Across the Transom: March 2024

and if I can’t comprehend the distinctions, then I can’t make creative use of the platforms.

While we’re readying to leave, I mention to Brady that I’m not sure how much of what’s happening on the Corner—in all of Harlem—is about race in America or about how we accumulate capital.

'There is no dividing line,' she says. 'Everybody says America’s greatest sin is slavery. Slavery is not a sin. The sin is greed.

Until they were stolen, the plains of Harlem were called Muscoota, by their Lenape inhabitants. They were used for farming before land was made a possession. Every so often, the soil was likely refreshed by controlled and alternated burnings. This same fertility is what made it the invading Dutch West India Company’s object of desire. They arrived directly from Amsterdam in 1623, on the lower end of the island, with a chartered goal 'to advance the peopling of those fruitful and unsettled parts.'

Every reasonably aware person of our time is aware of the obvious fact that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as a compensatory activity to which one might honorably devote oneself. The reason for this deterioration is clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life. In the civil-war phase we are engaged in, and in close connection with the orientation we are discovering for certain superior activities to come, we believe that all known means of expression are going to converge in a general movement of propaganda that must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality.