Erin L. Thompson Profile picture
Feb 1, 2020 19 tweets 16 min read Read on X
Jeanine Cummins: "I'll write #AmericanDirt, the greatest hamhanded appropriation of trauma ever!"

Colum McCann: "Hold my beer." Image
Colum McCann's new novel, #Apeirogon, out 2/25, is written in the voice of two men, one Palestinian, one Israeli. "When Bassam and Rami learn of each other’s stories, they recognize the loss that connects them and they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace."
"Both men have lost their daughters. Rami's thirteen-year-old girl Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber.... Bassam's ten-year-old daughter Abir was... killed by... the border police outside her school. There was a candy bracelet in her pocket she hadn't had time to eat yet."
Colum McCann is, to point out the obvious, neither Israeli nor Palestinian. Image
And let's not forget that McCann wrote a large part of #LetTheGreatWorldSpin, his previous best seller, in the voice of a Black woman - a prostitute in the Bronx.
"I remember I was with him in New York when he was working on the Tillie chapter and he could not get started. He kept saying to me, 'Give me one line a prostitute would say, just one.'"
"And then when I got home he called me and said, 'I got it. I wrote for sixteen hours. Tillie’s done. Her voice just came to me.'": postandcourier.com/free-times/arc…
The character of Tillie is a junkie contemplating suicide. So, how's that channeling of the voice of an oppressed person of color in crisis work out for McCann? Here's a sample:
"'I shoulda swallowed a pair of handcuffs when Jazzlyn was in my belly.... Say, Here you is, already arrested, you’re your mother and her mother before her, a long line of mothers stretching way back to Eve, french and ****** and dutch and whatever else came before me.'"
(I replaced a word with asterisks there, because, COME ON.)
In #Apeirogon's promo video (complete with sad teddy bear), McCann says "[The novel] happens to take place in Israel and Palestine, but it could really take place just about anywhere". That's... a good sign it's not written by someone from Israel or Palestine. ImageImage
@Center4Fiction @PghArtsLectures @CuyahogaLib @LiteratiBkstore @92Y @LemuriaBooks @WBURCitySpace @ThirdPlaceBooks @Powells @JCCSF @MontclairLitFes @isabelallende "In a moment when the publishing industry is grappling with which stories are told and by whom, it is a striking choice" to use real grieving fathers as the launching point for his fiction. MUMMHUMMM. nyti.ms/2Sy7g8G @joumana_khatib
@isabelallende, are you going to interview Colum McCann about this? https://t.co/Dqdt4CDTzh
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More from @artcrimeprof

May 4
In 2021, a Nepali monastery told the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that the museum possessed a sacred painting stolen from the monastery in 1967. The museum responded by offering to give the monastery a replica... if they would sign away their rights to the original. A 🧵
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In August 1967, the American scholar Mary Slusser photographed the painting during an annual festival at the Yempi Mahavihara (also known as I Baha) in Patan, Nepal. In September, , as her diary shows, a dealer offered it to her.
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In Nepal's Buddhist communities, sacred artifacts like the painting are owned jointly by their worshippers. They cannot be sold. Slusser's other writings show she knew this, and knew that it was against Nepal's law to export such artifacts. Still, she bought it.
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May 4
Every Carlo Crivelli painting is bonkers, but this one from 1481 in the Vatican Museums is especially over the top. Let me show you some details… Image
Virgin giving side-eye to the pervy Mr. Bean donor figure who looks like he’s trying to get a peek up her skirt.
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This sainted pope (probably St. Sylvester) appears to be wearing holy aqua socks.
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Oct 6, 2023
So this is happening Image
There’s a lot going on in this branding
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Arguing that tales of dragons are evidence that dinosaurs lived in human times - humm. Arguing that anything Herodotus says was literal truth - nope. (Nice buff H-man, there, though.)


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Read 16 tweets
Jul 20, 2023
Another must-read on NAGPRA and repatriation from @propublica! propublica.org/article/delaye…
“by funding scientific studies on Native American human remains… federal agencies have created incentives for institutions to hold on to ancestors in ways that undermine the goals of NAGPRA…”
It’s not that they didn’t think about consulting tribes - it’s that they thought doing so was a bad idea for their research. Holy moly.
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Read 4 tweets
Apr 28, 2023
Arlington National Cemetery is removing its Confederate Memorial - no more "loyal slave" myths! ImageImage
Here's a thread about this incredibly problematic monument:
And here's the announcement: arlingtoncemetery.mil/Media/News/Pos…
Read 5 tweets
Apr 26, 2023
Inscriptions friends... is pecking out a circular letter form instead of carving freehand weird for ca. 530 BCE? (Context in next tweet.) Image
So, John Marshall buys this stele in fragments from 1902-1913: metmuseum.org/art/collection…. Marshall was offering £10 a letter for further fragments of the inscription, or £500 for the rest of it.
In 1907, here's the part of the inscription he has (left) and two more parts he's offered by a dealer in Athens (right). The new parts have the cautious circles. ImageImage
Read 6 tweets

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