In…Rojas’…wildly creative novel…the dead writer watches his last, fateful days replayed in a private theater in the underworld. Decades have passed, and Lorca is aware of his posthumous fame, and how his death torments those who outlived him. All he wants is to sleep, finally and forever, but instead he’s trapped with the memories of his life, and of all the art and literature he created.
more.
Walker takes on the persona of white Citizens’ Council member Byron De La Beckwith, who killed Evers on June 12, 1963. Walker takes on other figures…including Evers’s widow Myrlie Evers. Nonetheless, the in-depth engagement with the possible inner workings of De La Beckwith’s mind, motivations, and interests, troubling as they were, really forms the core and driving force of Walker’s volume…
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![In [Countee Cullen’s] lifetime and after, his writings have been by turns excessively praised or prejudicially discounted, not so much for their particular literary merits or failings, but for the ways in which they address broader debates about race in American culture. Some, like W.E.B. Du Bois, sought to boost Cullen less for his art alone than for what his art would prove about African American character. Others, like Langston Hughes and many after him, suspected Cullen of aspiring to a kind of whiteness in his poetic practice—even as his poems articulate a unique vision of the joys and trials of being black, male, and some would vigorously add “gay” in early twentieth-century America.
more.
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art: photo of Cullen by Carl Van Vechten, 1941. Central Park, NYC](http://24.media.tumblr.com/4920268f557e193c9346504ba5cee311/tumblr_mkmtl7LFxF1qcwnv4o1_400.jpg)
In [Countee Cullen’s] lifetime and after, his writings have been by turns excessively praised or prejudicially discounted, not so much for their particular literary merits or failings, but for the ways in which they address broader debates about race in American culture. Some, like W.E.B. Du Bois, sought to boost Cullen less for his art alone than for what his art would prove about African American character. Others, like Langston Hughes and many after him, suspected Cullen of aspiring to a kind of whiteness in his poetic practice—even as his poems articulate a unique vision of the joys and trials of being black, male, and some would vigorously add “gay” in early twentieth-century America.
more.
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art: photo of Cullen by Carl Van Vechten, 1941. Central Park, NYC
“We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.” —Langston Hughes
He was born on this day [1902] in Joplin, Missouri. He died in 1967.
Not only has Plath’s small oeuvre spawned an ever-flourishing worldwide industry of biographical interpretation, but her writing so seamlessly fused self-obsession with an otherworldly gift for language that, on reading, it’s impossible to differentiate between scholarly interest and “curiosity of quite a low order” in one’s mind. This entrancing quality, this perfect, irreproducible formula of unadulterated narcissism and true genius, is what sustains her place in the spotlight…
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Nike presents “Be Bold. Be True”…features Kevin Durant and an exclusive… track produced by 9th Wonder… [clip] produced and directed by We Are Not Pilgrims. The spoken-word piece…written and performed by Joekenneth Museau. Street Etiquette handled styling…
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Most of the eminences who spoke or performed at President ’s inauguration would probably not have been able to land an advertising job at the fictional agency portrayed on the television series “Mad Men.” Not Mr. Obama, since he’s black and his middle name is Hussein. Not Senator Charles E. Schumer, who’s Jewish. Not Myrlie Evers-Williams, who gave the invocation, or , who sang, because they’re both black and female. Speaking of female, not Kelly Clarkson, the singer—nor Justice of the Supreme Court, who, as a Hispanic, would have been doubly problematic. Speaking of Hispanic, not the Rev. Luis Leon—nor the inaugural poet, Richard Blanco, who is both Cuban-blooded and gay. Reactions to the inauguration have dwelled on Mr. Obama’s ringing defense of modern liberalism. But the theater of the day was at least as telling as the speeches.
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Pres. Obama’s choice of the relatively unknown Cuban American poet Richard Blanco to read at his inauguration later this month caught many people in poetry circles by surprise. Blanco, 44, will be the first Latino poet, and the first openly gay man given the honor of reading at a presidential inauguration.
The child of migrant workers and now a professor at the University of California, Riverside, Herrera began to publish and perform verse in the late 1960s and early ’70s, amid the Chicano cultural ferment of Los Angeles and San Diego; he has been, and should be, admired for his portrayals of Chicano life. Yet he is no mere recorder of social conditions. Herrera is, instead, a sometimes hermetic, wildly inventive, always unpredictable poet, whose work commands attention for its style alone.
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Harjo recounts how her early years—a difficult childhood with an alcoholic father and abusive stepfather, and the hardships of teen motherhood—caused her to suppress her artistic gifts and nearly brought her to her breaking point. “It was the spirit of poetry…who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love”…Harjo [is] now an acclaimed poet, performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation…
more.
![Diaz describes a museum exhibiting [Native American] stuffs: “About the beautiful dresses emptied of breasts…/they were nothing compared to the emptied bodies.”
more.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/0319725053fd20d95f9646f77b793f40/tumblr_mf565opuGC1qcwnv4o1_500.jpg)
Diaz describes a museum exhibiting [Native American] stuffs: “About the beautiful dresses emptied of breasts…/they were nothing compared to the emptied bodies.”
more.
Curtis Mayfield - Move On Up
Boy selling peaches - Istanbul, Turkey - July 2012
Nigeria in 1800s.
Vintage Nigeria
United Selfies of America
Drake in Anchorman 2? Stolen from @elliottwilson.
![“We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.” —Langston Hughes
He was born on this day [1902] in Joplin, Missouri. He died in 1967.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/600e1bca4f8c710a51660b3fb2fd5574/tumblr_mhjtipdZ6t1qcwnv4o1_500.jpg)
![Harjo recounts how her early years—a difficult childhood with an alcoholic father and abusive stepfather, and the hardships of teen motherhood—caused her to suppress her artistic gifts and nearly brought her to her breaking point. “It was the spirit of poetry…who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love”…Harjo [is] now an acclaimed poet, performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation…
more.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/d65963362ff67509e9a6e0e70f3dce30/tumblr_mf7lxa3Te11qcwnv4o1_500.jpg)
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