Obama's relationship with black universities

This is a [rather scathing] commentary on President Obama's rocky relationship with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).  I am not in the circle of people who went to HBCUs nor do I have many friends who did, so the whole background of the cultural milieu of these universities and the President's lack of familiarity with them, coming himself from a more Northern upbringing, was new and interesting for me.

Overview of urban agriculture

Here is a pretty extensive, rather cheerleaderish analysis of the major urban agriculture initiatives in the US.  I'm glad to report that Chicago figures prominently on the list.

Syntactic analysis of rap

This is a really fascinating video about the different rhyme and rhythmic schemes of very skilled rappers.  My familiarity conks out around the year 2000, which tells me I need to check out Kendrick Lamar and MF Doom.

Another analysis on Donald Trump and race

This is an adroit analysis of the intersection of racial and economic politics that inspire such unwavering support for Trump's program in large swathes of white America.

La voragine

I just finished reading the Colombian novel La voragine (The vortex) by Jose Eustasio Rivera, written in 1924.  This is considered by many to be the most important Colombian novel ever written.  I know, I know, Garcia Marquez has a whole opus of amazing books, many of them probably better than La Voragine.  But Garcia Marquez is a world writer, his work is set in Colombia but really part of the global canon.  He captures many aspects of Colombia perfectly, but you don't have to be Colombian to appreciate him.  Rivera's work, on the other hand, is definitively, idiosyncratically Colombian, so much so that I'm not sure of how much it would resonate for someone unfamiliar with the country.

Anyway, I would highly recommend La voragine.  It deftly embodies that odd mix of unparalleled, almost Classical Antiquity sophistication on the one hand and impulsive, reasonless savagery on the other that define for me a major part of the Colombian collective character.  Rivera's isolated, semi-literate peasants, like many real peasants of present-day Colombia, speak with florid metaphors, profound critical analysis, and Age of Chivalry formality.  Then they enslave Indians, hack people with machetes, plunge into orgies of drink and gambling and sex, temporarily immune to any rational thought. 

If you're looking for an understanding of Indian culture or the interpretation of events from an indigenous person's point of view, this is not the book for you.  The Native Americans are a poorly-understood, alien lot in this story; often abused, sometimes aggressive, always squalid, disgusting, and incomprehensible.  The narrative point of view is decidedly that of the mestizo colonos, the white and black Colombians that seek their fortune or at least their mere subsistence in the jungle. 

And the landscapes, they are perhaps the main character in the story.  Rivera evokes the boundless horizons of Colombia's Eastern Plains, their rolling, sweltering prairies, the cattle roundups, the oases of dense forest that spring up around rivers and watering holes.  And in the chapters on the rainforest, he fully captures the sense of gloomy green monotony, the lonely, endless rows of tree trunks and sunless canopy overhead that inspire dread in the sons of the cool, high mountain panoramas of central Colombia.

The book is long and sometimes a hard slog with all the flowery language, but it's well worth a read, especially if you want to know about Colombia.  I've never been to any of the places the author describes, but I feel like I have after reading his descriptions.  And the people struggling in these exotic settings, all of them transplanted from elsewhere in the country, ring totally true to my experience of the Colombians I've known.

Another special day I forgot to mention

For those of you who don't know, May 6 was International Affairs Day in the US.  My understanding is that this day is dedicated to the diplomats who represent our country abroad.  Like the military, they are called to leave the familiar surroundings of their mother country and work for the greater good of that country in far-off lands.  They are often assigned to the same dangerous places as are soldiers, but diplomats don't get a gun to defend themselves! 

Anyway, it's too late for the formal celebration, but if you have a chance, go out and thank a diplomat.  I've met a few in my life, and they are admirable in that they are often quite ordinary people, even doing ordinary things like office work and admin stuff, but in extraordinary settings and circumstances.  I'm sure it can be a very rewarding job, but also demanding and difficult.  If you don't know any diplomats personally, at least check out the State Department's or USAID's website and learn about what they are doing. 

Excellent commentary on international development from Teju Cole

This is a nuanced, insightful article from Teju Cole (whose novels I've not yet read, though I think I really should) about international development, privilege, and how an individual can be a good person and even be correct on their surface-level analysis of a situation, while at the same time unthinkingly contributing to very bad larger trends and being totally mistaken in their response when seen in a larger, more complex context of things.  The author calls for his First-World readers to have more respect for the agency (read the ability to help themselves) of those in the developing world, while also beseeching his readers to act in their own contexts, pressuring their own governments and companies to cease doing wrong in the rest of the world.  In the end Cole is not advocating against contributing to a noble campaign or emergency relief effort, but rather he advocates in favor of keeping the larger structural issues in mind even as you make the best immediate decisions and actions that you can.

Special days

We all know that Mother's Day is tomorrow.  But I've enjoyed the recent slew of lesser-known holidays.  Here are the ones I'm aware of. 
April 23rd, which is International Book Day, as well as English and Spanish language days
This is due to the fact that Cervantes, Shakespeare, and lesser-known Latin American author Garcilaso de la Vega all died on this date in 1616.  I didn't know that before this year.  My family and I went to a book fair to celebrate.
May 1st, which is International Workers' Day almost everywhere in the world, though in the US we celebrate workers on Labor Day in September.  This disparity is specifically to avoid associating with or validating the socialist and anarchist roots of the May 1st holiday.  Weirdest of all is that May 1st as International Workers' Day has its origin in the US, in Chicago to be exact.  May 1st, 1886, was the date of a major general strike centered on Chicago, calling for an eight-hour workday.  Then of course May 4th was the Haymarket Riot in Chicago, where an anarchist crowd of German and Bohemian immigrants clashed with police, which explains why the US wants to celebrate workers any day of the year except in early May!

Roy makes a car

About a year ago, I picked up a book called "Roy makes a car".  It's a wonderful kids' book, with all the selling points.  It's got cars and tools, flying, races, transforming, even angels going around in cars and God making a deal with a person.  The illustrations are great, and the pedigree can't get any better; it's based on a tall tale collected by Zora Neale Hurston in her anthropological endeavors in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida.  It is an unpretentious book--my kids' attention wasn't drawn to it for a few months, but then all of a sudden there was a phase where it was all they wanted to read.

So where can you get this book, you may ask?  Well, not much of anywhere, unless you live near a library with ambitious multicultural librarians but rather unadventurous, latently racist readers.  "Roy makes a car" appears to be out of print.  I got it for about 50 cents from a library that sells books that don't circulate much.  I guess the reason that this wonderful book is no longer either in print, nor does it seem to attract library borrowers, is that the main character has black skin, and I think a lot of parents (and their quick-learning kids) tend to steer clear of "black books".  Nevermind that it's really a car book, an angel book, a tools book, a goofy book.  The characters aren't even all black.  My anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that middle-class white parents (and the multi-colored immigrant parents that aspire to acting like middle-class white people) simply aren't interested in a book with a black guy drawn on the cover. 

I make this generalization from my old neighborhood library in northern Virginia, a very active library with a great kids' section and lots of devoted parents (of all colors except black) coming at all hours with their kids.  You can tell that the librarians, some of whom are black, really try to cast a broad net in their book purchases, acquiring a wide, innovative range of stories, perspectives, even language.  But they have a policy that if a book hasn't circulated more than a few times in the past few years, they sell it for a song.  When you look at the books for sale, a remarkable proportion, especially of the kids' books, are "colored" books.  There are histories of Native Americans and their struggles against the colonists, beautifully-illustrated histories of ancient African empires, and lots of easy-reading picture books about immigrants or the Great Migration or other themes that just don't seem to interest middle-of-the-road white Anglos or upwardly-mobile immigrants to the US.  It is a sad commentary on what people find valuable for exposing themselves and their kids to.  Though, as with the travesty of food waste in relation to my dumpster diving, the situation favors people like me who are thrilled to pick up great kids' books on people of color for less than a dollar!

I'm looking forward to an upcoming trip back home to Chicago, with its massive library system.  There I'll be able to find another "black book" I've become interested in, "Popo and Fifina", written by Langston Hughes and set in Haiti.  It is also no longer in print, presumably for the same ridiculous lack of market caché discussed above, but luckily the Chicago Public Library keeps even unhip books for posterity, and isn't so quick to sell them off as a smaller town's system might be.