Barry Moser’s illustration for Lynne Reid Banks’s “The Hare in His Magic.” From The Magic Hare, Avon, 1994.
The dwarfing, warping, distorting influence (From James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man)
Since I have grown older I have often gone back and tried to analyze the change that came into my life after that fateful day in school. There did come a radical change, and, young as I was, I felt fully conscious of it, though I did not fully comprehend it. Like my first spanking, it is one of the few incidents in my life that I can remember clearly. In the life of everyone there is a limited number of unhappy experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life. We may grow to include some of them among the trivial incidents of childhood—a broken toy, a promise made to us which was not kept, a harsh, heart-piercing word—but these, too, as well as the bitter experiences and disappointments of mature years, are the tragedies of life.
And so I have often lived through that hour, that day, that week, in which was wrought the miracle of my transition from one world into another; for I did indeed pass into another world. From that time I looked out through other eyes, my thoughts were colored, my words dictated, my actions limited by one dominating, all-pervading idea which constantly increased in force and weight until I finally realized in it a great, tangible fact.
And this is the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates upon each and every colored man in the United States. He is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the viewpoint of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man. It is wonderful to me that the race has progressed so broadly as it has, since most of its thought and all of its activity must run through the narrow neck of this one funnel.
And it is this, too, which makes the colored people of this country, in reality, a mystery to the whites. It is a difficult thing for a white man to learn what a colored man really thinks; because, generally, with the latter an additional and different light must be brought to bear on what he thinks; and his thoughts are often influenced by considerations so delicate and subtle that it would be impossible for him to confess or explain them to one of the opposite race. This gives to every colored man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of dual personality; there is one phase of him which is disclosed only in the freemasonry of his own race. I have often watched with interest and sometimes with amazement even ignorant colored men under cover of broad grins and minstrel antics maintain this dualism in the presence of white men.
I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.
From Ch. 2 of James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. First published anonymously in 1912, and later reissued in 1927 under Johnson’s (now famous) name, Autobiography is an under-read classic, a fascinating and complex condensation of racism, colorism, and class in early twentieth-century America. Johnson was born on this day in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida.
The Dream of Aeneas — Salvator Rosa
It’s June 16 so I guess I’ll just recycle this Bloomsday blog again
What did Leopold actually do on June 16th, 1904?
Selections from one-star Amazon reviews of Ulysses
A list of Irish heroes (from “The Cyclops” episode of Ulysses)
Another page of Joyce’s notes, plus links to more
William Faulkner’s Joyce anxiety
Biblioklept’s lousy review (the review is lousy, not the book) of Dubliners
Joyce’s entry on the 1901 Irish Census
Biblioklept’s review (not so lousy, the review) of a superior full-cast audio recording of Ulysses
James Joyce explains why Odysseus is the most “complete man’ in literature
Leopold’s Bloom’s recipe for burnt kidney breakfast
Water Serpents II — Gustav Klimt
Portrait of a Man with a Floppy Hat — Egon Schiele
Tubular Jetty, Mouth of the Adour, Port of Bayonne — Louis Lafon
There are roses and tulips and honeysuckles | Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal entry for June 15, 1838
June 15th.–The red light which the sunsets at this season diffuse; there being showery afternoons, but the sun setting bright amid clouds, and diffusing its radiance over those that are scattered in masses all over the sky. It gives a rich tinge to all objects, even to those of sombre hues, yet without changing the hues. The complexions of people are exceedingly enriched by it; they look warm, and kindled with a mild fire. The whole scenery and personages acquire, methinks, a passionate character. A love-scene should be laid on such an evening. The trees and the grass have now the brightest possible green, there having been so many showers alternating with such powerful sunshine. There are roses and tulips and honeysuckles, with their sweet perfume; in short, the splendor of a more gorgeous climate than ours might be brought into the picture.
The situation of a man in the midst of a crowd, yet as completely in the power of another, life and all, as if they two were in the deepest solitude.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal entry for June 15, 1838. From Passages from the American Note-Books.
Orpheus and Eurydice — Agostino Carracci
“Between Absence and Forgetting” — A Review of Human Acts
At 3:AM Magazine, I wrote a review about Han Kang’s latest book Human Acts. I wrote about her last book, The Vegetarian, on the blog here.
Below is an excerpt of the new review. Follow the link to the full piece.
Suffering from an unnamed illness, all J. wants is to die—which, as Blanchot describes for us in his essay ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, is her inalienable right—yet the narrator ruins her chances. In the essay, Blanchot takes issue with Sartre’s ‘What is Literature?’ because he offers a definition of literature that only perpetuates the primordial lie of language. The so-called committed work’s language is forced to “designate, demonstrate, order, refuse, interpolate, beg, insult, persuade, insinuate”. Sentences are then specialised and instrumentalised towards a specific end. The grave risk here is articulated a bit differently from Blanchot by Adorno: “The error of the primacy of [commitment] as it is exercised today appears clearly in the privilege accorded to tactics over everything else. The means have become autonomous to the extreme. Serving the ends without reflection, they have alienated themselves from them.”1 Committed literary works lose their object of action because they forget that language first murders, as Hegel might say, its referents in service to mere presence—mere sake of behaving politically. “When even genocide becomes cultural property in committed literature,” Adorno writes elsewhere, “it becomes easier to continue complying with the culture that [gives] rise to the murder.”2 In affect alone, atrocious experiences are straitjacketed into fixed meanings. These kinds of works imagine themselves as counteractive agents to the strategies of violence and domination that governments still practice today, literally murderous and not, and continually risk complicity with the very regimes of brutality themselves. Both Adorno’s and Blanchot’s responses to this literary affectation result in high-modernist works that, through a resistance to exaggerated forms of politicking, appear in reality as apolitical but offer a more political resistance by not participating in the “rigid coordinate system” of authoritarian systems. For both of these thinkers, it is not an author’s or text’s political orientation that is at most risk, but the problem of representation itself.
While Human Acts does not resist denotative meaning like Beckett’s The Unnameable, it sympathises with the question that Blanchot raises in his essay. When J. opens her eyes and seethes at the narrator, it is because he made her open her eyes and refused her right to death. This opens onto a question of place and action: Does the very act of writing itself violate this right to death, or does it constellate a map of the ways in which language attempts to fill the void it instantiates in the first place?
Is this an art form or are you just a technician? | Martin Hannett and Tony Wilson at Strawberry Studios in July 1980
The Conqueror — Rene Magritte
Books acquired, 5.23.2016
Emily Barton’s The Book of Esther is new from Crown (Penguin-Random House). Their blurb:
Eastern Europe, August 1942. The Khazar kaganate, an isolated nation of Turkic warrior Jews, lies between the Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea) and the Khazar Sea (the Caspian). It also happens to lie between a belligerent nation to the west that the Khazars call Germania—and a city the rest of the world calls Stalingrad.
After witnessing the first foray of Germani warplanes into sovereign Khazar territory, Esther bat Josephus, daughter of Khazaria’s chief policy adviser, knows she must fight for her country. Germania is gaining ground and if they are successful, the Khazar kaganate will be wiped out. Only Esther sees the ominous implications of Germania’s disregard for Jewish lives. But as a woman she is prohibited from joining the war effort. Her one chance is to set out on her mechanical horse, Seleme, accompanied by Itakh, her adopted brother, to seek a fabled village of kabbalists. They may hold the key to her destiny: their rumored ability to change her into a man so that she may convince her entire nation to join in the fight for its very existence against an enemy like none Khazaria has faced before.
THE BOOK OF ESTHER is a genre-bending novel by a writer who invents worlds “out of Calvino or Borges” (The New Yorker). Reminiscent of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, readers will delight in this tour de force novel which blends rich steampunk fantasy, powerful feminism, and Jewish mysticism into a singular piece of fiction.
Barbara Taylor Bradford’s novel The Cavendon Luck is new from St. Martin’s. Their blurb:
It is 1938 in England, and Miles and Cecily Ingham have lead the family in bringing the Cavendon estate back from the brink of disaster. But now, with the arrival of World War II, Cavendon Hall will face its biggest challenge yet. It is a challenge that will push the Inghams and Swanns to protect each other and the villagers, and reveal their true capacity for survival and rebirth.
Told with Bradford’s deft, evocative prose and featuring a beloved cast of characters, The Cavendon Luck is a story of intrigue, romance, sorrow, and joy that readers won’t soon forget.
The Lonely Life — Jack Pierson
Peter (A Young English Girl) — Romaine Brooks
The City of Sleep — P. Craig Russell
From P. Craig Russell’s “La Sonnambula and the City of Sleep: A Fragment of a Dream.” Published in Night Music #2 (Eclipse Comics). Via Comics A-Go-Go!, where you can find full scans of the story.
Self-Portrait — Maurice Sendak
Watercolor illustration for the cover of the Hartford Courant’s Sunday Magazine edition, Dec. 19, 1993.
Biblioklept 