Global Eyes

Notes on Home(s), Hunger & Beauty

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Theaster Gates. A Clay Sermon.

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Make the understanding for yourself was a phrase I often heard my grandmother say. But I sat there with my mouth open waiting for her to make the understanding for me.

Gayl Jones, Palmares

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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

John Berger, from Ways of Seeing

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au·to·di·dact ˌôdōˈdīdakt/ noun: autodidact; plural noun: autodidacts; noun: auto-didact; plural noun: auto-didacts    a self-taught person.

Here are the books/essays I’m committing myself to (re)read before Trump’s inauguration.

“On Being White... and Other Lies,” by James Baldwin (1984) http://bit.ly/1tKX6Qi

The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

Political Fictions by Joan Didion

Silencing the Past; Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

The Emigrants by WG Sebald

Racecraft by Karen E. Fields

American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia by Edmund S. Morgan

Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral

The Black Book, edited by Toni Morrison

Civil Wars, June Jordan

... will add to/revise list as it develops.

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Words are purposes. Words are maps.

Adrienne Rich, from “Diving into the Wreck”

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My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind. I could not have known at the beginning of my life that this would be so; I only came to know this in the middle of my life, just at the time when I was no longer young and realized I had less of some of the things I used to have in abundance and more of some of the things I had scarcely had at all. And this realization of loss and gain made me look backward and forward: at my beginning was this woman whose face I had never seen, but at my end was nothing, no one between me and the black room of the world.

Jamaica Kincaid, Autobiography of my Mother

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I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 

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Blooms.

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So perhaps we write toward what we will become from where we are.

from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude

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I am a black female writer and I have no qualms whatsoever with people saying that I'm a black female writer. What I take umbrage with is the fact that some might try to use that identity -- that which is me -- as a way to ghettoize my material and my output. I am female and black and American. No buts are in that identity. Now you go off and do the work to somehow broaden yourself so you understand what America is really about. Because it's about me.

Gloria Naylor

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The Story of My Teeth

 by Valeria Luiselli

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from Simone Weil’s “The Need for Roots”

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define.”

“The social relations in any one country can be very dangerous factors in connection with uprootedness. In all parts of our country at the present time -- and setting aside the question of the conquest-- there are two poisons at work spreading this disease. One of them is money. Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.”

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My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind. I could not have known at the beginning of my life that this would be so; I only came to know this in the middle of my life, just at the time when I was no longer young and realized that I had less of some of the things I used to have in abundance and more of some of the things I had scarcely had at all. And this realization of loss and gain made me look backward and forward: at my beginning was this woman whose face I had never seen, but at my end was nothing, no one between me and the black room of the world.

Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

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In Vancouver: Reading List

I’ve carried very few books to here. Trying to live mostly in the world I am making, but still, always need the steadying hand of those who have come before.

Sent for You Yesterday by John Edgar Wideman who is sorely undervalued. This book instructs us on how fiction can make worlds that it are impossible to forget. It is a book of feeling, of tone. I read it as a conduit to dreaming.

Blindness by Jose Saramago

Paris Review Interview with Jim Harrison: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2511/the-art-of-fiction-no-104-jim-harrison

Place and Belonging in America by David Jacobson

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That's the way it must have been on Cassina way. Rows of wooden shanties built to hold the flood of back migrants up from the South. Teeming is the word I think of. A narrow, cobbled alley teeming with life. Like a wooden-walled ship in the middle of the city, like the ark on which Noah packed two of everything and prayed for land. I think of my grandmother and grandfather and the children they were raising in that house on Cassina and I see islands, arks, life teeming but enclosed or surrounded or exiled to arbitrary boundaries. And the city around them which defined and delimited, which threatened but also buoyed and ferried them to whatever unknown destination, this city which trapped and saved them, for better or worse, never quite breached Cassina's walls.        The life in Cassina Way was a world apart from Homewood and Homewood a world apart from Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh was the North, a world apart from the South, and all those people crowded in Cassina Way carried the seeds of these worlds inside their skins, black, brown and gold and ivory skin which was the first world setting them apart.

from Sent for You Yesterday by John Edgar Wideman

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One day I’m going to write about my great friend and neighbor Mary Frank.  Mary has always been a sculptor, painter and gardener, even though she is often mentioned only as the ex-wife of photographer Robert Frank. Her work is on display at Boston’s Gallery Kayafas through November 28. An article, here:  http://bit.ly/1MTB3vm

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In Paris: Reading List

I’m here with paper & books. Writing for my life. Will keep a running list of books reading/read/abandoned here:

Vertigo by WG Sebald

     Austerlitz

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje: This book is a marvel, structurally and story-telling wise. The first line (always telling) lets us know what we’re in for: “What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.”  Structure is story, this book teaches.

Where I Was From by Joan Didion

The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown

The European Tribe by Caryl Phillips

The Searcher: Hilton Als on Joan Didion, The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/searcher/

Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

The Need for Roots by Simone Weil

Going to Meet the Man by Jimmy James Baldwin

Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan

Bluets by Maggie Nelson: “And so I fell in love with a color -- in this case, the color blue–as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.” A book of ideas. I’ll follow Maggie Nelson anywhere.

The Flâneur by Edmund White

              Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire by Pierre Nora: http://www.timeandspace.lviv.ua/files/session/Nora_105.pdf