(Photo: Diane Diederich Photography) Read Parts 17-18 here A clear, cold winter morning dawns and London’s pigeons, night-shift workers, breakfast cookers, and babies are all up and moving. “O what a busy morning,” abuzz with engines, wires, machines, and butchery: “The housewife . . . Watches the cleaver catch the naked / New . . .
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(Photo: Aristotle, manuscript miscellany of philosophical writings, mainly texts by Aristotle (Greek) Rome, 1457. Cod. Phil. gr. 64, fol. 8v, Austrian National Library. Austrian National Library, unknown author.) Read Parts 15-16 here “monologue / Is the death of language” The fancy word is “intersubjectivity.” We become the selves we are (to the extent . . .
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(Photo: Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes – The sleep of reason produces monsters (No. 43), from Los Caprichos) Read Part 14 here “Nightmare leaves fatigue” Exhausted by the stresses of pandemic, racial reckoning, a nail-biter of an election on which hinged the question of whether something like democracy continues or we slide on into . . .
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(Photo: Michael Thurston, The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry. From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott. Palgrave, 2009) Read Parts 12-13 here “the triumphant cheers of the lost souls” Circles and cycles, accidents and underworlds, elections and mandates and slight tardiness. All of these shape the fourteenth section of Autumn Journal, as MacNeice reports on . . .
Read MoreRead Part 11 here “These days are misty, insulated, mute” We are at the midpoint of autumn and the midpoint of the poem, far enough into both to realize that the incessant endings signaled by earlier sunsets, falling leaves, the endings of days/seasons/years/relationships, and the poet’s own dithering, are themselves only the . . .
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(Photo: Kim Novak, from Hitchcock’s Vertigo) Read Part 10 here “Everything wrong has been proved.” Events of world-historical magnitude rage, both across the map and just outside our doors, rage even inside our homes, carried there by howling radios and their offspring. Work continues apace as we prepare, commute, spend the day in . . .
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(Photo: Persephone reunited with her mother Demeter) Read Part 9 here “And so return to work.” Just as a present-day trip to Birmingham sends MacNeice into memories of his earlier life in that city, section IX’s thoughts on teaching classics provoke a reverie in which MacNeice recalls “the beginnings of other terms,” a . . .
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Bridging Divides, Renewing Solidarities As we emerge from a summer rife with anti-Black racism and deadly violence against Black people, followed by police brutality against peaceful protestors, I reflect on the different histories of racism – anti-Black racism on the one hand, and, anti-Asian racism on the other – and their connections . . .
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I discuss here two examples of Asian American artists whose recent activities have helped to frame public notions of Asian American identity in relation to other US racial groups. As we continue to hear the stereotypical refrain about Asian Americans enjoying power and privilege in the US, due to our risk-averse, upwardly . . .
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Since the start of 2020, racist and xenophobic incidents against Asians and Asian Americans have spiked, with the website StopAAPIHate reporting over 2,600 incidents of harassment, bullying, verbal assault, and violence since mid March, with many, many more going unreported. Each of these incidents are painful but important to hear about. One recent example from . . .
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