Link Roundup! -The Toast

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Fascinating interview with Jennifer Makumbi:

The reality is, as I keep saying, that we all read differently. Remember for a long time, African writers have complained or have been surprised by the way their books are perceived in Europe. For example, in many parts of sub Saharan Africa, Arrow of God is seen as Achebe’s best novel but for some reason the rest of the world claims it is Things Fall Apart. And then again in Things Fall Apart, Achebe’s attention to the idea of fear as a human condition which drives us to great achievement and then destroy us just as quickly is crucial in many parts of Africa. This is ignored in Europe; to them all that Things Fall Apart does is focus on European action in Africa.


The Ivy League and how to deal with the legacy of slavery:

In 2003, Brown University president Ruth Simmons opened an investigation into the school’s role in the slave trade. The findings exhumed unsettling accounts of the many ways in which important founders of the institution participated in and benefited from slavery, including the use of slave labor to construct the oldest and most iconic building on campus, University Hall. Rather than burying these revelations, university president Christina Paxon dedicated a slavery memorial sculpture that now sits on the campus main green during the school’s 250th anniversary celebrations this September, and, in October, a new Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice was opened. Each of these initiatives stemmed from university officials’ desire to acknowledge and make amends.


Our very own Jaya on An Untamed State and The Hunger Games.


BEAR, always!


A conversation about rape and wanting for words.


HOW watermelons became a racist trope:

Newspapers amplified this association between the watermelon and the free black person. In 1869, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published perhaps the first caricature of blacks reveling in watermelon. The adjoining article explained, “The Southern negro in no particular more palpably exhibits his epicurean tastes than in his excessive fondness for watermelons. The juvenile freedman is especially intense in his partiality for that refreshing fruit.”


Scripps College is now admitting trans women.


#NorthernRacism


I was relieved to see, upon actually watching the footage, that this person trying to back out of the parking spot is actually a fool, because I myself have made some really embarrassing 345 point turns in my day, and still think about this guy in a white van who witnessed me taking like five full minutes to remove myself from the hospital parking garage last month.


Deaths in The Illiad: A Classics Infographic!


imagine that, what a shock

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Hey, it's my birthday! And my boyfriend bumped our plans! Because he "forgot" -- and then also did not immediately backpedal and reschedule his other shit without ever letting me know he had ever made a mistake. Because apparently my birthday is the re-schedulable thing.
22 replies · active 538 weeks ago
Nothing I've heard about The Newsroom so far has made me reconsider my decision to never watch The Newsroom.
3 replies · active 538 weeks ago
"That stayed."
Yay Scripps! Happy for my alma mater.
Happy birthday! Even if it's mediocre, you're sure to get literally thousands of Facebook greetings, and even if 99% are boilerplate, the 1% who took the time to write something truly personal or hilarious are going to make it OK. Also, here's a cake.



One year on my birthday, my husband was an hour late to pick me up from my office. When he got there, my only solace was that he brought me a stuffed Appa as penance/a pre-planned gift.

What I'm saying is, DUDES AM I RIGHT
7 replies · active 538 weeks ago
I can feel the left-hand column of that conversation in every muscle in my body.
2 replies · active 538 weeks ago
That's a pretty great cake! I am pretty envious of the penguin just languishing on the very peak. I am now considering leaving work and going back to bed just to be that penguin for a while.

I don't have Facebook, so the only messages I get are from my mother, my dentist, and some websites I don't remember signing up for. It's pretty great.
3 replies · active 538 weeks ago
Ha, I loved that Iliad infographic! I chuckled at the lack of deaths in Book 9, as of course no one dies, as Achilles is off having a massive, massive sulk. God, what a wang. So glad Hector beats him in the number of kills graph.
3 replies · active 538 weeks ago
I can't believe I watched almost 5 minutes of that guy trying to get out of that parking spot. It was surprisingly frustrating, like an itch you can't quite reach.
6 replies · active 538 weeks ago
The conversation in "That Stayed" reminds me of a conversation I've been having recently with my own sister. Language is so very important for humans, but it also makes discussion of sexual assault so very difficult. "Survivor." "Victim." "He said-she said." "Blackout sex." All of these are labels, and all of them are valid, if they help individuals define their own experiences and provide words for the experiences of individuals. But we must not define the experiences of others for them, and we must leave space for others to define their own experiences. At the same time, we must not invalidate those others' experiences, categorize them as we ourselves would. And, to complicate things even further, at the same, we must try and make those on the outside (e.g., media, universities, MRAs) understand the very real violations that occur in a countless number of ways to a multitude of individuals in our communities (which of course, is never a responsibility of an individual has experienced violence).

Language is hard, and talking about violence is harder, and reaching across borders and boundaries and working for change is the hardest. It seems like so many separate conversations, sometimes.
Haaaa, #NorthernRacism was... not what I was expecting. Canadian #NorthernRacism is also a real and terrible thing.
6 replies · active 538 weeks ago
Jaya's assessment of Mockingjay highlights the reason I liked the book. It certainly wasn't a happy ending but it was realistic.
2 replies · active 538 weeks ago
I loved that Iliad infographic! But I think that any top 3 of grim deaths needs to include Astyanax, the infant son of Hector and Andromache, who gets hurled off the walls of Troy by Neoptolemus. In another version of the story, Neoptolemus actually uses the baby's corpse to club the Trojan king to death. By a sacred altar. In front of a crowd of horrified witnesses. Ancient poetry was HARDCORE.
1 reply · active 538 weeks ago
I can't even handle it if someone it watching me do a run of the mill parallel park in front of my building. Its like a rule that if anyone is standing on the street it will take me 5x longer than usual and I will probably end up jumping the curb and or scraping my tires and making a very loud noise.
Just saying, "Bear" should be mandatory on all Canadian lit survey courses.
1 reply · active 538 weeks ago
I just spent some time trying to figure out if I can buy Kintu by Jennifer Makumbi. Anyone know if that's possible for us here in the US? The Kwani? website said Michigan State Press sold their books and I plan on sending them an email, but I couldn't find any such books on the MSU site. I'll just keep an eye out for it in the future if it's not possible, but it sounds like an interesting book and I loved the interview.
I meant to tweet this at Nicole yesterday to get it into the roundup, and then ended up sick as a dog, but: One Week One Band is doing South African jazz this week, with interviews and photography by Tselio Monaheng.

(I am better now. Meeting with one of my dissertation advisers at 1:30. Apprehensive.)
You all need to stop what you're doing RIGHT NOW and read this amazing article on toast (the edible kind, not the readin' kind).

This article just accomplished the formidable task of making me feel happy and calm despite: Tuesday morning, winter, insomnia due to panic attacks, stack of marking due in five days, impending menstruation, #NorthernRacism of both USian and Canadian varieties (and all other countries that have a northern part), basically everything that is not toast or The Toast.
2 replies · active 538 weeks ago
Man, there's some shitheads in the National Post comments.
2 replies · active 538 weeks ago
That Iliad infographic made my heart quiet and happy. I am going to ride this wave of contentment all day long, with the satisfied air of a Classics degree-holder who has seen something orderly and wonderful.
Alright, huddle up, Toasties.

I do social media for the academic library where I work. Last night, A Man tweeted "So when is Rolling Stone being moved to the fiction section, library?"

I have stared at/thought about this damn tweet for nearly 12 hours. We could ignore it, as it's just one guy who makes anti-affirmative action jokes (yes, really). On the other hand, this is an educational institution and I would take to school any student who said something like this to my face.

So I'm thinking links. Something higher-ed appropriate that pushes back against the nonsense that RS has pulled in the past several days. Anyone got something good?
4 replies · active 538 weeks ago
Is #northernracism a response to that really heinous Daily Beast editorial? Because my favorite part of yesterday was watching my twitter feed tear that thing apart.
In other news, Emily Yoffe is complete trash and has written another garbage article for Slate about campus sexual assault: http://www.donotlink.com/ctgy

(using DoNotLink because Slate doesn't deserve the clicks)
3 replies · active 538 weeks ago
I would like to know the answer to this question too! But without knowing the catalyst, I'm pretty happy to see this hashtag become a thing. After a few weeks of holiday parties and mingling with people I don't know well, I've had my fill of white northern people joking about how scared they have been to drive through Mississippi or Georgia on their way to New Orleans or Florida. It's a gross convergence of three of my least favorite things: white people pretending to be in danger, a convenient consumerist exoticization of certain parts of the south coupled with a derisive dehumanization of the rest of it, and above all, using southern racism and other -isms as a way to avoid looking at the oppressive institutions we are a part of in the north. Philly is REALLY bad about this.

ETA: reply to bird_internet, above. (Normally I delete my comment and re-post when it becomes disengaged from the thread, but The Toast as viewed through Firefox is particularly slow and choppy today.)
5 replies · active 538 weeks ago
So while doing this poems-for-a-young-man-for-his-birthday project, I came across two poems in a book called "Poems from the Women's Movement" that seem depressingly fitting for right now.

TW for this first one - http://www.sascwr.org/files/www/resources_pdfs/po... http://www.angelfire.com/ca/iloveDave/mysg.html (sorry for the dodgy webpage but it's the most complete one I could find)
To anybody who enjoyed the illiad infographic, you may also enjoy Alice Oswald's Memorial. She covers every death in the Illiad, from first to last and writes about each one. It's beautiful and well worth buying the whole book.

A brief excerpt:

ECHEPOLUS a perfect fighter
Always ahead of his men
Known for his cold seed-like concentration
Moving out and out among the spears
Died at the hands of Antilochus
You can see the hole in the helmet just under the ridge
Where the point of the blade passed through
And stuck in his forehead
Letting the darkness leak down over his eyes

Part of it is here: http://www.thepoetrytrust.org/podcast_poem/memori... & there are some YouTubes of her reading it.
I do not disagree with a single thing Shanley says in this interview: A Feminist Critique of Silicon Valley.
I was talking about this article with a friend who is a residence hall director at a university and his take was basically, "I'm glad to be a resource for the complainant. Such a small percentage of cases on campus go wrong for the accused, and victims are treated terribly in the legal system so that's a risk I'm willing to take."
1 reply · active 538 weeks ago
That parking lot driver had to be either drunk or a child, right? There is no way somebody who has ever driven before is that incompetent.
Ooooh Bear is being reissued, now I understand why everyone's been talking about it. I read it for school like eight years ago, still have my copy, told so many people about it, none of them believed me that it is a real book.
Has anyone else read the CIA torture report?

All I've read so far is this: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/09/...

My stomach is churning.
I'd been having a grumpy, petulant evening today, and then I got home and got a cheerful ToastPost from unshored on a strange and lovely postcard and I felt measurably better immediately. Thank you!
Made the mistake of looking at the driver video via Reddit via another website entirely and of course some juicebox in the comments was like "it's a woman, no surprise" or something like that.

ugggggghhhhhh
That poor parking lot guy reminded me of the Funniest Thing Of All Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZXzjKb8nTw
1 reply · active 538 weeks ago
On that parking video---I can tell exactly what's going on inside the car.

Every time the driver backs up or goes forward, one of those proximity alarms goes off. You can see it happening in the timing. Reverse. Alarm sounds as it senses car/curb/snowbank. The driver panics. Better go in the other direction! Too close! Alarm sounds as it senses car/curb/snowbank. And then the driver realizes the proximity alarm is bullshit. No toddlers are chasing bouncing balls behind the vehicle, no, it is only a car/curb/snowbank. So the driver feels justified, becomes desperate to leave, and goes all in and demonstrates how not to drive, anywhere, ever and the ear-breaking, insistent proximity alarm sounds continually inside the car, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, further stressing and distracting the driver and making more bad judgement calls more likely. I am guessing also that this driver has not been driving that car long, because most people disable that sucker if they can. And I'd guess the driver is unaccustomed to parking other than in the wide spacious lots of suburbia, but inexperience with the vehicle could do the same thing. Note the driver's unawareness of what the turning radius of the SUV is. Wide sloppy curves again and again.

I fucking hate those proximity alarms. If visibility from the driver's seat is that bad, the car should be redesigned.
5 replies · active 538 weeks ago
I think one issue with that parking guy must be that the lot is icy and he still has his summer tires, right? Because otherwise his decisions make absolutely no sense. He get's free twice and then just boxes himself back in!
So, this is way too late for today's Link Roundup (and I'll post it again tomorrow), but I just read Ta-Nehisi Coates's response to the TNR meltdown, and it is beautiful:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/...
1 reply · active 538 weeks ago

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