Jared

@mathbook.cafe

297 Followers 151 Following

read some books 📚

Coltrane adds: "I don't try to set standards of perfection for anyone else. I do feel everyone does try to reach his better self, his full potential, and what that consists of depends on each individual. Whatever that goal is, moving toward it does require vigilance." And as the performance shows, that vigilance is not without its tensions. Listening to Coltrane work through his own challenge may well stimulate self-confrontation in the rest of us. Each listener, of course, will himself be challenged in a different way. For many, the basic beginning will be that described by Don DeMichael in a Down Beat review of Coltrane: "This music... opens up a part of myself that normally is tightly closed, and seldom-recognized feelings, emotions, thoughts well up from the opened door and sear my consciousness.
making the signature of Agoue’ta-Royo “Master of Waters”
Part of Hurston's received heritage-and perhaps the paramount received notion that links the novel of manners in the Harlem Renaissance, the social realism of the thirties, and the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement-was the idea that racism had reduced black people to mere ciphers, to beings who only react to an omnipresent racial oppression, whose culture is "deprived" where different, and whose psyches are in the main "pathological." Albert Murray, the writer and social critic, calls this "the Social Science Fiction Monster." Socialists, separatists, and civil rights advocates alike have been devoured by this beast. Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap, and railed against it. It was, she said, upheld by "the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal." Unlike Hughes and Wright, Hurston chose deliberately to ignore this "false picture that dis-torted...." Freedom, she wrote in Moses, Man of the Mountain, "was something internal. ... The man himself must make his own emancipation." And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the "arrogance" of whites assuming that "black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions." Her strategy was not calculated to please.
In this era of violence, when the sword has been augmented by the pen, which has been augmented by the keyboard, it is particularly important to understand the double edged nature of our words to protect ourselves from violence of all varieties, but also to make sure we’re wielding our own weapons effectively (in this case, demanding data autonomy). By lifting the veil and understanding the nature of invisible violences, we can finally begin to halt and heal from it enough to ask the important questions: How am I both a victim and perpetrator of harm? How can we avoid recreating old violences in new systems? When are intentional violence, non-violence, and anti-violence necessary in the design of technologies?
Well it's like this, PaPa. You always go around speaking as if you were a charlatan and putting yourself down when you are 1 of the most technical dudes with The Work. Abdul was right that night. .. I didn't want to say. You ought to relax. That's our genius here in America. We were dumped here on our own without the Book to tell us who the loas are, what we call spirits were. We made up our own. The theories of Julia Jackson. I think we've done all right. The Blues, Ragtime, The Work that we do is just as good. I'll bet later on in the 50s and 60s and 70s we will have some artists and creators who will teach Africa and South America some new twists. It's already happening. What it boils down to, LaBas, is intent. If your heart's there, man, that's ½ the thing about The Work. Even the European Occultists say that. Doing The Work is not like taking inventory. Improvise some. Open up, PaPa. Stretch on out with It. Maybe I'm a bit too rigid. 1 of Berbelang's friends, Jose Fuentes, called me a repressed Negro. There was silence for a moment. Don't you think we ought to check with Earline to see if the other 1 has completely left. O pop, I don't believe that a little Erzulie ever did anybody any harm. The sisters smile. T Malice smiles too.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjb/114929834307029719⁠
in my opinion. You needn't use this phrase, normally, unless it's a ferociously debated point with lots of contradictory evidence. Only an immature thinker writes, In my opinion, My Fair Lady is the best musical ever. Without the in my opinion qualifier, it's entirely clear that you're stating an opinion. —Garner’s Modern English Usage
I do not know the specific ways in which the Negro's place in American life is to be made better. I do know that it will be made better in one way or another. And I know that it can be made better by all of us, working together. The problem of the Negro's place in American life is not a local problem alone or primarily, or a state problem, or a regional problem. It is a national problem, because on the Negro's place in the American nation depends our future relation to other nations, the rising nations of that great majority of the peoples of the earth whose skins are colored. It is a national problem because on its solution depend our national consistency, integrity and self-respect. That the Negro's place in American life is a national problem means that it is the individual problem of every citizen of the nation. It is a problem that cannot be ignored, evaded or postponed. It must be faced and dealt with now, while millions of American Negroes are fighting side by side with other millions of Americans against fascism and for the Four Freedoms. In our individual responsibility, most of us greatly need knowl. edge and understanding: knowledge of what the Negro's place in American life today really is; understanding of what the Negro thinks and how he feels about it. To give us such knowledge and such understanding, Mr. Watkins' anthology is of the highest and most timely value. Chicago, December, 1943.
Data Disk for Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis for use with IBM PC or compatible
Ex Libris: Brandeis University Library. In memory of Dora and Samuel Leavitt. Given by Judy Morss, Brandeis University National Women’s Committee, Boston Chapter, 1975
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/scapegoating-the-algorithm After the Democratic Party embraced civil rights and the Republican Party pursued a “Southern Strategy” to appeal to white voters opposed to racial integration, American politics entered a period of political realignment that has created more internally consistent and differentiated political coalitions. As political scientist Lilliana Mason and others have documented, this process of realignment and social sorting has increasingly transformed partisanship into a “mega-identity” that encompasses a wide range of other identities and characteristics, including race, religion, geography, and even personality traits. The emergence of a thriving partisan media ecosystem exacerbated this trend of increasing polarization. But this, too, predates the internet and social media: it’s typically traced to the Reagan administration’s 1987 termination of the “fairness doctrine,” which had required broadcasters to discuss controversial topics in an unbiased manner.
There is a dearth of good translators in the Anglophone world who recognize and respect language's creatureliness; language is like desire, like the act of wanting it changes us, it transforms us, it constantly makes and reshapes us.
Under the rubric of a plan for "rearming America," he advocated a profound shift in national priorities in the allocation and distribution of national treasure and resources. The Pentagon was named the beneficiary of an enormous infusion of funds, the domestic ledger the target for deep cuts in programs and spending. So munificent was the defense buildup plan Reagan endorsed that as part of attaining a six hundred combat ship navy, he even sought to bring back into active service from "mothballs" that old symbol of American military prowess the battleship, at a cost of additional billions. Many military strategists thought the notion foolish. In their view, battleships were dinosaurs of the seas, obsolete in the missile and nuclear age, when atomic-powered submarines carrying enough power to destroy the world patrolled the depths virtually undetected and when intelligence earth-orbiting satellites continuously circling the oceans left no place for battleships to hide. They were, besides, hopelessly limited in their capacity for modern warfare, their sixteen-inch guns woefully out of range and no match for missiles against which they would be forced to defend.
Then, in 1973, the literary critics in the white press hailed the long-awaited biography by Michel Fabre as the scholarly, authorized, and definitive study of Richard Wright that had eluded Constance Webb and that Saul Maloff had longed to see. Fabre had everything he needed in the way of research material-primary and secondary sources-but neither the true personality nor the creative genius and achievement of Wright emerges, to say nothing of his political significance. In The Nature of Biography, Robert Git-tings criticizes Southey's biography of Horatio Nelson and Forster's biography of Dickens—these criticisms underscore the restraint with which Fabre apparently approached his subject: Biography became, in part, the art of concealment. Illegitimate children do not exist; so Emma Hamilton's own feelings for Nelson in Southey's words, "did not, in reality, pass the bounds of ardent and romantic admiration." This type of biography, written not to reveal but to conceal human nature, persisted throughout the century. Forster's life of Dickens not only conceals the novelist's estrangement from his wife and his shifts to meet his mistress, Ellen Terman; it blankets Dickens' manic-depressive character, his half-mad outbursts of insult and anger, anything that deviates from the popular picture of a great, spiritually inspiring, and above all Christian writer. Besides, biographers often had their eye on the great man's widow-or even worse, were the widow.
I kind of want somebody to do a modern take on Epic of Gilgamesh. Specifically, I would love for an unboxing of what I perceive to be one potential subtext read on the story: So Gilgamesh finally finds the secret of immortality, but he discovers that the one immortal person is immortal because they survived a genocidal flood, and the gods took pity on them and granted them immortality as a result. Gilgamesh then returns to his kingdom and is just a a great king.
umpire call of “ball” overturned by ABS against Randy Arozorena (smiling graciously, but incredulous). The ball has 1cm over the outside of the plate. Any sane umpire would call this a ball
After thinking about this for a day, the only data summary I’m happy with would be the following simple analysis: “there are 256 coding tasks, each has an intrinsic time inside of it, when we flip coins we get to see 128 of the times in Condition 1 and 128 of the times in Condition 2. Here are the means and standard deviations of these times.” We could then all move on. I mean, rather than boring us with these robustness checks, METR could just release a CSV with three columns (developer ID, task condition, time). Then the seminar guys can run whatever dumb check they want.
'That stranger, who has not forgotten him, now turns to his shade and asks two questions. First: What were you thinking as you rode to market that morning in your master's arms? Did you really not know where he was taking you? Could you not smell the blood? Why did you not struggle to escape? 'And the second question is: What do you think was going on in that young man's mind as he carried you to market - you whom he had known since the day you were born, who were one of the flock he led out to forage every morning and brought home every evening? Did he breathe any word of apology for what he was about to do to you?
"Percentage of CFOs Optimistic About U.S. Economy" sourced from Grant Thorton CFO Surveys: Q3 2021: 70% Optimistic Q1 2022: 40% Optimistic Q1 2023: 55% Optimistic Q4 2023: 70% Optimistic Q1 2024: 35% Optimistic Q4 2024: 68% Optimistic Q1 2025: 45% Optimistic
close up of plastic crate with stress fracture
What is the act of literary translation for you? And has your view of the possibilities of translation shifted over time? The best definition of translation I’ve encountered comes from tracing the term back to the Latin translationem (nominative translatio), which means “a carrying across.” When applied to a text, the suggestion is that you are carrying a text in one language over into a second language. The Greeks used the word for the work of metaphor, which, like the translation of a text from one language to another, is rooted in equivalency and substitution. In the Old French, translation also referred to carrying the bones of saints from one place to another, as relics. It makes sense to me that the preciousness of such bones would have gotten linguistically intertwined with the precious religious texts copied by clerical scribes. The scribes carried a text from book to book, and sometimes also from one language to another. There have been other uses of the word, from the sacred meaning of being transported (translated) to Heaven, to the secular meaning of moving plantings from one place to another.
Blood Meridian is a profoundly spare and strange book; it occupies the same blasted landscape as the binding of Isaac. But it also complicates attempts to read it as a narrative of distinctively American violence. Despite the period details and extensive references to real historical individuals, the novel continually rises to the level of the cosmos. McCarthy’s hallucinatory landscapes (“the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning”) evoke an alien world beyond the actual settings, and even the landscapes pale beside the psychic territory mapped by his book. Humanity’s true frontier, the novel seems to say, is interior and is perpetually recreated by our inherent capacity for slaughter.
In the background of the “autobiographical pact,” which insists on drawing a hard line between fictional and nonfictional “lives,” hovers the issue of readerly trust. The “pact” assumes the relationship between the reader and the writer rests on an expectation of truthfulness. Unless the writer explicitly alerts readers to the fact that they are reading fiction, readers will take the author’s sincerity for granted. Even in cases where such qualifications are plainly in evidence—as they are in all three of the examples listed above—most readers will identify the first-person voice of the narrator with that of the author and routinely attribute the opinions and ideas, if not the experiences, of Crusoe and Gulliver to Defoe and Swift, respectively, just as they attribute Jane Eyre’s feelings and desires to her author, even though the book itself gives them no reason to do so. In fact, the voice of Charlotte Brontë herself is dispersed among all the characters in her novel.
'You'll be a free man when it's all over. Are you sure you want to return to your village?' 'Yes, I am. "You haven't got anybody left there, Momutu said and went right on before Amoo could answer. 'I too once had a village... just at the edge of a forest. In that village were my mother and my father, relatives... and the whole clan! We used to eat meat and fish. The farms were well cultivated. But as the years passed by, the village went to ruin. Nothing but moaning and groaning. The only things I have ever heard since I was born were cries, all I ever saw was agitated flight into the bush. You enter the forest and die of illness, or stay in the savanna and get caught... What was I to do? I have made my choice. I'd rather be with the hunters than with the hunted any day? Amoo did not understand. He, too, knew that life was like that. One was never safe, never sure whether one would live to see another day. And something else also bothered him: to what use did they really put the men and women who were carried away? It was said that the whites made boots from their skin. They talked for a long time, or rather Momutu rambled on without stopping. He bragged about his exploits and his nights of drunkenness. Amoo only listened. He found it increasingly difficult to understand Momutu's charac-ter. Momutu was like a petty king.
colorful front jacket painting by Laura James
The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
A chance event brought crashing home to me that there was something-one thing-greater than my reverence for Mr. Mu-hammad. It was the awesomeness of my reason to revere him. I was the invited speaker at the Harvard Law School Forum. I happened to glance through a window. Abruptly, I realized that I was looking in the direction of the apartment house that was my old burglary gang's hideout. It rocked me like a tidal wave. Scenes from my once depraved life lashed through my mind. Living like an animal; thinking like an animal! Awareness came surging up in me-how deeply the religion of Islam had reached down into the mud to lift me up, to save me from being what I inevitably would have been: a dead criminal in a grave, or, if still alive, a flint-hard, bitter, thirty-seven-year-old convict in some penitentiary, or insane asylum. Or, at best, I would have been an old, fading Detroit Red, hustling, stealing enough for food and narcotics, and myself being stalked as prey by cruelly ambitious younger hustlers such as Detroit Red had been. But Allah had blessed me to learn about the religion of Islam, which had enabled me to lift myself up from the muck and the mire of this rotting world. And there I stood, the invited speaker, at Harvard. A story that I had read in prison when I was reading a lot of Greek mythology flicked into my head. The boy Icarus. Do you remember the story? Icarus' father made some wings that he fastened with wax. "Never fly but so high with these wings, ," the father said. But soaring around, this way, that way, Icarus' flying pleased him so that he began thinking he was flying on his own merit. Higher, he flew-higher-until the heat of the sun melted the wax holding those wings. And down came Icarus-tumbling• Standing there by that Harvard window, I silently vowed to Allah that I never would forget that any wings I wore had been put on by the religion of Islam. That fact I never have forgotten… not for one second.
This longing, this aching to “go back,” is not just naïve, it’s a kind of political amnesia. Because what we are living through now, this current tide of fascism, reaction, economic precarity, ecological collapse, it didn’t begin with Trump. It didn’t emerge from a vacuum. It metastasized during the Obama years. Not because of who he was alone, but because of what we allowed ourselves to believe while he was in office. We believed the storm had passed. We believed representation was the same as repair. We believed that symbolism could outrun systems. And in doing so, we let the machine reload itself, this time with new branding and better PR.
A "bunker buster" bomb lifted by an industrial sized crane. The weapon is about half the length of an 18 wheel truck bed with a three foot diameter. Photograph from the Associated Press.
I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read—and that's a lot of books these days. If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity-because you can hardly mention anything I'm not curious about. I don't think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that. Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.
I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven't done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was. But people are always speculating-why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient. Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hours because the full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man's society when-soon now, in prison— I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.
man arms filled with books. closeup of Jacob Lawrence’s “The Library”
Stone statue of a seated woman with an infant standing on her right leg and held by her right hand
Black American flag of the American Revolution. More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucks_of_America?wprov=sfti1
Jefferson Pinder (b. 1970) Mothership (Capsule), 2009 Wood, salvaged tin, and 22-inch chrome rim Audio: Sun Ra, Space Is the Place; Stevie Wonder, Living for the City; and Remarks by President Barack Obama on Space Exploration in the 21st Century Gift of Henry Thaggert IlI in memory of Burnell P. Thaggert We grew up when NASA was in its golden age. Remember, the first interracial kiss on television was in outer space on Star Trek. Science fiction fantasy... is, in part, a spiritual place that African Americans have always inhabited. Jefferson Pinder constructed this sculpture with wood salvaged from President Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural platform and ceiling tin from a gutted Baltimore house. Referencing the past, present, and future, Mothership symbolizes the transportation and transformation of Black people toward new and unchartered territory, concepts underscored by the work's shape-NASA's Mercury spacecraft-and its name, derived from singer-songwriter George Clinton's stage prop, the Mothership.