Ingenial

The psychology of Settlers of Catan:

Legacy—Hers

When love leaps from my mouth
cadenced in that Grenada wisdom
upon which I first made holy war
then I must reassess
all my mother’s words
or every path I cherish.

Like everything else I learned from Linda
this message hurtles across still uncalm air
silent    tumultuous    freed water
descending an imperfect drain.

I learn how to die
from your many examples
cracking the code of your living
heroisms    collusions    invisibilities
constructing my own
book of your last hours
how we tried to connect
in that bland spotless room
one bright Black woman
to another   bred for endurance
for battle

Island women make good wives
whatever happens they’ve seen worse…

Your last word to me was   wonderful
And I am still seeking the rest
of that terrible acrostic

Audre Lorde

Here’s a poem by Margaret Walker called “The Crystal Palace.” According to the Jackson Free Press the poem is about The Crystal Palace Ballroom in Jackson, Mississippi.

The Free Press goes on to say,

“The Crystal Palace Ballroom was the most celebrated nightspot on Farish Street during the 1930s and early 1940s…Poet Margaret Walker Alexander, who taught at Jackson State from 1949 to 1979, celebrated the nightclub in the poem “Crystal Palace” in her collection “Farish Street Green.” Alexander described the club as “a place of elegance/where ‘bourgie’ black folks came to shoot/a game of pool” and listened to down-home music. A line she quotes in the poem is found in Tommy Johnson’s “Big Fat Mama Blues.”"

The Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace used to be
a place of elegance
Where “bourgie” black folks came to shoot
a game of pool
And dine in the small cafe
across the way.
The dance hall music rocked the night
and sang sweet melodies:
“Big fat mama with the meat shaking on her bones”
“Bookie woogie mama
Please come back home”
“I miss you loving papa
but I can’t live on love alone”
The Chrystal Palace
Used to be
most elegant.

Since I can’t find this incredible piece of literature anywhere on the net I’m throwing it on. Quotes are taken from “Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of African American Literature” (c) 1998 Houghton Mifflin

Start to finish, “Fern” is about the girl’s eyes. Fern’s eyes are almost a character in the story all by themselves… they are mesmerizing whirlpools that suck black men in but white men “let her alone” (961). A white man once had to flick a “young Negro” with his whip to get by on the road in front of Fern’s house. This is the great mystery of Fern (and her eyes) throughout the piece: while appearing to signal “that nothing was to be denied”, “men saw her eyes and fooled themselves.” (960)

Fern’s effect on the narrator is strange, entrancing and utterly irresistible. “I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate.” Consider another quote from 962, “Nothing ever came to Fern, not even I.” In many ways the narrative’s story with Fern follows very closely Toomer’s own frustrated attempts at self-definition, self-understanding and self-knowledge.

Fern herself doesn’t likely represent African Americans in any significant way being likely Jewish or bi-racial. Instead she represents a hole for African Americans to dump unfulfilled hopes and dreams into. Opportunity, while appearing as if it will not deny the African American, is always just out of reach.

The phrase “Saw her face flow into them, the countryside and something that I call God, flowing into them . . . Nothing ever really happened” sums up what Fern represents: a graveyard for the unfulfilled fever dreams of African Americans. “Face” could represent equal status in society that African Americans sought after. The “countryside” could represent that idea of “home” or a place of their own. This is confirmed by Toomer’s numerous references to Jewish cantors throughout the short story. Cantors of the time would have been pining for their own land, Israel, which would not become a nation until 1948. “God” speaks to ultimate truth or reality, something that eluded Toomer in his lifetime. All these things are swallowed up by Fern’s eyes and she herself is indifferent.
Read more…

Is there a single source that all spoken languages on earth share in common? Maybe. A new study in linguistics by Dr. Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand shows that languages may have originated from a common “seed.” The study seems to correspond with what biologists have proven about genetic code: that the further from South Africa people traveled while populating the world the more of their genetic code and, possibly, their language people lost. It’s an interesting theory. One that, if it bears out in further tests, will change the way we see linguistics forever. Read the full article at the New York Times.

So many great sections to quote from this article. Below are a few that stood out.

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system.

Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory.

The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.

What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting.

Read the whole article.

Five different short films, one dialogue. The rules: the short movie must have the following lines in it, “What is that?”, “It’s a Unicorn”, “Never seen one up close before”, “Beautiful”, “Get away”, and “I’m sorry”.

Here are the five movies, all great in their own way:

1. The Gift

2. El Secreto de Mateo

3. The Hunt

4. Jun and the Hidden Skies

5. Darkroom (rated R)

You can find out more about the project in this video:

With all this hype about the iPad (and the fact that I don’t have one) I thought I’d console myself by rubbing in some recent research from the American Psychological Association proving things don’t bring happiness. As it turns out,

“No matter which wristwatch one buys, even if it is entirely satisfactory, it can still be compared to one in a store display — encouraging counterfactual thoughts about what it would be like with their positions reversed. After returning from vacation, in contrast, it is not so easy to compare a hypothetical Vail ski run with the waves actually ridden in Fiji.”

Experiences can’t be evaluated as clearly in contrast to alternative experiences one could have been having. Purchases, of course, have more permanent effects than most experiences. If I go to the park and play baseball tomorrow afternoon I may not even remember the experience in a week. However, the study showed that my satisfaction of the same event may actually increase over time rather than decrease:

“Satisfaction with material purchases tends to decrease over time, whereas satisfaction with experiential purchases tends to increase.”

The living proof of this has to be my grandparents. They look back on their experiences with fondness and joy but they never mention the “stuff” they owned. The conclusion? Invest in experiences you can enjoy for a lifetime over purchases you’ll enjoy for a few years. Read the rest here.

Via Unclutterer

Eating vegetables in season makes sense, because the amount of energy used to get a blueberry from a neighboring state is a tiny fraction of one flown in from Chile. Local veggies will likely taste better, too. But grocery stores don’t make it easy.

Visit the interactive calender at http://eatseasonably.co.uk/what-to-eat-now/calendar/ or download the PDFs in A4, A3, or A1 sizes.

Meet Makmende. Kenya’s biggest blogosphere sensation and most dangerous Chuck Norris challenger to date. People in Kenya are saying things like:

• They once made a Makmende toilet paper, but there was a problem: It wouldn’t take shit from anybody.
• The world is not ending because Makmende killed The Antichrist.
• Makmende is the only guy who can drink boiling chai from a sufuria.

Learn why they’re saying these things by watching the video below:

See an article about the phenomenon written by Africa blogger Ethan Zuckerman.