Statement of Editorial Policy
The Physics Tomorrow Letters publishes papers that will support, inform, and delight a diverse audience of college and university physics teachers. It strives to present papers that are not only original, correct, and significant, but also carefully written and interesting to a large number of physics educators. Technical correctness is necessary, but it is not the only condition for acceptance. Clarity of exposition and potential interest to the readers are equally essential. It is the reader, not the author, who must receive the benefit of the doubt. To be publishable in PTL, a manuscript must be written for, and also must be useful, interesting, and accessible to a broad range of physicists.
Many of the published papers will be directly useful in the classroom. They may describe new approaches to teaching or present interesting additions to course content and assignments. While most papers will focus on the intermediate and advanced undergraduate curriculum, some will be of interest to instructors in post-graduate programs. Pedagogical value can be added to all articles by including suggested problems or projects for students. Examples include problems with analytical solutions, computational exercises and simulations, and the analysis of experimental data.
Papers that introduce new laboratory or demonstration apparatus, techniques, or exercises are also welcomed. Although brief papers that only describe how to build a new apparatus are acceptable, authors are also encouraged to share observations of how students interact with the apparatus. Papers that propose new student experiments based on novel uses of existing apparatus are also acceptable. In all cases, the approximate cost of the apparatus should be included, along with information on how to obtain the components.
The Journal invites manuscripts that can be used to bring contemporary research in physics and related fields into the classroom. Such manuscripts should not be review articles, but rather self-contained articles that describe a particular aspect of a research topic in such a way that it is accessible to as many physicists as possible. These articles may be useful to instructors who want to show how a course topic relates to current research and also may introduce undergraduates to current research topics.
Shorter manuscripts are generally more desirable than longer ones, and authors should consider submitting longer derivations, additional applications, program scripts, and data tables as supplementary material. Occasionally, review or tutorial articles are published, often of a length greater than that of the average article. These articles are solicited, and thus authors wishing to write such articles must consult with the editors at an early stage.
Unlike research journals, which may present accurate research results with little consideration of how many readers will be interested, strives to present a carefully curated sampling of the most readable and interesting articles related to physics teaching. The importance of graceful, clear, accessible writing cannot be overemphasized.
Most readers of a particular article will not be specialists in the subject matter presented. The introductory paragraphs should carefully present the context of the new work and should explain how this new work builds on and differs from the cited material. Manuscripts must take proper cognizance of previous work, and authors should be particularly careful to search physics education journals for related work. Such referencing is especially helpful to beginning teachers, and may remind others of once well-known ideas, proofs, or techniques that may again be useful to physics teachers and students. It is the responsibility of the author to provide adequate references to previous work, and submissions that lack them will be returned to the author without review.
Contributions are considered for sections including Regular Articles, Notes and Discussion, Instructional Laboratories and Demonstrations, Computational Physics, Guest Editorials, and Letters to the Editor. Regular articles should usually not exceed six journal pages, with notes and other contributions being substantially shorter. Notes are short communications that are usually confined to the discussion of a single concept, or comments on previously published articles. The Instructional Laboratories and Demonstrations section generally focuses on new apparatus and techniques for instructional laboratory exercises and demonstrations. Letters to the Editor are selected for their likely interest to readers. Book Reviews and Resource Letters are solicited, not contributed, and undergo a separate review process.
Collegial disagreement has a proper place in the Journal, but extended argumentation does not. To encourage the former and discourage the latter, the editors will forward to authors any communications received that are critical of their published work. Authors and critics will then be asked to correspond directly with one another. If after this correspondence, an improved understanding is reached, they will be encouraged to prepare a brief jointly-authored Note. If such an agreement should prove impossible, the critic’s Note may be published alone, or followed by the authors’ response if it makes a significant addition to the discussion. Letters to the editor are also appropriate for briefer comments on an article; these will be published following the same procedure as for Notes, although without necessarily requiring peer review. In no case will there be more than one round of discussion of a paper.
Why was my paper rejected?
Papers should significantly aid the learning of physics and not be primarily a display of cleverness and erudition; in fact, the harder a paper is to read, the more useful and rewarding must be its result.
The mere solution of a problem seldom constitutes an acceptable contribution, regardless of how difficult the problem, although using undergraduate-level physics to solve interesting or puzzling real-world problems can be valuable. If these topics are studied by specialists in fields outside of physics, then it is essential that the writer is aware of this work and provides citations to the most relevant articles.
Manuscripts that show new ways of understanding, explaining, or deriving familiar results must provide some original physical insight and not just be a clever derivation.


|The Bibliothèque Nationale - Paris|
The building has recently been restored and the windows cleaned. The bucolic arches (seen here on the left) were invisible to me, covered as they were with about a century's worth of Parisian grime and intellectual sweat. The lighting was also particularly dim, with one 40 watt bulb per table, providing shared "illumination" for four researchers.
One crabbed old scholar, working on his "Doctorat d'Etat," (a 30 year process) would yell at anyone who sat down at his shared table and who dared to turn on the light. "Monsieur," he would yell. "The electric light, it is not good for the eyes." And he would turn the light off, leaving the others (sometimes me) sitting at his table in the dark.
I was reminded of this remarkable, if somewhat solitary period of my life by an article in the New York Review of Books of January 9, 2014. It's a review of a book by Arlette Farge, entitled "The Allure of the Archives," and the reviewer is the renowned French historian, Robert Darnton of Harvard University.
The review evokes the pleasures of historical research - the discovery of a document that might just transform your efforts by providing you with a key that no one has seen before. Darnton writes of his own efforts in this beautiful building where the point of doing the research, not by computer, but by copying out the evidence on 5 x 8 index cards (Darnton asks if you can still find them anymore), which in his delightful phrase, allows you, the researcher, to "marinate" in the facts you have uncovered.
Darnton also places in perspective the digital environment. He claims that the following assertions are deeply flawed:
- We live in the information age. Misleading, says Darnton. Every age is an information age, each in it own way, he writes. "Farge (the author of the book he reviews) shows how information travelled through the media of eighteenth-century Paris. ...the flow of talk and images...shaped a collective consciousness that often erupted in violence." Information has always been "flammable," says Darnton.
- All information is available online. False, he writes. "According to a well known but unverifiable estimate by one of Google's engineers, 129,864,880 different books exist, and Google has digitized over 20 million of them." That is only about 6.5% of everything in print.
- The future is digital. Misleading again says Darnton. "To imagine a future in which digital destroys the analog is to misunderstand...the history of communications in general.
For journalism, this is a sobering idea.
We live in an environment that is so relentlessly and arrogantly digital that the idea that books, pamphlets, document and libraries are still relevant is a shock to the system. Investigative reporting has been a huge beneficiary of digital sourcing. But it still requires a lot of shoe-leather reporting, in much the way that historians do.
As Darnton states, the future may be undoubtedly digital. But he hopes it comes with a greater tolerance for analog information, and the willingness of journalists and historians to uncover that information on whatever platform it may be found.


Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds
Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, Sven Smit
After marking the book as read in Goodreads, I paused for a bit before choosing not to rate the book. It wasn’t a bad book; on the contrary, I enjoyed most of it!
The Power Curve and the supporting data were persuasive and illuminating. The book no doubt held some actionable insights for business executives. I have been a witness to some of the scenarios raised in the book, and it’s always nice to find camaraderie.
However, I decided against rating the book, because I didn’t know how to rate it. My reading of the advice in the book was mostly theoretical — yeah it all made reasonable sense, but I didn’t have the expertise nor the experience to judge the quality.
I find business strategy fun to read, and the more I read, the easier concepts become to grasp. That is probably obvious, but the acknowledgement of this has made me more patient and effective in pursuing information and knowledge that are beyond my familiar domains.
So, no stars yet.
Disney U: How Disney University Develops the World's Most Engaged, Loyal, and Customer-Centric Employees
This book is about Disney University, its conception, learned lessons about its employee training principles and strategies.
The book offered practical advice on how to apply Van France’s (Disney University’s founder) four circumstances: Support, innovate, educate, and entertain, to create a customer-centric culture.
Each of these were accompanied by accounts of how they have worked in the Disney context.
I found that the best bits of the book were these stories about the theme park, and I wished there were more of them.
The best barometer of how well and effectively this has worked is probably measured by the actual experiences of park-goers.
I have only been to Disneyland in Tokyo. On that visit to TDL, I had thought that it would be just another visit to a theme park. On the walk from the train station to the park grounds, I felt viscerally the difference in mood as I neared the park. People started putting on character headgear, and every park-goer I saw had something Disney on them.
The park was immaculate; everyone had a smile on; and the atmosphere was jolly, full of wonder, and maybe even a little magical.
I had a great time.
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design
I had read fantastic reviews about this book online, and had nodded furiously at the Microsoft’s inclusive design principles. I was super ready to love this book.
And in spite of these ridiculous expectations, I liked the book. It read a little repetitive and dense in parts, and I think some rereading and practical application in the near future would anchor some of these ideas and concepts better.
I also found the book immensely helpful, especially the summary blurbs at the end of most chapters.
Inclusive design is more than just meeting accessibility standards. Exclusion is more ingrained and is more pervasive than I realised.
Awareness shows the way to action. The first step to inclusion is to recognise where exclusion appears. Then we can mindfully resist, and purposefully create.
The Decision Book: Fifty Models for Strategic Thinking
Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler
Ah, I remember this book, but I don’t really remember much of it. Oops.
If you want context and better examples, this is not the book for you. The models here are better illustrated elsewhere, and this reads more like an expanded index at the end of a book.
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the creator of NIKE
I love a good memoir, and this is one.
I have not finished this book, but seeing that I’m counting down the hours till I continue reading, I’m about 500% sure that the book would be done before February rolls around.
I like NIKE. I wear my Cortez everywhere, and it was fun to read about its origins in the book. I applauded (in my mind) the good sense of Blue Ribbon Sports employees when they shot down Knight’s name suggestion of Dimension 6.
I’ve heard the origin story of the NIKE logo somewhere else, but to read about it again here gave better context around the 35-dollar fee.
I’m looking to the rest of the book!


Here is how to use secrets in Docker BuildKit for an NPM project with private dependencies
There are a couple extra steps needed to build docker containers that have a dependency in a private repo. Here is how I've done it.
Here is how you can host private NPM packages on GitHub, and get your application to find and pull them.
I was looking to make a React component library with the following requirements - react-bootstrap, Typescript, Sass, some sort of preview library, all from scratch and without ejecting from a CRA. I could not find a tutorial/documentation that fit all these requirements, so I put this together.


Michael Dennis Browne came to the United States in 1965 from England, where he was born, of mostly Irish ancestry, in 1940. After graduating from the University of Iowa, he taught at Iowa, Columbia, Bennington, and the University of Minnesota. He is now a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, where he taught for thirty-nine years, served a term as director of the creative writing program, and was a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers.
Browne’s poems have been published in many magazines and anthologies, and his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. Two of his collections have won the Minnesota Book Award for poetry. His most recent collection of poems, The Voices, was published by Carnegie Mellon in the 2016
As a librettist, he has written many texts for music, working for many years with composer Stephen Paulus. Their post-Holocaust oratorio, To Be Certain of the Dawn, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music by the Minnesota Orchestra. Other composers he has worked with include John Foley S.J., Carolyn Jennings, Juliana Hall, Tim Takach and Craig Hella Johnson, with whom he recently collaborated on Considering Matthew Shepard.
He lives in Minneapolis and is married to Lisa McLean; their children are Peter, Mary, and Nellie.
Fifty years ago, I asked my Aunt Miriam in England what she knew of her father’s father, who was born in Ireland, and she said, “He rowed on Lough Swilly.” I also learned from her of two recent family drownings on that body of water, the deepest lake in Europe and one open to the sea.
*Image from The Drontheim: Forgotten Sailing
Boat from the North Irish Coast, by Donal MacPolin
‘A Life of Letters’
by Jenna Ross
“Michael Dennis Browne has spent a lifetime passing on his love for the written word. Tonight, his students will return the favor.
A seat in Michael Dennis Browne’s classroom quickly leads to an armchair in his Seward home, a rocking chair in his northern cabin, a bench in his tiny writer’s shack.
Teaching, to him, is an intimate practice, and students often become friends, sometimes editors, occasionally family.


Nothing to Disclose
Hello! Today's prompt in the 31 Day Challenge is "inspired by a book." I love reading and I had several books in mind but I was struggling with how to translate them on my nails. I decided I was probably over-thinking it and realized it would be so much easier if I did a children's book. I love Winnie the Pooh so it seemed like a perfect choice!
So from index to pinkie we have Eeyore, Tigger, Pooh and Piglet. Unfortunately you can't see Piglet very well due to a glare. I attempted one of the newer characters, Lumpy (a "heffalump", or elephant), on my thumb. He turned out just looking like a generic elephant and it's late so I had to call it quits. Once again, if there is a specific color you would like to know please ask me in the comments.
Thanks for reading and happy polishing! ♥


A Brief History of Boston
Due to the role that it played in the instigation of the American Revolution, Boston, Massachusetts is often called “The Cradle of Liberty.” The history of Boston is rich and begins back in the 1930s when a settlement was established there by the Puritans.
The first deputy governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Dudley named Boston, his hometown was Boston, Lincolnshire, England. Boston had once been the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Company and then became the home over one thousand Puritans who had escaped Europe due to religious and political persecution.
Later in history the inhabitants of Boston became known as Bostonians.
The Puritans landed, in September if 1630 on the Shawmut Peninsula which had been named by its current inhabitants, the Native Americans. Until the town was renamed as mentioned earlier after Boston, Lincolnshire, England the Puritans named it Trimountaine.
The famous sermon called “A City Upon a Hill” was actually delivered by the original Governor of Massachusetts Bay Company, John Winthrop. This was delivered in 1630, prior to their departure from Europe and in it John Winthrop addressed the unique covenant that the Puritans had with God as well as their actions which the world would be observing.
The history of Boston shows that it became the hotspot of unrest as the heavy taxation that was being dished out to the colonists by the British Parliament caused them to rebel.
In response to the 1767 Townshend Acts, a boycott was organised by the colonists, this brought about what is the alleged “Boston Massacre.” It was determined during the trial that the redcoats had been made to draw their fire upon the crowds.
Originally it was believed that this is what caused the American public to be swayed against the British, recently however, historians have concluded that further actions by the British that were unpopular would have had to have occurred prior to a larger amount of the population coming to embrace a view as radical as independance.
There were many other upheavals the had a strong influence on the colonists deciding to raise arms and go to battle against the British. There were radicals including Samuel Adams who were directly involved in the Boston Tea Party which caused similar actions to take place in other port cities all along the Eastern seaboard, these had a tendency of polarising the sides in this dispute that were now widening. The views that were held by the Patriots and the loyalists only caused to become more ardent.
There were Parliament acts such as the 1773 Tea Act and the June 1774 Boston Port Act which were an attempt to regain the order in boston. There were several Revolutionary War battles that were fought earlier whether near or in Boston. For example the Battle of Bunker Hill, the battle of Lexington and the Siege of boston. This was the time in which Paul Revere made his famous Midnight Run.
This town name one of the wealthiest international trading ports in the world after the American Revolution, the social and cultural elite called the “Boston Brahmins” were made up of the old Boston families. The history of Boston shows that there was a rush of immigrants that arrived from Italy and Ireland and in the 1820s, Boston began to greatly change. Currently the largest religious community in boston is comprised of Catholics. A significant role in the politics of Boston has been played particularly by the Irish Catholics, with prominent figures such as John F. Kennedy and many others.
Boston fell into a decline by the mid-1900s due to the fact that there was a relocation of major factories to areas in which it was cheaper to find a source of labor. The way the city responded was with urban renewal projects which caused the old West End neighborhood to be levelled and the Government Center was constructed. Boton became a leader in the mutual fund industry when in the 1970s, they encouraged diversification into the fields of banking and investment.
In 1974, racial tensions were ignited due to the forced busing of students. This was merely a shot at creating a student body that was more balance, this was especially true for neighborhoods made up of a single ethnicity. Racial tensions in the city were highlighted bu the violence and unrest that ensued.
Since that era, many of those neighborhoods that were ethnically packed have now become housing areas for some of the society's wealthiest. The end result has been that there are great gentrification issues being dealt with by the city, many of the working class or modest neighborhoods have disappeared.
We deal in Boston Luxury Real Estate


The Twenty Most Important Events of Human History
If the history of the world is the trajectory of events leading from a time when we were tens of thousands of disparate, virtually autonomous bands to the present moment when we occupy every habitable inch of the planet earth and are verging on merging into a single civilization that dominates the planet, what are the twenty most important events? Here’s my tentative list:
1. Techtonic plate movements shaped the continents and the climate patterns of our earth. These movements ripped the original one-big-continent in two, created the Himalayas, opened the rift that would someday be the Mediterranean Sea, moved the Americas to the other side of the planet, and created the environmental conditions that favored the evolution homo sapiens sapiens—without whom we would have no “world history”, just ”world”.)
2. The Creative Explosion circa 40,000 BP marked the origin of most of the main features of human arts and culture–probably the beginning of dance, painting, literature, mythology, and religion.Technology also saw a radical spurt in sophistication.
3. The land bridge between Eurasia and the Americas vanished. The end of the last ice age eliminated the bridge between these continents, leaving two worlds, disconnected from each other, evolving separately until a traumatic joining millenia later.
4. Two divergent ways of life–sedentary farming and pastoral nomadism— emerged in Eurasia-Africa. One strategy predominated in a temperate belt stretching from Spain to China, the other largely in the plains, steppes, and grasslands of the north.
5. The seeds of urban civilization appeared along a number of rivers, gradually spreading out to form a handful of distinct world historical monads centered in China, the Indian subcontinent, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. (Over time, trade moving among these nexes gave birth to further nexes–Persian Civilization straddling the land routes of Eurasia, Greece as an entrepot of sea trade on the Mediterranean.
6. The Indo-European migrations brought pastoral nomads from the Caucasus region filtering down into a region stretching from Italy to India, laying the foundations for a host of significant later cultures (and languages).
7. The axial age saw the birth, within about 500 years, of all the major religious/cultural frameworks of history —Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Semitic Monotheism, and (Greek) Pagan Humanism.
8. Political super-empires coalesced: centered in various locales and expanding through conquest, vast political entities formed throughout Eurasia, including Rome, Persia, a series of Central Asian empires, India, and China. In the Americas the forerunners of similar empires began to emerge in Mesoamerica and on the east coast of South America.
9. The Han Dynasty planted the seeds of a civilization state. The first emperor of China consolidated a political state, but the Han Dynasty that followed him used that state power to establish patterns of Chinese history and culture that became the dominant themes of east Asia for the next 2,000 years.
10. Christendom was born. Christianity permeated the Greco-Roman world, then melded with the culture of pastoral-nomadic Germans from the north to form the pan-European entity known to itself as Christendom, the seed of what we now know as “Western Civilization”.
11. Islam erupted out of the Arabian desert, melding the Levantine, Arab, Persian, and Turkic worlds, along with the Mediterranean coast of Africa, into one new civilization/world-historical monad.
12. The (Long) Crusades pitted European Christendom against Islamic civilization along a front that spanned the entire Mediterranean Sea, a four-century conflict that gave Europe a hunger for the spices of the far east while at the same time blocking European access to those goods. (The long Crusades should be distinguished from the 12 European military forays into “the Holy Lands” that are usually termed “the Crusades.”)
13. The Mongol conquests created a zone of cultural transmission that briefly but consequentially linked China, India, the Islamic world, Russia, and Europe. Together with the Crusades, these conquests and the Pax Mongolica they spawned facilitated a massive flow of knowledge and technology from east to west.
14. The voyages of Columbus opened the door between the global east and the global west, resulting in the near-annihilation of the people of the Americas, the devastation of Africa, and the rise of western Europe as the world’s dominant power.
15. Secular humanism spawned science and democracy: Secular humanism emerged as a new social paradigm competing with religion to provide a coherent framework for understanding and operating in the universe. European thinkers who gave primacy to reason over faith laid the basis for modern science and eroded the idea of kinship as the legitimizing basis for political power, thus opening the door to democracy.
16. The machine entered history. Science fueled a sudden flood of inventions and technological breakthroughs in western Europe and its offshoots, making the machine a dominant player in human history. The ripple effects of these new technologies included revolution, democracy, industrialism and the nation-state
17. The women’s movement took off: The machine also played a part in the metamorphosis of gender roles: the position of women began to shift vis-a-vis men, a transformation so seminal it deserves to be considered as a separate event, one that is still underway.
18. A world war engulfed the planet. The wars of the twentieth century crumbled the major empires of the world and put paid to the very idea of the multi-ethnic empire as a fundamental unit of political organization. In the rubble of the multi-ethnic empires, the nation-state emerged as the fundamental political unit of human life worldwide.
19. Human domination of nature became a threat to the planet. The relationship of our species to the forces of nature went through a reversal: instead of having to adapt to our environment, we gained the ability to alter our environment to suit ourselves; as a result, the environment to which we must now adapt consists mainly of ourselves and our works—a possible dilemma.
20. The digital revolution began eroding political borders, undermining institutions, connecting people regardless of their position in physical space, and promoting individuation to the point of threatening community. Also, digital technology intersecting with medical and biological research gave rise to the possibility that our species may be melding significantly with our machinery.
Some Recommended Books (in no particular order)
- Harris, Marvin: Our Kind: The Evolution of Human Life and Culture.
- Fergusson, Niall. The Ascent of Money.
- Graeber, David: Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
- Catlos, Brian: Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors.
- Keay, John. A History of China.
- Harari, Yuval Noah: Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind.
- Liu, Xinru, The Silk Road in World History.
- McNeill, William. The Rise of the West.
- Nabhan, Gary Paul. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans, A Spice Odyssey
- Rogerson, Barnaby: The Last Crusaders, East, West, and the Battle for the Centre of the World.
- Rossabi, Morris (editor) The Mongols and Global History
- Russo, Patricia: Merchants & Faith.
- Shaffer, Lynda Norene: Maritime Southeast Asia to 1500
- Watson, Peter: Ideas, A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud.
- Yu Hua, China in Ten Words.
- Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe.
- Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire. .
- Niall Ferguson, Empire, the Rise and Demise of the British World Order.
- Fergusson, Niall.:The War of the World.
- Johnson, Steven: Where Good Ideas Come From.
- Wolf, Eric: Europe and the People Without a History.
- Chorost, Michael: World Wide Mind, Free Press.


TILLY-SUR-SEULLES, CORNERSTONE OF THE BATTLE FOR CAEN (June 9th - July 9th)
The fierce battle to capture the French village of Tilly-sur-Seulles was an exceptionally bloody episode in the story of the allied breakout from Normandy in the summer of 1944. South of the town of Bayeux, Tilly was not a primary objective for the allied advance in the way that the village of Villers Bocage was, but it became the cornerstone of the battle for Caen from June 7th until July 9th. The battles for the Tilly Front such as Lingèvres, Cristot, Audrieu, Saint-Pierre, Boislonde became sadly (in)famous for the combatants and the inhabitants as well.
TILLY-SUR-SEULLES saw what was probably the worst of the bocage fighting following D-Day. The village was taken and lost 23 times and was one of the first to be destroyed during the battle for Normandy. The civilians paid a very high toll for their liberation as one out of ten of the inhabitants of the village lost their lives.
The finest German panzer divisions, the Panzer Lehr and the 12 SS Panzer Division prevented the divisions of XXX Corps (7TH Armoured Division (the Desert Rats); 50TH Infantry Division, 8TH Armoured Brigade and 49TH Infantry Division (the “Butcher Bears”) from making significant progresses in the bocage.
The talk focuses on the infantry and tanks battles for and around the village south of Bayeux. The author, curator of the Museum of the battle of Tilly-sur-Seulles, will bring us eyewitness accounts from both the civilians and military sides to give a day after day and hour after hour portrayal of the battle and a fitting tribute to the civilians and the youth of Germany and Great Britain from the counties of Durham, Essex, Dorset, Devon, Hampshire, Nottinghamshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Cheshire, Northumberland… who fought, and the many who died, during the bloody battle for Tilly-sur-Seulles
All are welcome and a lively evening is guaranteed! Zoom details will be sent on the day. Thanks.
To stay informed about upcoming meetings join our mailing list on this link


In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado Book Review (Light Spoilers)
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado is a beautifully written memoir in which Machado documents her experience in an abusive same-sex relationship. In fact, I love the way the book was written so much, I'm going to use a similar writing style for this book review, although, mine does it no justice.
The Dream House as An Invasion of Privacy
This book was written in a way that made you feel too close for comfort to Machado-- but in a good way. The amount of sheer vulnerability required to write something as personal as this is incredible. In what seemed like a humiliating account of one of the most traumatic experiences a person can have, Machado details her experience in an abusive same-sex relationship to a person who seemed to be the woman of her dreams. The woman she refers to as the Woman in the Dream House unleashes some of the most hateful acts of ownership that one could only relegate to a form of psychosis.
The Dream House as a Contradiction
In In the Dream House, Machado compares her tumultuous love story with a myriad of novels, movies, historical cases and folklore to illustrate her experience and dismantle the myth of lesbian Utopianism that employs hetero-normative societal inferences and stereotypes about relationships and abuse. Machado uses stories, both fact and fiction, that depict lesbian relationships as inherently harmless and without flaw-- a misconception that has often resulted in the dismissal of the possibility that abuse (real abuse) can exist.
The Dream House as A Chamber of Secrets
The issue with abuse that is not physical is that the scars often last longer. The other issue, which Machado often points out is that the abuse is harder to prove, making verbalizing your abuse seem useless. What happens when that abuse also comes from a woman in a time where same-sex relationships are oddly still taboo? Patriarchy insists that we understand that women are docile and incapable of harm, especially harmless-looking upper middle class White women with blonde hair and blue eyes. Who do you run to when this person is the administrator of your torment? How do you explain why you keep coming back? How do you verbalize the insecurities that subconsciously make you feel like you deserve it? How do you explain that this is as good as it gets for you.... but it hurts? Will anyone listen? I mean, really listen? Instead of finding out, you lock yourself away in the proverbial and literal dream house until this dream house collapses, because that's all you can do. Where is your strength?
The Dream House as Unanswered Questions
In the prologue of In the Dream House-- if you're allowed to call it a prologue-- Machado explains that the "house" in some ways represents the archive, which is at the mercy of the archivist. So with that being said, was this the whole account? Although the answer is almost obviously "no", I can't help but to imagine what's been removed, what's been hidden, what's been replaced with her own internalization of what happened to her. What became of the Woman in the Dream House? Did the archivist ever seek therapy? Did Machado ever find the opportunity to address the pats in her that are still bruised from the relationship with the Woman in the Dream House? Have she and her wife discussed the implications of this on their own marriage?
The Dream House as a set of Conclusions
Machado opens up about how unfortunate it is that domestic abuse cases in same-sex relationships have rarely been documented, which causes confusion and furthers the perpetuation of stereotypes. This "silent archive" in which she contributed now has new voice that is so full of detail, research, theory, artistry, and true intellectual genius. Hopefully this book will start a thread of similar work from perspectives of which we have yet to witness. Hopefully this will be helpful to others who have found themselves in similar situations, that have-- hopefully up until now-- been difficult to verbalize thoroughly. Carmen Maria Machado has provided language, where there has been none.
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I knew it would be decent, based on all of the feedback, but I didn’t know it would be this great. This book was gorgeously written and shockingly educational. Carmen Maria Machado is a literary artist.
I’d also like to point out that Machado added a “choose your own ending” portion to this book that I was in love with. Ugh!!! The artistry!
"This is how emotions work, right? They get tangled and complicated? They take on their own life? Trying to control them is like trying to control a wild animal: no matter how much you think you've taught them, they're willful. They have minds of their own. That's the beauty of wildness."
In the Dream House Themes:
Hetero-normative views in same-sex relationships
Politics and Marriage
Have you read In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado yet? Is it on your list? Share your thoughts. The people want to know!
Until next time,


Literacy in Photography
Literacy skills for photography.
KS4 Students need to be able to:
- Describe techniques they have used in their work.
- Analyse the work of artists they are researching.
- Analyse their own work in the context of the artist they have researched.
- Read and understand information about artists.
- Write creatively about narrative in their own and others work.
KS5 Students need to be able to:
- Write a detailed related study between 1000 and 3000 words.
- Pose a question that will be answered within the related study.
- Analyse the work of other artists in a broader context e.g socio/political/historical.
- Use critical thinking skills.
- Research effectively around their chosen topic.
- Use sources other than/as well as, the internet.
- Analyse their own work in these terms and within the context of the artists they have been researching.
- Relate their work to current debate and assess how their work sits within that debate.
- Harvard reference and produce a bibliography.
Key Stage 4 Analysis Skills
Key Stage 5 Guides
Reading List and Sample Assessment Materials
Mrs. Bray – ebray73.wix.com/photography
Mrs. Mackintosh – kellydoney3.wix.com/photography
Miss Hill – fdbodmin.wix.com/photography
YEAR 12 & 13 A-Level Photography and Critical Contextual Studies, Suggested reading list:
- Read This If You Want To Take Great Photographs by Henry Carroll
- Read This If You Want To Take Great Photographs Of People by Henry Carroll
- The system of Objects by Jean Baudrillard
- Ways of Seeing by John Berger
- On Photography by Susan Sontag
- Camera Lucida - Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes
- Basic Critical Theory for photographers by Ashley La Grange (summarises the books 4,5,6 on this list as well as other photography theory essays)
- The Photograph as Contemporary Art (World of Art) by Charlotte Cotton.


The Alchemist: How Paulo Coelho escaped from Failure to Success, living his Legend!
Success comes often when you follow your true inner nature. “Live your legend” as Paulo Coelho writes in his bestseller “The Alchemist“. Paulo always felt he wanted to be a writer, but he did not do it … until he reached the age of 39.
At that point in his life he made a life changing Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella. That was the moment where he realized that he had two choices: either to do it, or to decide to accept that he would not be a writer. He decided to write and his first book became the story his Pilgrimage to Santiago. Then he decided to share his ideas in the form of a metaphor or story and he gave birth to “The Alchemist”. This book did not become a success. Only when he published his third book, “Brida”, he decided to resubmit the Alchemist with a different publisher and it became a hit.
Paulo Coelho trusts that word of mouth will share your message some day, on condition that you keep sharing your message, keep living your legend, and do not give up. Listen tohis story in the BBC interview with Paulo Coelho himself!
- What is your “Legend” (“Destiny” or “Calling”) ?
- What open choices do you have in your life today?


Forex Trading Psychology Books
Top Books On Forex Trading Psychology. Here you will find the free e-books about Forex trading psychology and emotion control in the financial trading. Also be sure to see our other trading resource lists:. Thinking in probabilities means to accept that there will be losing trades and winning trades. If you'd like to learn about the psychology of trading, you should first forex trading psychology books work to understand trading practices, techniques, and lingo before reading this book, so you can fully grasp the topics covered Forex Trading Psychology Books. This is a must-read for all traders bonus sem depósito opções binárias because it tells of the importance of thinking in probabilities.
It covers a wide variety of topics related to our personality. Less textbook theories, and more intriguing tales. You will learn how to calm yourself and set the long-term goals in your trading. Arguably, it is even harder to know ourselves The next opcoes binarias vao acabar trading psychology book is Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas. However, you won’t know which of the trades are going to be winners or losers One of the best books to understand the importance of trading psychology and its impact on your success is Mark Douglas’ book “Trading in the Zone.” Mark Douglas is an expert in trading psychology who coached traders around the world on how to master the psychological side of trading This trading psychology book will definite help you with this arduous task. In these books, you will find first-hand accounts of real traders and the mental demons they faced. Download forex trading psychology books it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Recommended for all traders No Nonsense Forex Trading Psychology - Kindle edition by Victor, Patrick.
Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading No Nonsense Forex Trading Psychology Final Thoughts on the Best Trading Psychology Books. Forex trading psychology is a big topic. I've read: Trading in the Zone The Psychology of Trading And frankly, all I needed to do was grow up Reading these books does nothing but make me think estrategia ganhar 500 por dia opções binárias of ways my mind can compromise me and in so doing actually compromise myself. So those are my top recommendations on the best books to improve your trading psychology. In simple language, the book explains why and how these issues occur, and how to approach them forex trading psychology books to keep them from happening.
Spend more time on improving your psychology and you will improve your trading faster. If we don’t get our trading forex trading psychology books psychology right, it can be harmful and negatively affect how we trade While the technical side of trading is complex, it can be learnt and rarely changes. Equally educational. Controlling one's emotions is vital for every Forex trader. So here's my advice: 1) Create a method / system.
Remember, successful trading starts with a solid mindset. 11 Market Mind Games: A Radical Psychology of Investing, Trading and Risk is one of the best scientific books ever written on trading psychology Mark Douglas’ Trading In The Zone is a book based on his personal observations on trading, and it’s extremely valuable and helpful forex trading psychology books to the aspiring trader and serves as a great introduction to the basic concepts behind good trading psychology Don't work yourself into a state that you need these kind of books. Learn Trading Psychology From The Experience of Real Traders.


UK UWMN 2001 Publications
Beaumont, W. R. C. & McDonnell, N. (2001) Acid Waters Monitoring 2000 Report on Fish Studies. 1-18. Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Dorset.
Evans, C. D. & Monteith, D. T. (2001) Chemical trends at lakes and streams in the UK Acid Waters Monitoring Network, 1988-2000: Evidence for recent recovery at a national scale. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 5, 351-366.
Evans, C. D., Cullen, J. M., Alewell, C., Kopacek, J., Marchetto, A., Moldan, F., Prechtel, A., Rogora, M., Vesely, J. & Wright, R. (2001) Recovery from acidification in European surface waters. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 5, 283-297.
Evans, C. D., Harriman, R., Monteith, D. T. & Jenkins, A. (2001) Assessing the suitability of Acid Neutralising Capacity as a measure of long-term trends in acidic waters based on two parallel datasets. Water Air and Soil Pollution, 130, 1541-1546.
Evans, C. D., Jenkins, A., Helliwell, R., Ferrier, R. & Collins, R. (2001) Freshwater Acidification and Recovery in the United Kingdom. 1-80. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford.
Evans, C. D., Monteith, D. T. & Harriman, R. (2001) Long-term variability in the deposition of marine ions at west coast sites in the UK Acid Waters Monitoring Network: impacts on surface water chemistry and significance for trend determination. The Science of The Total Environment, 265, 115-129.
Freeman, C., Evans, C. D., Monteith, D. T., Reynolds, B. & Fenner, N. (2001) Export of organic carbon from peat soils. Nature, 412, 785.
Harriman, R., Watt, A. W., Christie, A. E. G., Collen, P., Moore, D. W., McCartney, A. G., Taylor, E. M. & Watson, J. (2001) Interpretation of trends in acidic deposition and surface water chemistry in Scotland during the past three decades. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 5, 407-420.
Jenkins, A. & Cullen, J. M. (2001) An Assessment of the potential impact of the Gothenburg Protocol on surface water chemistry using the dynamic MAGIC model at acid sensitive sites in the UK. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 5, 529-541.
Jenkins, A., Ferrier, R. C. & Helliwell, R. C. (2001) Modelling nitrogen dynamics at Lochnagar, NE Scotland. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 5, 519-527.
Monteith, D. T., Evans, C. D. & Patrick, S. (2001) Monitoring acid waters in the UK: 1988-1998 Trends. Water Air and Soil Pollution, 130, 1307-1312.
Monteith, D. T. (2001) Proceedings of the 16th meeting of the ICP Waters Programme Task Force in Riga, Latvia, October 18-20 2000. Lyulko, I, Berg, P., and Skjelkvåle, B. L. 1-40. NIVA, Oslo, Norway.
Monteith, D. T. & Evans, C. D. (2001) United Kingdom Acid Waters Monitoring Network. 1-24. Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, London.
NEGTAP. (2001) Transboundary Air Pollution: Acidification, Eutrophication and Ground-Level Ozone in the UK. 1-314. Department For Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), London.
Wright, R. F., Alewell, C., Cullen, J. M., Evans, C. D., Marchetto, A., Moldan, F., Prechtel, A. & Rogora, M. (2001) Trends in nitrogen deposition and leaching in acid-sensitive streams in Europe. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 5, 299-310.
Page last modified: 12 March 2010
Page published: 12 March 2010


“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body” – Joseph Addison
As you may have been aware, I had set out to read at least 10 books as part of my three New Year resolutions. To some of you, reading 10 books is something that can be done in a couple of weeks. To me, it was somewhat of a daunting task as I am not exactly a devout reader (at least not until now). I may have read 10 books in the past 5 years (and some of them may not even qualify as books). When I thought about my resolution I figured I could -at the very- least read 1 book per month. Well, I blew that pace away by devouring 10 books in 4 months. Going to Cuba certainly helped as I flew through 3 books in that week alone! I am glad I accomplished this goal as I have gained so much knowledge and insight from the books that I have read. I can honestly say I have been bitten by the reading bug and I hope it continues to enrich my life with practical and soul strengthening knowledge.
Now….. what to read next?
Here are the 10 books that I have read:
Rich Habits – Thomas C. Corley
I really enjoyed this little book that was jammed pack with 10 habits that we should all embrace in order to live rich and wealthy lives. There are a few fictional stories that lead up to the definition of the 10 habits, but that (to me) was just fluff meant to set the stage and make the book more relational to the reader. It was a very quick read and could easily be read in an evening. I would highly recommend this book to someone looking for some practical advice on how to live more efficiently and with more purpose.
The Leader Who Had No Title – Robin Sharma
This was a great self-help book based around a fictional story about a veteran who lost his ability to lead his own life let alone be a leader among his friends and co-workers. In the story are a series of helpful tips about how to be a leader without having the prestige of a fancy job title. This is the second book from Sharma that I have read and in both cases, I really enjoy his delivery and his tips and pointers about how to be an authentic leader. I have adopted many of the techniques in my daily routine and so far I have been feeling an overall lift of my spirit. Thank you, Yves, for the awesome gift of this book!
Hockey Confidential – Bob MacKenzie
I had first eyed this book last fall and I had a keen interest in picking it up. Luckily, I had received it as a Christmas gift (thanks Jon!). I have always respected the author for his hockey knowledge as he often sticks to the facts and doesn’t usually inflict his own opinion. The book is a collection of “short stories” from various players, coaches and people involved in the game of hockey. Each story has an element of adversity that each person has had to overcome to get where they are today. I really enjoyed this book and the highlight of it was reading about Karl Subban, Montreal Canadiens defenseman PK Subban’s father. He immigrated to Canada from Jamaica as a child and raised 5 kids (3 of which became NHL worthy players). I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the NHL and its players. Each chapter features a different story and it really captivates your attention.
Conversations With a Rattlesnake – Theo Fleury and Kim Bethel
I had the pleasure of buying this book at one of Theo and Kim’s open forums that they held here in Moncton. They talked about the subject of addiction and abuse in a very open and raw way. Afterwards, I had the pleasure of meeting Theo and Kim to have them sign the book. The book is literally a conversation between Theo and Kim where they talk about healing from addiction and sexual abuse. They talk about everything related to the brain, how we feel and how we can learn to heal from understanding the triggers and chemistry of our emotions. I highly recommend this book to anyone who suffers from any kind of abuse and/or addiction or someone who struggles with mental health issues.
All The Way: My Life On Ice – Jordin Tootoo with Stephen Brunt
This was a very quick and interesting read. It is the autobiography of Jordin Tootoo, the first Inuk to ever play in the NHL. It tells a story of how Jordin overcame the obstacles of growing up in the Arctic and making it to the NHL. It also tells how he overcame the suicide of his very close brother Terrance and beating the odds in recovering from alcohol abuse. The book was rather raw in its delivery and at times the story bounced around but overall it was a good read and gave me a better understanding of the Inuit culture.
The Crazy Game – Clint Malarchuk with Dan Robson
This book picked me. Once in a while, I will come across a book that just captivates and this was one of them. My wife had gifted me this autobiography for Christmas and while I kinda knew of his story and his NHL career, I only had a passing interest in Clint Malarchuk’s life. When I saw the book in the stores, I had a passing interest to read it. Well, I am glad I did. His raw, detailed and authentic story about his struggles with anxiety, OCD, PTSD and alcoholism was very real and it struck a chord with me. I gained a lot out of this book and I recommend it to anyone who may be struggling with mental illness or who may be helping someone get through it. At the end of the book it had Clint’s personal email address, I sent him a note to let him know the impact his book had on me and I was very surprised that within a couple of hours, he responded back. A very personal touch.
Last Words – George Carlin with Tony Hendra
I have always enjoyed George Carlin’s comedy. He is very offensive so he is certainly not for everyone, but his look at life in some way matches the way I look at various things that humour me. This book was everything that I could have wanted. In his own words, George brings us into his life as a little boy growing up in the streets of New York city all the way up to his final appearances and what he wanted for the future of his career. Since I wasn’t around during the earlier years of his career, I was never really aware of this drug abuse and struggles he had. Since reading this book, I admired the strength he possessed when it came to fighting to be an innovative comedian that was clearly ahead of his time.
Zero To One – Peter Thiel with Blake Masters
This book was recommended to me by a couple of co-workers. It was a good read that zeroes in on tips, ideas on what builds a successful start-up business. It was very informative in that it outlined various methods the bigger players in the tech industry followed to build their fortunes. Each of them was very different in their execution but all of them shared some very basic fundamentals that were explained in this book. I enjoyed this read in that it gave me a lot of insight into how tech companies get their start and how to get them to succeed. Certainly not a book for everyone, but I believe it is a must read if you have always thought you would like to enter the start-up game (or would like to invest in one).
Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness – Michelle Knight with Michelle Burford
While on vacation I ran out of my own books to read, my wife had finished this one up so I decided to give it a go. I simply could not put it down and read it from cover to cover in 5 hours. This is a very graphic story about Michelle Knight, the woman who was held captive for over 10 years by Ariel Castro in Cleveland until she and 2 others escaped his house in spring 2013. This was a very shocking read and it spares no detail about what these three women (teenagers) had been through while being held captive. I am absolutely floored by how she was able to go through so much, yet still found it in her to forgive the man who tortured her. Her strength, will to live and survivor instinct was simply breathtaking. This was a very, very good read!
Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success – Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.
This was a very interesting and informative read. It spends time deeply examining human behaviour in terms of two mindsets, growth and fixed. The book sets different situations for each side and explains how a person will behave if they are of a certain mindset. I now have a better understanding of how a lot of people in my life think. I also now have a better understanding of how I can process my thoughts, especially during challenging situations.
Updated resolution numbers:
309 of 1000 KMs walked
18 of 50 blog entries posted
10 of 10 books read (goal achieved April 17th)


Angelou rose to fame during a tumultuous time in America’s racial history and broke barriers for black women through her legendary contributions to art and culture. Now, a new documentary is airing on PBS on Tuesday titled “American Masters ― Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise” takes an in-depth look at Angelou’s life and legacy and how she inspired millions around the world with her work.
Angelou was an actor, singer, playwright, poet, author, teacher, dancer and advocate, but Rita Colburn Whack, the co-director and co-producer of the film, says she hopes viewers see Angelou’s full humanity.
“[She was also] a human being with wants, desires, struggles and fears and…she [was] determined to overcome them,” Whack told The Huffington Post. “Maya Angelou was a woman who decided to overcome every obstacle set in front of her during a time when black girls and later black women were ignored, abused and dismissed,” she added.
The film, which is largely told from Angelou’s perspective through recordings taped before her May 2014 death, also includes commentary from some of her close friends and family members including her son Guy Johnson, actors Cicely Tyson and Alfre Woodard, Louis Gossett Jr. and politicians like Bill and Hillary Clinton.
From her early days as a mute and timid pre-teen to her rise as a legendary storyteller, the documentary explores how Angelou lived a life that impressed and inspired many. However, the film, which goes into great detail about many aspects of Angelou’s life, also shares some interesting little-known facts about her from over the years. We’ve shared some of these facts below and encourage you to watch the film to learn more about Angelou’s iconic legacy:
1. One of the earliest memories she had was being sent to live with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas at the age of 3.
Maya’s father and mother sent her and her brother Bailey to live with their grandmother Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas when Angelou was the tender age of three. In the film, Angelou recounts how they boarded the train to their grandmother’s house with no adult supervision and the resentment she felt towards her parents for sending them away.
2. Her grandmother ran the only black-owned store in the town and taught her to read.
Annie Henderson, who Angelou referred to as “Momma,” was the child of a former slave and the only black person in Stamps, Arkansas to own a general store at the time Angelou was sent to live with her. Henderson taught Angelou how to read and would often bring back books from the local white schools in town for Angelou and her brother to indulge in.
3. Her brother Bailey further encouraged her to read and absorb everything she could.
In the film, Angelou said that, growing up, her brother Bailey played a big role in encouraging her to read and learn. “Just learn everything, put it in your brain. You’re smarter than everybody around here, except me of course,” she recalled him telling her with laughter. “And he was right, he was smart. But he was also protective of me.”
4. Her family was terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan growing up.
Growing up black in Stamps, Arkansas amid the racial terror that swept the nation was painful and difficult, Angelou said in the film. She reflected on one fearful night in her childhood involving her Uncle Willie, who was crippled and had been accused by a white girl who claimed she attempted to touch him. In an effort to help keep him safe from the Ku Klux Klan, Angelou, who said the KKK rode on their horses past her grandmother’s store in search of her uncle, helped to hide him in the den of the store and bury him in a box beneath dozens of onions and potatoes.
5. Angelou was raped at the age of seven. She didn’t speak for five years after.
Angelou and her brother temporarily moved to St. Louis to live with their mother who was dating a man. Angelou said he was “intoxicated” with her mother and later raped Angelou when she was seven years-old. Police later found him killed and it had appeared he had been kicked to death. Angelou, who shared the name of her rapist to her brother, felt guilt and anguish from his death, so much so her “7-year-old logic told me that my voice had killed a man,” she says in the film. “So I stopped speaking for five years.”
Angelou was eventually sent back to live with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas where she said she spent her time reading every book in the black school library and all the books she could get from the white school library, memorizing the works of famous poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare and more.
6. Angelou was always truthful and honest ― even when it came to sex.
Angelou was a beautiful, towering teenager who had attracted the attention of a young boy who had expressed sexual interest in her. One day, Angelou, who said she had seen films about sex that spiked her curiosity, said she approached the young boy and the two had sex at a friend’s house. Although it was her first time having sexual intercourse, Angelou admitted that the experience had been underwhelming. “I asked him ‘Is that all there is?” she said in the film. “So I said, ‘Ok, bye.’ And a month later I found out I was pregnant.”
7. She has had two interracial marriages, both of which ended shortly after they began.
Maya Angelou met and wed Tosh Angelos in 1951. He was a Greek sailor who had shared a deep love for reading. This was a significant deal at the time considering the racial tensions that existed and the polarizing issues around interracial marriages. She said her mother had initially been disgusted with her for marrying a white man, and later fell for him, even expressing disappointment when the couple divorced less than five years later. She later wed Paul du Feu, a white writer, in 1973 but divorced less than a decade later.
8. She worked in nightclubs and quickly gained exposure for her singing and dancing. She soon became known as Ms. Calypso.
In the 1950s, Angelou worked in nightclubs and strip clubs in San Francisco. While she didn’t strip off her clothes, she did show off her fabulous dance moves and would sing Calypso songs whenever she went out. She was later invited to sing Calypso at local venues and became known as Ms. Calpyso, performing in venues at a time when stars like Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Jr. hit their peak.
9. Angelou was heartbroken after not landing a big role on Broadway.
In 1967, Angelou was considered to be actress Pearl Bailey’s understudy in the Broadway play “Hello Dolly.” It was a dream opportunity for Angelou and one that would allow her to better financially support her son. However, while the director and producer of the play both loved her, Angelou’s son claims in one heartbreaking part of the film that it was Bailey who said: “Oh no — I ain’t gonna have this big old ugly girl be my understudy.’” Later in life, Bailey received a Lifetime Achievement Award and dedicated the honor to Angelou.
10. She was invited to New York by Langston Hughes where she met other famous black writers.
Shortly after her rejection from Broadway, Angelou began writing and befriended famous black writers like Langston Hughes who persuaded her to move to New York to join the Harlem Writers Guild, which is now the oldest organization of African American writers. She soon met writer James Baldwin, and the two grew to be close friends who had much respect and love for each other.
11. She portrayed a white queen in a play alongside Cicely Tyson and Louis Gossett Jr.
In 1960, Angelou, alongside other popular black actors Cicely Tyson, Louis Gossett Jr. and James Earl Jones, starred in a play titled “The Blacks,” which featured an all-black cast with half of the cast portraying white characters. The play was polarizing and offered various statements on the state of race. Angelou portrayed a white queen, a role that was “quite fascinating,” as Tyson describes in the film.”[The play] was a piece that shook everyone.”
12. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on her birthday.
Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, which marked Angelou’s 40th birthday. His death rocked Angelou so much so she said she fell into a brief stage of mutism again. After about five days, she said Baldwin knocked on her door and ordered her to go with him to their friend’s home, Jules and Judy Feiffer, to share company and conversation. That night, Angelou told so many great stories about her life, that Judy Feiffer called Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House, and insisted that she had a book in her of some kind.
13. She turned down the opportunity to write an autobiography several times.
Loomis had called Angelou several times and tried to implore her to write an autobiography, a request she declined for months. She said she had been more interesting in writing plays and poetry. “Finally he said, ‘Ms. Angelou, I won’t call you again because writing autobiography as literature is almost impossible,’” she recalled in the film. “I said, ‘Well, in that case, I’ll try.’” So, she started to write and soon published her first novel “I know why the Caged Bird Sings” in 1969, a very important and successful novel that marked a landmark moment in literature.
14. She once had a heart-to-heart discussion with Tupac that prompted his mother Afeni Shakur to write Angelou a thank you note.
Director John Singleton invited Angelou to be a part of his iconic 1993 film “Poetic Justice” featuring rapper Tupac Shakur and singer Janet Jackson. Angelou, who made a cameo in the movie, talked about how she met Shakur for the first time on the set of the film for one day while he was in the midst of a cursing spree. Angelou, who had no idea who the rapper was at the time, took him on a walk and moved him to tears by telling him an empowering story about black people in America. “You’re the best we have, we need you desperately,” she told him. Shakur’s mother, Afeni Shakur, later wrote a letter expressing her gratitude towards Angelou for teaching her son a valuable lesson.
15. She was the first black poet to present at a presidential inauguration.
President Bill Clinton invited Angelou to present at his 1993 inauguration where she became the first black person and the first female to ever speak on the inaugural stage. Angelou delivered an original and riveting poem titled “On The Pulse of Morning.”
16. Angelou aged gracefully, never giving up on or stopping her mission.
Angelou became more visibly challenged as she aged. She suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was wheel-chair bound. But she never let that ruin her mission to teach, inspire and share her love. “She knew that if she didn’t continue to go, she would stop,” Cicely Tyson said in the film. “She had this incredible love for people.”
|MICHAEL LOCCISANO VIA GETTY IMAGES|
Maya Angelou Documentary ‘And Still I Rise’ Set To Air
The new documentary film, "Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise," begins with her quote, "We must encounter defeats but we must not be defeated, but in fact it may be necessary to encounter defeats so that we'd know who the hell we are."
Indeed, Angelou, who was literally transported with a tag on her arm and no adult supervision at the age 3 to Stamps, Arkansas, did not allow life to defeat her. She was a teenage mother who survived rape at age 7, had three marriages, worked with Dr. King and Malcolm X, and wrote a poem for a presidential inauguration. Angelou thrived with a new voice in each decade.
"Phenomenal woman wasn't just something she wrote. It was who she was," former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says in the film.
Indeed. Though most may remember Angelou as a poet and author of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Kunta Kente's grandmother in Roots or reciting the poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, the film sheds light on other parts of her life that are not as well known.
"Most will be surprised to know that there was so much more to her than what they thought," says film co-director and co-producer Rita Coburn Whack, who spent five years working on the documentary.
For example, early in her career Angelou, tall and lean, was a dancer and singer, known as Ms. Calypso. She toured with the Broadway play "Porgy and Bess" and while in Paris met author James Baldwin, with whom she would become lifelong friends. She wrote and starred in a 10-episode PBS series and was also one of the first Black woman member of the Directors Guild of America.
"The challenge was to bring something new to the table for people who knew about the  inauguration while educating a new generation," says Whack. "The real learning process was how to make it in such a way that was respectful of her time on Earth, the history of our generation and get new generations to be interested in her work."
Fewer know about Angelou's activism. After hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speak at the Riverside Church in New York, Angelou helped raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She then became the northern coordinator for SCLC.
In the film, her son Guy Johnson remembered a march Angelou led in New York protesting the shooting of an unarmed Black man.
"She had courage like few people had courage," Johnson told NBCBLK in an interview.
Johnson says his mother exposed him to "a world I would not have known without her."
For example, the film features footage of Angelou and Johnson living in Cairo, Egypt and then in Ghana, where Angelou worked at a university. It was during this time she met Malcolm X. She had planned to work with the charismatic activist when she returned to the United States but Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965.
"She gave me an understanding of the quality of all human beings," says Johnson. "Ethnicities differentiate us but they do not make us either better or worse. They merely make us different and make more rich the wonderful fabric of being human."
Whack says Angelou was a "walking lesson in history and reconciliation."
The documentary includes comments from Lou Gossett Jr., Common, Alfre Woodard, Diahann Carroll, President Bill Clinton, Cicely Tyson, Oprah Winfrey, Valerie Simpson of Ashford and Simpson, John Singleton, Dave Chappelle and Quincy Jones.
Her friend poet Nikki Giovanni describes Angelou as a "consummate performer." There's one particular part in the film that reveals Angelou's power to soothe the soul. She is describing her encounter with a popular young rapper who had become belligerent on the set of the 1993 movie "Poetic Justice" in which Angelou makes a cameo appearance. She grabbed him by the side and walked him down a small hill.
"I said young man come here," Angelou recalled during the speech. "When was the last time anyone told you how important you are? You're the best we have. We need you desperately. Do you know our people got on auction blocks for you? Got up at sunrise so that you could stay alive, you could be here today? I put my arm around his waist and I just walked him down the decline. Suddenly he started to cry."
It was Janet Jackson who told Angelou that the young man she was talking to was Tupac Shakur.
"I had no idea who he was," Angelou told the crowd.
Her grandson Colin Johnson understands the power his grandmother had to touch others. He says he was moved to tears for about 45 minutes after seeing the final version of the film.
"The impact she's had on so many people, to see her story done with such respect, such admiration and such reverence for who she was, is a proud moment," says Colin, who runs Caged Bird Legacy, LLC. "To see her lifted up like this, it's a big thing for us."
The movie ends with Angelou reciting her famous poem, "And Still I Rise."
Colin says his grandmother lived outside the box.
"She had a vision for what her life was suppose to look like, the direction for where her heart and her work was supposed to go like no other," says Colin, 41.
Angelou notes in the film that during the five years she didn't talk after being raped (from age 7 to 12), she read every book in the Black school library and all the ones she could get from the White school library. She memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes as well as Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe.
"When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say," Angelou noted.
Johnson says his mother's voice is particularly needed in today's climate.
"My mother would be the first tell you that we are more alike than we are unalike, but that doesn't mean that we aren't different," says Johnson. "We need to learn to appreciate our differences and not let them divide us."
Maya Angelou knew how a laugh could be a survival tool
Back in 1988, Maya Angelou described to a predominantly white crowd in Salado, Texas, how a maid’s smile inspired one of her most enduring poems. She says she wrote it to honor a maid she once watched ride the bus in New York City.
But it was the woman’s laugh that caught Angelou’s attention.
The unnamed woman, who was carrying two shopping bags, laughed whenever the bus stopped abruptly. She also laughed when it stopped slowly.
“I thought, hmmm, uh huh,” the poet told the crowd, verbalizing her internal thought process. Angelou, who was also an author, performer and activist, was a keen observer of the world around her.
“Now, if you don’t know black features, you may think she’s laughing, but she wasn’t laughing,” Angelou continued. “She was simply extending her lips and making a sound — ha, ha, ha, ha.”
“Oh, I see. That’s that survival apparatus,” she says.
The scene appears early on in the PBS documentary “Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise,” airing tonight as part of the “American Masters” series. The poet, who died in 2014 at age 86 before the completion of this film, recounts many of her life’s memories in the documentary. In several moments, Angelou is seen upending someone’s worldview.
The reaction shots of the Texas audience, for example, are telling. People hang onto the cadence of her words. With this poem, Angelou invites them to empathize with the maid and Angelou’s recognition of the painful history that drives the motivation behind the woman’s laughs.
Angelou demonstrates by widening her lips like a rubber band, resistant to keeping up the facade. And the laugh — the ha-has — grows increasingly desperate every time Angelou, with tears pooling in her eyes, mimics the maid’s hollowed laughs in her poem:
“Seventy years in these folks’ world, The child I works for calls me ‘girl’.
I say, “Ha, ha, ha, yes, ma’am,” for workin’s sake, I’m too proud to bend and too poor to break.
So — ha, ha, ha, ha — I laugh until my stomach ache, when I think about myself.”
Rita Coburn Whack, who co-directed and co-produced the documentary, said she’s seen Angelou recite the poem several times over the years, often times intermingling it with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1892 poem, “Masks.” Angelou often alluded to those masks as a form of survival for black people in America in her work, Whack said.
“The mask was the two-facedness that black people had to have in the country to survive,” she told the NewsHour. “To grin and bear it, and then to bear the unbearable that this is who they were.”
The maid’s story, excerpted in the documentary, is also embedded in a larger poem of Angelou’s, titled “For Old Black Men.” The poem describes fathers who “nod like broken candles” and who “laugh to shield their crying.”
A year earlier, in another reciting of the poem, Angelou states it more plainly.
“Black Americans, for centuries, were obliged to laugh when they’re weren’t tickled and to scratch when they didn’t itch,” she said.
“I don’t think we often enough stop to wonder, ‘How did that black man feel?’ when his throat starts to ache … when you must cry, but you won’t,” she added.
The fact that this was not fair and there was nothing you could do about it was a common thread in Angelou’s work, Whack said. Recall the maid’s “too proud to bend and too poor to break” line.
“The poem struck her very deeply because it wasn’t just the observation of the maid, but it was all of her life,” Whack said.
The nearly two-hour documentary, airing tonight, is but a snapshot into a life and career that echoes moments from Angelou’s 1969 autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” The film covers the poet’s treks to Africa, her performance as the White Queen in Jean Benet’s play “The Blacks,” and her work as a civil rights advocate, among other milestones.
Interview subjects in the film also described Angelou as a “consummate performer,” who sang and danced long before she penned autobiographies. Special mention must be made for her time as a calypso singer in the 1950s when she adorned vinyl LPs as “Miss Calypso.”
Most notable, perhaps, is when Angelou is heard speaking about growing up in the Jim Crow South in Stamps, Arkansas.
“I was terribly hurt in this town, and vastly loved,” Angelou says in the film of her hard-won time spent there as a child.
Her memories are punctuated with good times, too, often associated with her brother Bailey and her grandmother, who taught her to read. But Angelou also remembers how her grandmother, who owned the only black-owned store in Stamps, was disgraced when three white girls came to the store one day, stripped down nearly naked and showed themselves to her.
“The atmosphere was pressed down with old fears,” Angelou said of the town in the documentary.
Angelou was also raped — “I won’t say severely raped, all rape is severe,” Angelou once said — when she was nearly 8 years old, which she also discussed in “Caged Bird.” At the time, women, much less black women, didn’t talk openly about being raped.
The film also delves into Angelou’s later involvement with civil rights advocacy, including work done with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Guy Johnson, Angelou’s son, described how his mother stood her ground when police rode into a 1960 protest on horseback.
To deflate the police intimidation, she pulled out a huge hairpin and stuck it in a horse. The sergeant riding on top who fell off. Angelou believed that when you see things that are wrong, and don’t say something, nobody benefits, Whack said.
Johnson, 71, said a five-part series would be needed to document his mother’s “gigantic life.” She has known “times of sadness and total depression,” but she realized that wasn’t “constructive,” he added.
“If you want to do more than survive, if you want to thrive, you have to do so with grace, passion, compassion and joy,” Johnson told the NewsHour. And that meant speaking to the “common denominator of humanity,” he added.
Angelou’s works spoke empathetically, as with the maid. They spoke personally, with Angelou mining her own life experiences. And they spoke universally.
“She spoke from the black perspective because she knew that best, but she addressed to what was human in us all,” Johnson said. “And her message has to do with equality and justice for all human beings.”
Johnson said his mother demonstrated this during his son’s fifth grade graduation. Angelou walked around the class and Johnson remembered her saying, “Somewhere, there’s someone graduating fifth grade who’s going to find the cure to cancer, going to find the cure to poverty, who’s going to be able to take us to the stars.”
And then she turned around and said, “Why not you, young man? Why not you, young lady?”
Angelou believed that “within the human being, there’s the capacity to solve all of our difficulties. If we give the total mental capacity of the species, if we allowed that to be realized, we could resolve everything,” Johnson said.
Angelou communicated this when she wrote and publicly read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the first inauguration of former President Bill Clinton in 1993.


The 2016 Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples Lecture featured Maxine Burkett and Elizabeth Kronk Warner. The event took place on April 25, 2016 at the Many Nations Longhouse and explored Tribal sovereignty, traditional knowledges and climate-induced change among Indigenous peoples in the United States. Wisdom of the Elders recorded the lecture, which is available here: https://vimeo.com/172984433
The speakers were also interviewed for the UO Media Channel and discussed how climate change impacts indigenous communities on Pacific Islands and in the Arctic, and the role law can play in planning for adaptation to loss of resources and land. That recording is available here: http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/archives/10798
Maxine Burkett joined the William S. Richardson School of Law in 2009. She teaches Climate Change Law and Policy, Torts, Ocean and Coastal Law, and International Environmental Law. She has written extensively in diverse areas of climate law with a particular focus on climate justice, exploring the disparate impact of climate change on vulnerable communities in the United States and globally. Professor Burkett has presented her research on the law and policy of climate change throughout the United States and in West Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. Her work has been cited in numerous news and policy outlets, including BBC Radio, the ABA Journal, the New York Times, and Nature Climate Change. In 2010, Burkett served as the Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics at the Wayne Morse Center, University of Oregon, for the Center’s “Climate Ethics and Climate Equity” theme of inquiry. From 2009-2012, Professor Burkett also served as the inaugural Director of the Center for Island Climate Adaptation and Policy (ICAP). As the Director of ICAP, she led projects to address climate change policy and planning for island communities globally. She directed the completion of several adaptation related policy documents, outreach and education programs, and decision-maker support efforts for Hawai‘i and other Pacific Island nations. Professor Burkett attended Williams College and Exeter College, Oxford University, and received her law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She served as a law clerk for The Honorable Susan Illston of the United States District Court, Northern District of California. She was a White House intern and an Omidyar Fellow. She serves on the boards of Global Greengrants Fund and Kanu Hawaiʻi and is a member scholar for the Center for Progressive Reform. Prior to her appointment at the University of Hawai‘i, Professor Burkett taught at the University of Colorado Law School.
Elizabeth Kronk Warner joined the University of Kansas (KU) Law faculty in June 2012. Prior to her arrival at KU, Warner served on the law faculties at Texas Tech University and the University of Montana. In 2010, Warner was selected to serve as an Environmental Justice Young Fellow through the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and U.S.-China Partnership for Environmental Law at Vermont Law School. She has also served as a visiting professor at Xiamen University in Xiamen, China, and Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, Turkey. In 2014, Warner received the Immel Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her scholarship, which focuses primarily on the intersection of Indian Law and Environmental Law, is published in several prominent journals, including the Arizona Law Review, Colorado Law Review and Columbia Journal of Environmental Law. She is also co-author of the casebook, Native American Natural Resources. She has written extensively on the topic of climate change and its impacts on Indian country, including co-editing the book Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples: The Search for Legal Remedies. In addition to teaching, Warner serves as an appellate judge for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians Court of Appeals in Michigan, and as a District Judge for the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation located in Kansas. Before entering academia, Warner practiced environmental, Indian, and energy law as an associate in the Washington, D.C. offices of Latham & Watkins LLP and Troutman Sanders LLP. Warner previously served as chair of the Federal Bar Association Indian Law Section and was elected to the Association’s national board of directors in 2011. She currently serves as chairwoman of the Kansas Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. She received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and a B.S. from Cornell University. Warner is a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
Respondent: University of Oregon Law Student Meghan “Sigvanna” Topkok will serve as a respondent to the keynote speakers, providing her own perspectives and fostering dialogue between the speakers. Topkok is Iñupiaq with roots in Ambler and Nome, Alaska. Sigvanna is a student at the University of Oregon School of Law and intends to focus her studies on the interstices of federal Indian, environmental, and international law. She plans to return to Alaska after graduation to promote tribal sovereignty as a safeguard for the traditions and knowledge that have been passed down since time immemorial. She is passionate about learning and sharing her language and culture, and looks forward to giving back to her tribe and being an advocate for her people and the land they rely on.
For More Information:
Kathy Lynn, UO Environmental Studies, 541-346-5777, email@example.com
Mark Carey, UO Clark Honors College, 541-346-8077, firstname.lastname@example.org


Updated: Apr 17
⏱ The Book in 30 Seconds or Less
Refer to the photo I used for this post (my attempt to illustrate what made up a lot of Ozzy’s life story). Ozzy goes somewhere, Ozzy gets drunk, Ozzy scores some drugs, Ozzy finds himself in an absolutely insane situation. Wash, rinse, repeat. This book is a retelling of Ozzy’s remarkable life, from his perspective, made up of the fragments of it that he actually remembers! This book covers his life from his humble beginnings and early jobs (most notably working at a meat processing plant/slaugher house), to his rise to fame and all the adventures he had along the way. It is the story of one of the greatest rock stars of all time, someone who helped define a long period of music history, and someone who will probably be remembered for many years to come. It also revealed a lot about his constant battle with drugs and alcohol, his journey to get clean, and all of the not so glamourous things that go with being a Rock Star.
🤷♂ Who Should Read This Book?
If you’re looking for something different, or check any of the boxes below, this could be a great book for you:
You like autobiographies
You love rock music, and the evolution of the genre over the years
You get nostalgic about “classic rock” or rock from decades past
You love Ozzy!
You want to read about a roller coaster of a life
📚How Did I Come Across This Book?
I picked up this book to add some variety to my book rotation that‘s usually packed with fantasy. I love rock music, especially from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I’ve also always been fascinated by the life stories of some of my favourite rock stars. It’s always blown my mind to hear about how turbulent their lives were, reading about them gives me a glimpse into what it might have been like to live during those wild times.
🏆 My Verdict
Did I love Ozzy before reading this book? Yes. Do I love Ozzy after reading this book? Yes. If I were to give this book a rating out of 10 it would probably be 8/10. Honestly, it was a great read but as I got through it, it started to feel pretty repetitive. So much of it revolved around being drunk all the time, doing a lot of drugs, and the unpredictable life of an addict. I guess you could say that is a testament to how crazy Ozzy’s life was, and how hard it must have been to get through it— If I was getting bored of all the drugs and alcohol while reading this short autobiography I can only imagine what it must have been like to live through it! Overall, very happy that I read this and would recommend it to anyone looking to spice things up.
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning that I will receive a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Also, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
💵 Where to buy
I Am Ozzy - Amazon.com (affiliate link)
You should also check out the music video below for Under The Graveyard. It’s a great song, and the music video does a really good job portraying some of the dark times Ozzy talks about in the book.
Who am I?


Has there ever been a more written about person that Abraham Lincoln? Ford’s Theatre houses a 34 foot book tower to the Great Emancipator, while estimating the number of titles published is more than 15,000. Moreover, every year more titles are released not even taking into account journal, magazine, and newspaper articles. Authors and publishers continue to find aspects of Lincoln’s life that have not been directly addressed, new interpretations are provided, and in some cases authors just rehash other secondary materials. The historiography is mind boggling.
Adding to the literature is John Schildt, a certified battlefield guide at Antietam National Battlefield, who has penned a new book discussing the travels made by Lincoln while he served as president. In total, Schildt covers nineteen wartime trips Lincoln made outside of Washington D.C. These trips became less frequent as the war dragged on; beginning with nine in 1862, five in 1863, four in 1864, and a single trip in 1865. (page 18) As would be expected these sojourns were made close to Washington D.C.; visiting Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York.
The author proposes that these trips were made for three specific reasons. The first was to confer with generals, second to plot military strategy, and a third reason was to visit troops in the field. (pages 16- 17). The president seemed genuinely concerned for the combatants whether they be Union or Confederate. An example being provided in a lengthy quote from the Donald C. Pfanz work Lincoln at City Point, where the president is seen moving through the tents of injured men, shaking hands, offering encouragement, sharing a tear, and telling them they had to live. When it came to Confederates, Lincoln was known to visit those who were confined to hospitals. Lincoln is shown to be a truly benevolent leader. (pages 141-145)
A continuing thread about family, in particular Mary Lincoln, runs throughout the work. Mary is often seen as difficult, jealous, and perhaps another reason for Lincoln to have tried to escape D.C. for these short periods. Tad is shown to be a boy, doing boy things, and having boyish reactions. During the 1865 trip to Virginia, the presidential entourage came across three pound bales of tobacco that some of the adults took for their own use. Tad joined in and grabbed some as well despite being too young to smoke. (pages 126-127)
Some of the visits are better known than others. The trip to Gettysburg is well documented and Lincoln’s “few appropriate remarks” is perhaps the most widely known speech of all time. Other tours are less well known and herein lies the value of the book. For those seeking a concise and easy to digest book outlining a unique aspect of Lincoln’s life this is recommended. The endnotes, more than 200 of them, are helpful for those looking for further documentation.
Thank you to Arcadia Publishing for providing a complimentary review copy of this book.
This post may contain affiliate links. If you click these links and make a purchase, I may receive a small commission. This commission does not affect any price that you pay. All views and opinions provided are my own and are never influenced by affiliate programs or sponsors providing products.


Room to Read
A lot of blog sites ask for donations to help with running costs – forget that!
Today, there are more than 770 million illiterate people in the world and over 300 million children who are not enrolled in school.
Room to Read is working hard to change this.
Room to Read partners with local communities throughout the developing world to provide quality educational opportunities by establishing libraries, creating local language children’s literature, constructing schools, and providing education to girls where it is otherwise unavailable.
If you have read my blog or followed any of my articles, if they have saved you time or helped you out, and if you can afford to I hope you will join me in supporting Room to Read.
These guys are AWESOME!
Take a few minutes to watch this video..


From August 7 to September 13, 2014 the Mūkusala Art Salon in its Main Gallery will present the exhibition “Latvians. Myths and Contexts”, which looks at notions surrounding Latvian identity and underlines their interrelation with the changing history and open future.
The silhouette of the first major cultural building of the 21st century in Latvia, the National Library, on the bank of the Daugava, makes one consider its semantic origin. Working on the project of the library in the late 1980s, Gunnar Birkerts was influenced to equal extent by the Glass Mountain of Rainis, Latvian traditional rural architecture, as well as the mythic Castle of Burtnieki – or Castle of Light – mentioned in Pumpurs' epic poem “Lāčplēsis”. While all of these references can be associated with the new library building, it is the latter that has taken the strongest hold in the collective consciousness. It suggests that the image of the Castle of Light, created at the moment of the nation's birth in the 19th century, bears messages important to the contemporary Latvian society.
Over the last decade the Latvian society has undergone a series of changes – accession to the European Union, mass emigration to other European countries in search for a better life, the economic crisis, joining the Euro. Also – the tense geopolitical situation and neighbouring Russia's unpredictable, intimidating foreign policy. It appears that a desire for nationally intoned activities, vividly exemplified by the recently adopted National Preamble, has arisen in step with these events. Likewise, Latvian signs and symbols from ornaments on the costumes of participants of song festivals or folk collectives have entered the everyday, becoming key to success for design and fashion products.
The exhibition “Latvians. Myths and Contexts” looks at notions and images, significant to the Latvian identity, which have been present in visual arts from the late 19th century up to now. The selected notions and images have transformed along with the changes Latvia has faced, at each stage representing collectively and privately significant phenomena. Modifications of these images suggest their potential openness in the future. If the answer to a series of unpredictable changes is a strong identity, basing it on ethnic, national, state or any other ideology is each individual's free choice. The exhibition “Latvians. Myths and Contexts” gives no clear answers on what a contemporary Latvian is, or should be, but rather asks questions that may assist in finding them.
The four thematic sections of “Latvians. Myths and Contexts” – landscape; one's plot, one's parcel of land; signs and symbols; folk-maid – show works by Leonīds Āriņš, Jēkabs Bīne, Aleksandra Briede, Juris Dimiters, Kristaps Ģelzis, Helēna Heinrihsone, Kārlis Hūns, Ieva Jurjāne, Jānis Kalmīte, Sandra Krastiņa, Laura Prikule, Vilhelms Purvītis, Džemma Skulme, Niklāvs Strukne, Juris Utāns and others from the collections of the Mūkusala Art Salon, National Library of Latvia and several artists.
Ivars Drulle's installation “Cabinet of Folksongs” is on display on the 3rd floor of the National Library of Latvia.
A separate part of the exhibition – in the Upper Gallery of the Mūkusala Art Salon – is Arnis Balčus' solo show “Victory Park”, where, blurring the border of documentality and fiction, the artist creates a critical mosaic of Latvian history and society.
To complement the exhibition, on August 27 a discussion will be held on art and national identity on the crossroads of the changing history and open future.
Cooperation partner: National Library of Latvia
Curator of the exhibition: Līga Lindenbauma
Publicity image: Helēna Heinrihsone. “Early Morning in the Forest. The Birth of Lāčplēsis”. 1989. Oil on cardboard. 170 x 150 cm. Collection of the Mūkusala Art Salon. Photo: Jānis Pipars