atira.

jazz and essays. books and being. 2nd year PhD student in Communication. nyc

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The most revolutionary thing I've learned about Blackness is that our English is not at all "broken"

It was 2012 and I was a "white washed" (not real but you know what that means) junior in undergrad and an entire chapter included in this textbook was dedicated to our pidgin/dialect whichever your argument. 14 years later and the amount of borrowing with and without permission of rest of English is truly a marvel to the point where things I know damn well are just AAVE are attributed to wide ranging sources such as "Gen Z/Alpha slang" and "gay lingo" and "internet speak" in general. Our range

These are just a few of our many common grammatical rules:

Habitual "Be": In Standard English "He is working" means right now or generally. In AAVE "He be working" specifically means he works regularly or habitually, a distinction that Standard English can't make without adding extra words.

Copula Deletion: Dropping forms of the verb "to be" in places where Standard English requires them ("She tired" instead of "She is tired" or "They going" instead of "They are going")

Double Negatives: In Standard English, two negatives make a positive. In AAVE, using multiple negatives ("She ain't never going") simply adds emphasis to the negation, a common feature in many of the world's languages.

Metathesis: switching sounds within a word, the most famous example being "ask" as "aks," a pronunciation that has roots in Old English.

Remote "Been": When you say "I been knew that" the stressed "been" means you've known it for a long time, remotely in the past, which doesn't exist in Standard English without adding extra words.

Completive "Done": "I done told you already" is a way of saying the action is finished and the matter is settled with an emphasis on finality or frustration.

Subject-Verb Disagreement: In AAVE verbs are often uninflected for the third person ("She walk" instead of "She walks") to simplify conjugation.

I love being Black, we're so smart! We been developed our slice of language despite the slavery and diaspora

[sunflowermp4]

"Salvation" by Langston Hughes, from his memoir The Big Sea

[sixgrl]

[garadinervi]

The Langston Hughes Festival/1978, Part I, a homecoming tribute to James Baldwin, The City College of the City University of New York, New York, NY, March 17, 1978 [Good Books, Atlanta, GA]

[somerabbitholes]

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

[swearpaws]

More of these, please let’s have a grand chain of everyone’s favourite essays on all different topics bc it’s fascinating 😊

[siltmedallion]

Octavia Butler on why she writes

[triflingthing]

me time

[symphonyoflovenet]

I understood early that not everything I did was going to be a masterpiece, but I would try to do it the best I knew how.

Maya Angelou

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Rent Parties in Harlem

In a recent post, I showed a photo of a rent party in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. The bohemians of that era got the idea from the parties held in Harlem from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Guests paid a fee to enter the host's apartment and dance to the music provided (live bands before the war, records after). Food was extra. The host(s) used the proceeds to pay the rent.

The tickets issued for rent parties, which the hosts handed out to friends and even strangers, interested Langston Hughes. “When I first came to Harlem," he wrote in 1957, "as a poet I was intrigued by the little rhymes at the top of most House Rent Party cards, so I saved them. Now I have quite a collection.”

The collection now lives in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University, along with Hughes's other papers.

In the 1920s, competition for guests was fierce, because as many as a dozen parties might be held on the same block, and as many as five per building. One ticket from 1927 said:

Save your tears for a rainy day, We are giving a party where you can play With red-hot mammas and too bad She-bas Who wear their dresses above their knees And mess around with whom they please.

During Prohibition, of course, bootleg liquor flowed freely. Some parties had back rooms for gambling and drug use, and couples could sometimes rent one for themselves—for a price.

The term "rent party" never appeared on these tickets, which used euphemisms such as "social party" or "social whist party."

Hughes enjoyed going to these parties more than those thrown by artists and intellectuals. He wrote:

The Saturday night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any night club, in small apartments where God knows who lived—because the guests seldom did—but where the piano would often be augmented by a guitar, or an odd cornet, or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the street. And where awful bootleg whiskey and good fried fish or steaming chitterling were sold at very low prices. And the dancing and singing and impromptu entertaining went on until dawn came in at the windows.

Photos: Slate magazine and Open Culture

[hoodacademic]

11.15.23. your fav academic is back in the game ✌🏾Finally declared myself a long life nerd, got accepted to a PhD program, and am now spending all my time building the perfect notion space before courses start. Let the games begin

[covvboytears]

A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde

[wellconstructedsentences]

One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.

Nothing Personal by James Baldwin

[fluoresensitive-deactivated2024]

"My choice of language (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate coconspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture."

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye Foreward

[dykeplier-deactivated20240511]

[nibelmundo]

Toni (Morrison)’s my ally and it’s really probably too complex to get into. She’s a black woman writer, which in the public domain makes it more difficult to talk about . . . Her gift is allegory. Tar Baby is an allegory. In fact all her novels are. But they’re hard to talk about in public. That’s where you get in trouble because her books and allegory are not always what they seem to be about. I was too occupied with my recent illness to deal with Beloved. But in general, she’s taken a myth, or she takes what seems to be a myth, and turns it into something else. I don’t know how to put this, Beloved could be the story of truth. She’s taken a whole lot of things and turned them upside down. Some of them you recognize the truth in it. I think that Toni’s very painful to read . . . Because it’s always, or most times, a horrifying allegory; but you recognize that it works. But you don’t really want to march through it. Sometimes people have a lot against Toni, but she’s got the most believing story of everybody, this rather elegant matron, whose intentions really are serious, and according to some people, lethal.

1987 interview of James Baldwin in Lovalerie King and L. Scott, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays (2006, 1)

[booksellergothic]

Halloween Day 31!!!

Looks like we made it, the culmination of spooky season, the last day before we start the countdown to next spooky season

On The Many Hauntings of Langston Hughes

“Have you ever seen a ghost? If so,” Langston Hughes requested, “please let me know.” The June 16, 1951 edition of the poet’s regular column

Langston Hughes was one of, it not the, leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, and not someone most people would associate with scares, haunts, and things that go bump in the night. But Hughes was fascinated by ghosts and real life ghost stories, and the metaphor of the ghost as a symbol of unfinished business with the past, and thing that every Black American had and has. In this weekly column for the Chicago Defender he wrote, requesting people to send in their ghost stories, as well as creating the persona of Old Ghost, in order to speak to the many deaths and other sufferings of the Black community.

Later he wrote the tragic and truthful Ghosts of 1619

Ghosts of all too solid flesh,

Dark ghosts come back to haunt you now,

These dark ghosts to taunt you --

Yet ghosts so solid, ghosts so real

They may not only haunt you --

But rape, rob, steal,

Sit-in, stand-in, stall-in, vote-in

(Even vote for real in Alabam')

And in voting not give a damn

For the fact that white was right

Until last night.

.

Last night?

What happened then?

Flesh-and-blood ghosts

Became flesh-and-blood men?

Got tired of asking, When?

Although minority,

Suddenly became majority

(Metaphysically speaking)

In seeking authority?

.

How can one man be ten?

Or ten be a hundred and ten?

Or a thousand and ten?

Or a million and ten

Are but a thousand and ten

Or a hundred and ten

Or ten -- or one --

Or none --

Being ghosts

Of then?

..

Thank you for everyone joining me for this most wonderful time of the year. I am hoping - against hope - to keep up with book recs and reviews even now that October is all but over. If you are interesting in being tagged please let me know.

And BOO!

@dianamolloy @piggledy-higgledy @imdeadtiredtm @joyfullymassivewhispers @caffiend-queen @dangertoozmanykids101 @toozmanykids @myoxisbroken @wrathkitty @punemy-spotted @sillybillieandricky @stupendouslovegardener @sylviefromneptune @acidcasualties

[covvboytears]

Anaïs Nin, The New Woman