Jess Martinaitis

What If We Get It Right? →

Visions of climate futures

The task, impossible at times, is to dialectically hold two uncomfortable truths: that people who have been exposed to indoctrinating narratives most of their lives are not at fault for that, and that they are simultaneously responsible – assuming exposure to free information and accessibility – for examining the validity of those narratives. To co... See more

The Germans, of course, have a long word to describe this process of collectively coming to terms with their gruesome past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung

It’s no secret: Black culture drives pop culture. It is “the original avant-garde,” as Felipe Luciano, a former TV producer, has said. But I sometimes wonder if appropriation is a prerequisite of Black culture going mainstream.

A world in which artists think like entrepreneurs, he writes in the Atlantic, is one where “You’re a musician and a photographer and a poet; a storyteller and a dancer and a designer ... which means that you haven’t got time for your 10,000 hours in any of your chosen media. But technique or expertise is not the point. The point is versatility. Lik... See more

This raises immediately the question of whom one is writing ‘for’. My own, short answer is that I have never had a reader in mind. I have ideas, people, events, shapes, and I write ‘for’ those things, and hope that the completed work will be of interest to others.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth.

The black American writer Richard Wright once wrote that black and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality.

But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, pe... See more

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.