Saturday – 19 February 2011
It’s a grey day here… and there’s the possibility of snow in the forecast. Yay.

Last night was the beginning of the end of an era. The local Borders, where we spend the “coffee” portion of our Clitorati gathering,  is one of the nearly 300 stores that is slated to close. I’ve been going to that store for close to ten years; I started going there on Friday evenings because that was where and I would meet so that she could coach me at drawing. In fact, the entire Clitorati gathering came about from me telling people that they should come and hang out with us while we were there. And now, nearly ten years down the road, we find ourselves looking for a new home-away-from-home.

We knew that the stor was closing. What we didn’t know, until we arrived last night, was that the Seattle’s Best Coffee franchise/sublet that ran the cafe closed – for the last time – on Thursday night. This means that for the next two months (or however long it takes to liquidate their inventory), there will be no cafe service. At all. I spoke with Brandi, one of the sales associates about the closing: She said that she and the other employees found out about it on Wednesday… from The Wall Street Journal article. According to her, employees:

  • …had no advance warning.
  • …haven’t been offered any kind of relocation/transfer package to the Orem/Provo store.
  • …will be officially unemployed when the closeout sale is over.

While Borders has been on the rocks financially for a long time, I think that it’s poor form to let your employees be blindsided by the closure news and have to find out from mass media.

Since the list of closing stores came out on Wednesday, there’s been chatter among the group as to where we should now meet. We bandied about a few places and decided that we’d test drive the new location when the time came. Funny, we weren’t quite expecting it to be so soon. We had eight people show up for coffee last night, which made for a decent litmus test. I think that our new choice fared decently; we’ll have to see how it stands up over time.

After coffee and dinner, I came home and played DCUO for a bit. I’ve decided that I don’t necessarily want to plow through the game. Instead, I’m enjoying just roaming around the city (I haven’t even left Metropolis yet) and enjoying the view. Jim Lee and his crew did an amazing job of bringing Metropolis to life. I’m looking forward to seeing the other settings the game has to offer.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
 Today’s person of note is: Wallace Thurman (1, 2, 3)

Wallace Henry Thurman was an American novelist during the Harlem Renaissance. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, which explores discrimination among black people based on skin color.

Thurman was born in Salt Lake City, UT to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. Between his mother’s many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. His grandmother’s home doubled as a saloon where alcohol was served without a license.

Thurman’s early life was marked by loneliness, family instability and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago, but he would have to finish grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska.[2] During this time, he suffered from persistent heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California’s lower altitude in the winter of 1918, Thurman came down with influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. Considering his history of illness, he surprisingly recovered and then returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.

Thurman studied at the University of Utah and the University of Southern California, although he did not receive a degree. He moved to Harlem in 1925, and by the time he became managing editor of the black periodical Messenger in 1926, he had immersed himself in the Harlem literary scene and encouraged such writers as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to contribute to his publication. That summer, Hughes asked Thurman to edit Fire!! , a literary magazine conceived as a forum for young black writers and artists. Despite outstanding contributors, who included Hughes, Hurston, and Gwendolyn Bennett, the publication folded after one issue. Two years later Thurman published Harlem, again with work by the younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance, but it too survived only one issue.

Thurman was lauded as a satirist and often used satire to accuse blacks of prejudice against darker-skinned member of their race. He also rejected the belief that the Harlem Renaissance was a substantial literary movement, claiming that the 1920s produced no outstanding writers and that those who were famous exploited, and allowed themselves to be patronized by, whites. He claimed, as did a number of authors of the decade, that white critics judged black works by lower standards than they judged white efforts. Thurman maintained that black writers were held back from making any great contribution to the canon of Negro literature by their race-consciousness and decadent lifestyles.

Thurman and others of the “Niggerati” (the deliberately ironic name Thurman used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should be more objective in their writings and not so self-conscious that they failed to acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives. As Singh and Scott put it, “Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance is, thus, staunch and revolutionary in its commitment to individuality and critical objectivity: the black writer need not pander to the aesthetic preferences of the black middle class, nor should he or she write for an easy and patronizing white approval.”

Thurman died at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism.

Stray Toasters

And with that, it’s time to finish getting ready for today’s HeroClix tournament at Dr. Volt’s.

Namaste.