TayariJones.com: “I know that it’s sort of out of style to say you love Alice Walker. Her later novels have not been as good, there is the public feud with her daughter, and The Color Purple in all it’s many incarnations has taken of a life of its own. Alice Walker has sort of fallen into the same category as Maya Angelou—writers that the new generation likes to publicly mock even [though] we cut our teeth on [their] work. It’s our Electra complex showing. Maybe this is how we prove that we are grown, having our own voice and agenda. But we can’t deny that Alice Walker was a game changer who opened the doors for me and many other writers. You can’t take that away from her, and why would anyone want to?”
Firstly, I write here with a lack of experience with making thinkers like Alice Walker “fashionable”—such fashion shows most likely exist in academic circles from which I would remain separated… Additionally, every speaker that is allowed to spread their ideas throughout the world with mainstream mass media contributes to a pool of information that children use (correctly and incorrectly) for functional decision making—this is the main reason why I would “want to” “take that away” from a human being with such a media personality—even a charming and seemingly inexhaustibly pleasant person like Alice Walker.
For “us” to have an “Electra complex” imposes upon “us” a Greek model of consciousness. This is a style of thinking that often considers itself absolute in spite of the existence of theories of relativity. This is a style that sees itself embracing diversity and openness which implies that my developing style is “limited,” “rigid” and antagonistic without human reason or focus.
Ultimately, I am very pleased that Tayari Jones mentioned Toni Morrison while she celebrates Alice Walker. Ms. Jones praises Alice Walker for being “open” about her life which implies that there is something wrong with being the apparently closed way Toni Morrison sees. My ignorant, savage guess is that Toni Morrison understands that the concept of fame and its subsidiary, celebrity, are based on relatively recent inventions (like radio, television and the earth satellite). My ignorant, savage guess is that Toni Morrison places these relatively new things in a larger context, implying a functional knowledge of the ancient world that lowers the priority of celebrity for the sake of mental health. While Alice Walker is a “game” changer, I don’t think Toni Morrison is playing the same “game”—and we often assume that they are in the same league without quoting vital stats.
“Brain Reads Word-by-word”
sciencenews.org: “The data suggests that readers grasp real words as whole objects, rather than focusing on letters or letter combinations. And as a reader’s exposure to a word increases, the brain comes to recognize the shape of the word. Meaning is assigned after recognition in the brain, Riesenhuber says.” The implication here is that the modern brain still sees words as pictures even though occidental writing has never had pictographs. Those that want to level the accusation of “player hater” better recognize: these words you are reading right now have a heritage that reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of how the brain works. So it’s very sad to encounter a “Chinese-American” poet or an “African-American” poet that is so completely satisfied with writing with these words. Simultaneously, it is important to understand why these words are they way they are. The ancient Romans were not stupid. The Roman imperial character set is designed to pass official messages throughout the empire (note the use of present tense here). Pictures are missing from this set because it is designed to be portable from conquered region to conquered region. These words you are making out of these letters are more for military intelligence/espionage weapons than quanta of beautiful poetry. Sure, kid, we can celebrate our ability to “redefine” something like Roman imperial intentions but we can also work with tools that were designed from the beginning to be sacred and taxonomically coherent. To be so violently uninterested in these pre-imperial alternatives of perceiving the world—even when you are a colored descendant of such an incredible heritage—tells me yet again: the ancient Romans were not stupid.
“Team’s re-creation of ancient Karnak brings history of pharaohs to life”
Meg Sullivan: “After being crowned one of ancient Egypt’s rare female pharaohs, Queen Hatshepsut renovated a coronation hall lined with statuary depicting her father, her highly regarded predecessor, as a god. …‘Karnak is one of the most dazzling sites in Egypt nowadays, but if you try to figure out what any one feature originally looked like, you get in trouble because you have all these elements from different periods standing next to each other, many of which were moved or altered over time,’ said Favro, a professor of architectural history. ‘We set out to give people a clear sense of the chronology of site’s development.’” Since Jay-Z will never fund Black 21st century research into this area, we have to take what we can… but as we read articles like these, we need to continually be on guard with questions like: are we currently in possession of a universal concept of “god” or are we imposing ethnic words on another ethnic group that does not use those words? How do we know when we are observing “art” and “religion”? And, in the specific case of ancient Egypt, anything that occurs after the collapse of the so called “Old Kingdom” is considered an episode in a series of apocalyptic emergencies that eventually led to the fall of civilization and the rise of empire. It is this last sentence that would certainly guarantee my expulsion from any Indo-European funded egyptological study.
