Eudora Welty

And yet by sixteen she was ready to get out. She convinced her parents that she was old enough to go away to college—first to Columbus, Mississippi, and then to Madison, Wisconsin, which was far enough from home, but in the wrong direction. After graduation, she moved to New York, to attend Columbia Business School; this was 1930, and the theatre and Harlem jazz clubs and Martha Graham occupied her far more than her classes did. She returned to Jackson only when her father was dying, in 1931. Two years later she was back in New York, but financial worries and pressure from her mother brought her home again. It was then that she started to take photographs, principally in Jackson’s black neighborhoods, where she went to buy jazz records.  

Her real awakening, though, came with a job as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, in 1935, for which she travelled by car or bus through the depths of Mississippi and saw poverty—black and white—that she had never imagined before. Taking pictures now became her passion, and Welty published photographs before she published her first story. When the W.P.A. job was over, in 1936, she returned to New York several times, searching for a job in publishing and pounding the pavement with her photographs. All she ever got was a small exhibition in an optician’s store on Madison Avenue. Her subject was black Mississippians, in the fields or on the streets or simply looking outward, meeting impossible odds with a frank and powerful dignity.  

It is telling that through the late thirties Welty tried to publish her stories and her photographs in a single volume. The impetus for what she knew to be her first genuine writing had come from the same shock of discovery—from her W.P.A. travels, when, as she put it, “my feelings were engaged by the outside world, I think for the first time.” The evidence of this experience is sometimes stark, as in “The Whistle,” a story about impoverished tomato farmers who strip off their only warm clothing to cover the delicate crops during a frost, and in “A Worn Path,” about an ancient black woman who undertakes a long journey on foot to get medicine for her grandson (and who serenely ignores the petty insults of the white people she meets along the way; she, too, receives a nickel). Despite the subjects, there is nothing didactic in these stories; Welty’s tone remains as light and precise here as in her freak-show comedies. And, like the comedies, these stories do not need to name the big subjects they touch on—race, deprivation, ignorance, morality—because the author’s quick chiselling of character includes them all.

Claudia Roth Pierpoint, A Perfect Lady, 

artigo muito antigo para a The New Yorker, 

 recuperado ontem, dia do aniversário da escritora.

A 96-year-old violinist in bright pink lipstick and golden slippers

Completed in 1899, the building was created as a sanctuary for musicians who found themselves poverty-stricken in old age, “Old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young, did not possess the virtue of saving,” as Verdi wrote in a letter at the time.

Sally McGrane, Inside Milan’s Opulent Retirement Home for Musicians.

Albert Bartholomé, Périe, a mulher do artista lendo, 1883.

Vida: modo de usar (5)

Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some have started to worry. Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Maybe we’ve all become trapped in echo chambers of our own making – wrapping ourselves in an intellectually impenetrable layer of likeminded friends and web pages and social media feeds. 

But there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.

C Thi Nguyen, Escape the echo chamber. 

Domingo no mundo (54)

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.

Langston Hughes, April Rain Song.

Yourna Byrd

William Claxton, Yourna Byrd, esposa de Donald Byrd, NY, 1960.

The tone and timbre of women's speech

It is startling how much the ancient model of misogyny chimes with modern times. Not a day goes by without a male – and sometimes female – troll accusing me of “whingeing and whining” when I express views on current affairs. The mockery of female voices – Beard points out – is evident throughout Roman legend: there’s Philomela, whose tongue was ripped out to prevent her speaking of the rape she endured; Io, the mortal lover of Jupiter who mooed instead of speaking after being turned into a cow; as well as scientific treatises aligning low-pitched voices with courage, and high-pitched voices with cowardice. “Classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator but also the social and political stability, the health, or the whole state”, writes Beard. Sounds familiar.

 Afua Hirsch, The problem with a name.

On the brink of a mental crisis

Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its members started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later. Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school. 

Why are today’s teens waiting longer to take on both the responsibilities and the pleasures of adulthood? Shifts in the economy, and parenting, certainly play a role. In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends. 

If today’s teens were a generation of grinds, we’d see that in the data. But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s. (High-school seniors headed for four-year colleges spend about the same amount of time on homework as their predecessors did.) The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.  

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.

 Jean M. Twenge, Have smartphones destroyed a generation?

Acting my age

Lately I have found myself trying to unravel the somewhat counterintuitive idea of aging as something which grants a kind of freedom, particularly for those of an age that places them in a kind of middle ground: old enough to have real responsibilities like bills, full-time job(s), or even a mortgage, but not old enough to be seen as middle aged, when a type of settling down is seen as tradition. If there is a freedom here, it’s in the ability to cling to ideas of youth while also teasing out the comforts of what we imagine being old looks like. One friend says I’m such a grandma while putting on sweatpants at 7 p.m. and pulling several blankets over herself. I’m such an old man I joke, while digging my hand into a massive bowl of popcorn and letting stray bits of it spill all over my lap. People hear this and laugh, nodding from the shell of their own comforts.

Hanif Abdurraquib no último número da Real Life. 

Domingo no mundo (53)

Pequenos sóis

The idea that stars might be suns had been proposed by the Italian philosopher and writer Giordano Bruno. In his On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, published in 1584, Bruno wrote that “there can be an infinite number of other worlds [earths] with similar conditions, infinite suns or flames with similar nature ...” (For his astronomical proposals as well as his denial of other Catholic beliefs, Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600.) By the early 17th century, various thinkers entertained the idea that stars might be suns. Thus, when Galileo reported blemishes on the sun, his findings had dramatic implications for all of the stars. The stars could no longer be considered perfect things, composed of some eternal and indestructible substance unlike anything on earth. The sun and the moon looked like other material stuff on earth. In the 1800s, astronomers began analyzing the chemical composition of stars by splitting their light into different wavelengths with prisms. Different colors could be associated with different chemical elements emitting the light. And stars were found to contain hydrogen and helium and oxygen and silicon and many of the other common terrestrial elements. Stars were simply material—atoms.

 Alan Lightman, aqui, sobre a nossa compreensão do céu e das estrelas.

A peculiaridade humana sempre a atrapalhar os «ismos»

[...] não ignoro que o jogo da oferta e da procura seria quase mecânico e, portanto, domínio isento de moral, se nele não interviessem homens. Mas onde há um homem, há liberdade e responsabilidade.

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Memória de um Inconformista.