#paul lawrence dunbar

[viewfromthelake]

I got an eBay package that came from a church in Rhode Island. It had a lot of old stamps on the envelope.

[hellostraycat]

☆Quiet Epics2 ____________ We sing oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise; My hands bleed,we dig for the rind, Now you see, so vile; They hold the fruit and eat the rind, We, the seeds, spat from the fruit. . "Whosoever told it, that they told a dirty lie, babe". .

[onarangel]

Autumn....

[blackfolksintime]

Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School Students, Washington DC 1930s

[lesser-known-composers]

William Grant Still (1895-1978) - Songs of Separation

Idolatry (Arna Bontemps) ; Poeme (Philippe Thoby Marcelin) ; Parted (Paul Lawrence Dunbar) ; If You Should Go (Countee Cullen) ; A Black Pierrot (Langston Hughes)

Robert Honeysucker, Baritone & (?)Vivian Taylor, piano

[sagevalleymusings]

Kaos and the Fall of Media Literacy

In my junior year of high school English, my English teacher gave us two poems side-by-side to analyze. He said specifically that the poems were challenging to analyze and had a deeper hidden meaning that we might not get right away. The poems were “Douglass” and “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

I still remember this many years later, because I sat up with my brother and my mom for hours on end trying to figure out what the deeper meaning was, since “racism” was the obvious interpretation, so that couldn’t be what my teacher meant by a deeper hidden meaning. I looked up the biography of Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist. I looked up the biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a turn of the century African American poet one generation removed from slavery. I analyzed every single word and beat. My handouts were black with scrawled ink on every available surface as I tried to puzzle out what other than racism this poem could possibly be about.

The deeper hidden meaning was racism. I wasn’t supposed to have instantly known that Douglass was a reference to the famous abolitionist. I wasn’t supposed to have looked up the author, realized he was a Black American with parents that had been enslaved, and read the poem through his eyes. I was supposed to have looked at it, as a white teenager in suburban Ohio more than a hundred years after the ratification of the thirteenth amendment, and assumed that “the mask” was a more generalize-able social face than racial code switching.

“We Wear the Mask” taught me something very important about media literacy. It taught me that most people are terrible at it.

Most teenagers are terrible at everything in fairness. But the fact of the matter is that when our English teacher prompted the class for analysis, there was a pregnant silence before I timidly ventured that “Douglass” was obviously a reference to the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass. I didn’t say much more than that, though, because I felt like I had missed the mark. I couldn’t figure out the deeper hidden meaning.

I was the only one who’d made the Douglass connection. And if you don’t know that, if you don’t know when Dunbar is writing, it could be easy to miss that this is transparently about race.

Sometimes, in order to understand a piece of media, you have to have a little bit of background knowledge. Knowing these things can lend to a deeper understanding of the true intent of the media. Now that people know that both Wachowskis are transgender, it is transparently obvious that The Matrix is a trans allegory. It’s something that was always true, and people have been telling us it was true for a long time. But knowing the context makes it that more clear that it wasn’t even meant to be a hidden meaning. That was the open interpretation, and we just needed to know the context to know that.

Kaos’ premise is a modern-day Ancient Greek myth, complete with the Olympian pantheon, famous names like Minos and Orpheus, and with locations like Troy, Crete, and Athens. In order to truly understand what the story of Kaos is about, one would have to know a great deal about Greek mythology, so that you could see where the stories are remaining faithful and where they are deviating.

Or at least, that’s how it should be. Instead, the entire show is heavily narrated over, telling you exactly where they remain faithful and where they deviate. Part of the reason why seems to be that they’re not especially faithful to the original source material. The Tacita, for example, draw their name from Dea Tacita, a Roman god of the dead. The Greek interpretation of this seems to be a nymph named Larunda, but in either case, Tacita is not the name of an adherent of Hera.

So even knowing a great deal about Greek mythology, which I cannot claim to, this show could still be meandering and confusing. They change perspective repeatedly through the course of the show, weaving back and forth in time and location to spin out a complex tale with some familiar faces. And the tactic that Kaos decided to take in order to simplify this complexity is a narrator.

Narrators can be useful. But they can also be the bandaid of poor directing. One of the most repeated rules of any kind of storytelling is “show don’t tell” and a narrator is diametrically opposed to the concept of “show don’t tell.” Their entire purpose in a story is to ‘tell’ the audience complex or historical concepts that would be difficult to explain through subtler means.

In moderation that’s extremely useful. If your entire show is narration, that’s a bad sign.

And the worst part is that I appear to be in the minority on this. I’m reading a review on IMDB that says that this show doesn’t “spoon feed” the audience, and actually I would agree. It feels less like spoon-feeding and more like the writers parked a backhoe named Prometheus right on top of my jaw and are burying me alive in irrelevant world-building.

I see a lot of people calling the editing sharp, calling it fast-paced, maybe saying that the first couple episodes are a little slow but things change so quickly that you’re never bored… but the thing is, the first couple episodes are a little slow because someone is explaining the plot to you in painstaking detail the whole time. “Remember her, she’ll be important later” makes me want to claw my own eyes out.

One example I can think of which makes this even more noticeable by being an obvious attempt at subtlety is the “mark” on Orpheus’ hand. In this version of events, Prometheus and Charon were lovers long ago, and Prometheus, who is already plotting the fall of Zeus, has to kill Charon for some reason (I guess so that he winds up in the Underworld in a prominent position? Whatever. A lot of the plot is shockingly irrelevant to the plot.). And before Prometheus kills Charon, he makes Charon promise that one day, there will be someone Charon needs to protect and that “you’ll know him by the mark.” Fast forward to Orpheus who is trying to get into the Underworld. One of the Fates, Lachy, stabs his hand to get him to fess up to complicated plot things (again, honestly not that important) and then some time later (only a few scenes in this sequence, but spread out because of the way the story keeps jumping around) we are shown the bandaged hand as a reminder that Orpheus was stabbed, and then we are shown in the Underworld that Orpheus takes the bandage off and the wound has healed into an X scar. Okay, we’ve been shown, we’ve been reminded, we know that this is the “mark” that Charon is looking for, and we are expecting the payoff to be Charon noticing this mark at some point, we just don’t know how yet.

So we get to the expected scene, and we see Orpheus wrestling with… some guy, honestly I don’t remember or care. And he’s flailing his arm in an obvious ‘hey notice my mark’ way and you’re like, okay this is it. So far, an easy, satisfying plot point with a clear payoff that the audience can follow. Up to this point I don’t have a complaint with how the story is playing out.

But then. Not only are we shown this flailing again at a different angle, but the whole scene slows down as Charon fails to notice once, twice, finally realizes. And then a flashback happens about how he’s looking for a mark. And then Charon asks explicitly where the mark came from and if you hadn’t put two and two together the first time, the answer is “Fate” which Orpheus says not once but twice. And then Charon literally out loud says “This guy? Seriously?” And then we see a message scratched into the sand by an eagle which is literally signed by Prometheus (okay, it just says P but come on it’s literally signed) and then we cut away to Prometheus smiling down at Charon so that you know he absolutely did write that, just to hammer home… Seven. Separate. Times… that this is definitely the important guy and that’s definitely the mark.

That’s bad directing and worse editing. The idea that there’s a mark and that this comes to pass thousands of years later, that Prometheus is doing what he can at a distance and is watching events unfold, all that works as storytelling. It’s an interesting twist of narrative that the way Orpheus was supposed to have gone to the Underworld was the complicated way that led to him being stabbed, so that Charon would know to support him. It ties Orpheus’ story into the broader plot against Zeus in a satisfying way. But they hammer home the points of their story over and over again, a shocking achievement for a story which actually does have a pretty breakneck pace.

The watch is another one. Zeus pauses to say that his watch from Hercules is ‘lucky’ and we slow down to watch it hit the table. We see Zeus take the new watch off but we don’t see him put the new watch back on which is enough to clue the viewer in that it’s important that he didn’t put it back on. Dionysis sees the watch, puts it on, so far I don’t really have any complaints. We know this is going to come back, we just don’t know how yet.

This gets lampshaded to absurdity, however, when we see Zeus quizzing and murdering all his staff over this watch, Hera calling Poseidon who calls Dionysis, we spend so long belaboring the point that Zeus is very upset over this missing watch and then we are told again that it’s Hercules’ lucky watch. Every single story beat is told to us at least twice if not three or four or seven times just to make sure we’re following along exactly.

If I actually sit with it, I like the writing. The watch being missing and then traded to the Fates so that Dionysis couldn’t give it back is an interesting way to treat that thread. There’s some changes to the story that lead to interesting and different outcomes. For example, Orpheus and Eurydice’s relationship. In this version, Orpheus is so in love, so obsessed, that Eurydice has started to pull away. It feels too much. She feels like she isn’t as in love as Orpheus is and that disconnect leads her to feel less and less connected in their relationship as the guilt eats what feelings for him she did have. Cassandra calls her out on this, and we think that we understand that Cassandra is prophesying a breakup, which would be a sharp change from the original story. But turns out the “leaving him today” meant dying (which, we didn’t need Cassandra to be literally standing there explaining that as she’s bleeding out on the road, but whatever. Directing problems). That’s an interesting and new way to get Riddy into the Underworld.

Orpheus might be able to sense the pulling away and is clinging on even more tightly. The song he sings at the concert about sucking up her every breath is peak toxic co-dependence. I don’t like Orpheus for her. So it isn’t really a shock when it turns out that he stole her coin for passage into the Underworld, which winds up keeping her in the Underworld long enough for him to rescue her, a thing which otherwise in this version of the Underworld would not have been true.

That’s just one change that winds up having interesting implications for the story they’ve written. There’s plenty of others. The setting is a good one – I like Kaos.

But the directing and editing make this story feel force-fed for most of the show. It gets a little better as it goes on and we run out of things we need to catch the audience up on. But as late as the last episode of the season, we have a voice over saying “a line appears” while we watch a line appearing just you know for sure that this one this time is the line they’re really talking about.

But at the end of the day, I’m not sure I can even blame them. I haven’t looked into it too much, but I do wonder how a pilot of this show would have tested with audiences, if people who didn’t know anything about Greek mythology found the storyline confusing and meandering, if they came away frustrated rather than intrigued. Maybe the narrator was a late addition, to fix editing problems that led to an unwatchable show. But if that’s the case, then it absolutely is the bandaid I mentioned at the beginning, and that’s not a good reason to have a narrator. I’ve written about this topic before, but I think pop media and the decline of media literacy education have been feeding into each other. Creatives make simple, easy to follow stories because audiences haven’t been trained on media literacy and find it frustrating in ways that an older audience would not have, audiences become used to simple, easy to follow stories and balk at anything else, rinse repeat until you get a show whose premiere episode is 40% narration being called “not spoon fed.”

I want to come back to “We Wear the Mask.” When I was in junior year of high school, analyzing this poem and struggling with my mom and my brother to figure out the meaning, there was no Wikipedia. There was no SparkNotes. I had a full set of encyclopedias from the 60s and dial-up internet. Googling “We Wear the Mask” now gets you an immediate and in-depth explanation of the meaning. But it’s been my experience that the kinds of people who do Google the answers rarely actually read those answers. And most people don’t bother. And that’s assuming that Google doesn’t just lie to you, which it’s now doing with increasing frequency. The internet has any answer to any question we could think to ask at the tips of our fingers and it’s increased media literacy not one iota.

[lboogie1906]

Lieutenant General Andrew Phillip Chambers, Jr. (June 30, 1931 - June 3, 2017) was a retired Lieutenant General in the Army. His brother Lawrence Chambers was a Rear Admiral in the Navy and together they are the first Black siblings to hold flag ranks together in the US military.

He was born in Bedford, Virginia, a small town near Lynchburg. His parents were Charlotte Hadessa Chambers and Lawrence Everett Chambers. He had four other siblings and the entire family moved to DC after the death of Andrew’s father so his mother could work for the War Department to support her young family.

He attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. He earned an Army ROTC scholarship which allowed him to enroll at Howard University. He married Norita Elizabeth Garner (1954). The two have five children together. He graduated from Howard University and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Army, which began his 35-year career in active military duty.

He was Director of the Army’s Equal Opportunity Program and commanded the VII Corps of the Army (approximately 45,000 men and women) starting in 1985. The VII Corps was one of two principal corps in the US Army Europe during the Cold War and comprised half the American troops stationed on that continent at the time. He served as the Third Army Commanding General and Forces Command Deputy Commanding General at Fort McPherson. He received the Black Military History Institute Atlanta Chapter’s “Buffalo Soldier Award” for his distinguished military service. This was his last active duty post as he officially retired from military service in 1989.

He had a successful career as the director of community service for AmeriCorps and as vice president of the University of Maryland University College campus in Europe in Kaiserslautern, Germany.

He is survived by his wife, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren as well as his remaining three siblings. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[alredered]

Alredered Remembers Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Ohio-born African-American poet, novelist, and short story writer, on his birthday.

"Hope is tenacious. It goes on living and working when science has dealt it what should be its deathblow." -Paul Laurence Dunbar

[vicious-vixen-305]

Facts...

Like Malcom said, "the most disrespected person in America is the Black woman."

Like Paul Lawrence Dunbar said, "we wear the mask."

It's really sad that we STILL have to edit ourselves and tuck away parts of our personality to make others feel comfortable; so they don't think negatively of us in this neverending age of biased media.

Coco Gauff Now; Serena Williams Then: Same Playbook!

[outdaway3]

Paul Lawrence Dunbar Washington DC

[adelleandlaura4ever]

Invitation to Love

Come when the nights are bright with stars

Or when the moon is mellow;

Come when the sun his golden bars

Drops on the hay-field yellow.

Come in the twilight soft and gray,

Come in the night or come in the day,

Come, O love, whene'er you may,

And you are welcome, welcome.

.

You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,

You are soft as the nesting dove.

Come to my heart and bring it rest

As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.

.

Come when my heart is full of grief

Or when my heart is merry;

Come with the falling of the leaf

Or with the redd'ning cherry.

Come when the year's first blossom blows,

Come when the summer gleams and glows,

Come with the winter's drifting snows,

And you are welcome, welcome.

Paul Lawrence Dunbar

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

My sweet love….. my lovely Laura!

My life was changed when we met nearly 7 years ago.

Since the moment we held hands in that train to Paris,

From the moment the spark from our hearts passed through our eyes looking at each other,

From the moment our heartbeats fell into perfect rhythm…

My heart belonged to you.

I am forever yours, my Liebling!

I love you deeply Laura ❤️❤️❤️

@dreamiingofher

@adelleandlaura4ever

[cincylibrary]

Paul Lawrence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1872. He was of the first generation born after emancipation—both his parents had been previously enslaved. From a young age his talent in school and in writing became clear, but his education was ignored and he was only able to find unskilled jobs locally. But support from those who recognized his talent eventually gave him his big break, and he became the first nationally acclaimed Black poet. He went on tours nationally and in Europe. Unfortunately, Dunbar’s writerly brilliance was marred by an ugly personal life. He was a womanizer and struggled with untreated mental illness, aggravated by alcoholism that began when a doctor prescribed alcohol as treatment for his tuberculosis. His relationship with his wife, writer Alice Ruth Moore, was tempestuous at best and abusive at worst. She left him for good in 1902 after a severe beating. They remained estranged until his death in 1906. She expressed regret she didn’t get to visit him one last time, but didn’t attend his funeral. Curious about Alice Dunbar-Nelson or Paul Dunbar? See all of their works in our digital collection!

[driftlessarearev]

The Complete Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

The Complete Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

Via The Complete Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, by Paul Lawrence Dunbar Encased in a sturdy and stylish paperback, The Complete Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, exhibit Mint Editions handling of an early African American poet. Dunbar (1872 – 1906) lived a brief life, “published his first collection of poems as a teenager. While working as an elevator operator, Dunbar…

[yasbxxgie]

[1035624885710667779]

[macrolit]

Giveaw@y: We’re giving away 12 vintage paperback classics! Won’t they look lovely on your shelf? =)  Enter to win these classics by: 1) following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblogging this post. We will choose a random winner on 26 February 2023. Good luck! Follow our IG account to be eligible for our IG giveaw@ys. For full rules to all of our giveaw@ys, click here.

[theuniverseproject]

We Wear the Mask BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while       We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise,       We wear the mask!