The Bottom of Heaven Blogging Postmodern Blackness

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Links, media, and random ideas that we recommend from the past week.

• I woke up on the morning of my 35th birthday to see President Barack Obama receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. I’ve offered my thoughts about the award already, so this time I thought I’d let the awesome folks at SuperNews! remind us of the extraordinary difficult circumstances under which Obama receives the award (and that he is not, in fact, the Messiah).

• It’s time for National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black Month over at Carleen Brice’s blog! One of the books Carleen recommends that I need to get my hands on right away is Victor Lavelle’s Big Machine: A Novel. She describes it as  “Stephen King meets Richard Pryor.” Whoa. Anybody else read it yet?

• The new animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox is brilliant. Go see it. It’s not in 3-D, not produced by Pixar Studios, and probably won’t come with Happy Meal toys, but Wes Anderson’s adaptation has remarkable creative depth, humor, and ingenuity. I can’t recommend it highly enough. (The little one and I are off to see The Princess and the Frog today and I know I’ll probably have something to say about it too.)

• Check out Ommwriter, a wonderfully simple word processing program that I stumbled across at The Buddha is My DJ. The program is designed to give you a fresh, blank screen free of distractions, while its atmospherics help settle and focus your mind. Scott’s right, this thing is pretty freakin’ cool (and for Macs only).

• It’s a few weeks old now, but I’ve been mulling over Alan Brinkley’s column in Newsweek, “Half a Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste” about why both the science and the humanities should be valued. I shared the following paragraph with the my students on the last day of class this semester:

Science and technology teach us what we can do. Humanistic thinking can help us understand what we should do. The humanities are not simply vehicles of aesthetic reward and intellectual inspiration, as valuable as those purposes are. Science and technology aspire to clean, clear answers to problems (as elusive as those answers might be). The humanities address ambiguity, doubt, and skepticism—essential underpinnings in a complex and diverse society and a turbulent world.

• And finally, SADE is back. Thanks to my dad, Frieda and I were raised on a constant playlist of “Diamond Life” and “Promise” growing up, so we couldn’t be more excited! The first single “Soldier of Love” is in heavy rotation in my house and the calendar is marked for the full album release: February 8, 2010.