C. Namwali Serpell’s Seven Modes of Uncertainty, George W Bush,

George W Bush charged $100,000 to speak at fund-raising event for military veterans







Former First Lady Laura Bush earned $50,000 from the same charity

ANDREW BUNCOMBE 

NEW YORK

Thursday 09 July 2015

George W Bush, the man held responsible by millions around the world for ordering the US invasion of Iraq, reportedly charged a charity $100,000 to speak at a fund-raising event for military veterans.

A series of reports said the former president billed the sum to Texas-based Helping a Hero for an event in 2012. The organisation also provided Mr Bush with a private jet to travel to the event, which cost an additional $20,000.

Laura Bush, the former president’s wife, earned $50,000 after appearing for the group in 2011, ABC News reported.

In 2014, President Obama said he would deploy around 300 additional troops to Iraq - bringing the total to 750

Helping a Hero told the news channel the $170,000 in total costs were worth it because the Bushes helped the group raise record funds in 2011 and 2012.

“It was great because he reduced his normal fee of $250,000 down to $100,000,” said Meredith Iler, the charity’s former chairwoman.

Medea Benjamin, an anti-war activist with Code Pink told The Independent it was "disgusting" that Mr Bush had taken the money.

"This is the man who sent thousands of American servicemen to their deaths - and tens of thousands to be injured - on a fools mission to Iraq, and he has the gall to charge them for making a speech," she said. "I think it is astounding that he would have the nerve to do that."

The Pentagon says that 4,493 American troops have lost their in Iraq and that more than 32,000 have been injured.

Quite how many Iraqis lost their lives remains a topic of debate. The Pentagon has always insisted it did not keep details of Iraqi deaths. A report published in the Lancet as far back as 2006 suggested that up to 650,000 people had keen killed as a result of the 2003 invasion and the subsequent violence and chaos.

A spokesperson for the former president, Freddy Ford, confirmed the payment but declined to comment on the criticism over the $100,000 speaking fee from the veterans' charity.

In an e-mail statement to the channel, Mr Ford said, “President Bush has made helping veterans one of his highest priorities in his post presidency.”

Some veterans criticised Mr Bush for charging the fee. However, Frank Dorsey of the 25th AAA Searchlight Battalion Veterans Association in New York, said he believed the former president had always been attentive to the needs of veterans.

He added: "Most of the high-profile politicians charge all sorts of money for speeches at dinners and college events. It's a growing trend."

****----
US-based Zambian writer Namwali Serpell has promised to share her winnings in the Caine Prize for African Writing with the runners up.

She received the £10,000 ($15,600) prize for her short story The Sack.

The judges described it as "innovative, stylistically stunning, haunting and enigmatic".

Ms Serpell was among five writers short-listed for the prize, regarded as Africa's leading literary award.

Two South Africans and two Nigerians were also shortlisted for the prize - Masande Ntshanga for Space, FT Kola for A Party for the Colonel, Elnathan John for Flying and Segun Afolabi for The Folded Leaf.
Latest African news updates

Ms Serpell told BBC Newsday that the promise to share the winnings was "an act of mutiny".

"I wanted to change the structure of the prize.

"It is very awkward to be placed into this position of competition with other writers that you respect immensely and you feel yourself put into a sort of American idol or race-horse situation when actually, you all want to support each other."

The chair of judges, Zoe Wicomb, awarded the prize at a dinner held at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in the UK.

The short story "yields fresh meaning with every reading," she said.

In The Sack, two men who live together their whole lives love one woman but don't know which one of them she loves.

"One of the men has a series of backwards moving dreams about his own death and he becomes very paranoid about the other man," Ms Serpell said.

UC Berkeley

Namwali Serpell, UC Berkeley associate professor of English, recently won the ‪#‎CainePrize‬, a coveted award for African authors — and then she shared the prize money with her fellow nominees(!). Congratulations, Professor Serpell!

(Photo credit: Courtesy the Caine Prize for African Writing)

Serpell wins Caine Prize and shares the wealth

Berkeley English professor Namwali Serpell graciously accepts a coveted award for African authors, but says writing isn't a competitive sport.

NEWS.BERKELEY.EDU|由 PUBLIC AFFAIRS 上傳

16 July 2015

Several Modes of Serpell

C. Namwali Serpell’s Seven Modes of Uncertainty has roots in her observation that while she found great pleasure in the experience of not knowing what’s really happening in a book, she hated feeling uncertain in her life. Seven Modes is an attempt to draw the uncertainty we recognize in stories into relation with the familiar uncertainty of life, and to consider whether literary uncertainty could perhaps help us understand how to actually live with the anxiety of not knowing.

Serpell argues that literary uncertainty affords diverse modes of experience with aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions, and that it emerges over time from a reader’s shifting responses to complex structures of conflicting information. Think of the destabilizing feeling of a shifting point of view, of hearing the same story from a different perspective, or of a scene repeating until what seemed normal grows dream-like, uncanny. She uses readings of books by the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, and Tom McCarthy to show that novels are “structurally suggestive,” affording readings that in turn afford ethical experiences, positive and negative.

Fairly or not, this study of how literature can influence by disrupting what we think we know is itself given a hint of uncertainty when one learns that Serpell herself is actually a decorated writer of fiction. Indeed, this month her short story The Sack won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, awarded annually for outstanding English-language short fiction by an African writer. The Caine, which has been described as the African writing equivalent of the Booker Prize, carries a £10,000 award, a sum Serpell opted to share with fellow shortlistees Segun Afolabi, Elnathan John, FT Kola, and Masande Ntshanga. Serpell described the decision as an act of “mutiny,” and showed the capaciousness of her concern for structure in explaining that choice to Huck magazine:

Maybe it’s because I’ve been teaching about mutiny that that word is so present to me. It came from a sense that the prize itself is structured like a competition. Prizes are often competitions, but this particular prize brings the shortlisted writers together for a week before the ceremony. We did panels together. We did readings together. We hung out together. We drank together. We ate together and we talked about our families and our work.

When you spend that much time supporting each other, it felt horrible to be pitted against each other. You could feel the difference in the atmosphere when we would all be talking and hanging out and a stranger would come up and say: “Good luck,” or “Who do you think is going to win?” Suddenly the tenor would change. It’s so uncomfortable to be asked to compete with your friends. Writing to me has never seemed like a competitive sport.

The more I thought about it, I figured the reason the prize is structured this way is because of the money. The money has to go to one person and for people to be interested, we have to drum up this sense of drama. I thought instead of attacking the prize, which is a wonderful thing, I’ll go for the source of its structure, which, for me, seemed to be the money.

In the BBC Africa “Masterclass” video below, produced to mark Serpell’s Caine Prize win, she describes the power and possibility of short stories:

Readers can perhaps look forward to further ethically productive uncertainty at Serpell’s hand: she’s at work on a novel.