Evers’ death, the NAACP appointed his brother Charles to his position. Charles Evers went on to become a major political figure in the state; in 1969, he was elected the mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, becoming the first African-American mayor of a racially mixed Southern town since the Reconstruction. A police and FBI investigation of the murder quickly unearthed a prime suspect—Byron De La Beckwith, a white segregationist and founding member of Mississippi’s White Citizens Council. Despite mounting evidence against him—a rifle found near the crime scene was registered to Beckwith and had his fingerprints on the scope, and several witnesses placed him in the area—Beckwith denied shooting Evers. He maintained that the gun had been stolen, and produced several witnesses to testify that he was elsewhere on the night of the murder.   The bitter conflict over segregation surrounded the two trials that followed. Beckwith received the support of some of Mississippi’s most prominent citizens, including then-Governor Ross Barnett, who appeared at Beckwith’s first trial to shake hands with the defendant in full view of the jury. In 1964, Beckwith was set free after two all-white juries deadlocked. After Beckwith’s second trial, Myrlie Evers moved with her children to California, where she earned a degree from Pomona College and was later named to the Los Angeles Commission of Public Works. Convinced that her husband’s killer had not been brought to justice, she continued to search for new evidence in the case. In 1989, the question of Beckwith’s guilt was again raised when a Jackson newspaper published accounts of the files of the now-defunct Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, an organization that existed during the 1950s to help raise popular support for the maintenance of segregation. The accounts showed that the commission had helped lawyers for Beckwith screen potential jurors during the first two trials. A review by the Hinds County District Attorney’s office found no evidence of such jury tampering, but it did locate a number of new witnesses, including several individuals who would eventually testify that Beckwith had bragged to them about the murder. In December 1990, Beckwith was again indicted for the murder of Medgar Evers. After a number of appeals, the Mississippi Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of a third trial in April 1993. Ten months later, testimony began before a racially mixed jury of eight blacks and four whites. In February 1994, nearly 31 years after Evers’ death, Beckwith was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died in January 2001 at the age of 80. In 1995, Myrlie Evers-Williams (she is now remarried and lives in Oregon) was elected chairwoman of the board of directors of the NAACP. She is currently a member of the board’s executive committee.

From Scientific American:

Genetic material once dismissed as mere “junk” may in fact be responsible to the evolution of simple invertebrates into more complex organisms sporting backbones, according to a new study. Tiny snippets of the genome known as microRNA were long thought to be genomic refuse because they were transcribed from so-called “junk DNA,” sections of the genome that do not carry information for making proteins responsible for various cellular functions. Evidence has been building since 1993, however, that microRNA is anything but genetic bric-a-brac. Quite the contrary, scientists say that it actually plays a crucial role in switching protein-coding genes on or off and regulating the amount of protein those genes produce.

(Picture: The lamprey, the jawless fish that represents one of the earliest vertebrates, has several more microRNAs than the proto-vertebrate sea squirt).

Now, researchers from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and the University of Bristol in England report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that these tiny genetic segments could be responsible for the evolution of animals with backbones, noting that they found a surfeit of microRNA in the genomes of the earliest vertebrates, such as lampreys (jawless fish), when compared with invertebrates like sea squirts.

More here.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, John Allen Paulos has sent us the following expanded excerpt from his new book Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up:

I found myself at loose ends in a beach town in Thailand on Christmas morning, 2006. Away from my family in Philadelphia, I was visiting a friend who was planning an early retirement in Southeast Asia. While wandering near the edge of town, I spotted a spirit house, a sort of miniature temple mounted on a pedestal like a bird house. Although irreligious, I noted the fruit offerings strewn around it and was attracted to its makeshift beauty.

Pausing at the shrine, I saw a small Internet café just beyond it, empty except for three nubile young women who were giggling and periodically running up to one or another of the many computers in the room. The desire for my morning Diet Coke, the need to check my email, and the palpable mirth bubbling out of the women drew me into the place.

Despite the goings-on, I first took care of my caffeine and correspondence demands. Soon, however, I noticed there were Webcams on all the computers. It was obvious that the young women were multi-tasking, sending instant messages and occasional pictures in quick succession to nine farangs (Thai for Western foreigners) scattered around the world.

Feeling unmoored and a bit voyeuristic, I eavesdropped and soon gleaned that the girls had met the men on their earlier trips to Thailand. (Perhaps sexist-sounding, “girls” nevertheless seems the more apt term for them.) I noted with amusement that when new pictures of their admirers appeared on the various monitors, the girls would chortle, and the English “expert” among them would write something endearing. The three girls would then quickly move on to the samey (Thai for boyfriend or husband) of another of the girls. Each girl seemed to have three.

Seeing my obvious interest, the girls started to ask me what certain words in the e-mails meant. “Sawatee (hello), Mr. Diet Coke, what ‘pine for you’ mean?” I explained that “pine for you” meant “miss you very much,” that “obsessed with you” meant “think about you all the time,” and so on. The men seemed strangely oblivious to the girls’ limited English vocabulary. They also seemed lovesick, lonely, and mooning over their “true loves” at Christmas.

After I proved myself as a translator, the girls asked me what else they could say. I suggested that they write how lonely the beach was without their boyfriends and helped them a bit with their spelling. My lines elicited good responses from their sameys, causing them to laugh uproariously. They pumped me for more good lines, which I happily provided. The girl who had distractedly taken my money for the Diet Coke now offered me another one gratis as well as various coconut candies, which I accepted, and some fried insects, which I declined.

Christopher Moore, A Bangkok-based novelist whose compelling mysteries are set in Thailand, once jokingly remarked to me that Thai has no common word or phrase to describe integrity of a rigid, abstract type, but many frequently used terms for “fun.” And great fun it was helping the girls dupe farangs on three continents out of their money via the Western Union office in town. (Perhaps “dupe” is the wrong word since I think the bargain was a fair one and inexpensive at that: a Yuletide fantasy for a few dollars.)

Read more »

Cosma Shalizi and Brad DeLong share some thoughts on appropriate professorial attire. Cosma:

I have just had one Prof. Erik M. Jensen’s op-ed “A Call for Professional Attire” referred to me by multiple sources (none especially pointedly, thanks), and I find myself greatly irritated.  Jensen says that contemporary American academics generally fail to dress up, in the modes that are supposed to reflect seriousness and status, and spends about 2000 words bemoaning this; longing for a lost “golden age” (his phrase); and trying to ridicule, brow-beat, and shame his audience into complying with his wishes.  The closest he comes, in all of this, to present an actual reason for doing so is saying this: “People generally act better when they’re dressed right. If a professor is sending a signal of seriousness, of civility, students will pick it up.”  This is backed up by a casual, second-hand reflection on how “in DiMaggio’s day … [t]he men wore white shirts and ties under coats and hats, the proper attire in public, even at a ball game.”

This is a style of cultural commentary which drives me up the wall, so I try to avoid it.  It is not that hard to think of an actual rationale for what Jensen wants; it would go something like this.

DeLong:

A professor’s clothes–supposed to lie somewhere on the spectrum between total nudity and the purple-red dress of a Byzantine emperor–need to serve four purposes:

1. To make the appropriate people envy, in an appropriate way, the professor’s (actual or counterfactual) spouse.
2. To make the professor comfortable.
3. To make the students more willing and eager to learn.
4. To take a particular stand on the great debate between the courtier Lord Chesterfield on the one hand and the intellectual Samuel Johnson on the other, summed up in Johnson’s remark that Chesterfield’s fashion-centered advice to his illegitimate son taught the boy “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master.”

I will pass over (1) as requiring a knowledge of evolutionary biology and a working aesthetic sense–which disqualifies me on both counts. I will pass over (2) as requiring a knowledge of biological thermodynamics which I do not have, save to observe that the traditional tweedy professor male academic clothes are, from a thermodynamic point of view, appropriate only for some British or New England campus without effective central heating.

Tina Beattie in openDemocracy:

Nowhere in the lecture does Williams call for the implementation of sharia law – though this has become the default assumption underlying the febrile controversy the talk and its accompanying media coverage almost instantly generated. Rather, he asks how it might be possible for the civil law to accommodate some of the legal procedures by which Muslim communities in Britain have traditionally regulated their relationships and financial affairs, while safeguarding the equality and human rights afforded by modern law for vulnerable inidividuals (particularly women) within those communities. He reiterates several times that it would be important to ensure that “no ‘supplementary’ jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights.” He also points out that there is already provision in English law for Jewish and Christian communities to have some autonomy over the governance of their religious affairs, without thereby putting themselves outside the law.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

[N]ow the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has cited the Beth Din [Jewish arbitration courts] as one of his reasons for believing that sharia, or Islamic law, can and should become a part of what he called “plural jurisdiction” in Britain. His reasoning, if one may call it that, is clear: Other faiths already have their own legal authorities, so why not the Muslims, too? What could be more tolerant and diverse? This same argument has been used already, and will be used again, to demand that laws governing “blasphemy,” originally written to protect only Christians from being upset, should now, in a nondiscriminatory way, be amended to cover Muslims as well. The alternative—don’t have any blasphemy laws and let religious people’s feelings be hurt, just as the feelings of the secular are regularly offended by religion—doesn’t occur to the archbishop and people who think like him.

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)

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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

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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.