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Javier E

Percival Everett Can't Say What His Novels Mean | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...percival-everett-profile

music history jazz culture

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • The more I read Everett’s work, the more my thoughts turned to jazz. “It is the player who, by improvising, makes jazz,” Bernstein said. “He uses the popular song as a kind of dummy to hang his notes on. He dresses it up in his own way and it comes out an original.”
  • A jazz player may reference sheet music, but the resulting performance—animated by intuition and impulse—exceeds the descriptive capacities of the language it draws from.
  • Everett is not the first to reimagine Huck and Jim’s coupling, which other artists have interpreted as romantic or paternal. But he is perhaps the first to try to invert it. In “James,” Huck is Jim’s shameful appendage, the object of Jim’s resentful affection. He is the secret Jim can’t give up, the wedge that cleaves Jim’s family
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  • James Baldwin compared it to the talking drum, used to convey messages across distances that the human voice can’t travel: “It is a music which creates, as what we call History cannot sum up the courage to do, the response to that absolutely universal question: Who am I? What am I doing here?”
  • it’s difficult not to read “James” as a corrective of Everett’s previous works, if not of its source material. For Jim’s predecessors, freedom requires abstraction: the problem is other people. But Jim’s understanding of freedom is literal. He knows that his happiness depends upon the emancipation of his family. At first, he wields a pencil, but then he exchanges it for a gun.
Javier E

Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hy-facts-dont-change-our-minds

facts culture knowledge bias language brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context
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