Are normal people sane?

Are normal people sane? (mp3) From the Gresham College free public lecture series. Full transcript with illustrations here. Painting by Witkacy.

Sovietbus

My mum had a brilliant collection of books when she was a child, many of which I also enjoyed. This particular one was probably acquired in the same kind of spirit that my Communist-supporting grandparents bought their Lada and East-German radios (which all groaned on to outlive their owners).

There was, however, something that my mum always found off-putting about this book, which at the time she couldn't articulate. Now she thinks it was probably the very Russian toughness of the drawings, and moral tone of the tales inside. And Uncle Joe giving the kids a ride on his fun tank.

A little boy plays with his ball so much, it's goodbye...

This is an example from a beautiful series of lithographs depicting valiant fishermen who "toil that want and hunger may keep away from you and me."

A pesky fly starts life on the river, but soon ends up swatted by a cow:
"It serves you right, fly: Don't annoy people and don't annoy animals. We're fed up with you", the story ends.
Finally, a montage of stills from the film Land of Toys teaches kids to respect all as equals...

The last thing I noticed was her name inscribed on the end-paper... surely the scribblings of a Soviet-inspired child...

(Begun one day in March, 1912)

Illustrated endpapers by Victor G. Candell. From Alpha by Emery Balint.

Chick Corea's Children's Songs

Bonnie Greer talks at Peckham Library

Bonnie Greer gave a talk at Peckham Library this evening. I hope someone recorded it; she had many insightful things to say about writing - the difference between writing and publishing, and how a writer doesn't have to think about 'being a writer', but does have to consider publishing, and attack the mainstream publishing houses and incestuous critics by setting up small presses and literary journals. As the talk was arranged as part of Black History Month, she obviously talked extensively about race (read this article) and growing up in Chicago and moving to London in the 1980's. She was extrememly generous in the way she described her writing process, and talked about the "deamon" that good writers always live with, that usually brings them to their "night" work (Oscar Wilde writing Dorian Gray, for instance, against the "day" work of his lighter output). She said you can get confused with style, and think that this is the thing you have to perfect to be an original writer, but one should just steal it to get going, but always allow the deamon through. She also spoke about the way we are over-saturated by consciousness and how things should be, claiming that most books - she did not think anything of this year's Booker list - still follow a 19th Century sense of prose, and warned of reading only the best things, and not overencumbering yourself with the pressure to read everything, destroying your own voice. She spoke of finding the momentary flash of irrational desire before you stop yourself doing something as a perfect place to explore human beings. Against this she also called for British writers not to emulate American ones too keenly, but to grow stronger. She put all the above much more eloquently than I am here, and with copious examples and anecdotes, but I want to make note of it as a trigger to remember. Aside from writing, she talked about politics (I believe she is up against the BNP this week on Question Time) and history, and made an interesting point that because the UK only finished, in 2007, repaying the USA our debt from WWII (a figure in the billions, which was not wavered because the US feared Atlee was forming a Communist system - the NHS being a point in case), that our 'special relationship' is as much tied up with this as anything else. She also told the story of her father, who'd been part of the D-Day landings; as a black soldier, he was not allowed to carry a weapon until he hit the water, at which point he was handed a gun and made to swallow a white tablet (an amphetamine), then charge towards what was almost certain death. He survived, but when they returned to Normandy 40 years later, she said how he had not wished to talk to other veterans (who were white) also revisiting the beaches, stating that they had "fought another war".

Houdini's Picnic

Houdini's Picnic is a monthly music programme (created by Ezra Elia and Ruth Donegan) of the finest sort, and available to stream or download here.

Christopher Logue & Tony Kinsey

Kind of hilarious, excruciating, and brilliant all at once.

Listen here.

Kiss I

Howard University, 1946

In 1946, Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed Howard University students for a LIFE magazine photo essay. From its outset, Howard University, situated in Washington D.C, was nonsectarian and open to people of both sexes and all races. By 1950, Howard was proud to be "America's center of Negro learning" (LIFE, November 18, 1946). However, as Rayford W. Logan states in "Howard University: The First Hundred Years 1867-1967", it was not an exclusively "negro" establishment, and although these photographs display an attractive (not least, to my retrogressive tastes, for the fashions!), positive and sincere representation of African-Americans engaged in academic life, they are still, for the time and readership of LIFE, "comfortably segregated".
Of course, in 1946, segregation in state-suported public schools was enforced by law, so the university's commitment to all people, regardless of race, was challenged by higher powers. The Supreme Court declared this unconstitutional in 1954, but it is interesting to note that by 1963 there had only been a slight increase in the number of white students at Howard. In the Board of Trustees mission statement from that year, the members asserted how the University accepted a "special responsibility for the education of capable Negro students disadvantaged by the system of racial segregation, and will continue to do so as long as Negroes suffer these disabillities." In a recent article on Michelle Obama's plans to work her own backgarden and bring change to the disadvantaged of Washington, it is made clear that Washington's underclass is still overwhelmingly black. As Michell Cottle writes, "The Washington of guidebooks is a land of gleaming monuments, glossy law firms and upscale restaurants where slick-suited lobbyists lunch cheek by jowl with players from the Capitol and the White House. “The other Washington” is mired in crime, drugs, violence, unemployment, Aids (the District’s HIV rate is among the highest in the nation), homelessness, and, more broadly, hopelessness. Rarely do denizens of either group venture into one another’s territory." As such, is it deeply saddening or encouraging to think that the Howard Mission Statement of 1963 still applies?
On a positive note, those associated with the University include Alain Locke, editor of The New Negro (published in 1925, the definitve collection of Harlem Renaissance writers) who was Chair of the Dept. of Philosophy, and law student Thurgood Marshall, who went on to bring the epic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case against the state law that denied black children equal education; a triumph ushering in the Civil Rights reform movements of 1955-65. And today, Howard produces more on-campus African-American Ph.D.s than any other university in the world.

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