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The University of Pennsylvania, in its left-wing English department, has removed its long-standing portrait of William Shakespeare because he was white and male in favor of a more “diverse” writer. Is that not subtracting from Western civilization?
X, if I can jump in here for a moment — I know you were talking to Zooey, and not me — but the above scenario didn’t really happen as you describe (following your lead by only dealing with one thing, etc):
Students remove Shakespeare portrait from English Department at Ivy League school
excerpt:
At the University of Pennsylvania, the student newspaper reports that a group of students took down a large portrait of William Shakespeare, which had for years been displayed above a staircase in a building housing the English Department.
Why? According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, the students wanted the wall art in the department to represent the world’s diversity of authors, so they replaced Shakespeare on the Heyer Staircase with a photo of Audre Lorde, an African American writer, feminist and civil rights activist.
The Shakespeare portrait taken off the wall at the Ivy League school wound up in the office of Jed Esty, the English Department chairman and a professor of English. Esty, who, his website says, specializes in 20th Century British, Irish, and postcolonial literatures, wrote a Dec. 8 email to majors and minors in the English Department and shared it with the student newspaper. This is the email in full:
Some years ago, the Penn English faculty voted on a motion stating that we would like the FBH entryway to represent the full range of writers, texts, and media that we teach and study. We planned at that time to relocate the large Shakespeare portrait, but the effort stalled as we considered options for a suitable alternative in that public space. Late last week, following a town hall discussion in the department, some students removed the Shakespeare portrait and delivered it to my office as a way of affirming their commitment to a more inclusive mission for the English department. That commitment is shared by the faculty. After winter break, we will initiate an open and collaborative conversation among students, faculty, and employees in English to come up with a plan for that public space. In the meantime, someone has posted an image of the celebrated poet and activist Audre Lorde, and it will remain until we’ve arrived at a collective solution. The department will continue to explore, in all of our classes, the meaning of important works produced by artists and writers well before Shakespeare and well after Lorde, in several media and from across the globe. We invite everyone to join us in the task of critical thinking about the changing nature of authorship, the history of language, and the political life of symbols.
It’s just a portrait on a wall. I don’t see how it’s “subtracting from Western Civilization” to replace it with one of Audre Lorde, who, after all, is also a contributor to “Western Civilization.”
And more importantly, the adversary of the Russian people themselves, which is something that also deserves attention too.
I think from the point of view of state to state dynamics, yeah, the Russian state is our adversary. But we should never, ever forget that the people aren’t the state.
I hope it’s clear we said the exact same thing there.
That is–one reason (among others) we should oppose the Putin state is because he himself is an adversary of the Russian people. So we agree on that.
Honest, what I would like to see more of in this ongoing issue is some stuff from actual Russian leftists opposed to the Putin state.
…
I agree. Putin is the enemy of the Russian people. I think our two-party structure also goes heavily against the interests of the vast majority of this country, and we have our own forms of state-on-citizen violence too. And I’m guessing that’s a big part of WV’s point. But the degree of violence isn’t the same, nor is the degree to which the two states rip off the people.
While both do, Putin and his fellow Russian oligarchs have taken this to a whole new level. It’s reported he’s managed to hoard roughly 200 billion in wealth, while being — as far as we know — a “public servant” his entire adult life.
The everyday corruption of American pols is just dwarfed by the scale occurring in Russia, which pretty much started as soon as the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Some 15 million Russians died as a result of the switch from state capitalism — they never had actual socialism — to its warp-speed, kleptocratic neoliberalism.
As for Russian leftists now. Yes. I’d love to read their views. Would have to search for them. It’s much easier to find their writings from the late 19th to early 20th century. The vast majority of them opposed the Bolsheviks and would have condemned the neoliberal kleptocrats even more.
Thanks, WV. That looks like the biopic is going to be a classic.
Van Gogh is my favorite artist, all time. It was overwhelming for me to visit some of the places he lived when I went to France in 2007. Especially Arles. Took a picture of the Night Cafe, and the little asylum where he stayed during one of his “episodes.” Walked the streets he walked. Saw what he saw. Monet and others, too. But Van Gogh was the height for me.
This website has all of his letters, translated into English and annotated. Plus biographical info, etc.
The site for the letters is connected to the Van Gogh museum — as far as I know:
The most recent revelations, not yet included on the Bill Moyers timeline include:
Top Trump Organization executive asked Putin aide for help on business deal
and the revelations about Felix Sater:
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON — A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.
The associate, Felix Sater, wrote a series of emails to Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which he boasted about his ties to Mr. Putin. He predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would highlight Mr. Trump’s savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
