by Adele A. Wilby

The link to Charles McGrath’s ‘No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say’ which appeared in the New York Times in January, only a few months prior to Roth’s death in May this year, was forwarded to me by a friend who thought I might find the article interesting. How indebted I am to my friend that he thought of me in those terms, for the sending of that article rekindled my acquaintance with Roth; life’s events and circumstances had left my reading of his work to the margins.

After reading that January interview, I was surprised and saddened to hear the announcement that Roth had died; despite his eighty-five years there was no suggestion of ill health on his part in the interview. However, the numerous critical and appreciatory obituaries propelled me into reflection on what I might have missed over the years by failing to read this major twentieth century literary figure that has now left us, and that it was time I returned to Roth to discover for myself what all the praise and criticism of his literature was all about. All that remained of my reading of Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Human Stain forty years ago was the impression that they were good books. Fired up with a renewed enthusiasm to ‘return’ to the Roth I had left behind, unsure of what to select from his numerous writings, but armed with my own life story and political history, I chose his I Married a Communist to start reading him again.

I married a communist in the political heyday of the Cold War seventies and eighties, and we could be thought of as politically active in the decades that followed. Thus, with the value of hindsight, of having at least temporarily succumbed to a socialist ideology and politics, and the development of a healthy skepticism of all ideologies, I have to admit to a curiosity as to how Roth would present politically engaged persons, and the socialist politics of the era, albeit in the United States, and I was not disappointed.

My first reaction after reading the final sentence, closing the book and resting it on my lap was to heave a heavy sigh of great satisfaction. Roth, I felt, had written a great book. Read more »

by Joshua Wilbur 

I would never call myself a birdwatcher. I’m confident—arrogant even—about blue jays and cardinals, but everything else is a crapshoot. I identify finches as sparrows, sparrows as hawks, hawks as starlings. I’m more often wrong than right.

That said, I do like to watch birds. In college, I would go to the Boston Aquarium to see the African penguins. Peering over the central railing, I would pick out a single penguin from the group and follow its (his? her?) every move for as long as possible. Into the water, out of the water, into the water again…

These days I spend a lot of time in Central Park, where countless pigeons roam the paths.  When I’m not in a rush, I’ll find a bench and read for awhile, and, inevitably, the legion arrives. Again, I like to pick out one member of the group and see what it does.  Whether penguin or pigeon (or finch or sparrow or gull), what fascinates me about watching birds is how contingent—how utterly arbitrary— their actions can seem.

Why does the bird take three steps this way instead of that way?

Why does it fly to that tree in particular?

Why does it return to the ground at my feet, turn a few circles, and continue its march along the sidewalk?  

I understand, of course. It’s looking for food. But there’s a wide gulf between a pigeon’s world and mine. And I feel that divide most strongly when I look into a bird’s eyes. I’ll stare down at a pigeon, focus on the red and orange and black of its vigilant eye, and think about a very old question: “Is anyone in there?” Read more »

by Thomas O’Dwyer

The career of Kenneth Widmerpool defined an era of British social and cultural life spanning most of the 20th century. He is fictional – a character in Anthony Powell’s 12-volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time – but he is as memorable as any historical figure. In the first volume, he is a colourless Eton public schoolboy. Across the series, he tunnels his way under British upper-class and bohemian society. A powerful and sinister self-made monster, he even gains a life peerage. In the final volume, the aged Widmerpool joins a hippie cult and dies naked while chasing girls in the woods. Widmerpool lived and prospered in the solid certainties of his acquired culture. He died in the midst of its fragmentation.

Widmerpool was an original snowflake – one who believed that he was so unique that greatness and adulation were his destiny. His lowly father sold fertilisers. His mother raised him to be this snowflake with an inflated uniqueness that would override his mediocrity. The metaphor then was poetic – snowflakes are lovely, and no two are alike.

Today, we have a “snowflake generation,” defined by British author Claire Fox in her 2016 book I Find That Offensive!: “It is a derogatory term for one deemed too vulnerable to cope with views that challenge their own, particularly in universities and other forums once known for robust debate.” With some irony, these delicate modern snowflakes are also called “new Victorians.”

The collapse of cultural certainties was most clear in Britain but rippled through all Western societies. The origin of certain culture-war debates, which erupt from time to time like temperamental volcanoes, is pinned on one Englishman, Lord Charles Percy Snow. A chemist and novelist, Snow in 1959 published The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. He first delivered it as a lecture at Cambridge University. Snow observed that a group of educated people talking in a room would make allusions drawn from books and the arts. Not one of them would be expected to make, or understand, a reference to “the second law of thermodynamics.” Half of human culture – science – appeared to be non-existent for literary intellectuals.

Snow found this odd and alarming, and he considered it a problem whose solution was obvious. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mary Hrovat

It’s a Saturday in May. I’m 17, and I’ve spent the morning washing and waxing my first car, a 1974 Gremlin. I’m so delighted that I drive around the block, windows down, Chuck Mangione playing on the radio. Feels so good, indeed. I’ve successfully negotiated a crucial passage on the road to adulthood, and I’m pleased with myself and my little car. Times change, though, and sometimes even people change. Forty years later, with, I hope, many miles ahead of me, I sold what I expect to be my last car.

When I bought the Gremlin, I lived in Phoenix. I had walked to grade school, and my siblings and I regularly walked to the grocery store and the public pool; all of these places were within about half a mile of our house. However, my full-time job was 10 miles away. I’d been commuting by bus or riding with a friend who worked at the same place. I also took evening classes a couple of days a week at a community college (about 8 miles away), again riding with my friend. The college was not as easily accessible by bus as my job was, and I anticipated being a full-time student that fall. Buying the car was one step toward my goal of getting a degree.

I assumed, along with just about everyone else, that a car was necessary equipment for adulthood, or at least a necessary price you pay for independence. Buying the car was a way of beginning to separate myself from my parents. I was proud of myself for arranging and paying for my driving lessons, finding a car to buy, and writing a check to pay for it. These things represented initiative and independence (although I couldn’t have saved the money if I hadn’t been living at home). Read more »

by Gabrielle C. Durham

I like playing Scrabble, and part of the reason is creating new words. That and the smack talk. I played a game with the swain of the day decades ago, and he challenged my word, which was not in and of itself surprising. As you may recall, if you lose a challenge, you lose a turn. With stakes so stupendously high, you mount a vigorous defense. I ended up losing the battle (and probably won the war) and thought no more of it. The ex-boyfriend brought it up a few years ago; I think he has put that on-the-spot coinage next to a picture of me in his mind. It is a shame that the word he will forever associate with me is “beardful.”

My linguistic brain coined this neologism by merging noun + common suffix “ful,” as in words such as “youthful,” “fearful,” and “handful,” to create an adjective. Easy and legit, right?

A neologism is a new word or a new way of using a word and is not yet commonly accepted; it may never be mass-accepted, and it may stay new for decades. To survive its infancy, it needs to identify a durable, meaningful concept. The word or usage has to be relevant.

One form of a neologism is a back formation, which is typically shortening an existing word and changing the part of speech. An example is the verb “burgle” from the noun “burglar.” “Burglar” has been with us for centuries as a noun, and someone – let’s blame Shakespeare – realized that a verb would make the world shimmer that much more brightly. Thus was “burgle” begat. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

I met him at a Starbucks outside the Tower of London. It was pre-arranged. I had told him I was an independent blogger. He told me he preferred to talk to independent writers these days; the mainstream media was more trouble than what it was worth. It helped that I wrote for a site that he regularly read and admired.

The complexities of the London tube have thwarted me on more than one occasion, and this time was no different.  I was a full fifteen minutes late. He was sitting in a cafe, his signature fedora on his head, but still dressed inconspicuously enough so as to seem like one of the many people thronging the cafe.

“Mr. Naipaul”, I said, extending my hand. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you.”

“Oh yes, please, I was expecting you. Please, call me Vidia”

Taken a little aback by the very informal moniker I was supposed to address him by, I exclaimed, “Ok, thank you. And so sorry”, I said, “I have to admit that the tube, as wonderfully efficient as it is, challenges me every time I visit the city.”

“Indeed. It was difficult to get around the first time I visited too, more than fifty years ago. Often when I thought I had made it to my destination, I realized I was back where I started. Shall we?” Read more »

SCOFFLAW

There’s a lighthouse chasing us
just as I forewarned
when she jumped the queue
veered the red Renault
onto a prohibited bus lane
on New Kent Road.

We idle on the verge. A world tilts.
Bobby, rotund in blue,
knocks boldly on the pane.
She lowers the window.

“Well, then?” he asks,
“When I passed my driving test,
she says to the wheel,
“there were no bus lanes.”

“Young lady,” he says,
to her profile, “When
I passed my driving test,
there were no women drivers.”

“That’s sexist. Isn’t it?” she says.
“Getting cheeky, eh?” he says.
She giggles. He laughs, “Don’t
do it again, luv.” Nods.

I nod back. He plods
back to the lighthouse.
She shifts gears.
We give each other a high five.
In the rear view,
lighthouse appears closer than it is.

By Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

by Liam Heneghan

No one warned me that after my children finally left home when I secured the doors at night I would, in effect, be locking them out.

People deal with the mild trauma of being an “empty nester” in different ways, I suppose. Some handle it with quiet grace, some move cocktail hour to the early afternoon, some repurpose the bedrooms into a karaoke lounge, a discotheque and so on. I took the quieter route and reread all their childhood books—from nursery rhymes to the Hunger Games series and other novels for young adults.

I was first struck by the prevalence of animals themes in these books. For example, in Eric Kincaid’s superb collection of Nursery Rhymes (1990)—a favourite of our two boys—over forty percent of rhymes concern animals. However, a word search of a book I subsequently wrote on the topic of nature in children’s books called Beasts at Bedtime (2018) showed that I might just as well have called it “Trees at Bedtime.” In addition to the innumerable references to “beasts”, there are almost 200 references to trees in the book.

Trees are represented in these stories in all their remarkable forms: magical trees in fairy tales to trees like JK Rowling’s compellingly violent Whomping Willow at Hogwarts.

It is clear that many writers of children’s stories—especially the so-called classic writers—did not accidentally stumble onto such themes. Beatrix Potter, JRR Tolkien, Ursula LeGuin and many others, had a keen eye for nature, and often had an acute awareness of its devastation. The destruction of trees was a point of moderate obsession for Tolkien who famously wrote, “I take the part of trees as against all their enemies.”

What, I wonder, should we make of this veritable forest of arboreal allusions in children’s stories? Read more »

by Max Sirak

This month, in the midst of my grief and loss, I decided to self-medicate.

No, not like that. I didn’t go on some sort of drug-fueled bender.  Nor did I delve the depths of the bottle. Instead, I took some of my own medicine.

What I mean is, throughout my life, whenever a person I cared about was down in the dumps, my go-to move was to make them a mixtape. In high school this was because a friend was going through a breakup. Until last week, the most recent mix I made for a friend was over the loss of a pregnancy.

However, a handful of days ago, I decided to do for myself what I’d always done for others. Meet “It’s Gonna Be A Good Day,” the music-baby I made for me. 

It’s 53% hip hop.

There’s some language that may offend.   

But, should you happen to find yourself with an open mind and the desire to have a good day, I encourage you to give it a spin. Who knows? You might like it. And it might work.

It did for me. Read more »

by Christopher Bacas

In the Municipal building on Livingston Street, two floors are reserved for Housing cases. In each court, dozens of people work and wait, a Bosch tableau with an international cast. HPD lawyers work the perimeter. They bring Respondents to the bench, confer with them in the hallway and negotiate with Petitioners on their behalf. HPD attorneys also lunch with landlord’s counsel. There is little ethical or proximate difference between Officers of the Court, save who signs their checks and the pay scales. To a person, they distribute a crushing weight, balancing malfeasance and negligence, plunder and systemic rot. The lasting effect of a day in Housing court isn’t the stipulation Management makes for repairs, nor the tenant’s payment (sometimes, less an abatement), it is feeling that force haul you down and watching others already borne off by it.

We arrived by scuffling shoes and creaking doors, then slid into crowded pews, all the grim mugs on a subway car faced in the same direction. The docket was packed; twenty or more cases in a six-hour work day. Some would resolve in a few minutes, others stretch to an hour or more. The judge cuts off ramblers and ranters. While you wait, you rehearse your statement.

The electrical system in our building was nearly 90 years old. Its central node, a rectangular graphite board the size of a medicine cabinet. Protruding from it, six paired brass claws held six shotgun shell 60-amp fuses, no covering nor shielding. To replace fuses, small plastic pliers hung on a hook nearby. Current flowed to smaller boxes with smaller fuses in each unit’s kitchen. Air conditioners, particularly older models, can continuously pull 20-30 amps. Entertainment and communications: flickering modems, cable boxes, charging stations and flat-screens add to the load. Multiply by twenty-five units… Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

A few years ago I taught an undergraduate seminar on Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis and late 20th century adaptations of the play. Halfway through the quarter, a student confided in me that she was a sexual assault survivor, and that the content we were dealing with in class was bringing the traumatic experience back to her. I was caught off guard. I do not wish here to get into the fraught questions of whether or not trigger warnings are appropriate in higher education, or of whether or how instructors should attend to students’ emotional needs when dealing with potentially triggering subject-matters; this was not the point of the conversation with my student, nor was she trying to excuse herself from any assignment or to modify her participation in the seminar. (Indeed, she was one of the students whose contribution to class was most consistent and significant.) Our conversation was and still is momentous for me because I had not realized until then that a statement like “this play evokes rape” is an appropriate preface to a discussion of Iphigenia in Aulis.

This conversation was pivotal for my understanding of Euripides’ play; it changed the way I see my role as a teacher in general and a teacher of classical texts in particular. So focused was I on the ancient version of Iphigenia’s story, even when reading its reformulations in contemporary texts, that I failed to acknowledge the centrality of gender-based violence to this story. This, despite the obvious importance of the topic in one of the modern adaptations of Iphigenia we read, Caridad Svich’s 2004 Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell that was Once her Heart. Something about my experience and my training allowed me to go on thinking that Euripides’ play is not really about assault; after all, Iphigenia is not raped in any conventional sense of the term (some might say: nor in any sense of the term). But once I had met that student–truly met her–it became clear to me that Euripides’ play is, indeed, “about” sexual violence against women. The next realization, following close on its heels, was a gestalt switch, at once radically transformative and absolutely obvious. Of course it is about sexual violence against women: isn’t most of Greek tragedy and classical myth about that? Read more »

by Samia Altaf

“This girl will never be able to find a husband,” declared Baiji, big mother, my maternal grandmother, soon after she took her first look at me.

“Hai hai,” she almost beat her chest, “look at her, just look.” She points at me holding herself back as if from a contaminant, appealing to the women — assorted aunts and cousins milling around, who hid their faces in their chadors and shook their heads — “her nose is too big, her eyes too small, she is bald.”

“And worst of all, hai hai,” — here Baiji’s voice drops ominously and a trembling hand goes to cover her mouth at the horror of it — “her color! It is not… not…not fair. It is… quite dark.”

She looks pityingly at my mother standing beside her in all her Kashmiri “fairness” and youthful glory — my mother of the fairest, luminous, skin that she took intact and unlined to her grave seven decades later — and puts a loving hand on her head. “My poor daughter… what a fate for you, hai hai. Well, at least these genes have not come from your side of the family.” (One of the aunts present at the occasion swears Baiji said germs and not genes.)

Baiji might as well have added, while on the roll, that the girl is also toothless and incontinent for I was all of a year old. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The main job of ‘culture’ in a modern society seems to be shielding people from the demands of morality. In its intellectual role it justifies inequality between citizens. In its national history role it gives citizens a delusional sense of their country’s significance and entitlement, followed by a dangerous sense of grievance when this isn’t sufficiently recognised by the rest of the world. In its identitarian role it deflects demands for justification into mere proclamations of fact: ‘Why do we do this or that awful thing?… Because shut up. It is who we are.’

None of these ideas of culture is worth keeping. We should throw them all out and focus on a different idea of culture as integration in a social world, and of a cultured person as one who can hear and speak to many worlds.

I

First there is there is the idea of culture as a moral hierarchy between citizens. Individuals are supposed to strive to become better, more civilised people. Which turns out to mean, not better at being good people; not better at making and living up to ethical judgements, such as our obligations to the less fortunate. Rather, it means becoming a connoisseur of certain arcane and unpopular art forms.

Familiarity with opera, for instance, largely functions as a compass for orienting the socio-economic class structure between the civilised and the rest. Most people who attend opera performances do so as a performance of their class identity, not for genuine aesthetic delight. They have at best a superficial aesthetic appreciation of what is going on. This can be seen in their reliance on a handful of classic brands which substitute for independent taste or judgement. See for example the dominance of the odious Wagner, the Manchester United of opera. The best explanation of the popularity of opera among the upper classes is that it happens to be absurdly expensive and difficult to enjoy and therefore functions as a good – difficult to fake – signal of who is in the club. Read more »