Sterling A Brown Quotes

There's no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I've started drinking my own urine. I laugh spontaneously at nothing. Sometimes I sleep under my futon. I'm flossing my teeth constantly until my gums are aching and my mouth tastes like blood. Before dinner last night at 1500 with Reed Goodrich and Jason Rust I was almost caught at a Federal Express in Times Square trying to send the mother of one of the girls I killed last week what might be a dried-up, brown heart. And to Evelyn I successfully Federal Expressed, through the office, a small box of flies along with a note, typed by Jean, saying that I never, ever wanted to see her face again and, though she doesn't really need one, to go on a fucking diet. But there are also things that the average person would think are nice that I've done to celebrate the holiday, items I've bought Jean and had delivered to her apartment this morning: Castellini cotton napkins from Bendel's, a wicker chair from Jenny B. Goode, a taffeta table throw from Barney's, a vintage chain-mail-vent purse and a vintage sterling silver dresser set from Macy's, a white pine whatnot from Conran's, an Edwardian nine-carat-gold "gate" bracelet from Bergdorfs and hundreds upon hundreds of pink and white roses.

Poetry, I tell my students, is idiosyncratic. Poetry is where we are ourselves, (though Sterling Brown said "Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'") digging in the clam flats for the shell that snaps, emptying the proverbial pocketbook. Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there. Poetry (and now my voice is rising) is not all love, love, love and I'm sorry the dog died. Poetry (here I hear myself loudest) is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?

He showed up for an application wearing his Sunday white shirt and a tie bought for him several years before. It was easy to see he had outgrown the undersized clip-on tie. He was very confident for almost seventeen years old and some might say he was brash. Sterling was passing the office as I explained to this adolescent applicant that ISC was not hiring at this time. Jack insisted he was dropping out of high school to support his mother and siblings.

I believe by Elizabeth Alexander Poetry, I tell my students, is idiosyncratic. Poetry is where we are ourselves, (though Sterling Brown said “Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”) digging in the clam flats for the shell that snaps, emptying the proverbial pocketbook. Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there. Poetry (and now my voice is rising) is not all love, love, love, and I’m sorry the dog died. Poetry (here I hear myself loudest) is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?

In 2010, Bruce Sterling and Chris Nakashima-Brown wrote the short story “Windsor Executive Solutions,” a very future-weird speculative story about the future of the British Monarchy.

Within the emerging African American literary tradition, the exploration of blues forms and themes was begun by Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neal Hurston, and other writers in the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement. Blues as criticism arose during and after the Great Depression from authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray, and during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s important contributions were made by Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and others. In the present period, many African American scholars working in the disciplines and fields of music, history, folklore, drama, poetry, art, literary criticism, cultural studies, theology, anthropology, etcetera have acknowledged the blues as a hearth of African American consciousness. As stated earlier, the social sciences remain a barrier not breached.

Miss Brown, alas, is such a sterling character that she lacks the necessary frivolity and shallowness considered essential in any young female looking for a husband.

Luke paused before asking hopefully, "Did you say something about sandwiches?" Merritt smiled. "I'll bring a tray to the front parlor." She went to the kitchen, fetched various items from the larder and pantry, and set the teakettle to boil. Although most ladies of her position rarely, if ever, set foot in the kitchen, Merritt had fallen into the habit of making small meals for herself on Cook's days off. It was faster and more convenient than waiting for things to be brought to her, and there was something soothing about puttering in her own kitchen. She made sandwiches with brown bread, ham, and mustard, and added hard-boiled eggs and pickles on the side.

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, a Brown University anthropologist—who had written about gender and prompted Bo Laurent to start the Intersex Society—rekindled the testosterone conversation in her 2000 book Sexing the Body. She suggested that the term “sex hormones” be changed to “growth hormones,” because that’s what they do. Testosterone and estrogen affect the development not only of the ovaries, testicles, vagina, and penis, but also of the liver, muscles, and bones. Indeed, they influence nearly every cell in the body. “So to think of them as growth hormones,” Fausto-Sterling once told the New York Times, “which they are, is to stop worrying that men have a lot of testosterone and women, estrogen.” Back in 1935, the same year testosterone was named, two scientists working independently figured out how to make the hormone from scratch—the key to mass production. Butenandt, the testosterone-from-pee researcher, was funded by the German company Schering. His competitor Leopold Ruzicka was sponsored by Swiss company Ciba. They both accomplished in the laboratory what the body does on its own: they tweaked a few molecules of cholesterol and turned it into testosterone. Cholesterol (in addition to its notorious reputation as an artery-clogger) also serves as the raw material from which the body makes a variety of hormones. The

Anne Fausto-Sterling, a Brown University anthropologist—who had written about gender and prompted Bo Laurent to start the Intersex Society—rekindled the testosterone conversation in her 2000 book Sexing the Body. She suggested that the term “sex hormones” be changed to “growth hormones,” because that’s what they do. Testosterone and estrogen affect the development not only of the ovaries, testicles, vagina, and penis, but also of the liver, muscles, and bones. Indeed, they influence nearly every cell in the body. “So to think of them as growth hormones,” Fausto-Sterling once told the New York Times, “which they are, is to stop worrying that men have a lot of testosterone and women, estrogen.

federal judge with the splendid name of Sterling Cato was to hold a territorial court nearby—not at a courthouse, for no such edifice existed, but at a tavern kept by a pro-slavery

It is equally hard to know what to make of Fausto-Sterling’s (1992, p. 199) claim that “there is no single undisputed claim about universal human behavior (sexual or otherwise).” Presumably even the most ardent cultural relativist would accept that everywhere; people live in societies; they eat, sleep, and make love; and that women give birth and men do not. The arguments seem to arise when we move from basic universals to their specific behavioral expression. Though everywhere women are the principal caretakers of children, the fact that there may be variation in how that task is fulfilled leads some anthropologists to conclude that mothering is not universal. This is analogous to arguing that because people eat different food in different parts of the world, eating is not universal. Evolutionary psychologists do not argue for cultural invariance in the expression of evolved adaptations. As Tooby and Cosmides (1992, p. 45) put it, “manifest expressions may differ between individuals when different environmental inputs are operated on by the same procedures to produce different manifest outputs.” At a behavioral level, the expression of the mechanism may vary but that does not question the universality of the generative mechanism itself. Fortunately Donald Brown (1991), trained in the standard ethnographic tradition, has documented the extent of human universals. The list is astoundingly long but here is a taste of the hundreds that he finds: gossip, lying, verbal humor, storytelling, metaphor, distinction between mother and father, kinship categories, logical relations, interpreting intention from behavior and recognition of six basic emotions. Of special interest to the study of gender we find: binary distinctions between men and women, division of labor by sex, more child care by women, more aggression and violence by men, acknowledgement of differences between male and female natures, and domination by men in the public political sphere. Now this last observation (that men predominate in positions of power) provides a nice example of the extreme reluctance of cultural anthropologists to acknowledge universals. In 1973, Steven Goldberg wrote a book documenting the universality of patriarchy. He was inundated with letters informing him that he was wrong and pointing out counter-examples. (Other feminists were more willing to accept his premise, see Bem, 1993; Millett, 1969; Rich, 1976.) Over the next 20 years, he carefully examined the available ethnographic documentation for each putative counter-example and in 1993 authored a second book in which he was emphatic that no society had yet been found that violated his rule. There are societies that are matrilineal and matrilocal and where women are accorded veneration and respect—but there are no societies which violate the universality of patriarchy defined as “a system of organisation … in which the overwhelming number of upper positions in hierarchies are occupied by males” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 14). Such a state of affairs is deplorable but mere denial of the facts will do nothing to alter it—women’s engagement in the political arena will.

Kindness can kill as well as cruelty, and it can never take the place of genuine respect.