Dr. Hrabowski’s Higher Ed

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Freeman Hrabowski III grew up in Birmingham when it was known as the most segregated city in America, but he realized early he was born free to learn. (“Heaven for me was eating my grandmother’s blueberry pie and doing math problems.”) Hrabowski’s parents and grandparents passed down the idea that education might be an end-in-itself even if black people in the South didn’t have the luxury to conceive of “pure” learning at odds with economism. Hrabowski remains a realist when it comes to schooling. He knows culture don’t butter no bread. So, he’s become the foremost proponent of STEM education for black college students by building a scholarly vehicle for upward mobility—a research university that feels homey to kids in black communities who love learning math as much he did.

Hrabowski retired in 2022 after thirty years as president of the University of Maryland of Baltimore Country (UMBC)—a school with a less than toney pedigree that under his aegis has been the “baccalaureate-origin” institution for hundreds of black Ph.D.’s in natural sciences, math, and engineering. Scores more than have been formed by Ivies—or any other elite, predominantly white institution—in recent decades.

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This Met is Mine

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Manhattan’s Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery became a haven for Black Atlantic artists in the 70s and 80s. A current exhibit at MOMA chronicles work first shown at JAM and includes art by Lorraine O’Grady.  The author of the following post was born long after JAM’s moment. He encountered O’Grady’s work on the campus of the University of Chicago. It launched him on a trip that took him back to the playful start of his own art-life…

I came across one of the sixteen diptychs that make up Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album—(Cross Generational) L: Nefertiti, the last image; R: Devonia\’s youngest Daughter, Kimberley—in the the Booth collection.

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Action Painting (Redux)

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Originally posted here in 2016.

Micro-aggressions have been on my mind lately. Easy for us white guys to dismiss, but when a cab doesn’t pick us up or someone confuses us with some other white guy they once met at a party, it doesn’t trigger an identification with the victims of 500 years of violence and oppression. We rarely take it personally. The key is identification, not identity, though it arises from identity.

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Mnemonic Pantoum

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Hospital, pet, concert, third grade crush.
How is it decided which memories last,
which fade like Krazy Kolor from a punk teen’s hair?
I’ll never forget the beagle shot in Daddles.

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The Organization Man: Franz Kafka, Risk Insurance, and the Occasional Hell of Office Life

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Most readers know Franz Kafka as the reclusive author of stories and novels that have since become monumental works of modern literature. Some readers also know him as a bureaucrat who, unhappy in his office, castigated the “hell of office life.” But few know that he rose at the end of his life to the position of Senior Legal Secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (called, after 1918, the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Czech Lands). Kafka was no Bartleby the Scrivener, no harmless office drudge. Rather, he was a brilliant innovator of social and legal reform in “the Manchester of the Empire,” which at the time of Kafka’s tenure, between 1908-1922, was one of the most highly developed industrial areas of Europe.

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No Way Up

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CNN headline: “Mike Pence sits alone in a corner of sadness.”

I defy anyone to read that headline and not click on the article. Nice work whoever came up with that.

It was a short article simply reporting on polls that show that, while Republicans are well acquainted with ol’ Mike, they really don’t like him. The moment Mike merely nodded toward reality and truth, he lost any chance of ever being the Republican nominee.

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Days of Necrophilia

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…The first time we talked on the phone, they said they wanted to lend me a book, the most precious book in their collection. I imagine myself as a wandering librarian in a traveling circus, they said, a dealer in literary esoterica, a peddler of the insanity of the written word. I used to deal drugs for the Hell’s Angels: this is a step up. Though when you’re a girl from Chico with a Nazi dad and a hippie sex worker mom, forced to deal acid outside the high school instead of actually going to the high school, pretty much everything is a step up. If you start in hell, then everything is possibility, a kind of miracle. You learn to read the world as a Gnostic book that hasn’t written you into the text yet, or that wrote you in a long time ago but in a way you can’t recognize, in a way you may never understand.

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Soul on Film

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European cinema “has still got it” per guest essayist Emilie Bickerton in last week’s Times.[1] Like her, I’m lifted by the prospect of new films by the Dardenne brothers and Mia Hansen-Love. Other films/directors she cites sound lively too. Yet Ms. Bickerton may have missed the most galvanizing French cinema of this moment. When a worldly friend heard I’d been to Paris last summer, he commended “wild” new movies based on life in banlieues on the edge of the city. (“You’ll want to head right back to see what you missed!”) The movies that moved him were made by filmmakers in Kourtrajmé (slang for “court métrage,” or “short film”)—a collective that includes Romain Gravas (son of Costa-Gravas) who has directed two fast and furiously French features, The World is Yours and Athena (both available now on Netflix). If you’re ready to catch Kourtrajmé’s New Wave, though, I’d start with Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables.

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Tool of The People: Q&A with Ladj Ly

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Les Miserables

Sight and Sound‘s Elena Lazic interviewed Ladj Ly soon after the UK release of Les Miserables in 2020.

Most people discovered you through Les Misérables, but you’ve been making films for a long time. Can you tell me about your work with the collective Kourtrajmé?

Kourtrajmé is, before anything else, a group of friends. We all grew up together. We’ve known each other since kindergarten or primary school.

The collective was formed in 1994 with the ambition to make our own films. I joined in 1996. I was close friends with Kim Chapiron as a kid. I started as an actor in his films, and then at 17, I bought my first video camera and began filming my neighbourhood.

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“Baraye Azadi” (Iran’s Freedom Song)

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The single best way to understand Iran’s uprising is not any book or essay, but Shervin Hajipour’s 2m anthem ‘Baraye’ which garnered over 40m views in 48 hours (before he was imprisoned). Its profundity requires multiple views. (Translation by @BBCArdalan)

The lyrics are a compilation of tweets for #MahsaAmini that evoke felt life among the young in a modern society ruled by a geriatric religious dictatorship. The tweets speak “to the yearning for ‘a normal life,’ instead of the ‘forced paradise’ of an Islamist police state.”  [Per Karim Sadjadpour. More adapted tweets from him below the song.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0De6Asvzuso&ab_channel=iWind%21

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Nowhere Else to Go

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…The second-to-last night (the penultimate night on Earth), we were having dinner at their new place, the one we’d been trying to move into for months now. They showed me their books, their paintings (haunted self-portraits of a girl under water, or a girl lost in the dream of her own beauty, her own schizophrenia, an enclosed and infinite pain: but also they were no longer self-portraits, they were portraits of a dead girl, a girl who’d been dead for aeons, who’d escaped or gotten lost through a trapdoor in the basement of time, who’d…). They gave me jewelry to wear. I had a vision of the two of us, of future afternoons in the living room: languid afternoons, erotic afternoons in which nothing happens. They sang Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” for me (a prefiguration of their transition), serenading me, and afterwards they made me cum, fingering me vigorously and telling me what a whore I was, or am. This is all for my pleasure, they said. Your pleasure doesn’t matter. I moan. You’re just a fucktoy, a doll I bought at the store, you exist to be fucked, you’re pure sex and nothing else, you don’t have a soul, you don’t have a brain, you’re nothing but degraded lust, nothing but holes to be filled by so many cocks, a mouth to be used by so many pussies, a bimbo, a bitch, etc. They suck on my tits with a sexual hunger I’ve never seen before, and I explode.

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Denise

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a writer is [someone] for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others.
Thomas Mann

…..Inside the café, from left to right, 8:20 AM.  Caucasian male, red hair, red beard, green sweater, in his 20s, working on a lap top. Asian woman, about 50, wide black-framed glasses, red quilted jacket, underlining in red a book about “Power.” Young Asian man, charcoal grey sweater, ear buds, working on his lap top. Indian/Pakistani male, 30-ish, horn-rimmed glasses, heavy white sweater, laptop. Caucasian man, 50-ish, grey hoodie over black racing cap, on his laptop too.

…..All silent.

…..All alone.

…..Working toward what they could not know.

…..

I am often interested in why people write and what it is they choose to write about.

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