A couple more quotes from The Souls of Black Folk

[asakiyume]

Suddenly all my copyediting clients need copy editing! Which is excellent from an income-stream perspective, but suddenly my life of leisure has evaporated.

But in the spirit of Wednesday reading, here are a couple more quotes from WEB DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk These are from Chapter 8, "Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece." Each chapter opens with a quote from the lyrics of a song--and also a bit of the music for the song, which is cool. Here's an excerpt from the one for chapter 8:

“On the strong and cunning few
Cynic favors I will strew;
I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;
From the patient and the low
I will take the joys they know.”

That's from William Vaughn Moody's "The Brute." It seems relevant in 2020, although I see no sign of the promised death of spirit of the strong and cunning few.

These lines, from DuBois himself, also seem relevant:

We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by facts.

Interesting to see how he uses "we" here. He seems to be aligning himself with White readers. Or maybe his statement about having already reached conclusions in our own minds applies across the board. Anyway, it's more the bit about having our conclusions disturbed by facts that seemed resonant.

...For a mood shift, here's a humorous version of a color meme (choose the color that best represents you) that was going around on Twitter. I saw this version, generated by a computer language-learning program, when Ann Leckie retweeted it from Twitter user Janelle Shane (tweet link here):


So--which do you like?

Comments

[okrablossom]

Oh, no, do I have to be aquamarine??

[asakiyume]

My secret is I choose bunches of them. Feel free to take aquamarine and several more :-)

[sartorias]

I wondered where that came from--I was seeing it everywhere!

[asakiyume]

Some of them are more charming than others :-)

[osprey_archer]

OMG, a wild William Vaughn Moody appears! (William Vaughn Moody was a friend of Josephine Preston Peabody, my 1890s poetess BFF.) Re: the death of spirit of the strong and cunning few, perhaps that depends what kind of spirit you mean? Clearly in terms of possessing any kind of spiritual core, their spirits died long, long ago.

I would assume that DuBois is using "we" to refer to educated readers - anyone who was in a social/educational position sufficiently removed to study the condition of sharecroppers rather than simply living that condition.

[asakiyume]

You're so well educated--and as far as I can tell, you do it all yourself, by wide reading. I admire this so much. I had never heard of William Vaughn Moody.

Yes, re: spiritual core. Strong agree on that.

And yes, that makes sense for the "we."

[ashlyme]

I'm a blend of fuchsia, maroon, and periwinkle - God knows what you'd call that colour. I can't wait to see Sovay's choice. :-)

[asakiyume]

A delicious combination; I like a level-10 gastropod who appreciates a good cup and saucer.

[sovay]

So--which do you like?

Aquamarine, which looks distressingly accurate for an AI-generated personality test.

(If it's multiple choice, I do like the black with white spots—it reminds me of snowflake obsidian—and several items of my clothing are in midnight.)

[asakiyume]

You are definitely permitted multiple choices! And perhaps they were feeding it lots of Sovay text to generate that aquamarine answer :-)

I'm definitely hanging out with the first two columns, at least in my daydreams.

[anna_wing]

I'm all for aquamarines at midnight...

[asakiyume]

I like that answer even without checking to see what the combo gives us--who could resist aquamarines at midnight? And it gets even better when I confirm the meaning :-)