Editor’s Note: On July 3, 2020 (“Independence Day, observed”), the POTUS delivered a speech on illegally occupied land sacred to Native Americans, with a monument sculpted by a friend of the KKK as his backdrop. To many, the aim behind his intentionally divisive words seemed clear: to win reelection by igniting a new Civil War. In . . .
Read More
A lager is a lager is a lager. Unless it’s a Lager+. And that’s what I deem the sixth beer in the Leaves of Grass tribute series from Bell’s Brewery: Salut au Monde! Bell’s dubs it an Unfiltered Rustic Lager, their version of a Kellerbier. Rustic and unfiltered can also describe the persona that Walt Whitman cultivated in “Salut au Monde!” . . .
Read More
he told me he was glad I wasn’t fat yetbut this time, with flesh glutinous on my arms and back,hips spread like grain, I wax at his bedside and watchhis violeting cheeks, their bruised orchids flutterwith every labored breath and I allow myselfto imagine what he must see: five years and my . . .
Read More
A few days after Italo Calvino’s funeral I jotted down the notes that follow, in order to remind myself of the situation and the feelings of the moment. I had just returned from France, and that evening Calvino’s wife (Chichita) called to tell me that Italo was dying. I left that night . . .
Read More
A review of What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance and In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché (Penguin 2019 and 2020) “I entered the small, mud-walled room, where she offered me a stool and a metal cup of water, smiling, her hair tied back, her eyes bathed in . . .
Read More
Shelley washes up once or twice a yearon the beach at the end of my street.And I still feel lucky to find him—my dear Bysshe,all tangled in burgundy seaweed on the sloping shore.And not the real one, mind you, not the one they draggedrotten from the Italian surf, ten days dead, bloated, . . .
Read More
In 328 BCE, Alexander the Great added the gesture of genuflection to his court ceremonies, following the practice of his vanquished enemy, Persia. It was an act of humility already practiced in Babylonia—diminishing one’s stature to a greater degree than a simple bow. The practice is common to many religions and extends . . .
Read More
The baby in the crib is sleeping. Instead of tiptoeing out of the room, the mother tiptoes in, looks long at the infant, then moves quietly across the carpet to the dresser against the far wall. Slowly she pulls open one of the drawers, pauses, looks again at the baby, and then . . .
Read More
(Photo from “Where are They Now: Ballparks of Bull Durham”) Two decades before the small old ballparkbecame a shrine to Hollywood nostalgiaI was there, a college kid, new in town,sitting alone, ten rows from the fieldand five hundred miles from home.The sparse crowd that steamy Sundayunder a milky August sky, the park itself,with . . .
Read More
