Ordinary Notes e-bog

A finalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionCritically acclaimed author of In the Wake, "e;Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility"e; (Saidiya Hartman).A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past-public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal-with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages-sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature-always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. "e;I learned to see in my mother's house,"e; writes Sharpe. "e;I learned how not to see in my mother's house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words."e; Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of "e;beauty as a method,"e; collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a "e;Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,"e; and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.4-color art throughout