December 27, 2015
On Failure and Redemption: Bernard Malamud’s Pictures of Fidelman
Morality begins with an awareness of the sanctity of one’s life, hence the lives of others—even Hitler’s, to begin with—the sheer privilege of being, in this miraculous cosmos, and trying […]
December 20, 2015
I Am George Washington Gómez: On Works of Significant Worth and Importance
I remember the time I brought Américo Paredes’s novel George Washington Gómez into my AP English classroom; my teacher looked at the cover, frowned and asked: “Okay… So is […]
December 15, 2015
COP21: In the hands of its people alive right now lies the fate of the earth and all her creatures for the rest of time.
Democracy works but democracy is hard work. It demands involvement from the entire civil society in order to make its way. This is not just my understanding but is that […]
December 11, 2015
EcoFeminism at Cop21
Few people remember the ecofeminist movement of the 1980s, spearheaded by my friends Ynestra King, Starhawk, Grace Paley, Dorothy Dinnerstein and others. Many of the young activists from around […]
December 10, 2015
Notes on Love and Violence, Part 3
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” —Albert Einstein (1) […]
December 8, 2015
Trump, Saunders
Throughout the summer and into the fall, I felt that Donald Trump’s hijacking of the Republican storyline was pretty funny. Recently, it’s become less funny; and yesterday it stopped being […]
December 7, 2015
An Issue of Blood
This Thursday is Emily Dickinson’s 185th birthday; she was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she died in 1886. In 1885, she wrote to Mabel Loomis Todd, who […]
December 6, 2015
Uri Ur (Wake Up): On Aviv Geffen and Impossible Homelands
Ha’eymah ha’eyvah shirim shel milchamah vesin’at achim sheb’chol yom goveret. (The terror, the hostility the songs of war and brotherly hate that gets stronger each day.) —Aviv Geffen, “Uri Ur” […]
November 27, 2015
“Merely in living as and where we live”: Part I
In my previous post, I imagined the thrill of a first encounter with Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” which appeared for the first time in Poetry 100 years ago this month, November 1915. […]
November 19, 2015
Notes on Love and Violence
‘Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.’ — Max Frisch (1) My mother did not like me hanging around outside: to stand on a street corner any day, […]
November 19, 2015
Moby-Dick Out Loud on the Way to the Paris Climate Conference
By Karen Malpede I’ve been reading Moby-Dick out loud at night, slowly, with my partner. We were on chapter ninety-three–in which the castaway Pip loses sanity after being left adrift alone […]
November 13, 2015
Dybbuk or Ibbur: Midnight Dances with Isaac Bashevis Singer
Ghosts and all these things which people call today superstition are the very sparks which we are ignoring in our day. —Isaac Bashevis Singer in The Paris Review In an […]