毛笔 Maobi Dick

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”

[maobidick]

People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else.

Temperament, personality, or outlook don’t divide quite like that. The bits don’t separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century—people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That’s the way the world is going.

[maobidick]

There can be a fine line between turning to the literature of the past for insight into our own times and bending its messages into the ones that our ears are most eager to hear.

REREADING PAULA FOX’S “DESPERATE CHARACTERS”

[maobidick]

[This is a guest post by Brendan O'Kane, written on the evening of 3/24/17] At a friend’s dissertation defense this morning, a certain distinguished Dutch professor emeritus, explaining the appeal of prosimetric vernacular literature to audiences in late imperial Shandong, noted that “people befo

Important shit here

[maobidick]

How I Learned To Stop Erasing Myself

There’s a type of inborn initiative that comes from having never been obligated to answer questions about the meaning of one’s name that I was always envious of. Now, at 28, I'm slowly becoming mys...

There’s a type of inborn initiative that comes from having never been obligated to answer questions about the meaning of one’s name that I was always envious of. Now, at 28, I’m slowly becoming myself.

[maobidick]

Are we educating each other or just scoring points from our swivel chairs?

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out. More often than not, this boundary is constructed through the use of appropriate language and terminology – a language and terminology that are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with. In such a context, it is impossible not to fail at least some of the time. And what happens when someone has mastered proficiency in languages of accountability and then learned to justify all of their actions by falling back on that language? How do we hold people to account who are experts at using anti-oppressive language to justify oppressive behaviour? We don’t have a word to describe this kind of perverse exercise of power, despite the fact that it occurs on an almost daily basis in progressive circles. Perhaps we could call it anti-oppressivism.

[staff]

Support women in STEM

Because they’ve advanced the success and growth of those fields for just as long as men, even when they weren’t afforded the opportunity, the recognition, or the grants. Onward:

Rosalind Franklin (July 25, 1920—April 16, 1958)

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and, get this, X-ray crystallographer. As far as titles go, you can’t do much better than crystallographer. Her work in understanding the molecular structure of DNA laid the foundation for the discovery of the double helix. She also made significant contributions to understanding the structures of RNAs. And viruses. And coal. And graphite. Her work was not fully appreciated until after she passed away. Two teams of all-male scientists who used her work to discover great things later went on to win Nobel Prizes.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler (February 8, 1831—March 9, 1895)

Rebecca Lee Crumpler spent most of her professional life being the first at things. She was the very first Black woman to become a physician in the United States. The first (and only) Black woman to graduate from New England Female Medical College. She authored Book of Medical Discourses, one of the very first medical books written by a Black person. Every obstacle she powered through was done in an effort to provide care for other people. Hero. 

Mary Anning (May 21, 1799—March 9, 1847)

Mary Anning discovered the first full Ichthyosaur skeleton at 11,  the very first Plesiosaur at 22, and then opened up her own fossil store front a few years later. We repeat: She opened up her own fossil store. We could go on and on, but Rejected Princesses (@rejectedprincesses​) already did it best in this biographical comic. While you’re over there, check out their whole archive and the dozens and dozens of women’s life stories within.

Follow these too:

She Thought It: Crossing Bodies in Sciences and Arts (@shethoughtit​​) is a database dedicated to shedding light on women making strides in both science and the arts. A whole bunch of great things.

Lady Scientists of Tumblr (@scientific-women​​) promises everything you could ever want from a feminist science round-up blog: intersectionality and equal representation of all scientists who identify as female. Hell yeah.

Math Brain (@ihaveamathbrain​​) backs the novel idea that women are indeed capable of understanding math. Shocking. With the perfect amount of sarcasm, they tackle the idea some bozos have that women just don’t have the mind for mathematics.

[zevzekadamcom-deactivated202102]

Lan onlar ördek yavrusu

[maobidick]

Kedi

Who is the subject of Kedi: cat or human? What is obvious is the amount of time that the people on screen have spent caring for and gazing at these animals. They tell the stories of their favorite cats, their habits, their familial origins and relationships, their dietary tastes, love lives and territorial enemies. They create philosophies and theologies about the animals. One woman remarks dogs think humans are gods but cats know better. Another (in fact more than one) say the animals have the guts and determination that humans ought to have. They credit the animals with teaching them how to love again, how to heal wounds, how to be a child. One cat feeds on manchego and emmental. He prefers turkey to roast beef. Another stalks (the blood is kept off screen -- perhaps the disgust evoked by mauled vermin would distract) waterside rats. 

[maobidick]

For many European immigrants who came to the U.S. during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the gradual shedding of ethnicity in order to fit into Anglo-Protestant white culture was essential to success and advancement. As one mid-century Italian American put it, “We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents.” For many second-generation Mexican Americans today, the opposite is true: They are becoming Americans by seeking out and embracing their ancestral cultures, learning how to be proud of their parents. Their understanding of what it means to be an American derives not so much from the symbols and institutions of mainstream white culture but from a powerful sense of in-betweenness. For them, Americanness is less a sweeping mythology to which they must submit and more a framework for seeing, thinking, blending, reinventing. Their experience grows out of distinct demographic, social, and economic conditions, and their unique take on identity has challenged longstanding ways of thinking about assimilation.

The Making of a Mexican American Dream

[maobidick]

Women's Strike

At Housingworks, two women clock off shifts at coffee bar. Third co-worker asks where they are off to. The protest for women, they say. You know, men get abused too. You should march for men's rights. He continues to repeat this to several customers after the women leave. Third woman, a customer, laughs (in that I just want to show you I'm not hostile way).

[maobidick]

[maobidick]

Cathy Silber On a cold autumn day in 1988, I helped an old country widow in Hunan change her bed sheet. In her early eighties at the time, Yi Nianhua (1906-1991) was the best of the last writers of…

In this case, the desire to view nüshu as a covert and dangerous instance of women wresting power tools from male hands, rather than as a proper female activity which men admired but had little interest in themselves, is born of an orientation to the world so pervasive and persistent that even though many people recognize it, all of us need to be reminded of it from time to time, precisely because it is so pervasive and persistent. This is the uncritical acceptance of the values culturally ascribed to gendered practices, an attitude that Marilyn Strathern has called the “denigration of domesticity.”xv Work outside the home is more valuable and important than work inside the home. Why? Written literature is more important than oral literature. Why? Why do hammers and drills seem more powerful than ladles and looms? In many cultures, practices gendered female—things women do that men do not––are for that very reason considered less valuable, less important. (Take the rearing of children, for instance). To believe, even unwittingly, that nüshu is only important to the extent that it is not just a regular female activity serves only to entrench more deeply the very cultural attitudes that feminist scholarship seeks to interrogate and dispel.

[maobidick]

It is too often assumed that the test of a writer’s importance is his universality

Belli into English

ANTHONY BURGESS

Belli is one of those poets who make us revise our notions of literary greatness. It is too often assumed that the test of a writer’s importance is his universality – meaning his capacity to speak directly, without footnotes or glosses, to the generality of mankind. When I taught Western Literature in Malaya to Malays, Chinese and Indians, I found that both Dante and Shakespeare were less universal than I had previously believed. My students couldn’t understand Dante’s Catholicism, and they had difficulty with the social customs of Shakespeare’s England. I tried them on modern literature, and they laughed at Graham Greene. They couldn’t see why the hero of The Heart of the Matter had to commit suicide because he couldn’t stop committing adultery. “Why,” said a bright Malay girl, “does he not become Muslim like us and marry both women?” Universality can only mean the basic crudities – theft, murder, power, sex. I saw the film of Shakespeare’s Richard III in a Borneo village, and the natives understood its basic drift well enough. Indeed, they thought – from the costumes – that it was a tale of some contemporary Eastern rajadom. The only universal modern novelist is Harold Robbins. Ergo, he is the greatest. He himself believes that, but we do not have to join him.

Now, Belli is very narrow in his appeal. He writes about Romans in Roman; he addresses Romans. His first audiences were tavern audiences. Gogol was impressed by him, and Sainte-Beuve even wrote about him, but he was not destined to cross the literary frontiers as Tolstoy and Dickens did. He wrote sonnets, and the only way to translate a sonnet is to write what looks like a new sonnet. He used a narrow unexportable language, that of the Roman streets. It is no use waiting for Belli to be translated. To know him you must come to him, first paying homage to the statue in Tras­tevere, then marrying, as I did, an Italian wife who is knowledgeable about him. But there are a number of foreigners about – Americans, chiefly, who love Rome – who claim to the incredulous that Belli was one of the two greatest poets of the nineteenth century, the other probably being the Englishman John Keats, who, buried in Rome, is a sort of honorary Roman.

When I was introduced to Belli’s work, I was shocked by his obscenity and blasphemy. This was because I had been brought up as an English Catholic who had been told by his priests that Rome was a holy mother, not an unholy whore. I expected, when first visiting Rome, that all Romans would be pious and devoted to the Pope. I know now that they are pagan and can only approach the sacred truths of Christianity by way of vulgarity and blasphemy. They must, one assumes, also have been vulgar and blasphemous in their attitude to the old Greco-Roman pantheon. Reverence is not in the Roman nature. Reverence, I was to find, was not really in my nature either. When Belli starts sprinkling cazzo and dumpennente around Bible stories which he del­iberately misunderstands and mislocates, I recognize that the religious sense goes deeper than reverence and may sometimes be best expressed through blasphemy. You can only genuinely blaspheme if you genuinely believe. You can only believe if you take for granted. The Blessed Virgin may have been doubtful about being impregnated by an uccello, but the Romans have no doubt she existed just as Julius Caesar did.

I was determined to translate seventy-odd sonnets of Belli into English, and into strict Petrarchan sonnet-form too. But the trouble with using that form in English is that English has so few rhymes. There is a character in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four whose job it is to bring old writers into line with the ideology of the ruling party. He has to use God to rhyme with rod in a poem by Kipling because he can find no other rhyme. He is consequently tortured and liquidated. Italian has more than enough rhymes for Dio. It was a hard struggle to render Belli into ABBA ABBA CDC DCD (or other sextet variations), but I had to do it, and I did it. The rendering of the Roman language into an English equivalent was the real problem.

Italy is lucky in that she still has living dialects – variants of Latin that are not only to be heard in street and field but also to be found in books and used as serious literary media. This situation is no longer to be found with regard to English. In the year 1300 or thereabouts, English literature was created in many English dialects, and it was all written down. Chaucer wrote in the dialect of London; Langland in the dialect of Worcestershire; the anonymous great author of Gawain and the Green Knight (a work that the late Tolkien lavished his scholarship on) wrote in an earlier form of the dialect that I regard as my own – that of the North-West, of Lancashire and Cheshire. When London became the great cultural capital of England, as well as the centre of political power, the dialects started to disappear as serious media for literary expression. Chaucer’s English became the English that Italians who learn English now learn. No Italian in his right mind would set himself to learn the English of Yorkshire or Devon or Sussex. Only one dialect of English has withstood the steady domination of London English, and that is the Lallans or surviving Anglo-Saxon of the Lowlands of Scotland. Robert Burns wrote in it. Hugh MacDiarmid, conceivably the greatest of all living poets, writes in it, though he had to learn it as the rest of us learn Latin. My own dialect is spoken, but no longer written. It was the obvious equivalent for Belli’s Roman, but there is now no orthography for it. There is only one way of writing English now – the way of London.

Moreover, the aim of any translator of Belli must naturally be to make him known to as large a new public as possible. If I were able to use Lancashire dialect for rendering him, I could not possibly find an audience to read him, since the present-day speakers of dialectal English are not readers of books. Recite him in a Manchester or Liverpool pub? Possible, but the audience is still limited. Let me give an example of the problem. Sonnet 1,748 of Belli begins:

“Ma Ggesucristo mio,” disceva Marta,

“Chi cce pò arregge ppiù cco Mmadalena?”

This goes literally into London, or Queen’s, or Standard, English as:

“Jesus Christ,” said Martha, “how can anyone put up

any more with Mary Magdalene?”

But the dialectal flavour is lost. The Queen of England herself could recite it. I tried this:

Martha said: “Christ, am full oop reet t’t’scoopper

Wi’ Murry thur.”

But the orthography is unsatisfactory, and, again, I am narrowing in to a small regional society which the literati of the English-speaking world never enter. I am doing Belli no good. It’s as easy for London Englishmen to learn Roman as to learn North-Western English. The only answer was compromise – which the English probably invented along with the steam-engine and water-closet. I had to translate Belli into the English of London – or the BBC or Oxford and Cambridge and Buckingham Palace – but hope that the reader might try to audialize the phonemes and rhythms into whatever town or rural dialect he knew best, if he knew one at all. But the situation is false. England has no Porta, no Goldoni. Her literature, like her government, is hopelessly centralized.

The one thing that draws my translations of Belli away from the centralized literary tradition of English – a tradition of good manners and polite speech – is the blasphemous obscenity, which can, of course, be rendered very accurately into even the English of the Royal Family (the Duke of Edinburgh, consort to the Queen, is a naval officer and is fluent in obscenity when occasion asks for it). No trouble with cazzo or dumpennente. The form dumpendebat, by the way, straight out of the Stabat Mater, is a useful English-Latin neologism: I use it regularly now when I am tired of the regular equivalents of cazzo. The impact of Belli’s content remains, if not that of his idiom, and that, for the moment, must be enough. When, on Christ’s arrest, the “Pope” (Peter) is heard to say “I don’t give a fuck about the bastard”, such English readers as I have will at least catch something of the Belli flavour. Something is something, if it is not everything.

But Belli remains as one of the proofs that poetry is fundamentally untranslatable. England’s Dr Johnson said that poets keep languages alive, since one must learn their languages in order to read them. I am sure that Harold Robbins and, for that matter, Alberto Moravia lose little when they are translated into Serbo-Croat, Korean, or Lower Slobovian. But Belli ceases to be Belli when he ceases to be Roman. My hope is that my feeble efforts at translating him may draw a few people to him in his native dress and habitat. He is, after all, a sort of Roman saint.

[maobidick]

Hi, I'd like to order one noodle please.

Restaurant in Chengdu, Sichuan where you can order ONE noodle, which is more than enough to feed you!

[maobidick]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qTJ9lZX3KE)

[roxanegay]

All I really need to say:

In canceling Milo’s book contract, Simon & Schuster made a business decision the same way they made a business decision when they decided to publish that man in the first place. When his comments about pedophilia/pederasty came to light, Simon & Schuster realized it would cost them more money to do business with Milo than he could earn for them. They did not finally “do the right thing” and now we know where their threshold, pun intended, lies. They were fine with his racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies. They were fine with his transphobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. They were fine with how he encourages his followers to harass women and people of color and transgender people online. Let me assure you, as someone who endured a bit of that harassment, it is breathtaking in its scope, intensity, and cruelty but hey, we must protect the freedom of speech. Certainly, Simon & Schuster was not alone in what they were willing to tolerate. A great many people were perfectly comfortable with the targets of Milo’s hateful attention until that attention hit too close to home.

Because I’ve been asked, I will not be publishing my book with Simon & Schuster now that they have dropped Milo. After I pulled my book, they changed the release date of Dangerous from March to June 13, the day my next book, Hunger, comes out. I said nothing because I was neither threatened nor concerned but it did reinforce for me that this was not a company I wanted to do business with. My protest stands. Simon & Schuster should have never enabled Milo in the first place. I see what they are willing to tolerate and I stand against all of it. Also, I’ve received far better offers for How to Be Heard from other publishers.

There are some who will spin the cancellation of this book contract as a failure of the freedom of speech but such is not the case. This is yet another example of how we are afforded the freedom of speech but there is no freedom from the consequences of what we say.

[maobidick]

But modern writers and artists in India—and in other postcolonial countries—have always had to contend with the politics of cultural exchange between the colonised and the coloniser. When the Bengali critic Dineshchandra Sen, in a letter to the British historian EP Thompson, referred to Rabindranath Tagore as “a European writer of Bengali,” he was articulating a grievance against all cultural renegades. Yet far from being a failing on the part of the postcolonial writer or artist, the urge to cross over is essential to modernity. The scholar Rosinka Chaudhuri, in her 2014 book The Literary Thing—a fascinating study of the beginnings of modern poetry in Bengal—employs an interesting phrase to describe the phenomenon: “creative cross-contamination.” Let there be no doubt: the spirit of modernity is confused, many-hued, contaminated.

The Writer Of Modern Life from Caravan Magazine