It would seem like its a week for really amazing feedback on some of our books, they keep flooding in and we hope to find the time soon to update the list of reviews on our website (www.avaloniabooks.co.uk ) to include mention of all the many reviews our books have been receiving.  In the meantime we are very excited to see a mention of HEKATE LIMINAL RITES in “The New Age Retailer” which is a very popular publication in the US.  This is what the reviewer, Richard D. Wright, Tranquil Things, Derby Line, Vt.,  had to say:

“Hekate, a figure in the Orphic mysteries, is “the goddess of the crossroads, of thresholds, of dreams and oracles, of the realms of life and death.” Sources that give recognition to her can be traced back to the ninth century BCE. She is mentioned as a matter of course in Homer’s Odyssey, later in dramas by Aeschylus and Euripides, and still later in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Her worship dates from much further back and is now becoming a part of some contemporary ceremonies. The authors cite 98 literary references and use over 150 sources to bring together “a collection of material which relates specifically to devotional practices, symbols and magical techniques recorded as being associated with the goddess Hekate.” They explain that she is portrayed as the triple goddess with triple images and triple shrines, and that she is both a light bringer and, as queen of the restless dead, the ruler of ghosts.

Although the book draws its material from scholarly studies, it is written for the general reader. Its 30 brief chapters include sections on images, charms, initiations, herbs and poisons, angels, oracles, hymns, animal forms, necromancy, and fusions with other goddesses. It is a good source of background material for anyone involved with modern or ancient rites and rituals, or indeed for anyone simply interested in exploring the mysteries surrounding the worship of the triple goddess Hekate.”

For more information on Hekate Liminal Rites by David Rankine & Sorita d’Este, visit http://www.avaloniabooks.co.uk/catalogue/titles/hekate_liminalrites.htm

Mr. O'brien

I’m in the mood for ambitious fiction. Earlier this year I was blessed with a run of incredible reads,  topped off by Yvegeny Zamiatin’s masterpiece, We.

Mr. Zamiatin

Since then I’ve taken on more projects that inevitably have eaten into my reading time, and I am becoming more zealous in my quest for inspired reads. Ambition is the only flavor my literary palate wants to taste right now. I’m hungry for books that make me break out the booksdarts and re-read for pure pleasure. I want prose and plots that cause reactions, page turners that remind me how lucky I am to know how to read.

I’m compiling a list (in no particular order) of ambitiously written books and additions are requested in the comments section! I’d love suggestions for a 2010 reading list…

Mr. Baldwin

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

The Inferno by Dante

Morvagine by Blaise Cendrars

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

Candide by Voltaire

The Electric Koolaid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Black Boy by Richard Wright

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? by Edward Albee

Bowl of Cherries by Milliard Kauffman

The Whapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (as well as many of his shorter works)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

The Iliad by Homer

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Her by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

The Twits by Roald Dahl

Lolita by Vladamir Nabakov

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Monkeywrench Gang by Edward Abbey

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Peanuts by Charles Schultz

Mr. Abbey

more:

Bluebeard/Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Matilda by Roald Dahl

Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger

His Dark Materials Series by Phillip Pullman

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’brien

White Noise by Don Delillo

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Watchmen by Alan Moore

More..?

Amig@s de ElBaraMetal, la verdad es que este post me nació por el puro gusto, no se necesitan tener pretextos ni razones aparentes para justificar el hablar de un gran, grande, grandísimo disco de rock and roll como lo es The Dark Side Of The Moon, obra de los igualmente enormes Pink Floyd.

Corría el año 1973 cuando Pink Floyd, pioneros del rock progresivo y fieles seguidores de la psicodelia y la “locura” rockera de los años 60, editaron para la posteridad este álbum, considerado uno de los mejores discos de la historia, y tal vez, el que más influencia ha generado desde entonces en músicos de todos los géneros, no sólo del rock.

Y es que DSotM es un ejercicio complejo de creatividad musical, de una inventiva hasta ese momento inexplorada, que sin pensarlo siquiera, explotó y generó ondas expansivas de emociones encontradas en el entramado “floydeano” de la musicalidad exquisita de Gilmour, las letras profundas de Waters y las ambientaciones geniales de Wright y los beats secos pero volátilmente frágiles de Mason.

Todo el disco es genial, es verdad que hay que estar de un humor especial para escucharlo, ya que funciona mejor si se da uno el tiempo para oírlo de principio a fin, pero algunas piezas funcionan igualmente por separado, como la comercialmente magistral Money, Time y su genial introducción (pocas veces he podido escuchar algo más sencillo y a la vez tan complejo de emular y por ende, hermosamente rockero) o Us and Them, con todo el sentimiento explosivo que guarda en sus entrañas progresivas.

De colección este disco, hace poco salió por ahí la reedición especial del 25 aniversario, un disco remasterizado que salva algunos de los sonidos exquisitos del original, este si es para que se lo consigan en original (aquellos que todavía no lo tengan, que creo, serán, o deben ser, pocos).

De todas formas acá hay un sitio donde se lo bajan para que, después de darle unas dos o tres escuchadas, y si todavía no lo tienen, se lo pidan a Santo Clos o a los Reyes Magos ahora que se viene diciembre.

Carpe diem.

The dark side of the moon

Estaba escribiendo un post y a la par decidí escuchar el disco Dark Side of the Moon remasterizada en 2003 en formato SACD y DTS, aunque hace una semana compre mi versión para Itunes me sorprendio como la version DTS contiene muchos sonidos y efectos escondidos que no podran ser apreciados con la versión stereo para Ipod Nano G5.

Asi que voy a dejar ese post para el fin de semana y decido hacer mi semblanza sobre este disco tan importante para el Rock y conclui que me declaro incapaz para ello, por lo que mejor comparto estos excelentes videos que van a detallar todo lo que quieran saber sobre esta obra maestra del rock universal.

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I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977-

Fashion isn’t supposed to be politically correct. If it was it wouldn’t be so fun and so daring. And we know that the French especially don’t give a fuck. Which is why I love them. Just last month, my dear friend Jean, creator of the fabulous fashion blog Ledefile, alerted me to a previous issue of French Vogue with pregnant models wearing strappy high heels and smoking cigarettes.

loving the baby stuffed in the handbag

That obviously wouldn’t fly in American Vogue mostly because Americans have sticks up their ass. But I actually enjoyed the pregnancy photo spread. Sans the cigarettes , the photos alleviate the insecure feeling most women have about what pregnancy will do their bodies and how unattractive they may become because those models were HOT.

However, in the October issue of Vogue, in a photo spread, is Dutch supermodel Lara Stone,…wait for it….wait for it…in Blackface.

And a bunch of questions popped in my mind. Is this blackface or is this art? Why not just have a beautiful black supermodel on the cover? Should the French and more specifically other countries who don’t have the same kind of sadistic historical treatment of Blacks like in America, have to tiptoe around racial issues that wouldn’t offend the majority in their country? Do they have to pay for crimes that racist Americans committed? And if they should, should Americans as well be extra-sensitive to seemingly harmless stereotypical portrayals of race when that race does not have a prevalent history of victimization in our own country?

First of all, blackface itself aggrandized negative characteristics associated with blacks. It arose in the 19^th century in the US and Britian, and the characters belonged to the plantation genre. There was the mammy, the mistress, the pickaninnies, the house slave, and they were coons to be laughed at by whites at minstrel shows. The skin color was accentuated, the lips were made more red, the whites of the eyes were emphasized, and the Negro dialect was imitated.

once he puts on the black paint, he becomes an irrational buffoon

But looking at these images in French Vogue, I don’t necessarily see it in the same way I would see blackface propaganda. While even thinking about a white person covering herself in black make-up is shocking, these photos don’t have the same agenda as blackface performance. It is more artistic and beautiful than funny and coon-like. Primarily, in blackface the “ugliness” of blacks is amplified, and in this picture, the woman is beautiful. Beauty and Blackness were not correlations made to buttress racially hegemonic ideals.

But, why do we need a white woman to be in blackface for the image to be beautiful? Vogue already has a history of not putting black models on the covers, or only in the summer issues because the majority of their customers wouldn’t buy them. And in many letters to the Editor after Michelle Obama was featured on the cover, even though it was for politics, many readers were pissed that Vogue would put someone so unmodel-like and fashionless on the cover, e.g. black woman on the cover. Is the photographer saying something about art, or about masks? Is blackness only beautiful when it is false, or is blackness only beautiful when we see there is some underlying white characteristic? Hmmmmm.

Most of the reaction to these images have been shock by the fashion world and its readers. Especially in the wake of the recent reality show in Australia in which white performers sang Jackson Five songs in blackface and called themselves the Jackson Jive. Harry Connick Jr. was so pissed he gave them a zero.

Jackson Jive, just look over your shoulders honey... Oooooh!

But like Australia, France hasn’t had the same intricacies with racism towards African-Americans. France’s hegemonic power was largely enforced in North Africa, sometimes in the Caribbean, and the majority of their racism was geared toward Arabs. Additionally, America is one of the few countries that premised its’ mission of colonization on the assertion that African-Americans were sub-human. However, countries like France and Britian entertained the idea that through education and culture, the “inferior races” could be assimilated and acculturated into their society. In Macualay’s Famous Minute on Education he stated that the British wanted to have “Indians in blood and colour but European in thought and intellect.” Additionally, during the Harlem Renaissance many black writers and activists such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Josephine Baker, and James Baldwin, ex-patriates if you will, left the States for France specifically because it wasn’t racist and they felt free.

are we gonna get in a huff because the french put josephine baker in a banana skirt? is this minstrelcy or art?

So do the French and any other country without a perverse history of racism towards African-Americans really have to be held to the same politically correct standard as the racist Americans who started the whole damn thing anyway? Are we limiting freedom of speech (blackface) because the Americans fucked up?

And if you agree that no country should endorse the use of blackface for art, humour, etc. is it because it is a badge of victimization for blacks or is it because no one should be imitating a different race for humor? A couple years ago when I was teaching a class on Television and Literary Genres which focused on humor, we watched a few Dave Chappelle episodes from “Chappelle’s Show.” We specifically watched the episodes in which he performed comedy in Whiteface.

"since reparations have been paid to blacks the crime rate has fallen to zero, wait that can't be true, did the Mexicans get paid too? Ooops am i still on the air?"

When Dave is in whiteface he speaks in a stereotypically white way, is mildly racist, and is sexually repressed and impotent. After watching the episodes I asked my students if they were offended (they were all white) and they said no. And then I asked why is it that blackface is offensive and whiteface isn’t? They came up with the conclusion that it has to do with the history of victimization of blacks. When people are in blackface it connotes black inferiority, yet whiteface does not do the same because it would be historically inaccurate, because whiteness is seen as superior in America. I was even thinking about racial slurs, and even the one for whiteness, “cracker,” isn’t a term of inferiority per se because it alludes to a slavemaster who cracks the whip on the back of slave. So even the term itself is laden with dominance and power. Hmmmmm.

i am ashamed i did see the movie, but i do love my wayans! -white chicks

Why isn’t it offensive to make fun of a race, and you could even extend this to class or gender, when that race, class, or gender, in respect to its counterparts, is the most dominant, powerful, or not had a history of victimization? Thoughts?

I met Marty about 2 months ago, after introducing a high school friend and her husband to AdvoCare Products. They told Marty about AdvoCare and how impressed they were with the products and company. Marty did his research, saw the science, guarantee and the results that others had been getting. He took a step and decided to take action-making a change to get different results (without change, there is no change). Marty just finished the 24 Day Challenge- he LOST 3 chest sizes, 2 pants sizes, 1/2 neck size. After losing 20 lbs in 24 days, he’s now able to work out 3 days a week and on target to accomplish some new goals. Check out his blog by CLICKING HERE.

Marty caught the vision and saw the opportunity he had to share AdvoCare with his family & friends and is on his way to being very successful. He recently sat under the tutelage of President & CEO of AdvoCare, Mr. Richard Wright.

brought to you by TheChampionsLockerRoom.com

The stated purpose of this blog is now sufficiently fulfilled by Google reader, in a much less tasking way. Yet, there are topics that invariably makes sense much better as a blog post.

Was going through one of the Yale lecture recordings provided by Academic Earth (Its an excellent site, do visit it sometime: http://www.academicearth.org/ ) and there, one of the lectures introduced these lines by author Richard Wright.

“I found that to tell the truth is the hardest thing on earth, harder than fighting in a war, harder than taking part in a revolution. If you try it, you will find that at times sweat will break upon you. You will find that, even if you succeed in discounting the attitudes of others to you and your life, you must wrestle with yourself most of all, fight with yourself, for there will surge up in you a strong desire to alter facts, to dress up your feelings. You’ll find that there are many things you don’t want to admit about yourself and others. As your record shapes itself an awed wonder haunts you, and yet there is no more exciting an adventure than trying to be honest in this way. The clean, strong feeling that sweeps you when you’ve done it makes you know that.”

There was some recommended reading in the lecture. Some real life letters of Wright. Wright had already caught my curiosity with the above lines, so I went ahead and explored the mentioned letters from yale archives.

The letters are regarding one of the most crucial decision that he undertook. When writing his autobiography, one of the famous book clubs were sent the proof notes and took a liking to it. The book club had immense marketing clout and a favorable recommendation from them was enough to send the book sales soaring.

This excerpt from a new york times article( http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/01/books/books-of-the-times-an-american-master-and-new-discoveries.html ) clarifies the logistics:

His autobiography, “Black Boy,” was denounced as obscene on the floor of the Senate in 1945 by Senator Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi Democrat. The book sold 195,000 copies in its Harper edition and 351,000 through the Book-of-the-Month Club.

The catch though was that they liked only one part of the book. (about 2/3 rd book) and thus Wright decided to edit out the last part of the book. It was hard to think that an author would do that, but then again he had his own fights, his own methods.

Here is where the letters come in. He had to modify the end of the book now and this was done while corresponding with the book club. He is really trying hard to compromise, but there are some things which he just can’t do.While Canfield Fisher, the woman he is corresponding with, is a typical second rater using her authority to have her way.

Sounds interesting? Here is the link to yale archives, check out Wright and Canfield Fisher correspondence:

http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/SearchExecXC.asp

]]> http://radioblog235.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/24-ottobre-2009-10/ Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:25:55 +0000 lucanisi http://radioblog235.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/24-ottobre-2009-10/

Siamo arrivati alla decima canzone di oggi. I prossimi artisti non hanno ancora fatto la loro comparsa qui a RadioBlog 235. Ma rimediamo subito. Prima però vi ricordo che per qualunque comunicazione voleste farmi (oltre naturalmente a poter commentare nel radio-blog) potete inviarmi un’email (soprattutto se vi va di partecipare come b-jay) all’indirizzo radioblog235@live.it
Il prossimo video del nostro programma pomeridiano è dei Pink Floyd. Ascoltiamo adesso Wish You Were Here, qui su RadioBlog 235!

In “How Bigger Was Born,” Richard Wright’s account of the writing of the novel that would launch him into such controversial stardom, Wright sets out a theory of authorship. The novelist’s imagination, as he sees it, is an intersection of the “public” and “private”—by which he means an intersection of the “socially” determined and the “personally” directed. “An imaginative novel,” Wright explains, “represents the merging of two extremes; it is an

Wright, at Work in His Study

intensely intimate expression on the part of a consciousness couched in terms of the most objective and commonly known events.” Associated with this idea is Wright’s acknowledgment that much of the meaning of Native Son simply seemed to “happen” to him as he wrote; he didn’t “intend” so much as “discover” the meaning of the book. “I say frankly that there are phases of Native Son which I shall make no attempt to account for. There are meanings in my book of which I was not aware until they literally spilled onto the paper. I shall sketch the outline of how I consciously came into possession of the materials that went into Native Son, but there will be many things I shall omit, not because I want to, but simply because I don’t know them.” It is through the action of forces beyond the management of the author—Wright calls these “public” as opposed to “private” materials—that his “internal” and “personal” motives actually unfold. Writing is the experience both of acting and of being acted upon; it is in fact the experience of being unable to distinguish between acting and being acted upon. Once we set the terms of the matter in this way, it becomes apparent that Bigger Thomas in some sense “represents” the situation of his author, and not merely because Wright “identifies” with his violent rebellion (though, in “How Bigger Was Born,” he says that he does). Native Son situates Bigger precisely at the intersection of “external” compulsion and “internal” motivation, of “necessity” and “free will.” Nowhere is this better achieved than in the first “murder” scene (if “murder” it can be called). Here, Wright constructs a scene wherein his protagonist is essentially compelled to commit a crime: circumstance, not Bigger’s own volition, is the agent here. Bigger seems to have no true “agency”—no genuinely “personal” motivation—in committing this crime. Bigger Thomas, the Dalton’s chauffeur, has just carried Mary Dalton, who is stone-cold drunk and unable to walk, upstairs into her bedroom—a space in which no black man could be found and rightly understood, no matter what account he gave of himself. Whereupon her mother, who is blind, enters:

[Bigger] turned and a hysterical terror seized him, as though he were falling from a great height in a dream. A white blur was standing by the door, silent, ghostlike. It filled his eyes and gripped his body. It was Mrs. Dalton. He wanted to knock her out of his way and bolt from the room. “Mary!” she spoke softly, questioningly. Bigger held his breath. Mary mumbled again; he bent over her, his fists clenched in fear. He knew that Mrs. Dalton could not see him; but he knew that if Mary spoke she would come to the side of the bed and discover him, touch him. He waited tensely, afraid to move for fear of bumping into something in the dark and betraying his presence. “Mary!” He felt Mary trying to rise and quickly he pushed her head back into the pillow. She must be asleep,” Mrs. Dalton mumbled. He wanted to move from the bed, but was afraid he would stumble over something and Mrs. Dalton would hear him, would know that someone besides Mary was in the room. Frenzy dominated him. He held his hand over her mouth and his head was cocked at an angle that enabled him to see Mary and Mrs. Dalton by merely shifting his eyes. Mary mumbled and tried to rise again. Frantically, he caught a corner of the pillow and brought it to her lips. He had to stop her from mumbling, or he would be caught. Mrs. Dalton was moving slowly toward him and he grew tight and full, as though about to explode. Mary’s fingernails tore at his hands and he caught the pillow and covered her entire face with it, firmly. Mary’s body surged upward and he pushed downward upon the pillow with all of his weight, determined that she must not move or make any sound that would betray him. His eyes were filled with the white blur moving toward him in the shadows of the room. Again Mary’s body heaved and he held the pillow in a grip that took al of his strength. For a long time he felt the sharp pain of her fingernails biting into his wrists. The white blur was still. “Mary? Is that you?” He clenched his teeth and held his breath, intimidated to the core by the awesome white blur floating toward him. His muscles flexed taut as steel and he pressed the pillow, feeling the bed give slowly, evenly, but silently. Then suddenly her fingernails did not bite into his wrists. Mary’s fingers loosened. He did not fed her surging and her heaving against him. Her body was still. “Mary! Is that you?” He could see Mrs. Dalton plainly now. As he took his hands from the pillow he heard a long slow sigh go up from the bed into the air of the darkened room, a sigh which afterwards, when he remembered it, seemed final, irrevocable. “Mary! Are you ill?” He stood up. With each of her movements toward the bed his body made a movement to match hers, away from her, his feet not lifting themselves from the floor, but sliding softly and silently over the smooth deep rug, his muscles flexed so taut they ached. Mrs. Dalton now stood over the bed. Her hands reached out and touched Mary. “Mary! Are you asleep! I heard you moving about.” Mrs. Dalton straightened suddenly and took a quick step back. “You’re dead drunk! You stink with whiskey!” She stood silently in the hazy blue light, then she knelt at the side of the bed. Bigger heard her whispering. She’s praying, he thought in amazement and the words echoed in his mind as though someone had spoken them aloud. Finally, Mrs. Dalton stood up and her face tilted to that upward angle at which she always held it. He waited, his teeth clamped, his fists clenched. She moved slowly toward the door; he could scarcely see her now. The door creaked; then silence. He relaxed and sank to the floor, his breath going in a long gasp, He was weak and wet with sweat. He stayed crouched and bent, hearing the sound of his breathing filling the darkness. Gradually, the intensity of his sensations subsided and he was aware of the room. He felt that he had been in the grip of a weird spell and was now free. The fingertips of his right hand were pressed deeply into the soft fibers of the rug and his whole body vibrated from the wild pounding of his heart. He had to get out of the room, and quickly. Suppose that had been Mr. Dalton. His escape had been narrow enough, as it was.

But though the killing is, in fact, an “accident,” the novel shows how it is also what Kenneth Burke, in another connection, has called a “representative accident.” The act may be “motivated” by necessity. But it unfolds, or allows to emerge, what Bigger himself comes to recognize as his own “true” motivation, his own will: he did have murder in his heart; he had the mens rea (even if he recognizes it only post facto). Bigger makes himself accessory to a “murder” he himself committed; he discovers himself in the killing. “What I killed for, I am,” he says to his lawyer. “What I killed for must’ve been good! I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.” In taking responsibility for the act—even to the point of acknowledging to his lawyer that he had been, with Mary Dalton, a party to the erotic flirtation that preceded it—he makes his existence meaningful; he creates himself in the act. For the first time, he realizes that he is himself an agent—a “person acting,” not merely “a thing in motion” buffeted about by forces he cannot control. (Again, I adapt the terms from Kenneth Burke.) In short, in Native Son, Wright depicts an act that is at once “accidental” and a “murder,” something that our legal code, nuanced though it may be, is unable to recognize. And in fact this is Boris Max’s argument in his plea on behalf of Bigger during the trial: the occurrence at the Dalton home that night did in fact somehow represent Bigger’s character, which had been hardened and tempered by oppression. And yet that occurrence was also pre-determined, and Bigger’s role in it cast long ago. Because our culture is organized by assumptions of white supremacy, and because white supremacy had for generations been so violent and brutal in its operations, the killing of Mary Dalton had about it an air of inevitability.

The whole interest of the novel is in how Wright plays through the paradoxical implications of Bigger’s situation. In killing Mary Dalton, Bigger was both “volunteer” and “draftee,” both “actor” and “pawn.” To what extent did he “act” that night? To what extent was he only “acted upon”? Native Son brilliantly explores these questions. And in so doing, it uniquely equips the reader to understand Wright’s remarks about “authorship” in “How Bigger Was Born.” In suffering the happy “accidents” of authorship, the novelist comes more deeply to feel his own, strictly “private” powers. And that, finally, is the situation of Bigger Thomas—to have his own purposes, his own meaning, revealed by “accident.” The moment of the killing is the moment where he seems least in control of his own fate, and most a mere cipher compelled by circumstance. But that moment precisely marks the point at which, for the first time in his bewildered life, he becomes meaningfully creative, the first time he ever comes into “possession” of himself. The killing, in fact, marks the moment of Bigger Thomas’s “birth”; and we may take it, in light of what Wright says in “How Bigger Was Born,” as peculiarly emblematic of the new “birth” of freedom any author undergoes in risking so transgressive and original a novel as Native Son. In a fashion altogether uncanny, the novel is also an autobiography, a confession.

The worst ravages of racism divide Bigger against himself. Racism has robbed him of “motive”; it has reduced his “agency” to degree zero; it has made him a “thing in motion” rather than a “person acting.” But it has also given him all too abundant “motive” in the sense of “cause” or “reason” to act. And it has left him unable to understand, or in any event to confront, his own emotions; they are alienated from him. We see this in his conversation with Gus before the planned robbery of Blum’s Delicatessen.

“Sometimes I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me,” Bigger spoke with a tinge of bitter pride in his voice. Bigger paused, narrowed his eyes. “Naw; it ain’t like something’s going to happen to me. It’s….It’s like I was going to do something I can’t help….” “Yeah!” Gus said with uneasy eagerness. His eyes were full of a look compounded of fear and admiration for Bigger.

Bigger confesses that he is proud that he will be compelled to do something, or proud that something will “happen to him.” But how can a man take “pride” in Fate—in sheer Necessity—which affects him just as the moon affects the tide? The tide can take no “pride” in its motions, because they are exactly that: motions, not actions. Notice how Wright develops the planned robbery. Bigger arranges it so that he will be compelled to commit an act that he in fact dreads doing: he frightens Gus into promising to participate, even as he fears the likelihood that his stratagem will succeed:

Even though Bigger had asked Gus to be with him in the robbery, the fear that Gus would really go made the muscles of Bigger’s stomach tighten; he was hot all over. He hated Gus because he know that Gus was afraid, as even he was; and he feared Gus because he felt that Gus would consent and then he would be compelled to go through with the robbery. Like a man about to shoot himself and dreading to shoot and yet knowing that he has to shoot and feeling it at once and powerfully, he watched Gus and waited for him to say yes.

Bigger’s motive is self-destructive, or at the very least paradoxical: he takes actions to limit his own choice, his own ability to act; he acts so as to leave himself no exit. But then, once things are set in motion, once the robbery is on, he acts—all the while not permitting himself to acknowledge his real motives—so as to prevent that robbery from ever occurring. He picks a fight with Gus in the pool hall, the hour to strike Blum’s comes and goes, and the heist is off. “‘You done spoiled things now,’ G.H. said. ‘I reckon that was what you wanted.’ ‘You go to hell!’ Bigger shouted, drowning out G.H.’s voice.”

The novel everywhere studies the morality of action and passion, of doing and suffering: Bigger may indeed be a tragic character, despite his “naturalistic” heritage, because for him doing and suffering coincide, action and reaction merge. Wright’s world is not a world in which “individual will”—free will—has no meaning; he is hardly a determinist (this explains why he would later find the French existentialists so appealing). And the moral problem with which Wright confronts us is fascinating. In order to make Bigger Thomas a “heroic” figure, as opposed to a merely shocking one, Wright must assign him some responsibility for his own actions, some degree of real agency. Otherwise, we might pity him, but we could never identify with him. At the same time, to the extent that Bigger is made responsible, culpable—that is to say, to the extent that he transcends the condition of being merely a “thing in motion,” and thereby “owns” the two killings—he becomes repugnant to us, a kind of monster.

There is, of course, real danger in a novelist’s allowing violent protagonists to become attractive, charismatic, and compelling. This unsettles readers who are, and not entirely without reason, disturbed by the “charismatic” qualities of violent acts. But were Bigger Thomas altogether bereft of power, the novel would be rather nihilistic, which it certainly is not. Bigger’s appeal in fact depends upon his having power, twisted though its expressions may be. Deny him all responsibility for his actions, deny him the right to pay for his “sins,” and you deny him his humanity, his agency: again, he becomes a “thing in motion,” not a “person acting.” Allow Bigger Thomas responsibility, allow him to “sin,” to “act,” and although this makes him in some sense “monstrous”—as when he deliberately murders his girlfriend Bessie, once he fears she’ll betray him—it also makes possible our identification with him. His plight becomes meaningful only to the extent that his choices seem real. So long as “choice” is a reality in the novel, so long as the will is in some sense “free,” there is hope. The novel makes Bigger into something truly terrible the better that we might see, in him, something human—in order that we might see, in him, ourselves. Had Wright denied Bigger Thomas his agency, his will, the result would have been a fiction of despair. Men with no agency—men who cannot “sin” any more than a pit viper can—are unreclaimable, and, it is to be hoped, unimaginable. And at last, this is the ethical problem of the novel: in compelling us to accept Bigger Thomas as a real agent, Wright challenges our capacity for forgiveness.

N.B.: for the Library of America’s page on their fine two-volume edition of his works, click here. For the Richard Wright papers held at Yale’s Beinecke Library, click here. For the U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics pertaining to homicide and race, click here. You will find that almost all murders committed in the U.S. are intra-racial, despite the age-old fear-mongering “Willie Horton“-style fantasies that they are not.  I refer, of course, to the use of Wilie Horton in the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush. In connection with the latter, also click here and  here.

The American novelist William Maxwell (1908-2000), who wrote searchingly and lovingly about his Illinois childhood, told an interviewer late in life that if people didn’t write down what they remembered, so many beautiful things would vanish forever. 

Maxwell was right, and I am reminded of this now more than ever before.

One of the Beloved’s friends has endured the deaths of her parents, both in their early nineties, in the past year.  I met her parents twice.  They had been political activists in the Thirties; the husband, a writer, had worked with Langston Hughes.  When they heard that I was immersed in the jazz of their era, they — in turn — became happily animated.  They had been to Cafe Society; they had heard Billie Holiday and Fats Waller frequently; they had particularly loved a pianist who played on Fifty-Second Street but couldn’t immediately call his name to mind.  (He was Clarence Profit.)  They had been at the 1941 Count Basie recording session when Paul Robeson tried to sing Richard Wright’s blues in praise of Joe Louis, KING JOE.

Each of these comments seemed to me like a doorway into the miraculous past: people stting in the same room had been there.  They had seen my heroes; they might have magical narratives to share. 

Of course, they no longer remembered any details.  Robeson had had a hard time; the clubs on Fifty-Second Street had been a  great pleasure; they beamed as we exchanged the magic names.  I had come too late.  And they took their stories with them.

I urge my readers to ask questions of the Elders of the Tribe.  The Elders don’t have to be musicians; they can be someone’s aunt, who owned a candy store where Ellington would buy cigarettes.  Or we ourselves can be the Elders, contributing our own memories before they — and we — vanish.  I never saw Clarence Profit, but I did see Bobby Hackett indicating to the band the tempo he wanted for the next number by clicking his tuning slide back and forth in time.  Having written that down, I have hopes that it has a less evanescent existence. 

What do you remember?

As an avid reader and genuine lover of books, I really do not spend a lot of time  in bookstores.  Why?  Because brick and mortar establishments rarely carry the titles that I desire.  That’s understandable.  They only have a limited amount of shelf space per genre.   Given that fact, it often puzzles me how some selections have made it to the shelves while others are absent.  Recently, I was hanging out in one of my favorite bookstore chains, which will remain nameless, and decided to venture over to the African American fiction section.

Upon browsing, I became annoyed and dismayed; so much so that I had to call a friend and have her bear witness to the literary atrocity I saw on those shelves.   Many of the titles (and authors) escape me and for good reason–there’s no way that I would want to remember them.  All of these books fell in the trendy genre of ‘urban fiction’, which translates into ‘hot ghetto mess’ on paper.  What about the rich literary heritage of Black writers?  Where were those books?  Ah! One hardcover copy of ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison sat on the top shelf, while all of the street culture lore remained at eye level.  By   training and profession, I’m a marketer so I understand shelf placement very well.  These tales from the ‘hood were readily available with multiple copies; on the other hand, Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison were situated high enough so that a customer would have to want that book really bad to retrieve it.

Now, this bookstore is located in a predominately White, upper middle class neighborhood, but there are a few surrounding areas that consists mostly of middle class African American families, so apparently, the bookstore services those areas as well.  Nevertheless, the titles carried at the bookstore were audacious enough to pique my curiosity.  Who in the hell buys and reads those books?

Our children?  White children? If so, then that frightens me, whether it’s one or both groups.  Black youth who have taken up a love of reading should not be subjected to such material, unless they have been properly introduced to those prolific Black writers who laid the culture’s literary foundation.  How else will they learn how to balance their imaginations?  Think about it this way.  Most secondary English classes require students to read what has been dubbed as ‘classics’ by authors such as Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and William Faulkner.  If I recall my high school English class experience correctly, we read very few titles by Black authors.  I’m almost certain that hasn’t changed much in the past 20 years.  So, whenever a Black child desires to read works by Black authors (like I did), if the only thing that’s available to them are the urban fiction titles….now, do you see why I’m frightened?

Suppose White children are reaching for these urban fiction titles.  Will they believe that they have effectively tapped into the essence of the African American cultural landscape? If you add the current state of Hip Hop music and about 90% of Black television, then unfortunately, I would have to answer that question with a resounding ‘yes’.  Both White and Black children would have a rather lopsided perspective about the African American experience, which is a pity.  For Black children,  reading these works could potentially establish a warped sense of cultural identity, while for White children, these works could possibly continue the legacy of stereotyping.

Could it be that serious, Chandra?  Yes.  It is.  After all, we are talking about impressionable minds here.  Besides, books are a gateway to acquiring knowledge and understanding.  Whether fiction or non-fiction, all books can be used as a learning tool and give a deeper meaning to many of life’s occurrences and bodies of thought—past and present.  For instance, we are able to gain incredible insight regarding the past just by reading a book written during that time frame.  During present times, books  shape our opinions regarding ongoing social, political, economic, and cultural issues.  Therefore, it would be foolhardy to discount the effects of these ‘hood stories’.

So,  is urban fiction really needed? Yes and no.  Yes, because I have always been a firm believer in balance.  Everything Black ain’t good.  In addition, Blackness has many different angles and all of them deserve some light.  But there should be a sufficiency of all of it; not some of it—and most definitely not the worst of it.  This leads me to the other answer of  ‘no’.   In the long run, urban fiction will perhaps cause more harm than good because it will become harder to spot passionate and sincere writers.  If garbled vulgarity is considered quality writing and storytelling, then that means nearly anybody can write a book. Secondly, the need to construct a complete story and most importantly, leave the reader with a profound message will no longer be the motivation to write.  What a disgrace to the legacy of Black writers such as James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson, Gloria Naylor, John Oliver Killens, etc.

The aim of urban fiction is the same as much of contemporary U.S. culture—to entrap us all in the downward spiral of  dysfunction without a purpose.  For us, as African Americans, this nihilistic behavior is becoming the centerpoint of  our cultural identity.  Considering that Black culture has been in a defensive position for several decades, trust me, that’s not a good look and I….am….scared.

Sidebar Note: I have a good friend of mine that works in a bookstore.  He told me one day while we were discussing this very subject that the bookstore does not donate any of these urban titles to prisons for inmates to read.  Why?  Because the prison administrators do not want the content of the books to interfere with the prisoners’ rehabilitation.

The cream of new contemporary art I hear you cry! Why yes here it is, the Turner Prize. And this year we have one oldie, a Mr Wright who has given a rather restrained response, Lucy Skaer who has given a mathematical, clean-cut, cultural experience, Ernesto David who will hurl us deep into the dark realms of his subconscious and Roger Hiorns who has continued to nurture his modern day momento mori theme into several distinguished pieces.

An interesting foursome then, and a difficult decision for the judges. Skaer has given us works in a variety of mediums. Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ is reproduced 26 times in coal and resin to create ‘Black Alphabet (2008)’. The sculptures are placed carefully into rows, but some of the individual sculptures are clearly missing from the lines, in a sort of diminishing sequence. The remaining are placed in the corner, stacked up sideways like freshly cut logs hacked away from the regimented cubed forest in front of them. An antique wooden chair is displayed near by. Below the chair is a pile of bank notes with a printed image of glasses of water on them, a red triangular object in on the floor next to them. The chair’s parts have been deconstructed and printed in black ink onto a sheet of white paper forming illegible words, confirmed as such by the use of commas and apostrophes as something you could almost grasp as readable language but not quite. She has also been loaned a real sperm whale’s skull from a Scottish museum which is displayed through small openings in white walls, displacing the viewer’s experience, giving us just a glimpse of something impressive. She is reordering the museum experience and restructuring but not dislocating it from what it was. She has not violently ripped apart culture but has restructured the logic behind it.

Richard Wright’s main piece is a wall painting in gold leaf with detailed rococo swirls and sunsets, divided from the middle outwards creating a mirror image on both sides. It took him three weeks of hard labour to create it and you might suspect there to be a print underneath which he covered over with the hand painted gold, but material described is solely gold leaf, in which case it is an impressive effort. The affect of the whole is sumptuous and detailed but resembles nice bespoke wallpaper which is a little disappointing. Previous works on walls have had more innovation to them. They had movement and they worked with the environment and layout of the space. Here we get a block square. On the opposite wall above the door there are four red star-like shapes which do little to make a further impact to the room. Could he have not at least used a corner? His work since he rediscovered painting seems to be like a picturesque version of street art, but this is not one of his better examples.

Skaer has reconstructed the meaning behind objects but Hiorns has literally ground them down into a pulp. A passenger jet engine has been pulverised into dust, a symbol of what everything in the entire world will become one day. He admits he has a fear of flying and this piece contains obvious connections between airplanes and death. The layout of the dust with peaks and troughs and light and dark patches is reminiscent of an aerial view of mountains you might get from a plane. Hung on the walls are three sculptures, two of which are ivory coloured plastic casts injected with ground-up cows’ brain. They make a free-form grouping that look like slices of vertebrae from an alien animal. The other contains cows’ brain smudged into rectangular openings to create a regimented pattern in a stainless steel frame.

The materials’ previous identity has been removed by the industrial processes Hiorns has put them through. The only thing any of his work now still posses to their past self is the tenuous connotations of death, fatality and perhaps rebirth. Hiorns’ art here is a quiet and thoughtful conceptualism.

Ernesto David who some would describe as a latter-day Surrealist has made a long black stage stretching across the span of the room. A black cloth doll stretches across the entire length, its legs fall over various canvases and props, painted with eerie figures outlined in white and red on black. The doll could represent himself asleep and the props around him his dreams. Papier-mâché balloon men with faces resembling a young pouting George Michael, and a painting of faceless builders showing their arses provocatively are just some of the other motifs involved in creating this semi-nightmare world. It would help you to know that David is ‘in’ to gay pornography if you didn’t already. Inventive and slightly disturbing like all our dreams this piece is totally subjective to the viewers own experiences. If the Turner Prize is a good indication of shifts in trend then you could say that like the other three artists this year, David’s art is not sensationalist, the aim is not to be shocking or commercial, although it is an ‘uneasy’ consumption.

All of which asks the question are we moving into a subtle and more aesthetically appreciative period, with less emphasis on the sensational?

Shocking Masterpiece, Impressive Portrait, Provocative Novel: Native Son.

Psychological Impact of Discrimination on the Oppressed.

By Jemhur K.

“This negro boy’s entire attitude towards life is a crime! The hate and fear which we have inspired in him, woven by our civilization into the very structure of his consciousness, into his blood and bones, into the hourly functioning of his personality, have become the justification of his existence” (Wright, 367)

Native Son is an exploration of psychological impacts on the oppressed individual, and an accusation of discrimination exercised by the oppressive, dominant white population of America in 1930s. Bigger Thomas, the main character of the novel, was born into, grew up in such racially segregated society that he was no more than, actually indeed, a ‘native son.’

Richard Wright depicts the racial discrimination in an exceptionally rich and professed naturalism, with vivid and symbolic texture. The whole novel is contained in the first few pages when Bigger, in unconscious anticipation of his own fate, corners a huge black rat and kills it with a skillet. Much of Wright’s meaning is conveyed by appropriate “objective correlatives” for Bigger’s inner feelings and emotions. The icy gales and heavy snowfalls of Book One and Two represent a hostile white environment: “To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were sort of great natural forces, like a stormy sky looming overhead.” (Wright, 97) Throughout the Book Two, the red glow of the furnace appears as a projection of Bigger’s guilt. There is a constant play on blindness, focused around the figure of Mrs. Dalton but aimed at both the whites and the reader, who are expected to grope their way to an understanding of Bigger’s life; a life of racial segregation, oppression and hatred.

Native Son is the story of Bigger Thomas predestined to a fate where it was up to the whites to decide the meaning of being black, and what things they can and cannot do. He opened his eyes into a hostile world dominated by the whites, and where twelve million Negroes do not have access even to their “inalienable rights” among which are ‘life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness’. Wright successfully claims the innocence of Bigger, who committed a murder, and accused oppression and discrimination which breeds hatred and violence. Bigger, as well, was a product of this hatred, oppression and the white dominated society. Bigger lived a fate predestined due to discrimination, and he was not guilty because of a life which was out of his control. The social and physical environment has prepared him a life restricted in the prescribed south side of Chicago. He was born into a community where colored people were segregated and forced to live on the other side of the ‘line’. So, from early age he grew up in segregation and oppression; his mind as well, was shaped in the same manner. The Chicago society shaped and melded the character of Bigger Thomas, his thoughts and actions. He became a victim of discrimination

Wright is careful to craft the story so that the events of Bigger’s life seem almost out of his control. His life and he himself is trapped by the frustration and poverty of the Great Depression; he grows up in a society of racism and hopelessness, and ultimately becomes a product of this environment, a ‘native son’. At the beginning of the Book One the author exposes the physical environment of Bigger and his neighborhoods. The novel itself begins with an irritating sound of a clock ringer, a winter morning in Chicago. The scene is no less irritating than the clock sound: in one-room flat, Bigger and his brother avert their faces while their mother and sister dress up, and the mother and the sister do the same while the boys dress. At that moment the tiny room galvanizes into violent action when mother screams pointing her finger to a huge black rat. The scene illustrates how miserable their condition is, killing of rat reveals the roots of violence in Bigger’s character. Bigger frightens his sister, Vera, with a dead rat and makes her faint. His mother gets angry; she also expresses a bitter truth that she wonders why she birthed him. She also calls him “plain dumb black crazy”. (Wright, 12

As the second half of the Book One begins Bigger is leaving for the job interview. When he enters into the barriered white world he feels himself in “a cold and distant world: a world of white secrets carefully guarded”. (Wright, 45) As reaches to high, iron fence of Dalton’s mansion, he grew angry. He even thinks of himself being fool to come to take the job in a world which was not his.

During the 1930’s, blacks were programmed to be afraid of whites. When Bigger is around whites he hangs his head down as if ashamed and he talks only in a mumbling soft, low tone. No one has ever told directly Bigger to do so, yet he does it anyway. Bigger’s character and act reveal this reality during the interview with Mr. Dalton. Bigger hates himself for acting, talking and feeling that way he does. It is as though an involuntary change comes over him whenever he is in presence of whites. “Why was he acting and feeling this way? He wanted to wave his hand and blot out the white man who was asking him to feel this. If not that he wanted to blot himself out” (Wright, 50) These are deep traces of racism in Bigger’s mind and it is the long history of segregation and oppression of black that makes Bigger feel this way. Never in Bigger’s life has he known or seen anything different, but the ethnic diversity between the blacks and whites. As a result, white society has created a group of afraid, confused and angry human beings who were, as Bigger, victims of segregation. “The plot of the novel may be horrifying,” as Rosenblatt mentions, “But its horror is easily dissipated. Once the sociology explanations of Bigger’s behavior have been made neatly and at length, as they are by his lawyer, Max, that particular level of action, disappears because the reader feels free of book’s external events as soon as those events have been cleared up by science.”

What would have happened if the blind mother had not entered the room and if Bigger had not sought to keep Mary quite with a pillow? He himself did not know. He just admits that he was “feeling that way” when he was with Mary. “He felt that his murder of her was more than amply justified by the fear and shame she had made him feel” (Wright, 108). But what had she really done to him to feel this way? He did not know. “It was not Mary he was reacting to when he felt that fear and shame. Mary had served to set off his emotions, emotions conditioned by many Marys. And now that he has killed Mary he felt a lessening of tension in his muscles; he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried.” (Wright.109). That was how he revenged the white world, a distinct world he had long hated. The crime was not only against an individual, but the whole white world symbolically. Mary stood for white people who wouldn’t let them do anything he wanted to do. In this manner, the crime was a reaction to oppression and segregation.

The novel Native Son draws an exact picture of segregation. For instance, the Book Two in which Bigger is fleeing the police, in the midst of that desperate human drama, Wright finds ways of describing Chicago’s discriminatory housing practices and other social abuses. This section of the Book Two gives a clear view of physical segregation in Chicago. Bessie’s character is a good example for class distinction. In the novel, the character of Bessie allows the author to portray the effects of low-paid domestic work. Book Three presents an even more detailed attack on racism in Max’s questions and speeches. Throughout the novel, the author tries to reveal the ethnic diversity in all aspects of life such as: the housing and real estate industry, the courts, the electoral system, the church, the press, the boys’ clubs, the business and job opportunities, the cinema and the public places, the education and the system of charity. Wright’s portrayal of ethnic diversity throughout the Native Son, especially in the figure of Bigger Thomas, is the novel’s most striking and revolutionary aspect.

In summary, it can be concluded that Wright’s exploration of Bigger’s psychological corruption gives a new perspective, as well as a thought, on the oppressive effect racism had on the black population in 1930s America. Wright, with his unmatchable literary skill, blamed the “whites” for Bigger’s psychological damage and a murder he committed. He alleged the constant barrage and impact of racist propaganda and racial oppression resulted in Bigger’s deviated, psychologically-ill character. His defense was that, Bigger had already been predestined to a life which breeds hatred, and murder, so he was a victim of his destiny. The theme of the novel, motifs and symbols masterly crafted, all point out to this claim. The character Bigger portrayed is an account of typical reaction to oppression. As Wright himself emphasized, Bigger’s violence stemmed from racial hatred. He discussed Bigger’s innocence through the character of Max. Max tried to defend Bigger at court, and it’s his speeches which give us considerable amount of scientific, psychological explanations to Bigger’s character. And, as we read the book throughout, Wright successfully convinces that the racial oppression is to be blamed, not the Bigger. So, I can conclude that the Native Son is an impressive portrait, shocking masterpiece, and a provocative novel on the psychological impact of racial discrimination on the oppressed. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Native Son as a chronicle of psychological impacts of oppression reveals Wright’s extraordinary ability to explore psychology through a literary work.

“Wrights subject matter, if it can even be called that, is derived from a variety of sources. His kaleidoscopically converging lines, repetitive geometric progressions, and baroque decorative fragments collide with a variety of extrapolations of typographic fonts and patterns seemingly derived from the world of underground tattoo design to form a kind of hybrid, graphic Esperanto.”  -Douglas Fogle

Richard Wright shortlisted for the Turner Prize, 2009

The Turner Prize 2009 exhibition at the Tate Gallery will open to the public tomorrow and this years four finalists are once again going balls to the wall to redefine the meaning of contemporary art.

Dont know what the Turner Prize is? Well then..lets read together shall we:

“The Turner Prize, now in its 25th year, is arguably the world’s most recognised and prestigious award for contemporary art. The exhibition presents the very best of current British visual art with the intention of stimulating a lively exchange of opinions.”

Sounds like pompous British ( is that why they call them poms?) drivel if you ask me, but hey lets all take a look two of  this years candidates and pretend to be art critics for a day. First up is Roger Hiorns who previously won acclaim for this:

You know those blue copper sulphate crystals you used to grow in a jar in science..well this dude filled a whole room with them. Pretty schweet if you ask me..so far so good.

Next we have Enrico Davids:

 What the….if that’s supposed to be a glory hole then he’s doing it wrong. That looks like a picture Chris L sent me from one of his office parties. If you think that this is art then please enlighten me..because all i see is guy doing some serious clenching.

The other two finalists are Lucy Skaer (skull of a sperm whale) and Richard Wright (gold-leaf wall). I give up..this art critic sh*t is beyond me.

For more info visit The Turner Prize

A filthy, unmade bed. A shark pickled in formaldehyde. Some lights going on and off.

These are just a few of the past Turner Prize hopefuls which have prompted screaming tabloid headlines and public derision alike.

The time for the latest exhibition of contemporary artists’ work vying for the prestigious £25,000 prize has arrived again at Tate Britain.

As someone who has only seen the show once and didnt really understand it much then i think that now is the time to visit the gallery with wide, child-like eyes and a fresh perspective.

Richard Wright, has created a painting on one of the gallery walls using the painstaking, age-old fresco techniques of the old masters – drawing a cartoon, tracing it on the wall, then painting over it and finally gilding it.

Roger Hiorns has displayed, as a sculpture, the dust that constitutes the physical remains of a passenger jet engine, simply sprinkled in shades of grey over the floor of one of Tate Britain’s galleries. “The engine has been dematerialised,” says Tate curator Helen Little. “We are prompted to reconsider our faith in technology, and to think about the entropy of all things: all objects are, in the end, dust.”

Lucy Skaer – the second Scotland-based name on the shortlist, reflecting the strength of the visual arts north of the border – has brought with her an entire sperm whale skull, loaned from the National Museums of Scotland, and then largely hidden it behind screens so that it is only just glimpsed by visitors. According to curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas, it is a process of slowing down the act of looking and the viewer’s moment of perception, so that “the eye oscillates between the detail and the recognition of the form; she draws us into an encounter with the image.”

Enrico David, who has created a bizarre cast of sculptural characters who sit on a stage, waiting – somewhat aggressively – to be sized up by visitors. A construction worker bares his backside; Kenneth Williams appears, somewhat incongruously; and strange, egg-shaped papier-mache men line up to be scrutinised “with a sense of antagonistic resignation,” according to Carey-Thomas.

The winner, who will be awarded £25,000, is announced on 7 December 2009.

Worth a look – would love to hear what you all think about it …

Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828)

Reginald Horace Blyth, born in England in 1898, died in Japan in 1964.

Following are two haiku by Kobayashi Issa (小林一茶), who lived from 1763 to 1828. He was associated with the Jôdoshinshû sect of Japanese Buddhism. I reproduce here the translations and commentaries on the poems by R.H. Blyth, whose masterwork Haiku—published in four volumes from 1949 to 1952, under the successive titles Volume 1: Eastern Culture, Volume 2: Spring, Volume 3:Summer-Autumn, and Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press)—re-introduced the form into the English-speaking world, influencing such writers (in America) as Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Richard Wright, to name only three. These volumes were later followed by a shorter, two-volume History of Haiku (1963), which further extended Blyth’s influence on poetry—and on thinking about Japan more generally—in the English-speaking world. The commentaries he provides in the latter work are notably succinct, and by turns gnomic, amusing, and exact. The book is, in short, pretty generally a delight to read.

The original Japanese, together with Blyth's romanization. His translation and commentary follow below.

Just below the pissing,
Drip, drip, drip,—
Iris flowers.

This is one of the best haiku ever written. It has everything in it. It overflows, overflowers.

Again, the original Japanese, with Blyth's romanization. His translation and commentary follow.

A straw mat;
The Milky Way aslant
In the saucepan.

The greatness of Issa consists in his putting the Galaxy into the stew-pot.

N.B. The images and texts above are from R.H. Blyth’s History of Haiku (vol. 1): 388. For The Icebox, a Kyoto-based site devoted to haiku in English, click here. Readers curious as to my having mentioned Richard Wright, author of Native Son, in connection with haiku should have a look at a wonderful book, published posthumously and with an introduction by his daughter, called Haiku: This Other World. It collects 817 of the more than 4,000 haiku Wright wrote during the last two years of his life. For a link to Pure Land Haiku: The Art of Priest Issa, a book about Issa by David Lanoue, click here.

The Richard Wright Modern Design Auction will be held on Tuesday, October 6 at noon in Chicago.  Wright is the premier auction house specializing in modern and contemporary design. Since 2000, they have sold nearly 20,000 lots across the spectrum of 20th and 21st century design.  One of a kind Prince Charles Chairs by Peter Shire will be included in the auction.  If you can’t make it to Chicago, you can register and bid online.

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Savannah Libraries Launch “Soul of a People” Federal Writers Project Celebration

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