The best way I could think of to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday was to go hear 88-year-old author and activist Grace Lee Boggs, a marvel of a woman, a sort of reincarnation of Mother Jones. She spoke at UIC last night on King and "global citizenship." Like King, she has tough things to say to both the powerful (clue in) and the powerless (revolution starts with your own soul, not your opponents). I was impressed not only by her intelligence and energy, but mostly by how she has avoided becoming cynical and bitter (though far from naive) over the decades. A brief portion of my interview with her will run next month in the Tribune's Sunday Magazine. Here are a few questions that were cut.

Here, by the way, is what I wrote here two years ago on the rhetorical rhythm of the "I Have A Dream" Speech.

What does King have to do with "global citizenship"?
Boggs: King began to enlarge concept of citizenship beyond the legalistic way we see it, such as whether or not we're allowed to vote. He thought of it not in terms of rights but of responsibility. King thought of fundamental concepts such as love, citizenship and freedom in a very expansive way, as stretching our humanity. The Vietnam War then and the Iraqi war now give us the opportunity to look at citizenship more broadly, at how we extend it to the world. In this country we tend to narrow it rather than stretch it.

King is remembered and celebrated for his role in the civil rights movement, but his opposition to Vietnam and other political stances made him a controversial figure. Does popular remembrance of him gloss over how controversial he was? Do you think he would be controversial today?
Boggs: Absolutely. He was very controversial when he was alive, we tend to forget. Only by being controversial was he able to give leadership to the struggle for civil rights in this country. I think he would be controversial today.

You've spent a lifetime reading. Do you find any fresh ideas in anything you're reading now?
Boggs: I'm reading two books now. One is Race and the Cosmos, which I find very exciting. It asks, how do we get beyond thinking in terms of race, and categories, and instead in terms of the whole human race. ... The other is Against Race. it says race is a box that no longer contains all the multiplicities, given the changes taking place even in biotechnology. We can't look at externals in terms of judging human identity.
posted by Nathan at 3:29 PM 0 comments

 
Your media diet: The subject came up on a list-serv of friends and proved provocative. Here were my overly indignant two cents...

My bookmarks are here: www.nbierma.com/links. There are about 125, but I only read a few leisurely and a only dozen or so for my weblog at booksandculture.com.

I used to try to dutifully follow "hard news," and I still pick up the New York Times (the tree-icide version) about every other day, but since I've started the weblog my appetite for hard news has waned. For one thing, I'm sick of the implication that Howard Dean and Iraq are the only two things that are important and interesting in this wide world, and I'm tired of the predictable preaching about said subjects on both the left and right (I've ranted here before about the ambiguity deficit of most political writing, so I'll move on). I try to register a broader range of current events, places, and ideas in my blog. Something my journalism professor said in a class at Calvin stuck with me: make an effort to read and write what will still be worth reading two weeks from now. In my opinion, very little in the news media meets this standard. Think of it this way: who among us would benefit from going back and re-reading news coverage leading up to the 2000 election? How much that was said before Election Day and the ensuing mess was all that worthwhile? (And what does this bode for all that we're about to read this year :(

One other note: for opinion writing I recommend loyalty to columnists, not publications. The NYT's David Brooks, for being a conservative willing to criticize Bush, and the New Republic's Peter Beinart, for being a Democrat who is hard on Democrats, have more credibility in my eyes than the usual assemblers of rhetoric. They're good writers and good analysts. I say find a voice or four whom you trust and stick with them.

For my B&C blog, I mostly browse the New Yorker, Atlantic, New Republic, CBS' 60 Minutes site, the Boston Globe's Ideas section, the Washington Post's Outlook section, The Week's Briefing, and lately have dabbled in the Smithsonian and two polar opposites: the Economist and the Chicago Reader. The result may be construed as "non-required reading," but I just don't have the appetite for all-Dean-all-the-time.
posted by Nathan at 3:24 PM 0 comments

 
You have to see it to believe it: the official portrait of former Gov. Jesse Ventura as unveiled in the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul.
posted by Nathan at 3:23 PM 0 comments

 
• Etymology Today from M-W: duende \doo-EN-day\

: the power to attract through personal magnetism and charm

The word "duende" comes from Spanish, where it translates literally as "ghost" or "goblin," and is believed to derive from the phrase "dueño de casa," which means "owner of a house." The term is traditionally used in flamenco music or other art forms to refer to the mystical or powerful force given off by a performer to draw in the audience. The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote in his essay "Teoria y Juego del Duende" ("Play and Theory of the Duende") that duende "is a power and not a behavior ... a struggle and not a concept." Nowadays the term appears in a broader range of contexts to refer to one's unspoken charm or allure.

• Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 3:21 PM 0 comments

 
This week in my B&C blog: All about seeing things: articles on acuteness of perception and fluidity of consciousness. Plus, the presidential candidates' "faith-hopping," the descendants of colonial Loyalists in New Brunswick, overfishing in Europe, the punctuation of academic books, and more ... LINK/ARCHIVE
posted by Nathan at 3:48 PM 0 comments

 
I don't recommend many e-mail forwards, but this one gets good towards the end:

You know you're living in 2004 when...

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.

4. You e-mail your friend who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends is that they do not have e-mail addresses.

6. When you go home after a long day at work you still answer the phone in a business manner.

7. When you make phone calls from home, you accidentally dial "9" to get an outside line.

8. You've sat at the same desk for four years and worked for three different companies.

10. You learn you've been laid off on the 11 o'clock news.

11. Your boss doesn't have the ability to do your job.

12. Contractors outnumber permanent staff and are more likely to get long-service awards.

13. You read this entire list and kept nodding and smiling.

14. As you read this list, you think about forwarding it to your "friends".

15. You got this e-mail from a friend that never talks to you any more, except to send you jokes from the net.

16. You are too busy to notice there was no No. 9.

17. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn't a No. 9, didn't
you?

posted by Nathan at 3:46 PM 0 comments

 
• Etymology Today from M-W: borborygmus \bor-buh-RIG-mus/

: intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas

Unless you're a gastroenterologist, chances are you never knew there was a name for those loud gurglings your stomach sometimes makes. And looking at the word itself, you might think it's just some crazy coinage invented recently by someone who thought the word matched the rumbling sound. But actually, "borborygmus" has been part of English for at least 240 years; its earliest known use dates from 1762. We picked it up from New Latin, but it traces to the Greek verb "borboryzein," which means "to rumble."

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posted by Nathan at 3:44 PM 0 comments