Wednesday, November 11, 2015

For Everyone Who Thinks Hermione Should Have Ended Up With Harry

You need to sort out your priorities.

This is Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. You've probably heard of them. Their best friend is a guy called Harry Potter. You've probably heard of him too, but he's not that important compared with Ron and Hermione, tbh.

This is Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. You've probably heard of them. Their best friend is a guy called Harry Potter. You've probably heard of him too, but he's not that important compared with Ron and Hermione, tbh.

Warner Bros.

Because Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger are, without a doubt, the most important literary couple of all time. All. Time.

Because Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger are, without a doubt, the most important literary couple of all time. All. Time.

Warner Bros. / Apple

"But what about Romeo and Juliet?" I hear you cry. "What about Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, or Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy?"

"But what about Romeo and Juliet?" I hear you cry. "What about Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, or Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy?"

Warner Bros. / BuzzFeed

Let's start from the very beginning: From the moment they met, we all knew that Ron and Hermione were meant to be.

Let's start from the very beginning: From the moment they met, we all knew that Ron and Hermione were meant to be.

Warner Bros. / BuzzFeed


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23 Powerful Life Lessons "The Hunger Games" Have Taught Us

Every fire starts with a single spark.

There are many, many different kinds of love.

There are many, many different kinds of love.

Lions Gate Entertainment

And it's fine to be confused about that, it's never an easy thing to define.

And it's fine to be confused about that, it's never an easy thing to define.

Lions Gate Entertainment

Because love is weird.

Because love is weird.

Lions Gate Entertainment / Via violetharmon.tumblr.com

All friendships, no matter how short they may be, change us forever.

All friendships, no matter how short they may be, change us forever.

Lions Gate Entertainment


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Are You More Elf Or Hobbit?

Rivendell and The Shire are both pretty nice, tbh.

Saul Williams On The Politics Of Race And Poetry In America

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed

Saul Williams is an entertainer who wears many hats: actor, rapper, musician, artist, and writer, to name a few. We've seen him star in the 1998 film Slam and take the lead in the 2014 Broadway show Holler If Ya Hear Me. Williams has also performed alongside artists like Erykah Badu, The Fugees, and Nas. But he's arguably at his best — his most raw and true form — when he's Saul Williams, poet.

When the author was originally commissioned to write his latest poetry collection, US (a.), he was expecting to reflect on the country's elation over electing Barack Obama as the first black president. But as time went on, Williams' task to write about America became increasingly difficult due to the numerous deaths of black teenagers at the hands of police officers. As a result, US (a.) portrays the complicated identity of what it means to be an American and how race heavily influences everyone's experiences.

BuzzFeed had the chance to catch up with Williams and discuss police brutality, his new book of poetry, and his family's activist legacy. Here’s what he had to say:

When you were commissioned to write a book about America, what did that mean to you?

Saul Williams: On one hand, to be commissioned is an honor. Who the fuck asks anyone to write a poem? I was commissioned only once before to write a poem for Nas and Kelis's wedding. For this book, they threw out big names like Ginsberg and Whitman, saying this could be my big American poem like they’d done before. On the other hand, I was offended because I thought, What do you think my other books are? Aren't I critiquing America in them, too? Regardless, it didn't seem like it was going to be a hard task, but then suddenly the country erupted over the killings of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others.

How did those events change the direction of the book?

SW: I was a childhood activist out marching with my parents at 10 years old screaming, “Fuck the police, fuck the police!" My parents raised me talking about all of the craziness that goes on in society, and now I’m the adult with kids who are asking, "Did you hear about those fucking police?" Holy hell, that's hella depressing. I thought, Oh yeah, you want me to write about fucking America? I'll write about fucking America! That explains some of the middle-finger-themed poems.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed

What’s the biggest difference between US (a.) and your other projects?

SW: My other projects come out of my own head, but this book was commissioned. The publishers gave me nine months, I handed it in, and the next day I expected them to be like, "You're brilliant! This is beautiful, I love the titles of the poems!” But they were like, “This is only 12,000 words, did you look at your contract?” They were expecting 40,000 words, which is funny because as a poet it's all about economizing language; if I had gone back to the poems in the book that I had edited then maybe we'd be at 40,000 words, but I edited the fuck out of them because we don't need all those words. But they wanted 40,000 words, which for me is about 120,000 words before editing. That is America in a nutshell: It asks you to do something that's an honor and then be like, “It’s not enough.”

How I look at America particularly has a lot to do with what I learned when I was able to step outside of it.

Is there significance behind the way you used punctuation and capitalization in the title?

SW: It’s rooted in the idea of “us and them.” There actually isn’t any disconnect between us, in the same way that scientifically there's no real such thing as race. I thought about the divisions that exist in America and all of the perspectives that I could write from: men, black men, middle-class men, men from the ghetto, Americans, people who went to college, all of “us.” I also figured that in my truest form, I'd probably have to write multiple books to do a complete observational analysis on America, so the little (a) symbolizes my first installment. Who knows, maybe I'll come up with (b).

In the foreword you wrote that you “voted for change” and then almost immediately left the U.S. Was that intentionally planned?

SW: It just so happened that that opportunity came. Obama got inaugurated in January and I had a friend who offered me a place in Paris in February to move in June. It was cheaper than where I was living and I was like, I've always wanted to do this, I should fucking do it. I moved to Brazil as a kid and I knew that so much of how I look at the world and how I look at America particularly has a lot to do with what I learned when I was able to step outside of it, observe from the outside, and also communicate with people who are not from here.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed

What was it like to watch most of Obama's presidency from outside the United States?

SW: I think as we saw when Obama was elected, there was a celebratory mode that people were in. They thought it was really cool and it was a good look, especially after Bush. But I was interacting with a lot of North Africans and Middle Easterners who still brought up topics like drone warfare and the discovery of how much of a centrist Obama was, especially in his first term. Now it’s nearing the end of his second term and he's met with Native American communities 10 times more than any other president ever has. It's little things like that that might be the legacy. Simultaneously, when you get something like that happening all of the nonsense comes out of the woodwork, like the tea party, Donald Trump, and white-power type of shit. I think people witnessing the tea party found that crazy, but at the same time they couldn't find it so crazy because we were in the middle of a fascist uprising across Europe as well. Fuckshit's happening everywhere.

You included a photo of your mom in US (a.) where she’s getting arrested at a protest. Why is the picture important to you?

SW: In 2013 my cousin found it on eBay. The photographer was selling it and just described it "Black woman at protest Brooklyn, 1963.” My cousin who lives in St. Thomas was like, "Isn't this Aunt Juanita?" He sent it to me first and I burst into tears because I knew this story; we had grown up hearing about this photo because supposedly it was on the front page of the New York Daily Herald in 1963. I heard my parents say, "Your mom was on the front page and she got arrested for protesting.” My dad was like, "I got arrested too that day, but it wasn't in the paper.”

How did your parents inform your understanding of politics and social change?

SW: When I was in the third grade, I thought I either wanted to be an actor or a lawyer when I grew up. My mom told me to do my next school report on Paul Robeson, and it was that; it was the fact that my parents threw around names like Paul Robeson, invited guests to the house like Odetta, and someone like Pete Seeger was a regular member of my dad's church where he was a pastor. I grew up around these people who always aligned their artistry with protest and so I just thought it was normal. The connection between protest and art always made sense to me; it was always about these visionaries who gave their lives in service to humanity. The freshest artists were always that — Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell — they all knew the world is bigger than just them. I couldn't understand why anyone would waste their time singing about anything else when this is really where the iconic shit is.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed

What do you think about the role that social media plays in activism today?

SW: When the Arab Spring went down I was like OK, Twitter is the shit. Facebook is the shit. Now there's no fucking holding us back, they should've never given us these things. The Arab Spring had me fucking ecstatic. I was in Paris surrounded by a lot of people from the countries where the shit was going down, being in taxicabs with an Algerian driver on his iPhone like, "Holy shit!” That's when I really acknowledged the role that technology can and will play in the transformation of society.

How did it feel protesting in the streets of New York City over the death of Eric Garner compared with watching other events unfold online?

SW: It's real when you get out there, you see the police standing in those lines, you see what their faces look like, and you know that these are a bunch of guys that could give a fuck. Although there's a lot of cool ones — when I'm lost, I love asking police for directions, especially if I'm driving with a joint or something. But when it comes to protests, I saw the anger on their faces. At one point I was in a policeman's arms and he was shaking me so hard, he even ripped my favorite coat. My wife fucking screamed like I never heard her before, it was the scariest shit I ever heard. She was so loud that all the police turned and were like, “Let him go!” In those moments, no one gives a fuck about the internet. I remember saying to my wife, "You should've taken a picture!” But in the moment you’re not always concerned about that. No one talks about the fact that there are so many police on steroids; that's the popular drug amongst policemen. The rookie comes in and they’re like, “You want to be intimidating on the street? Bulk up, take some 'roids.” And there’s a crazy amount of testosterone in those things; no drug is ever just affecting your body. So these guys are amped up on steroids, literally, and acting accordingly. On the one hand, you feel empowered by technology, but being out there and having to reason with these guys is difficult. It can also be fun in a sense to reason with police, as long as you're not dealing with the gravest of realities, which is witnessing someone being hurt or killed.

Poetry has always been there for me when I needed it to help me find some sort of balance or to help me find humor.

How did poetry help you work through some of the events this year?

SW: Poetry has always been this therapeutic and cleansing process for me. I used to write raps, but I started shifting and specifically focusing on poetry when I was 23. That's also the age when I started meditating and wanting to work on myself. I always considered poetry the residue of the work I was doing on myself, so I was chronicling thoughts and ideas in an attempt to relinquish myself of doubts and fears that were getting in the way of this self-realization process. I was also chronicling the things that I was realizing, the epiphanies I was having. And in the gravest moments, whether it was breakups, deaths, or a close family member experiencing something terrible like rape, and I didn’t know what to do with this anger, I would write. Even if the terrible thing didn't happen directly to me and it happened to someone next to me, I’d still feel it. Poetry has always been this open-armed reception when working through ideas based on anger, fear, dreams, or what have you. I used to walk down the streets in New York reciting these poems like mantras in my head, because they would get me through the day. Poetry has always been there for me when I needed it to help me find some sort of balance or to help me find humor. Writing US (a.) helped me laugh, which is necessary sometimes, otherwise we're just scrolling through our timelines getting angry. To be just perfectly honest, when it helps the most are in those moments when you feel completely alone, misunderstood, and confused by life.

If you could say anything to your younger self, what would you say?

SW: Those mushrooms you have in your hand are a good idea.

US (a.) is on sale now.

US (a.) is on sale now.

MTV Books

Why Doesn’t America Have An Elena Ferrante?

Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed

This fall, Elena Ferrante’s beloved Neapolitan series of novels came to a close. Starting with My Brilliant Friend and ending with The Story of the Lost Child, the series’s two central characters, best friends Elena and Lila, ascend from the impoverished bottom of Italian society to, if not the top, then the comfortable middle class. While most critics and commentators have focused on the series’s portrayal of the women’s tortured but enduring friendship, I find that the books captivate American readers — myself included — for another reason: the main character’s sensational social ascent.

I scanned through reviews on Amazon to see if I alone was lured by their story of class mobility. I could be expected to thrill to this theme. My day job is running a journalism nonprofit devoted to these questions; my grandparents spent their lives selling shoes. But other Ferrante superfans made it plain that the main draw is not the books’ pulpy aspects but their social consciousness: “By embracing pure intellectualism, these girls find a way to cope with their existence and to gather a glimmer of hope … challenging all to rise above circumstance and need,” wrote one Amazon reviewer.

“What is brilliant about the book's treatment of these problems, is that while it is placed in a specific place and time (Naples in 1950s), it gets to the universal effects these problems create in people's lives from childhood onwards. In essence, it says a lot about poor rural areas or urban ghettoes in the US in 2014,” writes another. As one of the books puts it: "The women fought among themselves more than the men, they pulled each other’s hair, they hurt each other. To cause pain was a disease."

Economic ascents of the sort featured in Ferrante’s novels have become a rarity in American literature and life. The young upwardly mobile professionals are now in the past, replaced by a generation motivated primarily by fear of falling, as our median household income has stagnated. The poor tend to remain poor: They simply made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents, as Michael Harrington would say.

However, in the Neapolitan books, the girls are not stuck in place. While at first they merely dream of escape through financial gain and success, “In that last year of elementary school, wealth became our obsession,” Elena, My Brilliant Friend’s narrator, recounts, and the twosome then actually rise through the ranks, in an ambiguous, conflicted fashion. A porter’s daughter and a shoemaker’s daughter, respectively, the protagonists vault from the bottom of the heap in a desperate post-war Naples to positions of influence in the cultural establishment — Elena as a writer, and Lila as an programmer and entrepreneur in the country's budding technology sector.

It was the girls’ social class story that spoke to me. I think of my own family’s mobility: My immigrant grandparents had a small shoe store in the Bronx. As a child I played on the floor with polish, a shoehorn, and a footwear stretcher. My other grandmother worked as a teenager in New York City’s Lower East Side putting feathers on hats. In the East Village in the early naughts, where the primary music was a steady buzz of receipts being printed out in thousands of franchises and boutiques, where everyone was slouching toward perfection, I kept seeing the shadows of those early-20th-century work rooms hanging around like ghosts. I thought of how my mother got through college by working at a department store, how I was sent to a private school on my parents’ (low) middle-class salaries, where I got to be a special flower, with poetry recitals and Cuisenaire rods. This is a transformation that happens less and less frequently.

When we read Ferrante, we enter a portal and return back to this period between the 1950s and the 1970s, when such huge fluctuations actually happened more easily on our shores. Or as one of the Amazon reviewers put it: “I was raised in the kind of poverty that the girls experienced and know that Ferrante gets that sociological piece just right.”

One of the friends, Lila, was born in abject poverty; enough shoe leather and glue was a luxury. She is beguiled by a shopkeeper husband into a comparatively affluent life, and she molds herself into a provincial Jackie O. When that marriage comes violently undone, the undereducated Lila works in a sausage factory, where she is waist-deep in mortadella. Her mobility is reversed. But eventually she becomes a whiz at computing and starts a successful business with her partner. When does this happen now in this country? From mortadella to Microsoft? Almost never.

I spend my days editing personal narratives of people — journalists — who are themselves poor but were once affluent or are close to people who are trapped in an endless cycle of precariousness. Their families may be in three-quarter housing or dwelling permanently in motels. Sometimes, something happened and they tumbled down and never got back up. I want the outcomes to be different.

In Ferrante’s novels, the outcomes are very different. Elena escapes the stink, heat, dialect, and blood of Naples for what Ferrante describes in another one of her novels as the “bourgeois decorum” of Florence, where she sidesteps “the black well I came from.” Elena leaves the neighborhood on a scholarship, marries into a well-placed socialist academic family, and becomes a novelist. Part of the story, of course, is the 1960s boom that allowed Elena and others in the novel to ascend in different ways, including mobility by marriage. It is her future husband’s incredibly connected family, and his mother, Adele, who propel Elena’s upward mobility as a novelist.

Here we come to one of the unsung lures of Ferrante’s books: that the main character becomes famous and well-off through writing fiction. She is called upon to lecture to groups of women and then swelling groups of both sexes on her novels. In the series’s third book, Elena struggles with guilt over leaving her children, yes, but she leaves them not for dreary, poorly paid white-collar work but for an enriching life as an author — multicity book and lecture tours, surely expensive, organized by her publisher, a constant stream of article assignments, book deal after book deal, generous enough to help her sustain her household of three children. (That much of this rise is through publishing acclaimed books — usually an impoverishing activity — must only intensify critics’ love of the series.)

In America, most journalists are not being paid enough for their literary output and have become increasingly forced to rely on philanthropy, on nonprofits, squeezing their word counts for extra pennies, unable to pay their collective rent. In the novel, Elena’s despair and lust seem like luxuries for a member of the creative class. I read the books’ combined length in no more than two weeks' time (binge-reading feels better than binge TV!) — the protagonist’s well-remunerated, renowned, and very literary suffering has become a kind of pornography for me.

Where is the American equivalent of Ferrante? It would be good for our writers to tell our sordid story of the Great Recession and its aftermath and of inequality in the round like Ferrante has done: how wages have stagnated since 1979, how we have thrown the concept of standard of living out the window. There’s great literature to be written about people being frozen in place by their origins, incomes, and jobs. There’s even greater fiction to be written about citizens’ monumental zigzags from nothings to “somebodies” to nobodies.

Where are today’s American social novels about the downturn or its manic twin, class mobility? The inequality novel that Americans will read in droves, that critics pay attention to? There was once The Great Gatsby, Bellow’s Augie March, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and The Financier, even Raymond Carver’s working-class silent men of 30 years ago. Certainly those who claim the neorealist caption — Jonathan Franzen, recently dubbed an author of “failed-marriage razzmatazz” by one critic — have neglected this story.

Yet Ferrante is the writer that American readers are flocking to; perhaps our own most talented writers should take notice. Maybe the great American novel about our recent recession hasn’t happened for a reason. Maybe the novels of inequality were undone first by minimalism, then by $50,000-a-year MFA programs and the personal wealth they may require.

Who in American literature today deals with the subtleties of class difference in such a painful and sensitive way, while achieving even a fraction of Ferrante's massive popularity? The girls of her novels, after all, were born in the poorest neighborhood in a large, grimy city, at the end of World War II. They were not expected to go to college or even high school. Instead, they were expected to do manual labor, to marry men who would routinely hurt their bodies. They were not supposed to change their cities or their country.

There was this great age of American literature when these gaps and deprivations would be the centerpiece of our fiction. No longer.

One reason for this can be found in recent studies of Americans’ social mobility, which is low in comparison to many European countries. In today’s Mississippi, there is less mobility statistically than in the rest of First World as a whole. Among children who might be categorized as working-class or lower-middle-class, the likelihood that they might move up to the top quintile has fallen significantly. The writer Timothy Noah put it well in an article on the subject last year: “If you want to travel from the bottom to the top, try being born in western Europe.”

And so I — and we — must go to the fictionalized Naples of Ferrante to read the story we want to believe can happen again in our country and to encounter a brilliant panorama of women as they rise, fall, and rise again

***

Alissa Quart is the editor-in-chief of Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit that supported this piece. She is also the author of three nonfiction books, including Branded and Republic of Outsiders, and the 2015 poetry book Monetized. Follow her on Twitter @lisquart.

How Does The Way You Read Compare To Everyone Else?

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.” - George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

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47 Thoughts I Had While Watching "Harry Potter" For The First Time

White wizards doing black magic.

I was seven years old when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1998) debuted in the US. And I was pretty into it.

I was seven years old when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1998) debuted in the US. And I was pretty into it.

Scholastic

But I stopped reading after the first book, and I just wasn’t invested enough to the see the movie when it came out in 2001.

But I stopped reading after the first book, and I just wasn’t invested enough to the see the movie when it came out in 2001.

Shameful, I know.

Warner Bros. Pictures / Via gifhell.com

Seems weird, right? But growing up, Paid In Full was my favorite movie. I loved seeing people who looked like me on the screen, and people I could actually relate to.

Seems weird, right? But growing up, Paid In Full was my favorite movie. I loved seeing people who looked like me on the screen, and people I could actually relate to.

Also a shame if you haven't seen this cinematic masterpiece.

Miramax Films

But I've grown tired of being on the outside of all the Harry Potter inside jokes that I hear almost daily.

But I've grown tired of being on the outside of all the Harry Potter inside jokes that I hear almost daily.

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Which Fantastic Magical Beast Are You Based On Your Zodiac Sign?

We will be studying you next semester in Care of Magical Creatures.

"Fleek" And "Yaaas" Are Now Actual Words In The Dictionary

Dictionary.com announced over 150 new word entries today, including “doge,” “fleek,” and “yaaas.” What a time to be alive.

Here are 15 of the latest additions:

Asterisk (noun)

Asterisk (noun)

"Any factor or element that makes an otherwise outstanding achievement somewhat doubtful or less impressive."

imgur.com

Bestie (noun)

Bestie (noun)

"A person's best friend."

Via vzooparke.tumblr.com

Digital Citizen (noun)

Digital Citizen (noun)

"A person who develops the skills and knowledge to effectively use the Internet and other digital technology, especially in order to participate responsibly in social and civic activities."

pridesite.tumblr.com


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