“Shirt” by Robert Pinsky

Shirt

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes–

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers–

Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the patern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

Tuesday Poem

Inheritance

At my elbow on the table
it lies open as it has done
for a good part of these thirty
years since my father died
and it passed into my hands
this Webster's New International
Dictionary of the English
Language
of 1922
on India paper which I
was always forbidden to touch
for fear I would tear or somehow
damage its delicate pages
heavy in their binding
this color of wet sand
on which thin waves hover
when it was printed he was twenty-six
they had not been married four years
he was a country preacher
in a one-store town and I suppose
a man came to the door one day
peddling this new dictionary
on fine paper like the Bible
at an unrepeatable price
and it seemed it would represent
a distinction just to own it
confirming something about him
that he could not even name
now its cover is worn as though
it had been carried on journeys
across the mountains and deserts
of the earth but it has been here
beside me this whole time
what has frayed it like that
lossening it gnawing at it
all through these years
I know I must have used it
much more than he did but always
with care and indeed affection
turning the pages patiently
in search of meanings

by W.S. Merwin
from The Shadow of Sirius;
Copper Canyon Press, 2009

Muhammad Ali: The Rumble in the Jungle

From Wikipedia:

M ali In one of the biggest upsets in boxing history, Ali regained his title on October 30, 1974 by defeating champion George Foreman in their bout in Kinshasa, Zaire. Hyped as “The Rumble In The Jungle,” the fight was promoted by Don King. Almost no one, not even Ali's long-time supporter Howard Cosell, gave the former champion a chance of winning. Analysts pointed out that Joe Frazier and Ken Norton had given Ali four tough battles in the ring and won two of them, while Foreman had knocked out both of them in the second round. As a matter of fact, so total was the domination that, in their bout, Foreman had knocked down Frazier an incredible six times in only four minutes and 25 seconds.

During the bout, Ali employed an unexpected strategy. Leading up to the fight, he had declared he was going to “dance” and use his speed to keep away from Foreman and outbox him. However, in the first round, Ali headed straight for the champion and began scoring with a right hand lead, clearly surprising Foreman. Ali caught Foreman nine times in the first round with this technique but failed to knock him out. He then decided to take advantage of the young champion's weakness: staying power. Foreman had won 37 of his 40 bouts by knockout, mostly within three rounds. Eight of his previous bouts didn't go past the second round. Ali saw an opportunity to outlast Foreman, and capitalized on it.

In the second round, the challenger retreated to the ropes—inviting Foreman to hit him, while counterpunching and verbally taunting the younger man. Ali's plan was to enrage Foreman and absorb his best blows to exhaust him mentally and physically. While Foreman threw wide shots to Ali's body, Ali countered with stinging straight punches to Foreman's head. Foreman threw hundreds of punches in seven rounds, but with decreasing technique and potency. Ali's tactic of leaning on the ropes, covering up, and absorbing ineffective body shots was later termed “The Rope-A-Dope.” By the end of the seventh round, Foreman was exhausted. In the eighth round, Ali dropped Foreman with a combination at center ring and Foreman failed to make the count. Against the odds, Ali had regained the title. Many years later, Foreman would become champ again at age 45. Muhammad Ali (Foreman's best friend at the time) did not attend the title bout. When asked why, he said “I would deviate attention from George. It was his moment, not mine.”

More here.

Some of his famous quotes:

I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world.
At home I am a nice guy: but I don't want the world to know. Humble people, I've found, don't get very far.

I figure I'll be champ for about ten years and then I'll let my brother take over – like the Kennedys down in Washington.

Frazier is so ugly that he should donate his face to the US Bureau of Wild Life.

Same Species, Polar Opposites

From Scientific American:

Same-species-polar-opposites_1 Two years ago, several research vessels shipped out to the North and the South poles to assemble a census of creatures living under the ice. One of the most surprising results was a discovery that 235 identical species lived on opposite sides of the world but were undocumented anywhere else. It's easy to understand how massive humpbacks can swim from Arctic to Antarctic waters, but most of the miniature worms, snails and crustaceans on the researchers' list are no bigger than grains of rice. How could tiny creatures adapted for the frigid waters travel 9,500 kilometers through warmer climes to reach the opposite pole?

Under the microscope, these invertebrates sometimes look like shredded plastic bags or shrimp with bullhorns. It's unclear how they could cross a swimming pool, let alone the globe. So, their “bipolarity” poses a 160-year mystery of the ocean—one that has only grown with time. “If bipolar species are as common as our initial list suggests, it really means we don't appreciate the mechanisms that are important for connectivity in the ocean as well as we thought,” says Russ Hopcroft, project leader of the Arctic portion of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership's Census of Marine Life.

More here.

Misunderstanding Darwin: Natural selection’s secular critics get it wrong

Ned Block and Philip Kitcher write about What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, in the Boston Review:

ScreenHunter_02 Feb. 23 10.09 But even as some scientists suggest that natural selection may be limited in ways Darwin could not envisage, they accept his basic insights and work to improve our biological understanding within the framework he set forth.

In their controversial new book, What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini set out to dismantle that framework. They argue that standard evolutionary thinking—what they call Darwinism—is guilty of a basic logical error, not a mistake in biology but an “intensional fallacy.” That fallacy, they say, undermines the entire enterprise. To be clear, the authors preface their demolition with a disclaimer: in attacking Darwin, they are not supporting any religious view of “origins”; thoroughgoing materialists, they do not think that biological patterns require an intelligent designer. But their criticisms are intended to knock evolutionary theory from its scientific pedestal by demolishing the scientific credentials of natural selection.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are not biologists. Fodor is a leading philosopher of mind and cognitive scientist, best known for his ideas about the modularity of mind and language of thought; Piattelli-Palmarini is a cognitive scientist. They do not have new data, new theory, close acquaintance with the everyday practice of evolutionary investigations, or any interest in supplying alternative explanations of evolutionary phenomena. Instead, they wield philosophical tools to locate a “conceptual fault line” in contemporary Darwinism. Apparently unshaken by withering criticism of Fodor’s earlier writings about evolutionary theory, they write with complete assurance, confident that their limited understanding of biology suffices for their critical purpose. The resulting argument is doubly flawed: it is biologically irrelevant and philosophically confused. We start with the biology.

More here.

Postmodern Man

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

ScreenHunter_01 Feb. 23 09.53 It's been more than 30 years since Jean-François Lyotard closed the historical door on Modernism. It was 1979, to be exact, when Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Rumors of the death of Modernism had been swirling for years. But death comes in stages, especially when the mortally wounded is a “movement” or an “age.” Lyotard's book managed to tie all those rumors together and then package the result as “Postmodernism,” the new next thing.

Lyotard focused on the idea of narratives. Past periods, Modernism in particular, had been fond of what he called “meta-narratives,” all-inclusive narrative frameworks that explained everything, more or less. Think, for instance, of Marxism and the way that class struggle drives every other part of the story. Look at the objects around you, the way you're dressed, current politics, movements in the arts. Strip away the details, any good Marxist will tell you, and lurking beneath you will find the class struggle. That bottle of water you're drinking is, in its essence, a natural resource owned by someone who then employs laborers hiring themselves out to work at a price determined by the market. This central relationship between wage-earners and owners of the means of production determines political structures, ideas on morality, even the dynamics of the family. For the Marxist, class struggle is the meta-narrative overarching all the other stories that fit inside.

Lyotard called the new age Postmodern because he thought that such meta-narratives no longer captured the complexity of late-20th-century existence. The fragmentation of identity brought about by modernization and globalization was too profound. At best, any narrative was going to tell only a small part of the story. Meta-narratives had blown apart into an endless chaos of micro-narratives.

More here.

Food Fight

ScreenHunter_01 Feb. 15 09.38 As some of my previous blogs attest I have a big interest in food. This extends beyond the buying, cooking and eating of food to social and political issues concerning food. So it was with some interest that I noticed the latest Atlantic contained a piece by Caitlin Flanagan entitled “Cultivating Failure.”

The little headline above the article indicated that the title was a sly double entendre—`How school gardens are cheating our most vulnerable students.’

I dimly recalled that Flanagan had gained a certain amount of notoriety for being a harsh critic of the feminist movement and for having boasted that she had never changed a sheet or sewn on a button. It was not obvious why she should now be engaged in attacking school gardens; the only possible connection to feminism being that the movement promoting such gardens was if not founded, at least given a public face, by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame. All this by way of saying that I had no reason to pre-judge one way or the other the contents of the article.

It begins with a fictional anecdote. I quote in full because paraphrase would lose the full force of the rhetorical strategy. It is intended to establish the author as a friend of the oppressed and to set the stage (poison the well) for an attack on school gardens.

“Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because the child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.”

Read more »

The Trappers and the Trapped

By Maniza NaqviWardakandstan

This is about fat and no-fat Generals.

But before I get to them here’s a little gem about a way to catch wild monkeys: The trapper takes a glass bottle with a long neck and a wide body. You know, like a good old vodka bottle. Then he finds a nut that monkeys consider a treat and drops it into the bottle. Then the trapper cements the bottom of the bottle to the jungle ground. Monkey arrives and sees the nut. Immediately with no second thought, sticks his elongated paw and pinched fingers through the neck of the bottle—and wraps his fist around the nut. Then the trapper comes along. The monkey can see the trapper coming but the monkey doesn’t run away. The monkey won’t run away though he is trying to pull away. The monkey is pulling and tugging and wriggling but he can’t get away—he’s stuck to the bottle. He can’t get his paw out. Why? After all he got it in, he should be able to get it out, right? He can’t get his paw out because he’s got it around a nut and now his fist is too large to come back out through the narrow neck of the bottle. But he won’t let go! He won’t let go of the nut—- and so there he is, fist clenched in the bottle staring at the advancing, trapper. The monkey can see the trapper coming at him wielding a club—yet the monkey won’t let go of the nut. The monkey just isn’t programmed to let go. The trapper clubs the monkey’s brains out, he clubs the monkey to death but the monkey has his fist still wrapped stubbornly around the nut. It just won’t unclench that fist. It isn’t programmed to unclench. Doesn’t know how to. Stupid monkey! Greedy monkey!

Is the US not able to let go? Is the US programmed to be trapped in Afghanistan? Is the US trapped in Afghanistan while many players in the region state and non-state look on patiently and contentedly all the while providing supplies and supply lines for its war? In its war in Afghanistan this non regional and chief warrior, the US military’s, cost per gallon of fuel is US$400 and cost per US military soldier is US$1,000,000. Somebody is bleeding and being clubbed and someone is getting rich.

I think about this story of a monkey in a bottle when I read the news and I think of platitudes such as, “Government in a Box”, a concept that the United Nations rejects of using development and humanitarian aid as a military strategy and therefore as a weapon. If anything the US military is involved in opening one Pandora’s box after another which is evidence of an unrestrained military out of the box. The nut can be a metaphor for an idea and a concept driven by power, greed, hubris and overreach.

Read more »

The Myth of the Movie: Avatar, We’re Not in Kansas Anymore!

by Daniel Rourke

3D! According to the film industry, to director James ‘billions at the box-office’ Cameron, Avatar is the first ‘true’ 3D movie. It takes the experience of cinema to the next (natural?) level, and it does it in a way that makes the movie industry gasp. According to the industry, Avatar is the 3D film that other film makers will be watching for years to come; Avatar is the Citizen Kane of 3D cinema.

It is at this point that I could repudiate this position, arguing plainly, perhaps with examples from cinematic history, why Avatar is not a revolution, why beneath its faux-3D visuals it is the same old same old, re-wrapped and re-branded for the computer game generation. But, the truth is that I think Avatar is a triumph of film-making. Not because of its technical bravado or simple, effective characters, but because of something that Hollywood seems to have forgotten about itself: the mythic potential of cinema.

Although Avatar is definitely not the Citizen Kane of 3D cinema, it might just be its Wizard of Oz.

At its best Hollywood can be transformative. It can speak through its audience, mirroring the concerns of the generations. At its worst Hollywood is little more than a series of plucked-off-the-shelf set-scenes stitched end-to-end. Recent Hollywood vehicles that made a mockery of the art of film-making include Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Spider Man 3, Transformers, Indiana Jones IV and – dare I suggest it – both recent renditions of James Cameron’s estranged Hollywood franchise, Terminator III and IV.

Watching these movies is like being force-fed visual gruel. A luke-warm dribble of grey matter concocted to approximate the flavour and consistency of much richer, organically grown, cinematic equivalents. These films, each in their own way, do away with characters and conflicts, replacing them with up-and-coming stars and plot devices. Instead of scripts these films have sound bites, instead of cinematography and vision these films are filled with chase scenes and montages designed to pull the viewer from one meagre set-scene to another.

Read more »

Monday Poem

Spirit Level

I've been a carpenter most of my life
and so have had occasion to use
what used to be called a spirit-level
but which today we call a level
–ditching spirit for the sake of efficiency
baby-with-bathwater-like as we
so often do, way past what's necessary

but the hole heaps up

this level is used to set things straight
to the plane of the horizon as with a beam
or plumb as with a stud to make sure
structure's right by spirit

you breathe deep and easy and hold the level
so the spirit bubble floats in the small arc of a glass flask
dead center which if placed upon a joist would say,
this floor is level

being on the level
good way to be

by Jim Culleny
Feb 7, 2010

The Civil Rights Movement: Unity in Disunity

This is an essay written by my 16 year old daughter, Sheherzad Raza Preisler. I am posting it today in honor of Black History Month:

John_F Taking its lead from the 1957 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1960s in America was a major stride towards civil rights. Initially, the 1960s may appear to be a time of great cohesive progression towards equality. After close analysis, however, one sees the prevalence of different factions and changing strategies in the midst of resistance. The first half of the decade was characterized by legislation and nonviolent protests, however, as tensions grew, approaches that embraced violence became more popular, but the goal remained the same: equality for all. These different strategies, rather than being an impediment to success, were in fact necessary, because they combated different forms of resistance.

Early articulations of major groups and leaders promoted two major, overlapping ideal goals and strategies: to achieve total equality, through nonviolence and legislative action. In 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee declared the necessity of nonviolence, arguing that it agreed with effective Judaic-Christian practices of unconditional love, even in the wake of oppression. In the following years, the Committee held numerous nonviolent sit-ins, many of which resulted in cruelty against the protesters, who never fought back. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march in Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most segregated cities, in 1963. Policemen such as Bull Connor met the protesters with vicious dogs and fire hoses. Dr. King was jailed, and in his April 1963 Letter from the Birmingham Jail, he explained that his intention was to bring Christ’s gospel of freedom throughout America through nonviolent gathering. Dr. King also refuted the idea that the protest intruded in Alabama state affairs, because every city in the United States was interconnected, and it was therefore his duty to promote equality everywhere. This vision of interconnectivity was also present in a June 1963 address to the American people made by President John F. Kennedy. In his address, Kennedy stated that compromising one’s freedom, compromises everyone’s lives.

Read more »

Hosting virtual seminars, lying parallel worlds into being and loving Japan: Colin Marshall talks to musician, artist and ex-blogger Nick Currie, a.k.a. Momus

Better known as Momus, Nick Currie has, since the mid-1980s, led parallel careers in music (with 21 albums out so far), prose, art and journalism, exploring the nexuses between them while traveling the world and examining his favorite cultures. He has most recently turned toward traditional ink-and-paper publishing with two volumes, The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands. Since 2004, he has written the blog Click Opera on his life, work and art adventures, which he closed on February 10, the eve of his 50th birthday. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

Momusportrait I was thinking, reading your final post, about Brian Eno's diary that he published, at the end of which — just a year of daily personal diary entries — he says, “Oh, it's so good not to have to write this damn thing tomorrow.” Is there a similar feeling with the much larger effort you have just put the cap on?

It's not a relief at all, because blogging is the best thing I've done in years. I feel like it's the ending, and maybe the happy ending, or maybe the sad ending, of a very enjoyable thing. It's become an ingrained habit in me, so as soon as I knew I was putting the blog to bed, in came a great story, a conversation I was having with Ezra from Vampire Weekend and I thought, “Wow, this is a great update to that Vampire Weekend story we featured last year.” Then I thought, “Well, I can't do it, because the blog ends tomorrow.” It's frustrating.

And your introduction, calling me a former blogger; in a way, one reason I'm ending the blog is so that I don't get called “Nick Currie, blogger” anymore. But actually, it's even sadder to be the former blogger Nick Currie. I'm hoping that'll be a very brief interim period, and then I'll be known as Nick Currie, something else.

I could include more things that you've done in that introduction, but I do think, when I read that, considering the region of the world you have your origins in, that's not the sort of thing appreciated by the UK, is it? When you do a lot of different things?

There is a tradition of dilettantism. It's an Italian word; in Scotland we probably have a less polite word for it, like you're a “thrawn” or a “tosspotter.” Scottish people are also able to be leisurely and expansive in their interests, and we had a period of Scottish humanism; the 18th century was full of amateurs and dilettantes in Edinburgh. You can be a jack of all trades and a master of none, or you can be an amateur, with its roots in the verb “to love.” I think enthusiasm's tremendously important, and the blog was a way for me to find things to be enthusiastic about out there on the web every day.

Mostly I'm successful without getting jaded or jaundiced, but I did find myself moving in ever-tighter circles. I would have this very small number of web sites I'd click through every day, and I would say — a bit like, is it Brenda Lee? — “Is that all there is?” It's huge, it's getting huger every day, the web, and yet somehow it's not delivering. And why should it? It's not life; it can't give you the adrenaline rush of real life. But then again, real life seems very slow and gray after the web. There are only certain places on the planet which, to me, have the excitement and the speed of the internet. One of them would be Tokyo, Japan.
But then it does seem to me that, whereas there's a lot of exploration of the web that went on in Click Opera, it was also, to an equal extent, about your own life and the things you did in the concrete world. I imagine the same mechanism went on. It would be a driver to help you find interesting things on the web; was it also an engine of making life as interesting as you could make it?


It was, but I was a little bit worried because I was approaching a one-to-one ratio. In other words, the things you would talk about and the things you would do would approach equality. Every single thing I would do in real life would end up getting written about. There is this saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. I forget who said that, but, actually, you know, it is worth living.
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Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar

John Colapinto in The New Yorker:

ScreenHunter_04 Feb. 21 19.43 Everett, who this past fall became the chairman of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Cultures at Illinois State University, has been publishing academic books and papers on the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) for more than twenty-five years. But his work remained relatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” which was published that fall in the journal Cultural Anthropology. The article described the extreme simplicity of the tribe’s living conditions and culture. The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive ability.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, calls Everett’s paper “a bomb thrown into the party.” For months, it was the subject of passionate debate on social-science blogs and Listservs. Everett, once a devotee of Chomskyan linguistics, insists not only that Pirahã is a “severe counterexample” to the theory of universal grammar but also that it is not an isolated case.

More here. [Thanks to Lee Kottner.]

Sunday Poem

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite wellWH Auden
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn.
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

by W.H. Auden – Feb, 21, 1907- Sept 29, 1973

Maya Angelou: Global Renaissance Woman

From mayangelou.com:

Angeloumalcolmx540 Born on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Angelou was raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, Dr. Angelou experienced the brutality of racial discrimination, but she also absorbed the unshakable faith and values of traditional African-American family, community, and culture. As a teenager, Dr. Angelou’s love for the arts won her a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School. At 14, she dropped out to become San Francisco’s first African-American female cable car conductor. She later finished high school, giving birth to her son, Guy, a few weeks after graduation. As a young single mother, she supported her son by working as a waitress and cook, however her passion for music, dance, performance, and poetry would soon take center stage.

In 1954 and 1955, Dr. Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and, in 1957, recorded her first album, Calypso Lady. In 1958, she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, acted in the historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks and wrote and performed Cabaret for Freedom.

More here.