Wien – Kaffee bleibt – nach Wasser – das Lieblingsgetränk der Österreicher. 37 Prozent haben sich in einer aktuellen Umfrage für den Muntermacher ausgesprochen, dem am 1. Oktober ein „eigener“ Tag gewidmet ist. Erstmals wurde diesmal auch ein Genussbotschafter ernannt, der am Mittwoch im Rahmen eines Pressefrühstücks vorgestellt wurde. Die Wahl fiel auf „Falstaff“-Herausgeber Wolfgang M. Rosam, dessen Medium auch mit der Befragung von 500 Österreichern zu dem Thema betraut war. Dabei zeigten sich gegensätzliche Gründe für den Konsum des Heißgetränkes: vier von zehn (41 Prozent) schätzen die Wirkung als Energiespender, mehr als ein Drittel (39 Prozent) die Entspannung und mehr als ein Viertel (29 Prozent) gab als Motiv die Pause beim Kaffeetrinken an. Bevorzugter Ort des Konsum sind die eigenen vier Wände: 61 Prozent genießen Melange & Co am liebsten zu Hause, ein Fünftel im traditionellen Kaffeehaus. Nur zwei Prozent befürworten die To-go-Variante. Auch wenn weiterhin die skandinavischen Länder in Sachen Verbrauch deutlich vor der Alpenrepublik liegen (Jahresverbrauch in Finnland pro Kopf und Jahr: 10,35 Kilogramm, Österreich 7,33) gelte der Bohnentrank hierzulande als Kulturgut, omnipräsent im sozialen Leben. Im Schnitt greifen Herr und Frau Österreicher drei Mal täglich zur Tasse oder zum Häferl. In keinem anderen europäischen Land sind die Ausgaben für Kaffee derartig stark gestiegen wie hier. Auch die Auswahl an Spezialitäten erweist sich als besonders: Vierzig unterschiedliche Kompositionen findet man auf den Speise-bzw. Getränkekarten. Europaweit bleibt Wien das Kaffeehaus-Zentrum: 815 Hauptbetriebe und 145 Filialen standen laut WKO 2017 zur Wahl; dazu kommen 750 Kaffeerestaurants, 500 Espressobars und Stehkaffeeschenken plus 200 Kaffeekonditoreien. Die Wiener Kaffeehauskultur zählt seit 2011 zum immateriellen UNESCO-Kulturerbe. Der vor mehr als sechzig Jahren ins Leben gerufene heimische Kaffee- und Tee-Verband hat zur Jahrtausendwende den „Tag des Kaffees“ für den Muntermacher ins Leben gerufen und setzt heuer auf die verbindende Kraft des Koffeins: Unter dem Motto „Building Bridges“ stehen Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede in der europäischen Kaffeekultur im Fokus. Geschäftsführer Johann Brunner verwies auf die Rolle Österreichs als Gastgeber und Vermittler im Zuge der aktuellen EU-Ratspräsidentschaft und zog Parallelen zur Kaffeekultur – beides bringe Menschen zusammen. Seit 2015 wird auch weltweit der „International Coffee Day“ zelebriert. (APA) Schlagworte Mehr Artikel aus dieser Kategorie The post Jeder Zweite würde ‚‚Alltag ohne Kaffee nicht überstehen” appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. via GuaripeteMagazine https://ift.tt/2R6wGYe Beinahe jeder und alles hat heute schon einen eigenen Tag, warum also nicht auch der Kaffee. Immerhin wird der Tag des Kaffees (1. Oktober) in Österreich bereits seit 17 Jahren gefeiert, zumindest vom Österreichischen Kaffee- und Teeverband. Den aktuellen Tag des Kaffees hat der seit 1952 bestehende Verband zum Anlass genommen, sich die Kaffeegewohnheiten der Europäer, im Speziellen der Österreicher, genauer anzusehen. Dabei stellte sich unter anderem heraus, dass nicht die Italiener die Kaffeenation Europas sind, sondern die Finnen. Die wichtigsten Ergebnisse im Überblick: Finnen sind Spitzenreiter beim KaffeekonsumBeim Kaffeekonsum schlägt der hohe Norden die Italiener ebenso wie Österreich. Die Finnen sind (laut Statista Consumer Market Outlet) mit einem jährlichen Kaffeekonsum von 10,35 Kilogramm pro Kopf (2017) Spitzenreiter in Europa und auch Nordamerika (das ebenso untersucht wurde). Im Norden spielt Kaffee anscheinend eine besonders wichtige Rolle. Gefolgt werden die Finnen nämlich von den Niederländern (9,58 kg), den Schweden (9,40 kg), den Dänen (8,16 kg) und den Norwegern (7,76 kg). Auf Platz sechs folgt immerhin Österreich mit einem jährlichen Pro-Kopf-Verbrauch von 7,33 Kilogramm. Das entspreche etwa drei Tassen Kaffee pro Tag, erklärt Johann Brunner, Geschäftsführer des Österreichischen Kaffeeverbandes bei der Präsentation der Studie. Erst auf Platz sieben folgen die Italiener mit 6,69 Kilogramm pro Jahr und Kopf. Die Amerikaner kommen auf nur 4,43 Kilogramm. Filterkaffee im Norden, Espresso im SüdenBei den Kaffeevorlieben sind im hohen Norden helle Röstungen und Filterkaffee beliebt. Je südlicher es wird, desto eher werden dunkle Röstungen und vor allem Espresso gefragt. Niederländer geben am meisten für Kaffee ausHeißgetränke sind übrigens der am schnellsten wachsende Markt der Welt, 85 Prozent davon sind auf Kaffee zurückzuführen. Am meisten Geld geben nicht die Finnen, sondern die Niederländer für Kaffee aus, nämlich 81,4 Euro pro Kopf und Jahr, gefolgt von den Italienern (66,6 Euro), den Finnen (65,1 Euro) und den Österreichern (62,9 Euro). Wobei die Österreicher die höchste Steigerung bei den Pro-Kopf-Ausgaben in den letzten Jahren aufweisen können (nämlich von 27,1 Euro im Jahr 2010 auf 62,9 Euro 2017). Österreicher trinken ihren Kaffee am liebsten zu HauseDie Österreicher trinken ihren Kaffee am liebsten zu Hause und aus dem Vollautomat, wie eine Umfrage des Magazins Falstaff (mit 500 Befragten) ergibt. 61 Prozent trinken den Kaffee am liebsten zu Hause, gefolgt vom traditionellen Kaffeehaus (22 Prozent) und modernen Cafés (12 Prozent). Nur zwei Prozent trinken ihren Kaffee am liebsten unterwegs. Die Zahl der Vollautomaten hat sich in den letzten 15 Jahren übrigens auf 38,1 Prozent verdreifacht. Der Anteil der Filterkaffeemaschinen hat sich hingegen von 74,2 Prozent (2003) auf 30,8 Prozent (2017) reduziert. Die Hälfte der Österreicher kommt nicht ohne Kaffee ausKaffee ist für Österreicher offenbar wichtiger als Wein und Bier – zumindest offiziell. 37 Prozent der Österreicher nennen Kaffee ihr Lieblingsgetränk (für 56 Prozent ist es Wasser). Knapp die Hälfte der Befragten (49 Prozent) geben an, dass sie den Alltag nicht ohne Kaffee überstehen würden. (ks) The post Finnen sind Europameister in Sachen Kaffee appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. via GuaripeteMagazine https://ift.tt/2QbWGAh Time for another edition of Unlocking Library Coolness, where I share neat-tastic things I’ve discovered about local libraries, beyond the inestimable excellence of All The Reading Materials. The look on my kids’ faces when I told them their library card allowed them to check out up to 50 books is still one of my favorite memories. In previous editions, we’ve covered Libby, language learning options, and then magazine options for digital browsing. Last month, I talked about my terribly satisfying habit of checking out cookbooks I want to try before I buy. This month, we’re talking about the Library of Things. I’m not sure if that’s the official title, but it has its own Wikipedia entry, so I’m thinking that’s it. A Library of Things is:
So, TL;DR – you may be able to borrow Useful Things in addition to Books and Media from your local library. I first learned about this during a podcast interview with Jennifer Lohmann from NoveList (Ep. 242. Jennifer Lohmann: NoveList and Hosting a Romance Book Club). She’d noticed in the course of her work that some libraries offered really nifty things. From the transcript: Jennifer: I get to see what all the cool, like, cool things libraries are doing. I just talked to a library that was having a, a candy mold collection that you could check out. Sarah: Okay, that’s cool. Jennifer: Yeah! I was just then like, yeah, wow! Okay! Sarah: That’s brilliant. Jennifer: And they also, they, they lent fishing rods, too. Sarah: Also cool. Jennifer: That’s one of the best parts of my job is poking around library websites and going, oh, my gosh! This is awesome! That’s so cool that they’re doing that! I was reminded recently of this nifty feature of the library when I saw the Twinbrook branch of the MCPL (that’s Montgomery County, Maryland) had a new collection of musical instruments to check out. HOW COOL IS THAT. Their collection includes, “…a variety of guitars, ukeleles, and hand-drums (djembe, doumbek, bohdran, kalimba, and more) to start our musical collection. There were 29 instruments and six amplifiers total: six ukeleles, six acoustic guitars, two electric guitars, two electric basses, 11 drums, two kalimbas (thumb pianos); and two bass and two guitar amplifiers, and two headphone amplifiers.” As a person with a few musical instruments in her home and two dudes who love to experiment with different ones, the option to borrow from the library to try one out is a brilliant idea. If you are looking to get dressed up for a job interview, wedding, audition, graduation, prom, or other formal event, the Riverside Library can help. With our NYPL Grow Up work accessories collection, you can now borrow neckties and bowties, briefcases, and handbags. Graceful curtsey to Philip Bump of The Washington Post, whose tweet alerted me to this excellent collection. The NYPL is not alone in lending ties and other items for job interviews and events. The Paschalville branch of the Philadelphia Free Library has a “tie-brary,” and libraries in Cincinnati and other locations also offer similar options, too. (If you’re thinking, hold up, I could donate to a program like that, contact your local* and see if they offer a lending program like these!) *I absolutely love, btw, the silliness of calling my local library “my local” like it’s a pub, partly because I don’t have a local pub and because I’m way more likely to go to a library than a pub (though I do love pub food and cider, aka Apple Juice for Grown Ups). Anyway, what other Library of Things collections are there out there? SO MANY. Among the different choices I’ve spotted:
How do you find out if your local library system offers a Library of Things? Well, many will have a webpage, such as the Northlake, IL, Library of Things collection. Googling would be the first step – which is true for many things, EXCEPT when your loved one has a fever because Dr. Google has atrocious bedside manner! You can also call your library to ask if they lend the things you’re looking for, or if they have a Library of Things collection. Many, many thanks to the clever librarians who have developed these collections for patrons. It’s another way that our public libraries are utterly priceless. What about you? Does your local (hee!) have a Library of Things? What items have you borrowed or seen? The post Unlocking Library Coolness: The Library of Things appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. via GuaripeteMagazine https://ift.tt/2xSyhIr It’s Wednesday and I’m sick! I haven’t been sick in a while and it’s awful. Went to the doctor yesterday and I pretty much have to ride it out. So that’s where I’m at! How are all of you? Good? Bad? … Can’t get enough of Alisha Rai’s writing? Check out this short story she wrote for Refinery29! Hopefully, it’ll help tide you over until her next book comes out. … September 23rd was Bi Visibility Day! Shoutout to my fellow bisexuals! If you’re like me and want more bisexual characters in your romance, author Dahlia Adler has a great list of recs over at Frolic.Media. … Authors Kevin Kwan, Jasmine Guillory, Jenny Han, Tara Isabella Burton, and Caroline Kepnes discuss how fashion affects their characters and writing: “I did a lot of mock online shopping for what Alexa would wear to this wedding,” Guillory says. “I wanted her to feel like the star version of herself, like she has a glow about her the whole night.” Guillory — or Maddie — ultimately selects a red fit-and-flare cocktail dress with a low neckline. The cut of the dress was intentional; Guillory wanted Alexa to be able to wear it without Spanx underneath, in case she happened to later undress in front of her wedding date, Drew Nichols. Instead, she would be able to wear the dress with a pretty, sexy bra and panty set. For Alexa, the dress inspires a serious confidence boost. “Normally, she would think, ‘Oh, a guy like this would not be interested in me,’” Guillory explains. “But with that dress on, she feels like Cinderella. … It’s kind of a magic dress and a magic night, so she might as well flirt with the hot guy. Why not?” What are your thoughts on the intersection of characters and clothing choices? … Did you know Pottery Barn has a Harry Potter collection? RIP your wallet. … Sometimes, to get through the day, we just need to look at cute animal photos. Enjoy the Zooborns Instagram account! … Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way! The post Links: Fashion, Bi Visibility, & More appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. via GuaripeteMagazine https://ift.tt/2OelGcP
Don’t want to miss an ebook sale? Sign up for our newsletter, and you’ll get the week’s available deals each Friday. The post Books by Suzanne Brockmann, Charlotte Stein, & More appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. via GuaripeteMagazine https://ift.tt/2xUBwzg 9/27/2018 0 Comments Peter Fryer & Thinking BlackA decade ago, shortly after the publication of my first book, a biography of the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, I sat at home with the phone pinned to my ear awaiting the first listener’s question to my phone-in interview on BBC radio. Eventually, the caller came on the line. But he did not have a question; he merely wanted to make a statement: “I resent…” his voice trembled with anger. “I resent the fact that the publisher got a white man to write a book about Marcus Garvey.” “What makes you think I’m white?” I asked. The caller paused. Perhaps he was confused. “Well, you don’t sound black!” As a black man who hadn’t knowingly attempted to pass for white in the way that I spoke, I hadn’t anticipated the objection. But now that I thought about it: What was reason for the caller’s rebuke and sharp resentment? Why would it have mattered if the author of a book on a significant black subject had been white? It’s an old conundrum—and one that has surfaced once more with the republication of Staying Power, a seminal work on black lives in Britain written by a white English Marxist, Peter Fryer, more than thirty years ago. The writer and intellectual Paul Gilroy, who contributes a foreword to the new edition, recalls that in 1984, upon the book’s publication, Fryer was subject to hateful treatment “dished out by resentful, lazy, and hostile community spokespeople who told him that he had no right to undertake the work because this particular history of suffering was their own special property.” But the book has endured better than the initial critiques, and more than thirty years later, the belief held by its author, an engaged and committed radical historian—that his book could be an invaluable weapon in the fight against racism—has been vindicated. Fryer was a journalist whose interest in Britain’s black population was signaled early in his career, in 1948, when he traveled as the correspondent for the Daily Worker out to Tilbury Docks, east of London, along with a handful of other newspaper reporters, to cover the disembarkation of the MV Empire Windrush bearing, as he put it, “Five hundred pairs of willing hands from Jamaica,” and heralding mass migration to Britain. Fryer would later excel as an independent historian whose affiliation with the Communist Party of Great Britain did not survive the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination, when he wrote sympathetically about the revolution and was subsequently expelled from the party. Fryer’s moral compass, which sharpened his writing, was governed by an abhorrence of the inequities endured by the underclass. This led him in the late 1970s, without any special resources or the backing of a university, to embark on an epic research project that culminated in Staying Power. The book was a rigorous, if occasionally romanticized, “people’s history” that challenged the dominant assumptions underpinning much of the mainstream writing on Britain’s post-war “immigrant problem,” which, within a decade of the Windrush’s arrival, had morphed into the “color problem.” The cultural life of black migrants and their descendants did not figure in the work of conservative historians. But neither did they appear to fit into the model of the working class conceived by radical historians on the British left such as E.P. Thomson in The Making of the English Working Class. This oversight was particularly apparent in the first New Left’s Raymond William’s formulation of class and extended to the researchers who descended on factories for the 1961–1962 Affluent Worker Study yet failed to include the black workforce among their interviewees. On a simple but profound level, by writing a history with black people at its centre, Fryer challenged the assumption that the working class was a homogeneous and indigenous group. But there was a caveat: in Fryer’s conception, black history was radical. His subjects, overwhelmingly men, were radicals viewed through a prism of racism; there was little room for the portrayal of an aspirational black bourgeoisie. For black critics such as Trevor Phillips, Staying Power offered “a depressingly one-dimensional picture of black life.” A recent public conference at the University of Sussex on the book’s legacy exposed tensions between the academics (mostly white) and members of the public who were largely black. Black attendees took exception to Fryer’s “arrogance and ownership,” which they saw as epitomized by “The” in the book’s subtitle The History of Black People in Britain, as opposed to “A history…” The conference also highlighted the gulf between those for whom black history was an academic exercise and others who were living it. Fryer’s own color appears more important now than it did in 1984. It’s doubtful whether, in today’s political climate, a British publisher would be rushing to print such a manuscript by a white author. Any publisher today would be far more comfortable (excited even), as would black readers, if the author was black. This attitude in part explains the extraordinary charge, a kind of visceral and vicarious pleasure, evinced by black readers over the title of Reni Eddo-Lodge’s recent book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Race? It’s a black thing, isn’t it? As with many facets of race, this dilemma over proprietorship has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade. Before considering whether white writers are able to write about a black story, it’s worth reflecting on whether they should. Today, any serious African-American or Afro-Caribbean novelist seems to have to earn her or his spurs by embarking on at least one fictional tale of slavery. The growing list includes Toni Morrison, Marlon James, Andrea Levy, and Colson Whitehead. This is their prerogative. But in centuries past, the true-life stories of slaves were the only bridges that allowed prospective black authors to cross over into publication. From the 1800s onward, several hundred slave narratives were published. Early on, a number of these testimonies were dictated to well-meaning white amanuenses fired with abolitionist zeal to act as conduits for a largely white reading public, bringing to its attention a so-called “black message inside a white envelope” (in the words of William L. Andrews, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). But slave narratives operated not just as accounts of brutality and redemption; later, they served a vital role in complicating and rebutting the notions that black people were not quite human and could never master the tools of civility. Following the publication of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography in 1845, manuscripts of slave narratives increasingly adopted the subtitle that Douglass had attached to his work, “Written by Himself,” as a direct challenge to assumptions about black intellectual inferiority and illiteracy. When black people became the authors of their own lives, their white allies were relegated. John B. Russwurm fully understood and espoused this necessity when he explained the early mission of his abolitionist newspaper, Freedom’s Journal: “too long have others spoke for us [such that] our vices and our degradations are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed unnoticed.” Nonetheless, a century later, black writers and researchers were still jealously guarding what they considered to be their people’s stories from predatory white counterparts. In 1927, when Zora Neale Hurston sat down with Kossola O-Lo-Loo-Ay of the West African Takkoi tribe, the last African to be stolen from the continent and sold into slavery, to record his story, she was incensed by what was beyond belief: that the enslaved had largely been excised from the histories of slavery, which were often written, with the benefit of ledgers, bills of sales, and maps, from the point of view of those who benefited from the trade. “All these words from the seller,” Hurston complained, “but not one word from the sold.” Indeed, Alain Locke, one of Hurston’s mentors, counseled that she should advise Kossola “to avoid talking to other folklore collectors—white ones, no doubt—who he and Godmother [Hurston’s benefactor] felt ‘should be kept entirely away not only from the project in hand but from this entire movement for the rediscovery of our folk material.’” But what happens in the absence of a tradition of interrogating history, when there is no rediscovery of suppressed voices on the horizon? The presence of black people in Britain, dating as far back as the third century AD with the occupying imperial Roman army, is now accepted widely; it even formed the centerpiece of a recent BBC TV series that reprised much of Fryer’s original research. But before the 1980s, a manuscript that began, as Fryer’s did, with the sentence “There were Africans in Britain before the English came here” would have been deemed laughable, heretical nonsense. With the exception of a handful of intellectuals like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, there were few black authors or historians, to my knowledge, writing about the history of black people in Britain. Into that vacuum walked Peter Fryer, who labored throughout the early 1980s researching and composing his monumental text. In Staying Power, he argued that race was a central aspect in Britain’s development during both the height of empire and its aftermath, and that British culture had been transformed by the presence of its black population. For me, growing up black in England in the 1970s, there seemed little by way of literature—other than the unflattering, patronizing kind penned by white men—to illuminate the dark past of black lives. My father would often remark that the deviousness of the British didn’t end with the swashbuckling days of imperial plunder when, in his Jamaican-inflected dialect, “the Inglisman tek away the man country and give dem some beads.” Then, in those straightened postcolonial times, having exhausted their own subjects, white English writers seemed increasingly bent on stripping us of all we had left: our stories. When reading books that featured black British characters or storylines, I turned the pages in as gingerly fashion as a man opening an envelope containing a bill he knows he cannot pay. As a teenage reader, the work of Colin MacInnes in City of Spades (at least from the uber-cool black man on the cover) seemed more promising. There was no photo of MacInnes himself, but I guessed from his portrayal of “spades” that the author must be a sympathetic white man. The novel’s protagonist, Johnny Fortune, appeared, even to my unsophisticated child’s eye, to be a caricature, but I was glad for the attention the author afforded black people. It wasn’t great, but it would have to do. In nonfiction, our presence, if noted at all, was confined to the margins of English history, which mostly seemed to exclude migrants and us, their children. But then surely others—writers, I hoped—felt the same and were busily, quietly writing literature that would one day define us. Scouring the shelves of the local library, though, was distressing; the books could not be found. It was with some trepidation, then, that thirty years ago I delved into the book that was available: Staying Power. I began, at first like a thirsty but cautious man, sipping the content; by the end, I was gulping and overcome with delight. Fryer’s care and sensitivity was uncanny; the book read as if he was one of us. The response by writers of color was one of gratitude, even though some, such as Trevor Phillips, who later became the head of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, lamented its narrow focus on radicals. Because of Staying Power’s retrieval of the lost histories of black Britain, Salman Rushdie considered it “an invaluable book, which manages the rare feat of combining scholarship with readability.” Fryer was well aware of the perils that accompanied a white writer composing a book with the subtitle The History of Black People in Britain. In his introduction, he asked: “Can such an account be written by a writer in a way that is acceptable to black readers?” He went on to justify his work stating that he would “make the effort to ‘think black’—i.e. to grasp imaginatively as well as intellectually the essence of the black historical experience.” This question of the possibility of “thinking black” is one that has been asked on both sides of the Atlantic. The US tradition of such discourse, with its inevitable fixation on its particular racial legacy, was never an ideal fit for how race might be written about in the UK; but, even as an approximation, it appeared to be more advanced than anything on offer on these shores. It was possible to be both envious and disturbed by American writers’ attempts to use their craft as a tool of repair in resolving racial conflict. “Among the many humiliations of the American Negro,” wrote the novelist William Styron in 1963, “not the least burdensome has been the various characterizations he has had to undergo in the eyes of the white man.” For much of American history, black people had been oppressed by their white compatriots, but four years after writing this assessment, Styron believed that the condition, at least as it related to him, had been reversed when he lamented: “the whole Negro population has been on my back.” His novel The Confessions of Nat Turner was to blame. Black people seethed over Styron’s fictional depiction of the slave rebel leader. In 1831, Turner’s bloody insurrection in Virginia had resulted in the killing of sixty white people before his capture, confession, and execution. Styron said he conceived of Turner as a hero, and that he attempted “to portray an era of history which we are now beginning to understand, to our enormous heartbreak and misery was the most crucial era that America possessed.” It was bold of a white author to intervene in that fractious history by suggesting in his fiction to many African-American readers chagrin that Turner had been in love with a young white woman, the one person whom he personally killed in the rebellion. Styron was vilified. Ten black authors issued a harsh collective critique of his work. “The whole thing soured me in being a friend of black people,” Styron complained, “and I hate to say that.” This hostile reception served as a lesson for how things might go horribly wrong in writing about race and black history, even with a presumption of empathy and good intentions. A fellow Southern writer, John Howard Griffin, had gone even further a few years earlier in his determination to put himself in the shoes of the “other.” Griffin set out to impersonate a black man and so explore the segregated South undercover. This sounds like a bizarre act of minstrelsy, but the subsequent book Black Like Me, written from the point of view of a participating observer, was motivated by earnest good will. Aided by a sun lamp and a course of oral medication usually prescribed for vitiligo, Griffin transformed himself in appearance into “a fierce, bald, very dark Negro.” Finding work on a shoe-shine stand in New Orleans and later steeling himself to spend time in Mississippi, Griffin was exposed to the glaring “hate stare” and the kind of daily humiliations he’d never have experienced if not for adopting black-face. Ten years ago, a month or so after my BBC radio phone interview, I agreed to give a presentation on Marcus Garvey to a group of Pan-Africanists who met regularly in South London. My daughter, Jazz, accompanied me to a draughty, near derelict tenement building in Brixton for what turned out to be a rite of racial sacrament. At the start of the meeting, we joined hands with twenty or so others and conjured the ancestors—pouring libations on the floor for those stolen from Africa but who had not made it to the other side—lest we forget. I gave my presentation and, at the end, the host called for questions. A young woman, whom I’d noticed had remained at the back, huddled in a thick coat and slightly detached from the proceedings, was the first to speak. She shimmered with intensity, battle ready. “Are both your parents, black?” she asked. There was a collective intake of breath from the brothers and sisters, and one or two whispers and sighs of “shame.” But no one intervened. I could not betray my irritation. “What do you mean?” “You know, ’cause there are some light-skinned voices that are allowed to come through. And certain others aren’t.” She smiled, satisfied. “So are they?” “What?” I felt suddenly as if I was being called on to audition, to show my bona fides. I found my thoughts turn to Fryer, to my early admiration of his work and the tangled debates about race, writing, and authenticity. Fryer would have accepted, as I did in Brixton, that there were others whose experience of blackness was more acute, and that they carried more intense feelings of anger. “Massa day done,” the slaves had shouted on emancipation: “Is our turn now.” And yet, the clock had turned slowly; their descendants were still not heard—at least in the UK, where others, whether brown like me or white like Fryer, acted as privileged intermediaries. The woman tried again: “Your parents. Both black?” I did not answer, refusing to be led down the rabbit hole of a manufactured dispute. I had devoted a number of years to researching and writing a five hundred page book on Marcus Garvey and that is what mattered, not whether I was a shade or two lighter than her. A century ago, Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois had rehearsed the familiar argument over whether the so-called undiluted disadvantaged black population had greater moral authority on questions of race than their semi-privileged brown compatriots. It was time to put an end to the kind of thinking which Freud characterized as “the narcissism of minor differences.” I felt aggrieved, both for myself and for my daughter who had enthusiastically come along to the meeting. Jazz, then seventeen years old, was even lighter-skinned than me. Was she black enough? The meeting came to an end and we stacked away the chairs. As my daughter and I walked out into the cold, drizzly night, she argued that I should have told the young interlocutor that my parents’ color was unimportant. I agreed. Back in the 1980s, Staying Power offered people like me an invaluable intellectual resource for a turn away from the separatist and divisive politics of race that many then indulged in—and that has resurfaced in recent years and even found a home in some mainstream publications. But color does not confer privilege in writing; neither is experience alone enough. As Fryer had shown, skill was required, hard work, luck, and, finally, empathy. “Thinking black” cannot take anyone the whole way, to the full experience of “being black.” But there is no singular black experience. And a great creative leap is necessary, no matter what your color, when interpreting the past—whether tales of a “division of Moors” in the Roman imperial army stationed in the northern Britain, or the history of enslaved Africans transported to the West Indies. Peter Fryer’s Staying Power is still the gold standard in writing about black people’s history in Britain. He supplied a vision of history that was underpinned with compassion and extraordinarily deep research, even as he acknowledged the limitations of his perspective. “All who venture into this field,” wrote Fryer, “must sooner or later ponder the West African saying: ‘Knowledge is like the baobab tree; one person’s arms cannot encompass it.’” The post Peter Fryer & ‘Thinking Black’ appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. via GuaripeteMagazine https://ift.tt/2Om06mG 9/27/2018 0 Comments Inside the Mayo ClinicVisiting a cousin in an otherworldly alpine sanitarium, Hans Castorp, the hero of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, succumbs not just to the lung-rattle his cousin has checked in to cure but also to the hospital’s cult-like allure and its promise: something beyond health. I felt like Hans on my own sojourn, some months ago, at the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota’s lowland answer to Mann’s pristine peak. The Mayo has long been ranked among the best hospitals in the United States, widely treated even by those who’ve never been there as the ultimate medical authority, as well as last resort. When my father, in his thirties, was dying from a little-understood disease, the query always posed—breathlessly so—was, “Have you tried the Mayo?” There were urgent conferrals on the phone: “Pick up the other line! The Mayo!” Out of the cacophony of desperation, the name chimed cleanly, supremely. My father never made it there, daunted by the money, the distance, the mythos of the place. Decades later, with a rare permutation of the same ailment that no doctor I’d seen had been able to treat, I recalled the talk about the Mayo and found that the world’s nearly sole, and top, expert was there. The clinic dates from 1883, when a deadly hurricane propelled a local order of nuns into a self-taught crash course in nursing. The nonprofit hospital they founded, with help from a surgeon named W.W. Mayo and his sons William and Charles, would be known as the “Miracle in a Cornfield.” By the 1920s, it had vastly expanded to accommodate the influx of sufferers drawn by its reputed wonder-cures. The Queen Mother of Egypt, Ernest Hemingway, Lou Gehrig, Jack Benny, Lyndon Johnson, and the Dalai Lama have all been patients there. 1.3 million more came to the Mayo just last year. When I arrived as a patient myself, I was told that Ken Burns had just left. In his new documentary, The Mayo Clinic: Faith—Hope—Science, the filmmaker ascribes the institution’s success to groundbreaking advances in both medicine and its delivery: the human side of care. Most important, he finds, among the Mayo brothers’ innovations was to place doctors on salary rather than paying them per appointment so that they could devote as much time and focus to a patient as her condition required. Their partner Dr. Henry Plummer, the mad genius of the operation, pioneered many of ventilation, sterilization, data, and communications systems still in use in hospitals throughout the world today. Plummer is credited, for instance, with inventing the unified patient record, in which notes and test results from different doctors over time are gathered in a single file toward a full diagnostic portrait. Ever the perfectionist, Plummer then built a pneumatic tube system to convey the records between offices and, with nearby mills and chemists, engineered longer-lasting paper and ink than were then available on the market. A signed photo the Mayo archive holds of Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the brothers Mayo shows their script, made with their own pens, crisp and dark to this day, while FDR’s has faded. Most impressive among the clinic’s historical artifacts are the alarmingly lifelike wax anatomical models produced from the 1930s through 1980s by sculptors brought to work in the Mayo’s design department. Like their Italian predecessors from the late Renaissance onward—such as Clemente Susini’s lurid eighteenth-century Anatomical Venus figures—the Mayo’s were created for teaching purposes, as ersatz cadavers, yet are so exquisitely crafted as to far exceed that purely technical goal. What delicacy the Mayo versions may lack, compared to their Continental counterparts, they gain in American freshness and frankness. Any of the Mayo’s models might double for the boy next door. And, in effect, they sometimes did: a series of the models replicates work injuries from the surrounding rural area, such as one that shows a farmhand impaled through the rectum by a pitchfork. Burns doesn’t mention the wax models. In Europe such models are preserved and displayed as masterpieces, yet the estimated 3,000 Mayo figures have for the past thirty years been packed in cardboard boxes in a medical warehouse cooled only by industrial fans. I saw a sampling of the models by accompanying an archivist on her rounds; they are not available for public view. Many need cleaning and repair, and the archivist’s time is limited due to her other duties. Donors—of which the Mayo has many, from billionaires to grateful poorer patients who come, one official told me, bearing “coffee cans of change”—may understandably prefer to contribute toward medical cures, but these archival treasures are also in need of funding. The fineness of the wax figures struck me as yet one more example of the thoroughness and thoughtfulness of almost every aspect of the Mayo I encountered. Before I flew to Minnesota, I was advised by the registration staff to take a virtual guided tour of the facilities so that I could feel as if “welcomed back” to a familiar place. The clinic’s lobby featured a grand piano played by volunteer musicians from among the staff and townspeople, as well as original Rodins and Mirós. Instead of blaring TVs, the doctors’ waiting areas held jigsaw puzzles in the midst of completion: each visitor might fit a piece or two into a growing nature scene before being called in. There were “greeters” to shepherd guests through the halls, “quiet rooms” where overwhelmed patients or caretakers could nap, and a chapel with a labyrinth-patterned floor for “walking meditation.” Surgery recommended in my very first consultation was scheduled for the next morning, not months ahead. The procedure was offered nowhere else in the US; no specialist I’d spoken with in New York, New Haven, or Boston had even heard of it. For relief of mysterious spells of faintness and aches, I was sent —along with a PTSD-plagued veteran, and a forklift operator knocked from her perch by a crash—to a workshop on exercises to soothe our own neural-system flareups. This included an app then still in development that showed an image of a temple door that we could open only by lowering our heart-rates, as measured by gizmos clipped to our ears. The more will I exerted in my mind the more tightly the door shut. The less control I sought the more it gave way to reveal a garden beyond. When I tensed up again it slammed, and I loudly swore, shattering the calm of the room. Though the app’s New Age interface had made me skeptical, it was hard, and when I later tried the techniques on my own, I did in fact feel a bit better. During my stay, I was startled to hear the clinic’s founders gossiped about by staff as if they were, old dears, still roaming the campus: hardy (“Dr. Will”), gentle (“Dr. Charlie”), saintly (the nuns), or kooky (Plummer). Trivia abounds: one devotee recently wrote in to the town paper to query the difference in the Mayo brothers’ heights. (Answer: about three inches). Burns’s film resounds with similar cult-like hagiography, and drags with needless details like a minor character’s exact date of death, as if a quiz was to follow. Soft-focus testimonials to the Mayo from patients both unknown and well-known—among the latter, the late John McCain—frequently lead the film to seem less a documentary than a commercial. At other points, however, the film can be riveting. A concert violinist who develops a tremor is forced to stay awake during surgery and play his instrument so that surgeons can determine what part of his brain is responsible, and is then outfitted with what he calls a “garage-door opener” allowing him to zap the tremor off when he needs to perform. A young woman who glows with vitality carries—impossibly, it appears—a terminal disease. A doctor reflects that each “physician has a private graveyard at the back of their minds” of all the “patients they failed.” Even the Mayo makes errors and meets defeat. The film acknowledges other problems as well. The Mayo was late to admit African-American doctors to its ranks. It does not take patients without insurance who do not have the means to pay. A wrenching segment tracks a long-disabled older patient at the Mayo’s Florida satellite clinic from elation at finally receiving helpful treatment to heartbreak when her husband’s job loss means that it is curtailed. Speaking by phone with me, Burns echoed Mayo materials stressing that the clinic addresses “the whole patient,” not “just” the body. For me, that hierarchy was reversed: a note I scrawled to myself during my time there reads: “Interior weakness (struggling to ignore, hide, all of my life) + (‘public’) exterior = full, legitimate human.” Before I’d come, I’d had no problem with the rest of me; what my own “Magic Mountain” provided was the space, time, concentrated care, and sense of dignity I needed to have, or be, a body at all. What would it take for all patients, of all backgrounds and economic strata, to receive that level of attention wherever they might be? The bar may be high, but—as the Mayo’s history and offerings show—it is not unreachable. Ken Burns’s The Mayo Clinic: Faith—Hope—Science aired September 25 on PBS. The post Inside the Mayo Clinic appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. via GuaripeteMagazine https://ift.tt/2xWJyHE A London exhibition looks at the art that came out of the twentieth century’s most tumultuous relationships. But is it only within the context of romantic unrest that the best art can be made? It was a Friday evening in 1914 and the American novelist and playwright Natalie Clifford Barney was throwing a garden party in Paris. Throughout the decades, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, and Marcel Proust would all drop by, but Barney’s salons were particularly known as gathering places for lesbian and bisexual women. That night, the painter Romaine Brooks had, true to character, shown up alone. An American born in Rome, Brooks was already becoming known for her uniquely dark and somber portraits of women. That Friday—and over the course of many Friday salons—in the cool of Barney’s garden, she and Brooks fell in love and would remain so for the rest of their lives. However, their disagreements, which became famous in their circle, often exploded in their art—to great creative success. Brooks was a loner—she disliked parties and much of the social jockeying on which Barney thrived. Barney, on the other hand, adored social energy and refused to have a monogamous relationship. She dated a string of other women, including Élisabeth de Gramont (a descendant of Henry IV of France) as well as the socialites Janine Lahovary and Dolly Wilde (niece of Oscar), which put pressure on her relationship with Brooks. But the challenges of their relationship were also at the core of their many artistic breakthroughs. When Brooks met the Italian heiress and socialite Luisa Casati at one of Barney’s parties, she channeled her jealousy into a lustful, hypersexualized, and remarkably original portrait in which Brooks depicts Casati exposing herself in a black cape, her hair and nipples a fiery red. In an earlier portrait of Ida Rubinstein, an heiress and Russian ballerina, Brooks allowed the other side of her relationship with Barney to shine through: Brooks depicted Rubinstein looking off into the distance while remaining unbowed by the winds and clouds around her—a stoic strength seemingly derived from the lasting love and respect she had for Barney. Not all romantic turmoil translates into genius, but for nearly all artists, affairs of the heart leave a mark on their oeuvre. “Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy, and the Avant-garde,” an exhibition that I saw at the Centre Pompidou-Metz outside Paris (opening soon at the Barbican in London) explores how more than forty artistic couples—from Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp to Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin to Brooks and Barney—aided or destroyed their partner’s creativity. The show does not answer the question of whether some of these artists would have been better off without their partners, or whether their partners were crucial to their work. It does, however, imply that it is only in especially difficult and fraught relationships that exceptional creativity is channeled. In the case of Brooks and Barney, their relationship was difficult, often desperately so, but it ultimately served to benefit both of their careers. For a couple like Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, it would seem that one member of the relationship benefited disproportionately—perhaps many of the women in these relationships would have been better off without their man. (There is, of course, a vital difference between a partner who is a fellow artist and a partner who is a muse: a muse is rarely an equal.) Most interesting is the question of whether great art derives primarily from romantic collaboration or domination—that is, in romantic ease or unease—because it is most often the latter that receives our focus and our mythologizing. There is Picasso and Maar, of course. There is also Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. Kahlo’s painting The Wounded Deer, in which a deer with Kahlo’s face is mortally wounded by arrows, depicts the physical trauma of the many operations related to her childhood polio, a bus crash, and her miscarriage, but it also shows the pain of feeling that so little of her love for Rivera was returned. Rivera was Kahlo’s everything. She wrote in her diary: “Diego = my husband / Diego = my friend / Diego = my mother / Diego = my father / Diego = my son / Diego = me / Diego = Universe.” But to him, she seemed to mean far less. He was an open philanderer, and had an affair with her younger sister, Cristina. His respect for Kahlo and her feelings often seemed close to nil. One of Kahlo’s best paintings, Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana), grapples with this constant romantic devastation. In this self-portrait, an image of Rivera is stamped onto her forehead. She looks out towards the viewer—glum, quiet, almost beatific—and one wonders if she is weighing whether she has brought their heartbreak on herself. Perhaps only by being dominated in love was she able to access such a scarring, fundamentally true emotion. Romantic unrest thus seems to lend itself to accessing new perspectives—to creativity. A more contemporary example of heartbreak inspiring great work is Marina Abramović and her former partner, Ulay. They made one of their most meaningful works at the lowest point of their relationship: the very moment of their breakup. In 1988, the two began walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, met in the middle, and officially ended their romantic relationship. The fact that neither of them seemed to want it to end but knew that it had to end added an extra layer of emotional wreckage, each person deeply wanting to be with—and not wanting to be with—the other. They then continued walking past one another. “For her, it was very difficult to go on alone,” Ulay said in a later interview. “For me, it was actually unthinkable to go on alone.” They met again, in 2010, during Abramović’s performance “The Artist is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ulay visited the performance without warning. They looked at one another from across a table, blinking and slightly shaking as if their entire pasts, as if all of the memories of their relationship, were flooding through their bodies. What might be considered their greatest works of art came, therefore, at the moment of romantic devastation—their breakup—but also at this second moment of reckoning. At their best, romantic relationships are able to foster openness and trust—inspiring a belief in the goodness of all humans. A strong relationship, even amidst its inevitable tumult, allows one to feel protection, kindness, empathy, even autonomy. Studies show that being in love allows you to think in a more global, long-term, and creative way because it pushes you to think further ahead—beyond the literal and concrete. And yet, though inter-artist romance is so often venerated, should it be? What, for instance, would Maar have accomplished had she not had to deal with Picasso? What about Kahlo vis-à-vis Rivera? Perhaps they might have been able to blossom into artists renowned in their own lifetimes. So too when “love” manifests itself as manipulation and heartbreak, it might not really be love. The truest form of love is a kind of aloneness, spent together. Love is the protection of a partner’s independence, the providing of space and freedom and a sense of earnest openness when the rest of the world desperately wants to infringe upon all of that. The trouble with romanticizing chaotic love is two-pronged: it is emotionally destructive, but, less obviously, it implies that it is only within the realm of power dynamics—domination or submission—that art is created. More often, it is within the context of collaboration that the best art is made. Emilie Flöge, for instance, Gustav Klimt’s long-term partner, was a skilled fashion designer who ran her own couture house in Vienna. She modeled for him and was in his paintings “Emilie Flöge,” as well as, more famously, “The Kiss,” in which they both star. More subtly, though, her talent for dressmaking and her advocacy for free-hanging, no-corset dresses known as the “rational dress style,” embraced by turn-of-the-century feminists, became one of Klimt’s signature artistic themes, no doubt a quieter but equally important contribution. (His paintings, in turn, bolstered her couture practice.) In the case of Brooks and Barney, their tumult was, perhaps, useful, but they were far more collaborative in their art than is often known. Brooks craved solitude, and although Barney got a rush from parties, they decided to make a place where they could be alone, together. While Barney was still living on the rue Jacob in Paris, and before the Second World War, they had a summerhouse built in the south of France, which they dubbed the “Villa Trait d’Union,” or the Hyphenated Villa. It was called that because the house was composed of two distinct wings, which came together into a central dining and living room area. Brooks would work at one end and Barney at the other. Of course, their relationship would continue to careen. Brooks would soon go slowly mad, believing her chauffeur was trying to poison her and that someone wanted to steal her drawings. Barney continued seeing other women. But, at that house, Barney completed her feminist text Thoughts of an Amazon (which drew a philosophical line between the poisonous ideologies of war and the inherent aggression of all male relationships), and Brooks worked on her most richly nuanced portrait of Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge, the British sculptor and long-term partner of Marguerite Radclyffe Hall. They were apart and together—protecting each other’s independence even as the Second World War approached. No matter what happened inside and outside of their relationship, they allowed the other her time, her space, her selfhood. It was their collaborative love and their protection of the other, far more than their power struggles, that fueled their art. Each day, in the mornings and the evenings, they would come together in the center of the house, bearing witness to the truth of their solitude, reflected in the other. Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York. The post Does Bad Romance Lead to Great Art? appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. via GuaripeteMagazine https://ift.tt/2Oe1Cra 9/27/2018 0 Comments In the Nineties Race Didnt ExistIn the summer of 1997, when I had just turned eleven, my mother decided my sister and I knew nothing and that it was up to her to fix it. We took a train to Washington, D.C., left our bags at an uncle’s house, and began a five-day odyssey through what felt like all of the museums that could possibly exist in the world. I was given a composition notebook, with instructions to take notes. I’ve retained little from our frenzied speed walking through places like the U.S. Mint, the Washington Monument, the Air and Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the Arlington National Cemetery, except for what I wrote in the capitalized block letters I’d adopted as my handwriting of the season. The single incident I’ve committed to memory took place in the Museum of American History, at an exhibition on Jim Crow. I was gazing up at large artistic renderings of black people sitting in the backs of buses, not being permitted entrance to swimming pools, drinking from water fountains below the word colored, when a white boy, younger than I was, and his father, drew closer. The father was earnestly explaining how long, long ago, those people couldn’t sit in the same part of the bus as these people. I was struck by how he never said “white” or “black”: in my family, when you mentioned a new acquaintance or friend, the first question was always “White, black, or Ethiopian?” and then judgments were made accordingly. “Why?” the boy asked his father. “Well, back then, some people couldn’t do what other people could.” “Which people?” asked the child, now thoroughly confused. Desperate, the father looked up, saw me, and jabbed a finger in my direction. “People who looked like her. They couldn’t do anything.” The boy and I stared at each other, our differences stripped bare in the middle of that crowded room, for what could have been seconds or minutes or centuries, before he pulled his gaze away, asked his father something else, and they drifted off. I, a mere casualty of a lazy historical education (where was the boy’s notebook?), didn’t move until my mother found me and whisked me off to another location where there were words to be transcribed. I didn’t tell her what had happened, partly, I think, because she wouldn’t have understood: to her, we were Ethiopian, and thus somewhat above and beyond the race wars that raged around us. Explorations of race in mainstream nineties movies (except those of black filmmakers like Spike Lee, Carl Franklin, Julie Dash, et al.) followed rules identical to the above encounter: race was either unnamed or it was clumsily portrayed in a way that resisted nuance and good sense. However, the narrative potential of the adversity faced by black Americans was too good not to be mined, and so filmmakers found ways to make white characters suffer similar indignities: in this way, audiences could enjoy the tragedy without the guilt. Take the alternative realities depicted in Gattaca (1997, directed by Andrew Niccol) and White Man’s Burden (1995, directed by Desmond Nakano). In the former, we see a society in which only those conceived through genetic selection can advance; in the latter, one where black people dominate and white people are considered second-class citizens. Welcome to the nineties! Gattaca’s protagonist, Vincent Anton Freeman (Ethan Hawke) is an invalid, meaning that no geneticists were involved in his conception to ensure desirable traits like longevity and blue eyes. As Vincent explains it, “I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science.” We see that bigotry in full force when Vincent applies to high-level positions and is consistently rejected, despite his intelligence and qualifications. He is relegated to menial labor, while genetically perfect specimens like Jerome Eugene Morrow (Jude Law) are given everything. He gets his dream job and must scrub his skin every morning, lest any particle of it sully his elevated surroundings. He is exposed for the invalid that he is, and despite his years of excellent service, is relentlessly pursued by the police. This is a cleaner kind of systemic injustice, devoid of a slave-owning past or a racist present. With the erasure of race, we get to see a beautiful white man suffer outrages historically visited upon those with black skin. (Note how in this world where genes alone matter, the only black person we see on-screen, briefly, is Blair Underwood. It seems that even when skin color doesn’t matter, it absolutely still does.) Vincent acts as an emissary via which audiences can experience a compelling narrative of subjugation and beating the odds, while never having to contend with the messier questions tangled up in race-related discrimination, not least of which is their own involvement in its history. You get all the drama with none of the trauma (if you will). As the title suggests, White Man’s Burden takes an entirely different approach, as each shot, each conversation, each interaction screeches its good intentions at you, with little concern for history or subtlety. Take the opening scene, where Thaddeus Thomas (Harry Belafonte) and his stylish, affluent family and friends are toasting their successes. He and a guest get into a heated argument:
Do you get it? To call the movie’s plot “heavy-handed” is to call Henry James’s sentences “not short.” When factory worker Louis Pinnock (John Travolta, whose performance begs the question, is he trying to sound black or have we not been paying attention to his voice?) is fired from his job for staring at Thaddeus’s wife (this movie could be retitled “Spot the Relevance”), Louis kidnaps Thaddeus. Louis ultimately dies trying to save his former boss; along the way, we see black characters discussing fatherless white children, a world in which TV is dominated by black people (which was actually pretty satisfying), and the police brutally beating Louis, the movie’s stand-in for all white people. The irony is that by attempting to shed light on the horrors visited upon black Americans, the movie forgets that there’s little joy to be had from watching another person suffer needlessly. By placing the main black character at the heart of a cruel system, he still emerges as the villain. The writing is too weak to make the connection between systemic racism and power, except in the most simplistic of ways. In the end, it accomplishes only a dubious reframing of context to one in which the viewer can hate the black character and root for the white one. Beyond its switcheroo parlor trick, White Man’s Burden does precious little to explore or satirize the complexities and implications of its characters’ societal roles. It assumes that white audiences will understand what lies at the heart of racial tension and violence if someone who looks like them is the victim, forgetting that if one can’t acknowledge the humanity of another because of their race, then empathy is in short supply, no matter the plot. The filmmaking tactic of either applying simplistic explanations in fits of guilt and moral high-mindedness or ignoring race completely is not an artifact of the past. The naïve bluntness of White Man’s Burden has since been reiterated in numerous movies that distill racism into blocks of right and wrong (The Blind Side, Black or White, The Help), while the recent glut of movies set in dystopic realities allow for the injustices endured by people of color on a daily basis to be reenacted by white actors for the greatest emotional impact, without a confrontation of reality (Divergent, The Hunger Games). With the gradual increase of prominent filmmakers of color, there are more and more multidimensional stories being spotlighted, ones where characters run the gamut of life experience, race, cultural background, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. With these films comes a collective sigh of relief from white filmmakers the world over (You’ll take on the burden of telling your own stories? Awesome!). But the trend whereby minority artists are relegated to telling stories about their own communities, while white artists can tell stories about anything, has prevailed for far too long. Not to mention that you can’t talk about prejudice without also mentioning the people who have historically benefited from it, so white artists have plenty to contribute to the conversation. Here’s the thing: there is no blueprint for the right way to cinematically tell stories that involve race. But it’s just as weird to write a story that’s explicitly about race as it is to write one in which race is simply not there (as opposed to writing a story about a person, an event, a community … you know, a story). I suspect that many white filmmakers keep falling into one of these two narrative traps because white people don’t really have to think about race at all, if they don’t feel like it. They get to exist as people, in both fact and fiction, and the idea of defining someone by skin color only happens when a nonwhite person enters the scene. I get that and, in some ways, I envy it. But I don’t get thinking it’s acceptable to leave out the parts of discrimination relevant to a story just because they make you uncomfortable or they mean you have to hire a nonwhite actor. I don’t get how it isn’t obvious that being able to sit wherever you like in the bus doesn’t eliminate a past when you couldn’t or a present in which bus service and quality vary depending on the neighborhood. I don’t get how you can live in America, especially in 2018, and not see how race dictates so much of who gets represented, what we receive, what we feel owed, and how we live. Read more pieces in our “nineties movies” series here. Nafkote Tamirat is the author of The Parking Lot Attendant. The post In the Nineties, Race Didn’t Exist appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. via GuaripeteMagazine https://ift.tt/2xWJx6y 9/27/2018 0 Comments Guy Davenports Translation of MaoIn 1979, Guy Davenport’s second book of “stories” appeared: Da Vinci’s Bicycle. He was fifty-one. I put quotation marks around the word stories because almost nothing happens in any of them. When they’re good, they’re good for other reasons. Davenport was a disciple of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, and like everyone answering that description, he was a supreme crank. The main problem with all of these guys is that they vastly overestimate the value of literary allusion. And I know all about it, ’cuz I was ruined in my youth by these lizard-eating weirdos. Davenport certainly did his part. They were all brilliant. They could write sentences that stick with you forever. Most people never write even one; these guys could practically cut them off by the yard. Yet, none of ’em knew when to stop. They always, always got carried away. My hypothesis is that too much of their motivation for writing was to enshrine their crankitudes. They were always trying to get away with something. Zoom in on Davenport. Let me ask you: How much Chinese do you suppose he knew? I think the smart money is on “very little.” He probably knew about as much as I do—which is to say, as much as can be learned from one semester of study, augmented by the eager observation of one or two native speakers reciting a handful of classic poems. But a supreme crank knows how to exploit every little drop of whatever he or she knows. Davenport, who really did know all about poetic meter in English, must have listened very actively when he got somebody to recite Li Bai (or whomever) to him. Davenport knew what he was not hearing. Chinese meter was not about vowel quantity, nor stressed and unstressed syllables. What Chinese poetry almost certainly sounded like to him was clusters of five syllables, all of them stressed. That’s what mile after mile of Tang- and Song-Dynasty poetry sounds like to an English speaker. Armed with this thought, he did a translation of a famous poem by Mao Zedong. The form of his translation is unique in American letters: The text is set up as quatrains (that’s normal enough), but the individual lines have only three syllables each. Davenport knew that this did not accurately reflect the original Chinese, but—and this is where the brilliance comes in—it does get across (like nothing else available in English) the collapsed syntax and staccato pacing of classical shi poetry. See for yourself. Below is basically page one of Da Vinci’s Bicycle. I cannot bear to leave out the context, which is a deliciously understated spoof on Richard Nixon’s verbal boneheadedness during his historic visit to the People’s Republic of China, February 21–28, 1972:
There is a problem, though. And it’s not that shi poetry has five syllables per line and not three. It’s that the original poem is not a shi poem. It’s a ci. (Pronounce it “tsr.” I know, just trust me: tsr.) Here’s the original:
That’s right: the whole thing is just four lines, and the parts are of irregular lengths. Moreover, there’s a nifty little hand-off repetition thing going on there, a bit like American blues, or at any rate, like a song—which is what a ci poem is supposed to be. I’ve marked the repetitions in blue. Here are two other translations of the same piece, either of which might have been at Davenport’s elbow when he made his version. The first is from The Poems of Mao Tse-Tung (1972), translated by Willis Barnstone in collaboration with Ko Ching-Po:
“Shatter the air” is a bit much, but all in all, the above is a lot closer in meaning to what the forty-one-year-old Mao Zedong wrote. Alternatively, look at this anonymous translation from Mao Tse-Tung Poems, published by Foreign Languages Press, Beijing in 1976:
But there’s the pity of it, Iago! Davenport’s version is misleading, damnably misleading, if our object is to “work towards the Chairman” and his particular poem. But! If we want to be led to a more general truth about what most Chinese poems were bound to sound like, both to Nixon and to Davenport as native speakers of English, then “West wind keen, / Up steep sky / Wild geese cry / For dawn moon” blows the other translations out of the water. See how these bums operate? They don’t know Chinese, but they know something. They always know something, and they make that something seem like everything. And then you wind up using their versions in the classroom, because what are you gonna do, choose the less-exciting poem? Not gonna happen. And you know what? That would be fine—except for one thing. The perpetual American vindication of “getting away with it.” Before you say “Oh, c’mon,” I ask you to look around, friends. Look forward, look back; look left, look right. Take care of yourselves. Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His second book is Try Never. He is a correspondent for the Daily. The post Guy Davenport’s Translation of Mao appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. via GuaripeteMagazine https://ift.tt/2OfmPRn |
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