Ethiopia as Utopia

Edwardian Promenade posted this great biography of Meta Warrick Fuller, an important African American artist.
One of her most famous works is this beautiful Ethiopia Awakening.  It depicts an African woman pulling the bandages off of her mummy-self, revealing a beautiful Egyptian queen underneath.  Her bandages represent both the confines of history (and, conversely, an imagining of history that sees ancient Egypt as monolithic and white) and the bonds of slavery.  The woman underneath is not just beautiful, but regal, demanding respect. 
Ethiopia is often pictured as a utopia in African American writing.  There's a good reason for this: Ethiopia is the only country that resisted both slavery and colonization (political slavery to a dominant, white European/American power).  In the middle of all the rhetoric that African Americans couldn't possibly run their own society without white interference, Ethiopia was a clear example of how an African country could flourish without giving into the standards of the Western world.
One of the best poems on the subject is by Frances E.W. Harper, unsurprisingly titled "Ethiopia."  (Scroll down to the second poem, past her much more famous "Bury Me in a Free Land.") 
In Harper's poem, Ethiopia is not yet a utopia.  (This is similar to her poem, "Moses," where the poem leaves off before the Hebrew slaves manage to find their promised land, again, as a representation that African Americans have not yet completed their journey.)  Ethiopia will become a utopia, according to the poem, when God grants African Americans justice and they return home to Africa, free.  But like in Fuller's sculpture, there is the image of bondage, in this case "the yoke" and "his [the slavemaster's] fetters."  Harper imagines these things falling away, just like Fuller's sculpture pictures a woman with bondage around her legs.  She's hopefully in the process of losing them, but hasn't lost them yet. 

Songs About London

British Invasion band The Kinks has a lovely song about London called Waterloo Sunset.


In addition to it being both a lyrically sad and melodically happy, there's a great cover by David Bowie.  He makes it into much more of a rock song.


The only thing I don't like about this song isn't so much the song itself as it is its status as a song.  This seems to ignore a lot of other important songs.  
For example, everyone of a certain age has heard the song by a Ms. Fergie.

No one in the U.K. has ever failed to hear "London is the Place for Me."  Although a lovely song in itself, and song has taken on a particular tone to it, especially given the Windrush generation's memories of the song, and how it turned out to be the rose-colored view of coming to the mother-country.


So even though "Waterloo Sunset" has been voted the best song about London, but for my money, the best song about London has to be something by The Clash.
I'm sure most of you expected that to be followed by a clip from "London Calling," with a discussion of how excellent the song is.  And it is a perfect composition.  It imagines London in a nuclear apocalypse.  But for a song that is actually about London rising up and demanding justice, the Clash song that you should look to is none other than "The Guns of Brixton."



Although only about a neighborhood of London, the song is ultimately about fighting the injustice of police brutality.  Which, considering how strong the police state in London is, with the police's DNA database one hot mess and the entire city under surveillance with CCTV, this song seems more important than ever. 

Midtown

In addition to falling in love with cities, I've been known to fall in love with neighborhoods. My own childhood neighborhood, the areas around my Grandmothers's homes, Tavistock Square in London, even a certain corner of MSU's campus have become significant to me. Of course, these places are significant because I spent a lot of time there, because I know have memories of being there.

Every once and a while I find myself at a certain place and I realize I'm just loving what the place looks like. (Usually this is followed by how stupid I was not to bring my camera, because of course I want to take pictures.) The neighborhood in question was Midtown.

There's something perfect and antique about this neighborhood. Most of them are older homes and apartment buildings are from the turn of the century. Some of them are uncared for, but their are ones that are, and there's something very livable about them. They look like they need to be lived in.

We passed by the Forest Arms, which made me sad. In 2008, the Forest Arms, an apartment complex, burned after being recently renovated. Looking at it now, I noticed that there were hanging plants from third floor windows, which, coupled with what looks like a still damaged building, was poetic. Damaged buildings should always look like new life is springing from them.

When I think of the Forest Arms, I also end up thinking about the Hard Lesssons's The Arms Forest. It's named after this same apartment area. I love the album, and seeing the building always makes me think of this.

Breaking Down Gender

Slate is running another great series of articles, this one exploring male-female relationships.  In a recent article, the author mentions that a lot of our culture's unease about platonic male-female friendships is probably related to gender roles. 
I like having guy friends.  The article mentions women like not having to talk about their feelings all the time with their guy friends.  I take umbrage with this statement.  There are guy friends that I never talk to about my feelings, but I don't want to conclude that's because of their gender.  It could easily be their personality, because I have lots of other guy friends who I can have long, private conversations with too.  And because there are girl friends that I have very little of those discussions and others that I have a lot with. 
Gender seems to me to be a poor way of choosing friends or even relating to them, especially since there are so many personalities and experiences to learn from and understand.  I like this series because it explores how strange society reacts to these relationships, but sometimes the assumptions about gender bothers me.  Gender is far more flexible and fluid.   

Women in Literary Arts

A few weeks I stumbled upon this new organization, Vida.  Their goal is basically to "explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women." 
I wish I had known about this organization when I was writing about women writers from the 19th century.  I suspect VIDA is more into modern women writers, but they're not the first people to notice that women's writing often gets ignored.  So hats off to the organization for bringing attention to the issues.  :) 
Stumbling on their website also means that I found a whole new list of books by women to check out.  (Because, clearly, I need more things to read.)  But these poetry books include:
Cate Marvin's World's Tallest Disaster.  I don't so much judge books by their cover as by their title.  I like this one, especially for a poetry book.  Marvin also had another book of poetry out, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, and worked on an anthology called Legitimate Dangers, both of which also look good. 
Erin Belieu's Infanta.  In my poetry, I have this thing for poems that have one word titles from non-English languages or are obscure terms.  I'm kind of curious to see if Belieu is the same way.  I'm also planning on checking out her One Above and One Below and The Extraordinary Tide.
In creative nonfiction, there's is:
My Lesbian Husband.  Great title?  Or greatest title? 
Ecotone.  When I first saw this, I thought it might be a literary magazine, but I'm thinking now it's meant to be an academic tome, focusing on feminism.  As a feminist, I'm okay with that.  
The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West.  Women's history, sadly, almost always manages to get ignored.  It's nice that someone is trying to focus on a woman's (possibly inaccurate) story as a way of talking about women. 
And no list is ever complete without a few literary magazines.  As someone who used to be on staff, I like looking at what other people do with the format and I want to be supportive.
Hotel Amerika.  I usually like to pick a few of the issues up, even at random, if I can.  The TransGenre issue looks particular intriguing.  
Seneca Review.   An older, well-respected literary magazine.  Hard to beat that. 
Page to Page.  Not an actual literary magazine in the strictest sense, but a retrospective (which seem to be in vogue at literary magazines these days) about the Seattle Review. 
And in the meantime, because I make the mistake of shopping on Amazon, I also find other books that I want to read.  Including:
Emily Dickinson's The Final Harvest.  I need to read her more obscure poems and not just the ones that they always teach in schools. 
The Best American Essays of the Century.  I'm not much of a fan of Joyce Carol Oates, to tell you the truth, but I do need to do more essay reading, and why not start with what is suppose to be the best?  For good measure, I've decided to throw in a few older editions, including 2007 and 2004.  And since we're on the subject of best essays, I decided that I could probably do with some great nature and science writing (even from 2007), African American essays, American magazine articles, Non-Required Reading, history essays and short stories. 

In Other Skies

Continuing on a theme, last night I came across the work of Ainsley E, who has her own blog called In Other Skies. It's a design blog, which I really love. Design blogs basically collect cool images, usually around ideas or themes, and post them. I like Ainsley's taste. Just a small peak at her blog brings up cool links to places like OK Great, Design for Mankind, Adam Simpson and automatism.
What I like about design blogs is that, if you check one regularly, it's a nice way to put a little art in your day, especially for me, who doesn't always get a lot of visual art as part of a healthy creative diet. (I do rather well in terms of written form of art, but sometimes slide on the other things.) So maybe I'm going to have to follow these blogs a little more closely, if only because it's good for me.
In the meantime, I went out there looking for something that I thought was beautiful, and this is what I found. I like it when people do interesting, unexpected things to their homes. Who expects to walk in a bedroom and find something as lovely as this?

Christine Collins, Songwriter

I'm usually the first one to admit how in awe I am of my friends.  I see them as being incredible, smart and talented, and, depending on which individual, always find other admirable qualities.
So when I discovered last night that one of my friends, Christine, had a whole budding musical career online, I was pleasantly surprised.



The first one she showed me was this little number, "Starscape," which she wrote as an ode to Doctor Who, which we were talking about at the time.  I think it might be as perfect for the show as its infamous theme song.  I think the simplicity of the tune relates well with how it's suppose to be a children's show.  At the same time, there's something strong and dramatic and dark about it, and again, just like the show, especially in recent years.  Most songs about spaceships don't work out well (unless you're the Vines), but this does.



She told me in our conversation that she is really proud of this song, "Metaphor."  I think there's something very indie rock/folk about this song.  I love the line "There's a metaphor in your hair."  The second verse, about reading Keats and noticing that they have similar writing style, is really beautiful and, again, is just like indie rock.  Other great lyrics include the line about a poet's fingers being pruned. 
I guess it isn't a huge surprise, since I used to live with the young lady in question and I did occasionally hear her singing.  And I knew she wrote poetry because we used to exchange poems by slipping them under each other's doors and critiquing them, so being a singer songwriter is a logical next step for her.  But when we talked about it, she was all "Oh, I'm not that good."  Whatever.  I think these videos speak for themselves.  To check out more of Christine's stuff, look here.