Jeanine Cummins: "I'll write #AmericanDirt, the greatest hamhanded appropriation of trauma ever!"
Colum McCann: "Hold my beer."
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.
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.
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.)
“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.
Inscriptions friends... is pecking out a circular letter form instead of carving freehand weird for ca. 530 BCE? (Context in next tweet.)
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.
The Art Institute of Chicago knows about this photograph from 1970 of its Buddha sculpture embedded in the wall of a shrine in Nepal. It knows Nepal prohibited the export of such antiquities in 1956. And yet it's still working on whether to repatriate it...
The Art Institute currently holds at least four Nepali artifacts for which there are photographs or other evidence of theft - all donated by a single collecting couple, the Alsdorfs, who previously had to return nine other stolen artworks.
Even I didn’t think it was this bad: “Reporters reviewed the [Metropolitan Museum’s] catalog and found at least 1,109 pieces previously owned by people who had been either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes; 309 of them are on display.” nepalitimes.com/here-now/in-se…
“A look at the museum’s catalogue of more than 250 Nepali and Kashmiri antiquities, for example, found that only three have any origin records explaining how they left the regions.” 😳