20180606184614prompt_1______reading 20180606184620prompt_3______reading 20180606184617prompt_2______reading
I need to write 3 discussion(like 3 piece of small writing,each need 200 words) in my writing class, each need around 220 words
it’s a discussion part of my writing class. The professor will not grade about it but he would check if I finished this assignment or not. I just need to let him know I had finished this discussions part and not required a high quality.
I also can give you the many examples about this three topics which written by my classmate also in this class which easy for you to understand what you need to write.(You also can look a glance the prompt and the related reading and write based on others answers and write a new conclusion)
each discussion I have 10 answers that already written by others.
prompt(1):
A talk to teacher
1. Baldwin is speaking in America in 1963 and is addressing what is, in that moment, a national crisis. What parts of that situation are different from our current moment and need to be “listened to rhetorically” (p. 5-7 of the AGWR) and translated in order for us to understand his message now as it was understood then?
2. Thinking of ourselves as writers writing to a current audience, what parts of our own context (historical or cultural) do we need to pay special attention to and be careful with when writing about Baldwin in order to shape our own ethos and not be misunderstood by our own audience? Are there problematic issues or differences in language, etc. that we need to handle with sensitivity in order to keep a good ethos with our readers?
Prompt1 sample:Those parts that African Americans cannot sit in the front of the bus. And, they work so hard at that time. Also, the neighborhood they lived is different from the same place right now. At past, black and white people were separated. Black people were supposed to be “a source of cheap labor.” These situations are different from our current moment, and in order for us to understand these, we should understand by ethos.
In order to write to a current audience, we need to pay attention to the language we use when we write our own cultural essays. For example, at that time, he wrote African American people “were treated as though they were animals.” And he wrote that white men were “white republic.” These sarcastic words may produce issues if we write our own context to current audience. Because of different situations between now and past, we should pay attention to these words to give our audience a comfortable time reading our context.
prompt(2):
Englishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations
In two paragraphs:
Please explain the overall structure of Mendelsohn’s review. How does he introduce his topic to the reader? What part of his own arguments or background information does he want the reader to understand before he begins to compare the different translations?
Why do you think he chose this particular organization for his review?
prompt(3):
We have been considering the role that ethos plays in writing – the character of the writer and the “character(s)” of themselves that writers create by the way that they write — especially when they write about themselves.
How does Rowland’s discussion of himself as a writer — his motivations and his self-doubt — affect our perception of his character? And what is his purpose in telling us so much about his own private life and about his need to learn that writing can be private in a piece that is, after all, quite public?
4/20/18, 3*57 PMEnglishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations | The New Yorker
Page 1 of 8https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/englishing-the-iliad-grading-four-rival-translations
This week in the magazine, Daniel Mendelsohn a new version of Homer’s
Iliad, translated by Stephen Mitchell. He also the translation and his piece in
this week’s Out Loud podcast.
A good way of getting a sense of the values and priorities of the Iliad’s many
translators is to compare how they translate a given passage. The best showcases
for these comparisons aren’t necessarily the poem’s “big moments” but smaller,
more ordinary passages, such as the one I’ve chosen below, lines 795-800 from
Book 13. This is one of the dozens of extended similes that Homer uses to
convey how a given event looks and feels—in this instance comparing the
massed ranks of Trojan troops preparing for battle to waves breaking on a shore
during a wild storm at sea. A reasonably straightforward translation might look
like this:
And they went in like a maelstrom of quarrelsome winds
that goes earthward beneath Father Zeus’ thunderbolt
and with an inhuman din churns with the salt sea, the many
roiling waves of the greatly-roaring ocean
Page-Turner
Englishing the Iliad:
Grading Four Rival
Translations
By Daniel Mendelsohn October 31, 2011
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https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/daniel-mendelsohn
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/11/07/111107crbo_books_mendelsohn
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/11/07/111107on_audio_mendelsohn
https://www.newyorker.com/
4/20/18, 3*57 PMEnglishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations | The New Yorker
Page 2 of 8https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/englishing-the-iliad-grading-four-rival-translations
cresting, !ecked with white, some before, and others hard behind;
So too the Trojans were packed together, some before, others hard
behind.
But simply to convey what Homer’s words mean gives no sense of the real
challenge that the translator faces, which is to think of ways to reproduce the
wonderful sound effects Homer contrives here to evoke the sounds of the sea.
Below is a line-by-line transliteration of the Greek text—with the stressed
syllables in ALL CAPITALS—with translations of each word or phrase just
beneath.
HOI d’isan AR-
ga-le-OAN a-neh-MOAN ah-tah-LAHN-toy ah-EL-lay,
They went (of quarrelsome) (winds) (resembling) (a maelstrom)
HAY rha th’oo-
POH BRON-TAYZ PAH-TROS Di-os AY-si peh-DON deh,
that beneath (the thunderbolt) (of Father) Zeus goes earthward
THEH-speh-see-
OY d’oh-mah-DOY ha-li MIZ-geh-tai, EN deh teh POLL-ah
(with an inhuman) (din) (the salt sea) (churns), and many
KU-mahtah PAH-
PHLAH-DZON-tah poh-LEE-PHLOYZ-BOY-oh thah-
LASS-ays
Waves roiling (of the loudly-roaring) sea
KUHR-ta phah-
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/1Greekpic
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2Greekpic
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/3Greekpic
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/4Greekpic
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/5Greekpic
4/20/18, 3*57 PMEnglishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations | The New Yorker
Page 3 of 8https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/englishing-the-iliad-grading-four-rival-translations
LAY-ree-oh-OAN-tah, pro MEN T’AHLL’, OW-tahr ep’ ALL-
ah:
Curved white-capped (in front) some, (but) (hard behind) others
HOSS TROE-
EHS pro men ALL-oy ah-RAY-roh-tehz, OW-tahr ep’ ALL-oy
(just so) (the Trojans) (in front) some (were packed together) (but)
( hard behind) (others)
Note, #rst of all, how the last words of the #rst, third, #fth, and sixth lines of this
passage all end with the same sound combination, loaded with liquid “l”s (aellêi,
“maelstrom”; polla, “many”: ep’ alla, “others hard behind,” ep’alloi, “others hard
behind”): these liquid “l” sounds (with some explosive “p”s thrown in in the third,
#fth, and sixth lines) beautifully evoke the sounds of the roiling waters, even as
the insistent repetition of the “p-ll” sound cluster from line to line gives a sense
of whitecaps breaking on the beach, one after another. (In other words, the near-
rhyming words do what the waves do.) And, as if to make the analogy concrete,
the sixth line—which reconnects the imagined world of the sea to the narrated
world of the Trojans at war—repeats the “some before … others hard behind”
language of the #fth: the waves are all ’ … ep alla; the Trojans are alloi … ep’ alloi.
So the sixth line is packed behind the #fth, imitating its sound cluster precisely
the way in which the Trojan ranks, packed together in battle formation, are
massed one behind the other.
Also of note is the way that the two adjectives in the fourth line—paphladzonta,
the “roiling” waves, and polyphloisboio, the “greatly-roaring” sea—replicate each
other’s consonants: the “p”s, the “ph”s, the “l”s, the soft “s”s and “z” sounds. If you
repeat those languidly unspooling words, you’re making the noises of the surf.
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/6Greekpic
4/20/18, 3*57 PMEnglishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations | The New Yorker
Page 4 of 8https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/englishing-the-iliad-grading-four-rival-translations
With that in mind, let’s compare some notable translations of this vivid passage.
Here is Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 rendering:
They went on, as out of the racking winds the stormblast
that underneath the thunderstroke of Zeus-Father drives
downward
and with gigantic clamour hits the sea, and the numerous
boiling waves along the length of the roaring water
bend and whiten to foam in ranks, one upon another;
so the Trojans closing in ranks, some leading and others
after them, in the glare of bronze armor followed their leaders.
Lattimore is alert to Homer’s effects, particularly his play with consonant
sounds. His “drives downward” in line 2 nicely gets the “d” and “n” sounds in the
Greek eisi pedo_n d_e, “goes earthward”; and I particularly like the way he
reproduces all those liquid “l” sounds in his line “boiling waves a long the length
of the roaring water.” He also strives to reproduce the “some … other”
construction of the Greek in his “one upon another … some leading and others
after them.” You’ll notice, too, that Lattimore favors a long, six-beat line that
mimics the six-beat line that Homer uses—one of the ways he tries to conjure
the grandeur and expansiveness of Homeric verse.
Four decades after Lattimore, Robert Fagles’s 1990 translation took the #eld,
establishing itself as the preëminent English translation. Fagles uses a loose #ve-
beat line. It can be a bit too loose—it sometimes feels like stacked prose—but
has an admirable clarity:
Down the Trojans came like a squall of brawling gale-winds
blasting down with the Father’s thunder, loosed on earth
and a superhuman uproar bursts as they pound the heavy seas,
4/20/18, 3*57 PMEnglishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations | The New Yorker
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the giant breakers seething, battle lines of them roaring,
shoulders rearing, exploding foam, waves in the vanguard,
waves rolling in from the rear. So on the Trojans came,
waves in the vanguard, waves from the rear, closing.
Fagles’s sensitivity to the alliteration of “l” is clear, especially in his #rst two lines
(“squall of brawling gale-winds” is really good), and it’s nice that he tries to
suggest Homer’s line-ending alliterations with his end-rhyming “roaring” and
“closing”. And at the end of this passage he uses a striking repetition of the word
“waves” to suggest the important repetitions of both sounds and words in the
original (particularly that “some … others” construction). Some readers will
appreciate the way that Fagles (who wrote poetry of his own) ampli#es Homer’s
“curved” and “white-!ecked” waves into waves with “shoulders rearing, exploding
foam,” although a little of this poeticizing goes a long way. The big mistake, to
my mind, is the way Fagles blurs the line between the two parts of the simile: the
waves and the battle-lines of Trojans. By importing the diction of warfare into
the #rst part of the simile (“battle-lines” of waves, a “vanguard” of waves), he
actually weakens the impact of the simile overall. Nonetheless, it’s a strong,
successful rendering, with an energy and verve appropriate to the lines
themselves.
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4/20/18, 3*57 PMEnglishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations | The New Yorker
Page 6 of 8https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/englishing-the-iliad-grading-four-rival-translations
To my mind, the sensitivity to sound effects shown by both of those translators
isn’t strongly present in the new translation by Stephen Mitchell. What I like
best about Mitchell’s version is its strong #ve-beat rhythm—arguably the best
yet in English. But as his rendering of our passage shows, there’s virtually no
attempt here to reproduce the sound effects in the Greek:
The Trojans attacked like a blast of a sudden squall
that swoops down to earth with lightning and thunder, churning
the dark sea into a fury, and countless waves
surge and toss on its surface, high-arched and white-capped,
and crash down onto the seashore in endless ranks:
just so did the Trojans charge in their ranks, each battalion
packed close together.
The only repetition here is “ranks” in the #fth and sixth lines, and we get
virtually none of those alliterations and sea-sounds, which the earlier translators
grappled with. I #nd, too, that there is a general heightening of diction
4/20/18, 3*57 PMEnglishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations | The New Yorker
Page 7 of 8https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/englishing-the-iliad-grading-four-rival-translations
—“attacked” for “went in,” “swoops” for “goes,” “countless” for “many,” “battalion”
for “rank”—and a loss of some #ne points (“fury” misses the fact that Homer’s
thespesioi homadoi, “with an inhuman din” is meant to evoke a sound). There’s a
lot of energy here, but Homer knows better how to pace himself and mete out
his effects.
I’ve done a translation myself ( ), and my guess is that
you could spend an entire working day solving the problems presented in this
six-line passage—nailing down the meaning in a #rst draft, perhaps, and then
spending several hours working out how to get the sound effects, to say nothing
of the rhythm. At this rate, it would take about seven years to translate the Iliad
—assuming you worked on weekends. That’s just about how long it took
Alexander Pope to produce his Iliad; it was announced in 1713 and the #nal
volume was published in 1720. Many consider it the greatest English Iliad, and
one of the greatest translations of any work into English. It manages to convey
not only the stateliness and grandeur of Homer’s lines, but their speed and wit
and vividness:
As when from gloomy clouds a whirlwind springs,
That bears Jove’s thunder on its dreadful wings,
Wide o’er the blasted #elds the tempest sweeps;
Then, gather’d, settles on the hoary deeps;
The afflicted deeps tumultuous mix and roar;
The waves behind impel the waves before,
Wide rolling, foaming high, and tumbling to the shore:
Thus rank on rank, the thick battalions throng,
Chief urged on chief, and man drove man along.
One small example of the many beauties of this translation is the precision and
detail of the #fth line. In Homer, those two gurgling adjectives, paphladzonta and
of a modern Greek poet
of a modern Greek poet
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of a modern Greek poet
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of a modern Greek poet
of a modern Greek poet
of a modern Greek poet
of a modern Greek poet
of a modern Greek poet
of a modern Greek poet
of a modern Greek poet
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4/20/18, 3*57 PMEnglishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations | The New Yorker
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polyphloisboio slow the line down mightily—you have to chew on them a bit, roll
them around in your mouth, make the surf-noises. Pope manages this in English
by dragging the line out with the many s sounds— “deeps,” “tumultuous,” “mix”;
and by placing “deeps” before “tumultuous,” he forces your tongue to drag a bit as
it searches for the helpful “t” in “tumultuous” to latch onto again before you can
move on. It’s just one of many tiny effects that accumulate to make this at once
the grandest and the most minutely detailed there is ever likely to be.
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Daniel Mendelsohn, an author and critic, teaches at Bard. His new memoir, “An
Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic,” will be published in September. Read more »
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12/6/2017 The Walls We Build Around Us – Medium
https://medium.com/@pharaonick/the-walls-we-build-around-us-c2ae921b51f5 1/9
Nick Rowlands Follow
just wondering around
Jul 17, 2013 · 13 min read
The Walls We Build Around Us
On writer’s block, obsession, and the Egyptian
revolution
Some time back in 2011, amidst the chaos and confusion of the
Egyptian revolution, I forgot how to write — constructed a barrier in my
mind and hammered home the instruction, “WRITER’S BLOCK, DO
NOT PASS!” Two years later, and I’m only just learning to peek over to
the other side and see there is life beyond.
The hows and the whys form a story I’ve been needing to tell for a long
ti
me.
. . .
From 2006 to 2010 I lived in Egypt, working as a tour leader and then a
travel writer. Mine was the Egypt of felucca captains and donkey boys,
boisterous games of backgammon and cafes thick with scented tobacco
and laughter, old magic locked in stones and the echoing solitude of the
desert.
Photo by Rennett stowe
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But by 2010 it was time to move on. The exotic had �nally become
mundane, and the delicious chaos of life in Cairo was taking its toll; my
writing felt lifeless and formulaic; I missed my family. I needed to quit
while ahead, before I morphed into that species of resentful and
twisted expat who forgets how privileged he is, who allows his fear of
leaving the familiarity of the foreign to poison his relationship with the
host country.
So in November 2010 I said a bitter-sweet goodbye to friends that had
become family, and who refused to believe I was really leaving. I
traveled to the US, and spent my �rst Christmas in years at home with
my actual family in England. Along the way, having received a job o�er
too good to refuse, I decided to prove my friends correct by returning to
Egypt “for one last year”. I was set to �y back some time in February
2011, after giving a talk at a travel writing workshop in London.
Which is why I was stuck in England at the end of January 2011,
watching the beginnings of the Egyptian revolution through the �at
glare of my computer screen. Like many people following along from
afar — especially all those with a deep and personal connection to
Egypt — I was overcome with con�icting emotions: exhilaration,
admiration, fear, impotence, guilt. Frustration, too, because I felt I was
meant to be there. I knew I had to go back.
. . .
I consider myself fortunate that I’ve always found it easy to express
myself, although I’m more comfortable doing so verbally than through
writing. It’s only recently that I have come to understand why.
There’s a �exibility and a �uidity to the spoken word — thoughts don’t
need to be complete, and the ebb and �ow of conversation means there
is a participatory shape to the expression of ideas. By contrast, writing
is a more deliberate, more linear, and more solitary act; there is a sense
of something solid, something permanent, in the act of committing our
thoughts to paper. To write necessitates standing beside our words,
owning them. But to speak — to speak requires conviction only at the
point of utterance, as our sounds dissipate into the ether to live on as
memory alone.
. . .
Egyptians are fond of saying that if you drink from the Nile, you are
fated to return to their country. But the Nile is as �ckle as it is timeless,
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and the Egypt to which I returned in March 2011 was not the country I
had left four months earlier.
This was around the time that the euphoria following Mubarak’s ouster
was decaying into the disillusionment, fragmentation, paranoia, and
confusion of an epic, country-wide comedown. While it is true that the
street was invigorated and there was an almost tangible excitement and
hope for the future, there were also palpable and thickening tendrils of
tension; the atmosphere in Cairo was both explosive and brittle. The
cycle of broken promises, demonstrations, violence, and politicking
that has subsequently come to de�ne Egypt’s ongoing revolution was
just beginning.
I had hoped being in Egypt would illuminate the realities on the
ground, o�er some much-needed clarity on an undeniably complex
situation. But I found that proximity to the unfurling revolution made
events seem even more opaque and confusing than they had been from
the comfortable tumult of Twitter, back in England. To appropriate a
common expression — it was impossible to see the desert for all the
swirling grains of sand.
And I could never get over my concerns with a di�erent sort of
appropriation — the sense that perhaps, having missed the initial
“Eighteen Days”, I had returned to Egypt to stake a claim over
something I did not really own. I became obsessed with the idea that
there was an invisible but unbreachable crevasse between me and all
my friends who had been present for, and participated in, Mubarak’s
downfall. A dark and insecure part of me felt like an uninvited guest at
someone else’s party. I realize now that I never spoke to anyone about
these fears — and I know that my friends would have laughed me out of
my hauntings — but I was unable to let these feelings go.
Where some people saw opportunity (and indeed, many careers were
launched o� the back of the “Arab Spring”), I saw opportunism, and
what I came to think of as revolutionary voyeurism. I felt that many
people, conditioned by a lifetime of news-as-entertainment, were
treating the revolution as their chance for interactive ring-side seats at
the hottest new drama in town. I knew these thoughts were beneath
me, and my sentiments were by no means set in stone; but by opening
myself to the shadows of my own motivations, I tainted my perceptions
of others’.
As the months passed, and the counter-revolutionary rhetoric about
invisible hands and foreign interference clamped ever tighter around
the national psyche, I began to worry that foreigners attending
demonstrations might even be harmful to the cause. Yet many of us
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were deeply invested in the country, and strongly believed in the goals
of the revolution. And besides, wasn’t this a universal struggle? I
discovered I was no longer sure of anything, and a sense of unease and
disorientation permeated my existence throughout the year.
Everywhere I looked, everything I considered, was swathed in shades
of violent gray.
All of which is a rather long-winded way of explaining how and why I
forgot how to write. More accurately, of course, I simply lost my ability
to do so — lost my con�dence, my inky mojo. My day job as a video
news producer still involved writing, but with the exception of one
piece published soon after my arrival, I was unable to sort through my
personal thoughts and emotions e�ectively enough to nail them to
paper. Being unsure of what I felt, I lost con�dence in my ability to
express myself in writing.
There was certainly no lack of material. This may, in fact, have been
part of the problem: there was just so much going on, and it was so
overwhelming, so complicated, so nuanced; where to begin? Every
time I grabbed hold of my �eeting impressions long enough to begin
the process of solidifying them in writing, I froze up. Even attempting a
straightforward account of what I had seen and done left me paralyzed.
I was terri�ed, either that I would write something which I could not
later stand behind — that I would be judged and found wanting — or
that in trying to describe my personal relationship to the revolution I
would come o� as self-centered.
Eventually, unable to do justice — in my mind, at least — to the
complexity of events or to what I was feeling, I clammed up and started
to withdraw. I began looking for excuses to avoid my more engaged
friends, and I took solace in drink and in poker. I let my thoughts and
emotions run wild, but I allowed my words to shrivel and die inside of
me.
. . .
I came to writing relatively late in life, at the age of thirty. It was 2008,
and after two years on the road in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia as a tour
leader, I was ready to settle in one spot and attempt to assemble the
trappings of “normality” — a bed, real friends that didn’t disappear after
two weeks, a space to make my own tea. Yet I wasn’t ready to leave
Egypt, a country that somehow felt more like “home” than England
ever had.
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I was lucky to �nd work writing and maintaining an online travel guide
to Cairo, and freelancing for a local print city guide. I soon took over as
managing editor of the city guide, started a blog about daily life in
Egypt, found additional work as editor at an online travel media
network, and picked up an extra freelance gig here and there.
Writing, for me, was therefore a public act, and the words came into
existence only so they could be released into the wild. I knew my mum
kept a diary, but the idea of writing solely for myself had never crossed
my mind. I had no real concept of the transformative power that the
process of writing itself holds. Looking back now, this seems laughable:
I have always been an avid reader, and if reading the words of others
can be so moving as to elicit a strong emotional and intellectual
response, it stands to reason that producing such words yourself could
have a similar e�ect.
But I viewed writing as something you threw out there, for money or
for approbation, or ideally for both. If I had truly understood that you
should write �rst and foremost for yourself — if I knew how cathartic
and illuminating and liberating an act it can be to abandon yourself to
the act of writing, with no thought to potential publication — then
perhaps this whole issue of a revolution-inspired writer’s block could
have been avoided.
Moreover, this does all suggest another question: How could I have
“forgotten” how to write, if, as it seems, I never really knew how to
write in the �rst place?
. . .
My �rst glimpse of salvation came in the latter half of 2012. I had left
Egypt in May and was now living in San Francisco, happily married to
the woman who’d stolen my heart when I visited the US in 2010. I had
hoped that the novelty of pastures new and the excitement of
beginning the rest of my life would unlock my creativity; that the words
would begin to �ow again. But not writing had become a habit, and I
still believed that writing = publishing.
I was complaining to my wife, who is also a writer, about my continued
inability to put pen to paper. She pointed out that I had, in fact, written
almost continually during my time in Egypt.
We had remained in nearly constant contact since the day we �rst met,
before we even realized that our futures lay together. While we had
used a bunch of communication tools — SMS, chat, Twitter, Facebook,
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Skype — email was our primary and preferred means of staying in
touch. Multiple emails every day — the mundane, the epic, and the
intimate. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of words; a digital
archive of our shared blossoming, the trajectory of convergence.
Many of these emails stretched to over 1,000 words. Many of mine
were, by de�nition, about my life in Egypt — about what was
happening, and how I felt about it. I had never before thought of these
emails as “writing”. It helped, a little.
Yet still I remained �xated on Egypt, convinced I needed to write the
proverbial line under that chapter of my life. I felt that if I could only
write something, anything, about my time there, my writer’s block
would be banished and I would be free to move forward. That without
some form of written closure, my words would be left forever hanging
over the abyss between past and future.
But along with the same conceptual insecurities I had struggled with in
Egypt, I now had what I considered to be an additional problem. I felt
so far away from Egypt, both in time and in space, that my desire to
write about it seemed entirely decontextualized, almost a non-sequitur.
Not to mention that in an enthusiasm of “new beginnings” I had long
since killed my personal, Egypt-focused blog (which had in any case
been chronically neglected for years). I needed to begin again with a
new platform… but what form would that take and would I design it
myself and what was I going to write and how would I attract readers
and what could I write and how was I going to ensure everything I
wrote was just perfect and besides what did I want to write…?
I knew I was digging myself a deep hole, and using the excavated debris
to fortify the wall of a writer’s block built from nothing but shadows
which only I could see. I eventually began to admit that I might just be
making excuses, and to consider that perhaps I didn’t really want to
write anyway — to wonder if that stage of my life was truly over, and if
the only line I needed beneath it was a mental one.
. . .
I �nd it interesting how the choice to view writing as a public act comes
with such a weight of associated baggage. The concept of the individual
as brand is both aggrandizing and dehumanizing.
I have always been the toughest critic of my own writing, willing to
share only that of which I am proud and can stand beside. But for me,
at least, this issue of quality was only one facet of the larger and more
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complex problem of presentation. How, exactly, do you organize your
online presence? Where does your writing live; how is it
compartmentalized; to what extent should you strive for an
overarching coherence?
I have started, and deleted, numerous blogs on Tumblr. I insisted on
building my latest self-hosted WordPress blog from scratch; I already
dislike the design, as well as most of the (still sparse) content. If not
careful, I can spend all my time tinkering with the triviality of
cosmetics, the design equivalent of the Oscar Wilde comment on
commas. Seduced by the honeyed promises of “personal branding”,
disoriented by the range and sophistication of all those publishing tools
available to us, it’s easy to lose focus on what actually matters.
I see now that my problems with writing were more akin to being lost
in a maze, or perhaps a hall of mirrors, than to being stuck behind a
wall. The con�uence of confusion, indecision, fear, stubbornness,
arrogance, and egotism manifested a situation in which every direction
became a dead end before I could even start down it.
. . .
Like most mazes, the way out was deceptively simple once I �nally
recognized it. You already know what it is. I already knew it too.
Towards the start of this year I discovered in my wife’s library the book
Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. The subtitle, “Freeing the
Writer Within”, tells you all you need to know. My main takeaway was
this: We all have a boundless and energizing wellspring of creativity
within us. One of the ways to tap into and release this energy is to get
out of the way, and to write. That’s it — you just write.
By removing ourselves from the writing process — removing all our
hopes and fears, our desires, any thoughts of topic or appropriateness
or purpose, the entirety of our ego and all the accumulated sludge of
the self — we create a space for the words within us to pour out.
The mechanics of the practice, and it is a practice, could not be easier:
you sit down at your desk with pen and paper or your computer, and
you start writing the �rst thing that comes into your head. You do not
plan or edit, you do not correct typos or misspellings, you keep your
hand or �ngers continuously moving and allow that which is within
you to manifest without, and you do not stop. You are done only once
your predetermined number of minutes or pages has been reached, or
once you have (temporarily) bled yourself dry.
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It seems stupid to admit it, but the purity of this approach to writing
came as a revelation to me. I already knew that the sole thing I actually
needed to do was to write; the �rst piece of advice given to anybody
who wants to write is that you sit on your ass and you write. And yet
somehow along the way I had got tangled up and trapped in the maze,
fallen for the deceit — magni�ed by our hyper-connected and
increasingly digital lives — that writing is primarily for public
consumption, for sharing, and that it must therefore possess a certain
quality.
This is not true — it is blindingly obvious that this is not true — but it
seems I had to hear it from someone else. My wife had been telling me
so all along, but I didn’t listen. I needed it laid out in the solidity of
black and white.
The reason Goldberg got through to me where all others, myself
included, had failed, is that she showed how the act of writing can be
an end in and of itself; she elucidated its purpose. By writing without
ego, without thought, without intention, you are skimming o� the
quotidian froth from your brain and setting it aside; this allows you to
access a self that is deeper and more authentic than the one you
present to the world, and to yourself, on a daily basis. There is a sense
that it’s you who is being written.
Coming to understand that my writing does not have to be “about”
anything, that it does not have to be published or judged, that it does
not even have to be “good”, was the liberation I was searching for and
that I so desperately needed. The shadows remained, but I was no
longer in thrall to them. I was at last able to give myself permission to
write again.
. . .
One of the greatest bene�ts of this free-writing practice is that you
deposit and nurture and explore a kind of creative mulch of thoughts
and feelings, all expressed without passing through the potentially
limiting �lter of your brain. And from this fecund inner space a more
considered and sculpted and polished piece of writing can begin to
emerge at any time; something still written primarily for yourself, but
with which you may be comfortable enough to share in the world.
A story, perhaps, that needs to be told.
. . .
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Note: The feature photo was taken from Flickr Creative Commons, and is
by Rennett Stowe.
http://www.flickr.com/PHOTOS/TOMSAINT/2987926396/
9/30/2017 “A Talk to Teachers” James Baldwin, 1963
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“A Talk to Teachers”
By James Baldwin
(Delivered October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child – His Self-Image”; originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963,
reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.)
Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are
in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately
menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible – and particularly those of
you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people – must be prepared to “go for broke.” Or to put it another way, you must understand
that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you
will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won’t happen.
Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave
that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m
the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A
society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us
here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for
example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became
barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he
is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own
decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the
universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that
kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in
this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it
and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and
undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars
and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees “liberty
and justice for all.” He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by
his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization – that his past is nothing more than a record of
humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless,
watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only – his
devotion to white people. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.
All this enters the child’s consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because
we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything,
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look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don’t have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we,
their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot
know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his father is always on edge. He is aware
that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the bus, his father or mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He
is aware that there is some terrible weight on his parents’ shoulders which menaces him. And it isn’t long – in fact it begins when he is in
school – before he discovers the shape of his oppression.
Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the
U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st
Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives – even
if it is a housing project – is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so
proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies – in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child
knows this, though he doesn’t know why.
I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born – where I was born. We looked down over the Park
Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn’t know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is
still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany’s on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover
that you are literally in the white world. It is rich – or at least it looks rich. It is clean – because they collect garbage downtown. There are
doormen. People walk about as though they owned where they are – and indeed they do. And it’s a great shock. It’s very hard to relate
yourself to this. You don’t know what it means. You know – you know instinctively – that none of this is for you. You know this before you
are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn’t it for you?
Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those buildings a man says, “Go to the back door.” Still
later, if you happen by some odd chance to have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, “Where’s your package?” Now this by no
means is the core of the matter. What I’m trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of
opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely
inarticulate and dangerous rage inside – all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white
people see every day of their lives – I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than “Yes Sir” and “No, Ma’am.” They
will tell you it’s raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you want to hear. They really
hate you – really hate you because in their eyes (and they’re right) you stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a
moment. It is the most sinister of the facts, I think, which we now face.
There is something else the Negro child can do, to. Every street boy – and I was a street boy, so I know – looking at the society which has
produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and
the politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else’s benefit – not for his. And there’s no reason in it for him. If he is
really cunning, really ruthless, really strong – and many of us are – he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because
that’s the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city – every ghetto in this country – is full of people who live outside the
law. They wouldn’t dream of calling a policeman. They wouldn’t, for a moment, listen to any of those professions of which we are so proud
on the Fourth of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day
when the entire structure comes down.
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The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to
justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were,
indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. Therefor it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his
actual history. The reason is that this “animal,” once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack
the entire power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place. What I am trying to suggest to
you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they
didn’t understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in or4der to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we
have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.
The Reconstruction, as I read the evidence, was a bargain between the North and South to this effect: “We’ve liberated them from the land –
and delivered them to the bosses.” When we left Mississippi to come North we did not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of the labor
market, and we are still there. Even the Depression of the 1930’s failed to make a dent in Negroes’ relationship to white workers in the labor
unions. Even today, so brainwashed is this republic that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be good faith, “What does the Negro
want?” I’ve heard a great many asinine questions in my life, but that is perhaps the most asinine and perhaps the most insulting. But the
point here is that people who ask that question, thinking that they ask it in good faith, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make
Negroes believe they are less than human.
In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I was not a “nigger” even though you called me
one. But if I was a “nigger” in your eyes, there was something about you – there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very
young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons
that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you
project, is you! So where we are no is that a whole country of people believe I’m a “nigger,” and I don’t , and the battle’s on! Because if I am
not what I’ve been told I am, then it means that you’re not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.
It is not really a “Negro revolution” that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example,
one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this
culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the
reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role
here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad.
Now let’s go back a minute. I talked earlier about those silent people – the porter and the maid – who, as I said, don’t look up at the sky if you
ask them if it is raining, but look into your face. My ancestors and I were very well trained. We understood very early that this was not a
Christian nation. It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my
grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way. It was a simple as that. And if that was so there was no point in dealing with white
people in terms of their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn away, smiling all the time,
and tell white people what they wanted to hear. But people always accuse you of reckless talk when you say this.
All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet, but may find an
outlet soon. It means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they
were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time
and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children – some of them near forty – who have never
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grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people
really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What
happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all.
They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower.
That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to
the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is
dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to
me was the way Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody – not even out of malice, just because
they didn’t know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren’t cruel; they just didn’t know you were alive.
They didn’t know you had any feelings.
What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the American white man who has long since lost his
grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about
the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that there are people in the world who don’t
go into hiding when they hear the word “Communism,” astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which we
will not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this country now, on the part of people who should know better,
is abysmal.
The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don’t think anyone can doubt that in this country today we are
menaced – intolerably menaced – by a lack of vision.
It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, “I can’t do anything about it. It’s the government.”
The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the
right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South,
that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country’s life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School
would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here and there was no public uproar.
I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must
find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the
basis of the evidence – the moral and political evidence – one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in
this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then
return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I
would try to teach them – I would try to make them know – that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are
surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I
would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never
make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides
he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man’s respect. That it is up to
him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular culture – as
represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies – is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be
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aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is – and
that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more
beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible,
but principally larger – and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given
administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. I would try to show him
that one has not learned anything about Castro when one says, “He is a Communist.” This is a way of his not learning something about
Castro, something about Cuba, something, in time, about the world. I would suggest to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous
province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way – and this child must help her to find a
way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy,
it will be destroyed by that energy.
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