Wednesday, August 20, 2008
What a flash!
Well, the Bolt struck again this morning, and what a dazzling flash! It's such a pleasure to watch him run. He's graceful, like a gazelle – natural, as if it's what he was born to do! Donovan Bailey had just finished saying that he didn't think Usain would try to break the world record when, lo and behold, Usain Bolt gave himself a wonderful birthday present with a 19.30 run that broke Michael Johnson's twelve year old record of 19.32. And what a tremendous thing for him to have the whole olympic stadium, on its feet, singing "Happy Birthday!" None of the commentators' that we heard mentioned this as it was happening, but it seemed to me to the same kind of hopeful moment for the world as when Barack Obama addressed the record crowd in Berlin. People of every nationality stood to honour a young black man from a little island who had just pushed himself to do a truly remarkable thing. Then Melaine Walker following close on Usain's heels, leapt to victory in the 400 metre women's hurdles and, having finished the race, knelt on the ground – I'm guessing to give thanks. She was delighted with her victory, and unassuming as she celebrated it. I wish for these Jamaican Olympians every possible good thing in their future careers. God bless them! They are fine examples to young people everywhere, truly rejoiced by their accomplishments, wearing their glory with grace and ease. Usain is a man with a sense of humour, a great kidder who doesn't seem to take himself too seriously, an attitude some appear to regard as irreverent. But we are different people, all of us; our temperaments differ and we have our various ways of coping. I think it's Donovan Bailey who once said that, in the last analysis, the race is in your head – an observation with which Asafa Powell would probably agree. Usain's clowning is no doubt part of his strategy for keeping himself grounded, and I can't think why anyone should find this the least bit offensive. Is it perhaps that they think he should be in awe, because he is a young black man from tiny country, of being on the world stage? Because what is awesome is his prodigious talent. And what is endearing and gracious about him is that he wears his greatness so lightly.
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26 comments:
usain is simply phenomenal
Michael Johnson called him 'Superman II'. That seems about right. And Melanie Walker's gold is nothing to be sniffed at either.
What's that about a small island, Pam? Tell worl' map seh nuh draw Jamaica small. Wi likkle but wi talawa.
fsjl: Well, as Martin constantly complains, sometimes it's hard to tell whether or not I have my tongue in my cheek. That's why I like Gates statement that for black people words are 'rhetorical acts'. I guess sometimes my rhetoric is under too many layers? Also check the spelling of Ms Walker's name, please Prof...
Gates? Bill, Bob, or Skip?
Just call my spelling old-fashioned, traditional, and so on. Melaine Walker's achievement is not diminished.
An old friend of mine is in Beijing and just posted some photographs on his Facebook page, including one of Usain Bolt shortly after winning the 200 metres.
fsjl: Henry Louis Gates... The Signifying Monkey man. As for Melaine's name, it's just that I know you are a stickler. For correctness. And how do I find your friend's Facebook page? Is it worth hunting up? Facebook annoys me – probably because I have such trouble navigating it.
It's not really worth hunting up his page (Wayne Chen, if you really want to). And, yes, I am a stickler for correctness. A precisian in such matters.
fsjl: There. You see – I knew. Perhaps I will get the courage to face down Facebook. It sends things popping up at me, which annoys me, and I close the whole thing down!
It's not that bad, and it is a useful way of keeping up with old friends.
fsjl: Do irritating things not thrust themselves in your face? I've had a pop-up window refuse to go down: it kept giving me alternatives and regardless of the one I took, simply would not go away... In the end I had to shut down the computer – which is not state of the ever-so-rapidly -changing art, but is new and powerful enough, with fandangles enough. I won't put up with that from a machine.
The 'new' Facebook deals with pop-ups better. And you can use your anti-virus software and browser software to deal with most annoying pop-ups. That's all I can say, alas.
fsjl: Well, right now I'm trying to organize the blog a bit better, and keep at it. I didn't say it when I wrote the piece on blogging, but I do feel part of a community up here. Thanks again to all of you who visit. I see blogs – and I know there are more – that facilitate conversation about things that are important to me. I like the idea that I can drop in anonymously or show up and say who I am and leave a comment, if I want. I see blogs that are points of exchange about things that are not so vital, at the minute, to me, but that are very worthwhile nonetheless. So for now, I'll put Facebook to one side. I'll visit when someone else 'summons' me, so to speak, but, for the rest, it'll have to happen in due course, DV.
It depends on how thick your 'social network' is. My students seem to live on Facebook. The younger generations expose a larger part of their lives online than I, for my part, find seemly. I know more about my older son's love life than my father ever knew about mine (not from what he puts on his Facebook page, mind you).
fsjl: I have, I fear, a scandalously thin social network. Nor would I be putting my business up on Facebook, Neckbook, Handbook, Footbook, etc., etc. As for revelations about one's love life, I have some notions about certain consequences of contraception that one might call social, but that aren't those that usually get talked about under that heading. They might explain in part why nowadays young people feel not just free, but obliged, almost, to noise abroad their very personal business. I'm thinking perhaps I should explore this in a blog... We'll see.
Given some of the things I've seen put up on Facebook by people close to me in age, I ought not to be surprised by what students in their late teens and early twenties post. Yet I am. I've warned students that employers search Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites, and what they put on the internet is available for the entire human race to see.
Like you, I'm not going to post anything I want to keep private on Facebook (or Neckback book, Bellybangarang book or anything else). We live, today, in an age in which privacy is becoming less and less possible, and in which the past is harder and harder to leave behind; youthful indiscretions are going to be following the young people of today around for the rest of their lives.
Not being a Roman Candle or a Rastafarian, I have no objection to contraception. I think it a good idea to have children only when you're ready to have them, and sex is a good and healthy thing between consenting adults. The fewer worries the better. But private matters ought to stay private. Once you post them to the internet, they don't.
After all, I'd no idea that Eddie Baugh read this blog till you mentioned it (hello there, Eddie!), and for all I know the Pope could be reading it (I hope he appreciates my feeble pun above). Millions of people potentially, read what's online and not all of them are good-minded people.
fsjl: Is it that privacy is less and less possible, or that we are in a culture in which to be a person is to be public? I'm not communicating my notion about contraception clearly enough. Whether one is Rastafarian or RC, isn't to the point. Sex, of its nature, was once a private thing. Whether one was doing it, who one was doing it with, when one was doing it, etc., were all things one kept close. The privacy, I am thinking, had to do with awe – of the sheer biology of it, for you knew that you were not in charge of it; it was in charge of you. Then suddenly there were – well, not only contraceptive pills but all kinds of sex pills. Suddenly sex wasn't to be tiptoed carefully around, it was an Olympic sport, something to be talked about in newspapers and family magazines ("Ten ways to a tantric orgasm!") and had in business class on transatlantic flights! It may well be a crazy notion, and I shall think more about it, but "Sexual Liberation" and "The Facebook Phenomenon" seem to me to have a lot to do with each other. As for Prof Baugh, he doesn't read this blog: he said he'd come across it quite by accident, and I believe him. And I called his name in the course of examining a public thing: he'd written something in a book, an item for public consumption, and what he'd written was incorrect. There was no way to address that but by calling the requisite names. (I think I've called only the names of 'public' people up here – except of course for folks in my family.) But I do take your point about the open nature of anything that's hung up here. One needs to be careful – and always willing to be rapped on the knuckles.
It is that privacy is becoming less possible in a world in which we are increasingly monitored (as a result of things that make our lives more convenient).
I don't know that the easy availability of contraception made sex into an Olympic sport -- reading say Lord Rochester, suggests otherwise. The young have always made mock of risks. The problem is that the audience today is immense and uncontrollable. I've no idea who's reading this, and what they make of what you and I are saying to each other. Something that people who've known each other for decades might take in their strides, or see as a a light jest, could be misunderstood or misinterpreted by a stranger.
And, btw, take a look at John Maxwell's column which I've just put up on my blog.
Hi fsjl: Yes, the young have always made mock of risks, but I'm not sure that the female young shared that recklessness with unqualified enthusiasm. And I agree with you about our having sacrificed our privacy for convenience sake, though I'm constantly surprised at how many really smart, diploma-ed people don't realize how closely Big Brother IS watching us! It's a complex thing, this phenomenon of self-revelation/self-exposure in cyberspace. I think it's pretty clear that in some cases it's a cry for help: some people hang up the details of their gun collections or the grotesqueness of their fantasy lives in the hope that someone will find and rescue them. And even I, with my severely constrained social network, know three couples who met out there in the ether. For certain, if one is up here, one is looking for an audience. The questions are: Why the need? What does one wish to share with the audience? What does the need for audience say about our Self? Does sharing these things-to-be-shared, whatever they are, threaten or enlarge the Self? And of course, is that Self becoming an increasingly Virtual Public Self, one that is threatening Individual Private Selfhood? I shall look at John's column on your blog forthwith.
I'm not so sure about the wisdom of young women. The number of supposedly smart ones I knew who ended up with bellies astounded me. When I mention to students today the phenomenon of the young man who seems to grow wings when his girlfriend gets pregnant, a good number of heads nod; and I hear fascinating stories about people they know.
It isn't just Big Brother. There are an amazing number of supposedly smart and educated adults who fall for 419 scams.
I met my present wife online, btw.
All of us, in some way are looking for an audience. Otherwise we would not present ourselves in public. Those of us who write, for example, are deliberately seeking an audience, sometimes for very intimate parts of ourselves that we choose to share with the universe (a poet's desire to tug at her husband's hair with 'lithe toes' for example, taken not at all at random).
But, until recently, everyone could close the door. It took much more effort than it does now to reveal yourself to an audience. Now, it takes very little. And everyone does. Perhaps that makes it banal and unimportant -- and thus people whose lives are banal and unimportant find themselves obliged to engage in more and more transgressive acts in order to achieve some sort of transitory excitement, or even fame. Or, perhaps, the desire to act, to present our selves in public is something that has roots in our psyches; something, that is to say, natural to our selves as social beings who must construct society through our actions. Rhetorical acts, as Skip Gates calls them.
fsjl: You misunderstand me about the women. They were unenthusiastic, but also reckless, hence the belies to which you refer. Big Brother is a catch-all term. I'd say those of us who write and publish are seeking an audience. The woman with the lithe toes perhaps should have kept her business to herself... The rub is of course the "banal and unimportant" part of your observation. Another possible construction of the aims of education might be teaching people how not to be banal. I don't regard anyone as unimportant – I'm a teacher. How could I? Ah! The Signifying Monkey man is Skip, is he? BTW, I decided to leave 'belies' above, comme Kamau...
Brathwaite doesn't excuse everything!
Unenthusiastically reckless? Now there's a contradiction in terms if ever I heard one. Perhaps you could, at some time, unpack that thought.
I'd say the poet with the lithe toes wrote a very good poem, and exposed as much of her heart as she chose. But Jamaica oman dangerous, you know.
fsjl: I suppose there is a double entendre in "Brathwaite does not excuse everything," but in context, I'm not following you... I just thought the 'belies' fit nicely. As for "unenthusiastically reckless", unpacking that is possible, via the notion of "prismatic vision" that I advance in my dissertation, about our dispostion to hold and operate "unresolved pluralities". It's a thing we do in the Caribbean, where operating apparently opposed or conflicting notions and/or values is not uncharacteristic.
Well, given that it is the nature of the Caribbean to turn things askew (I was explaining to a Spanish filmmaker in Kingston years ago that the JLP was the conservative party and the PNP was the socialist party and he exploded '¡pero todo está al revés!' -- since he expected the labour party to be on the left and the nationalist party to be on the right) you have a point! But I was just teasing you for your reference to Kamau.
fsjl: It's not that we turn things upside down – it's that we can happily tolerate and operate apparent contradictions. Perhaps like what the scientists have had to do (up until recently, since they've supposedly resolved the difficulty) with quantum physics and the theory of relativity...
I'll have to ask my son the physicist about that!
fsjl: Please do. I'm no physicist – never went any further than high school biology. I am however, one of the (very few, they say) people who read every word of A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME.
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