66\u00a0 bar steady 29.92 0mph N dew-point 58\u00a0 Summer night<\/p>\n
Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon<\/p>\n
The drive into the MIA this afternoon was the first time I’d driven any distance since the long trip to Alabama.<\/p>\n
Sheila gave a walking lecture on the African check out tours.\u00a0 She showed pieces in Egypt, then the Nok figure, the Ife Shrine head, the Benin head.\u00a0 She spoke briefly about the linguist’s staff, the kente cloth, the elephant tusk and the leopard. It was a usual well-informed presentation.\u00a0 Sheila knows the African collection in some depth.\u00a0 She tried to provide so-called Pan African ideas, but I didn’t find any of them unique to Africa.<\/p>\n
Africa, like Asia and North America, is a land mass, not a cultural designation.\u00a0 It has, like Asia and North America, a bewildering variety of indigenous peoples, colonial adventures, global corporate interests and all this mixed now in the stew of politics referred to as developing nations.\u00a0 Seeking for identifiers by continent,\u00a0 across Africa, for example, is like seeking for unity across Asia or North America.\u00a0 It is a category mistake.\u00a0 Continents do not have cultures, people do.\u00a0 To maintain that somehow Algiers and Tunisia share a common cultural underlayment with, say, the Zulu or the Ashante or the Tutu or the Masai attempts to shoe horn disparate peoples in a too tight continental shoe.<\/p>\n
Kate and I watched There Will Be Blood tonight.\u00a0 This is a powerful movie with mythic overtones.\u00a0 The push for oil, the mania required to build an oil company or a church, the violence of men competing for power and money and the interlocutor of the barren land combine in a peak at the roots of contemporary American society.<\/p>\n
Much of the filming was done near Marfa, Texas.\u00a0 Marfa is the location of Donald Judd’s open air show places.\u00a0 It is a unique town, a place a reporter for the Ft. Stockton newspaper told me is “Taos fifty years ago.”\u00a0 She didn’t see this as a good thing.<\/p>\n
The land in the movie is bleak.\u00a0 Until my trip to Imperial, Texas a few years ago to see our land I hadn’t understood why people would say West Texas and shake their head.\u00a0 It is mesquite, sand and rattle snakes.\u00a0 In a few places, for a time, there was oil and natural gas.\u00a0 There is a stark beauty to it, a beauty similar to the high plains, miles and miles of flat sameness, broken at the horizon by low mountains and foot hills.<\/p>\n
More garden work tomorrow.\u00a0 Get the red car, too.\u00a0 The heads were delayed at the machine shop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
66\u00a0 bar steady 29.92 0mph N dew-point 58\u00a0 Summer night Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon The drive into the MIA this afternoon was the first time I’d driven any distance since the long trip to Alabama. Sheila gave a walking lecture on the African check out tours.\u00a0 She showed pieces in Egypt, then the … Continue reading Miles and Miles of Flat Sameness<\/span>