Category: language

Liberty and Love

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Maria Popova on Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mills via Adam Gopnik‘s A Thousand Small Sanities:The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.

“With an eye to the perilous erasures with which history is often rewritten — history, I continue to insist, is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance” – Popova

“Recognizing that intimate life is an accommodation of contradictions, they understood that political and social life must be an accommodation of contradictions too. The accommodation was their romance. That meant that social accommodation could be romantic, too. Love, like liberty, tugs us in different directions as much as it leads us in one. Love, like liberty, asks us to be only ourselves, and it also asks us to find our self in others’ eyes.” – Gopnik

There are echoes of blackness’s moral underpinnings, here, as found in Moten and in Glissant.

Boris Vian

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Alexandra Schwartz on Vian for the newyorker (August 2014). Article is on Vian’s “L’Écume des Jours” and “I Spit on Your Graves,” Michel Gondry’s “Mood Indigo”, James Baldwin’s remarks on Vian in “The Devil Finds Work,” and some of Vian’s contemporaries – Curzio Malaparte’s “The Skin” and Vladimir Pozner’s “The Disunited States.”

An interview with Other Suns

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Amirah Mercer interviewed me, for her new venture– Other Suns, concerned with the aesthetics in black culture. Here is the article.

One definition of heaven is a place of utmost happiness, something enjoyable and pleasant. If you had heaven here on Earth, in this very moment, would you even recognize it? Because you do—we all do—have access to creating utopia in our everyday lives. For proof, look no further than the photography and collages of Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier.

Simone Leigh

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The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat at the Guggenheim.

an act of astonishing fortitude that carved out a space of sanctuary and autonomy in defiance of an unjust reality.

The title is drawn from the writings of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897).