writing
Southern Biographies: epistemologies, methodologies, theoretical perspectives
Joy Owen, Marcio Goldman, Ramon Sarro and Santanu Das give talks as part of the Southern Biographies event. Chaired, Thomas Cousins.
Physiognomy
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s “heads”
In the late 80’s I wrote an awful essay for my Media teacher at Camborne Tecnhical College. There was no internet to speak of back then so I relied upon the books in the limited library for research. Most of the books seemed to be related to mining and farming. In the art section there was a book which mentioned the the long discredited science of physiognomy. I included a line or two about it in my essay, mainly for the obscure sound of the word. Using peoples features to identify aspects of their personality seems to be what people do. It seemed intuitive which is probably why it became an avenue for scientific racism before being rightly discredited. Judging people by their looks turned out not to be a science but just another example of cultural bias.
Not long after I saw an exhibition of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s “heads”. Messerschmidt and his oddness are described by Friedrich Nicolai in the Paris Review. The exhibition was in a former night-club in Londons, Pall Mall (Pell-Mell as my Granny called it). The floors and walls were lined with textured black rubber. Messerschmidt’s gurning heads were like the venue, remarkable and strange. The exhibition blurb mentioned physiognomy in relation to the work of this crazy bloke. Maybe the artists self portraits as he pulled faces indicated his utter madness?
Nowadays science has moved on… or perhaps not. Facial recognition has fired up the imaginariums of nerdly psychonauts. Algorithms judging people by their physique; their shifty eyes or their skin colour. Physiognomy continues to stumble in a quagmire of truths and lies.
Reni Eddo-Lodge in conversation with Rebecca Surender
Reni Eddo-Lodge (author of Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race and winner of the Jhalak Prize 2018), in conversation with Dr Rebecca Surender (Pro Vice-Chancellor and Advocate for Diversity, University of Oxford).
Nothing is Pure. Everything is Complicated.
People have a strange vision of me. I’m going to set a few things straight real quick.
I was an anarchist pacifist two years ago, I was an anarchist pacifist two months ago, I’m an anarchist pacifist right now, and I probably will be one until I go to my grave. I didn’t get fired for what I believe or what I’ve done, because none of that ever really came up. I got fired because of the language I used when I was working with Anonymous in 2011-12, and because I believe in engaging with racists instead of shunning them. On a personal level, my friends can tell you, it’s not just racism. I’m not an easy friend. I confront a lot of difficult topics head on, and I can be in turns comforting and challenging. If I am worried you are going to far with drugs or alcohol, I will tell you. If I think your relationship is fucked up, you’ll understand why I think that. If I think the road you are going down leads to dark ruin, a wasted life, and only makes the people who ruined you more powerful, well, weev, you know that’s what I think.
I don’t give up on people. I have in the past. I told my dad he was a failure as a father in a mall in Northern California, and the next time I saw him, I was identifying his body. I told Aaron we needed to be apart, and when I could have warned people that he would try to kill himself I was 6000 miles away. I have lost so many people, and I will lose more, but it will never again be because I didn’t try. And that’s true of this whole damn world. We may lose it, but not because I didn’t try.
I am not a conservative. Conservatism in an age of calamities can only be about death, and I have had enough of death. I’m not a proper lefty. The left as I know it doesn’t afford enough agency to people who came up hard. To my mind, “everything is systemic, nothing is personal” is as bankrupt as “everything is personal, nothing is systemic.” Everything is both, all the damn time. You have to live with that, you have to live with no easy answers. I am much more persuaded by lefists who work their politics in the street, taking care of people in need, like trying to shut down prisons, instead of cheering when the bad guys get put in them. I am more persuaded by conservatives who practice hospitality and Christian charity towards all, including people who aren’t like them, because that’s what hospitality and Christian charity means.
The public made me into a boogyman, and then people cheered when the Times accidentally mugged my career. I didn’t apologize for that, and I’m not going to apologize for doing what I believe is right and effective. But none of that had anything to do with what I was hired for by the Times. All I was going to do there is explain to the world how the internet works, and how it works on humans. It’s not a complicated mission, but one the world needs, and one I can do. So I’m going to keep working on it. I’m also going to keep opposing racism, sexism, hatred, the wars declared and undeclared, all the dehumanizing bullshit I see from the entire political spectrum. I’m going to keep loving the people the gods put in my path. I’m going to keep loving humanity and our pearl of a planet until they lay me in its belly. I don’t think I’m ever going to be persuaded that the nation-state is very good for us, or at least, I think we can do better.
I believe in the humanity of all humans, which seems ridiculous to have to say, but all across the political spectrum, so many of you don’t. I’m sorry you didn’t find an easy world at the beginning of the 21st century, but you didn’t. Nothing is pure. Everything is complicated.
And I think that’s why people hate me: because I don’t fit, I am full of impurity and complication, and my story doesn’t let you ignore that in me, or the world. I am never going to be easy to label, and I’m always going to make people uncomfortable. And many people would rather bleed than be uncomfortable. I will love you, and I will not be cool about it. I will never, ever, ever settle for your unjust and hateful world.
If you do want to know what I think about racism, here’s a few pieces from the last nine years. There’s be more, but this isn’t what I’m payed to write about. I’m a technology writer, and it’s rare I get paid to write anything else. So most of this was written for love, not money.
https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/the-problem-with-white-shunning-56b67cc2d726
https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/black-men-please-play-pokemon-go-c99a61a05aa5
https://medium.com/message/looking-past-our-racist-assumptions-to-see-africa-f5bddab648ea
https://medium.com/message/how-white-people-got-made-6eeb076ade42
Not Nano
How do I go about filling three pages of foolscap from within a text editor? Do I write it longhand count the words and compare it the same number of words on the screen? I’m not sure if it matters. I do not want to write it longhand. I’d prefer to type it. I understand our brains work differently around the process of scribing letters as opposed to pressing buttons. I feel that no matter the method the brain is trying to work it’s same magic and typing can become as expressive and the written word. If only because we become better practised at spitting the words out without the medium getting in the way. I guess that is my aim to remobve the barriers of the medium. Of course the inner geek in me likes the idea of my private musings being seacrhable in electronic format. I cannot help myself. I collect digital archives, like so many of us. I don’t really want to publish everything but I do want to be able to pick out the pearls of what I am trying to say. I am also lazy. I talk about howI’d like to become a writer and I occaisonally try to write something amusing of erudite. I always fail. I think this could be because I stopped writing for writing’s sake. Not that I ever had much of a habit. There was that one time when I was travelling alone and I kept a brief diary or wrote letters. The diary was written in tiny scrawled writing. It was almoist as if I was trying to hide the words as I wrote them. All my moronic, narcissistic and shallow thoughts gathered into bundles of words. It’s hard to keep writing my thoughts are constipated. If I go back and read over what I have already written I stop. I want to go back and fix my typos, spelling errors and
I saw a notebook reviewed in the back of a magazine yesterday. The mere fact a notebook was being reviewed ought to be of concern. Despite the review I am still at a loss why it sells for fifty four dollars. Perhaps if I wrote in such a book the import of my words would become evident to the world at large. Or then again I might just be an idiot. I mention this because I happened to glance at a notebook which I think Choppy gave me. It is covered in trendy brown cardbard and the pages are dotted instead of lined. The design makes me feel that things I write in it are going to+ be cool and arty. However the illusion is destroyed before I can begin by an imitation lithograph on the cover which is of a cartoon figure farting a cloud of japanese text. Perhaps the content of the Japanese words in the fart cloud save this image from it being crude but I suspect they don’t.
Writing in a constant stream is failing me this morning. Perhaps I was too late and perhaps the medium of typing as opposed to handwriting is to blame. Or maybe it is the interruptions and the coffee and breakfast. Whatever the reason I am noticing my sentance structure is jumbled and my thoughts disconnected. Everytime this text editor (nano) reaches the end of a line it starts to scroll the line of text away to the left. Which would be fine if I never looked at the screen to see how much of the black screen I have filled up. Which is none, unless I press Ctrl-J to justify the line I am on. Of course when I do that It essentially justifies the single line into a paragraph, so I will. The entire screen is divided simply between the text I have written and the background which is John Snow’s map of cenral London with the water pump directly under the beginning of this sentance.
You see now all my sentances are getting muddled because I was pressing Ctrl-K instead of Ctrl-J so I was not justifying my sentances I was deleting them. When I realised I tried to fix it by pressing Ctrl-U to UnCut the text. I have a feeling there are still a couple of sentances missing. There is no Undo, pressing Ctrl-Z just suspends the whole shebang to the computers memory. My thoughts end up as dislocated scraps inside the device. I suspect Nano is not going to cut it as my text editor of choice. Although I do love the simplicity of the open screen. All distractions blocked and I just type. Suzy is home so my time is up.
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