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- Adventures in BigStock: Reading Positions for the New Year
- 332. The Bitches Look Ahead to 2019
- Fantasy, Chefs, & More
- Exporting the Technology of Occupation
- James Baldwin’s Harlem Through a Child’s Eyes
- Poetry Rx: This Is the Year
- Ghost People: On Pinocchio and Raising Boys
| Adventures in BigStock: Reading Positions for the New Year Posted: 04 Jan 2019 07:04 AM PST BigStock reached out to us about featuring their portfolio in our entries, and we had so much fun exploring, we wanted to share some of our favorite images. There are some seriously talented photographers at work in stock imagery. There's also a lot of gold to be mined when it comes to stock photos. Every month, we'll share with you some great, beautiful, or downright silly things we've come across on BigStock. Beware of plot bunnies! This month's theme: New reading positions. With the hopes that you'll have an amazing reading year, here are some new reading positions for you to try out.
Listen, I love reading in my undies. But if you're pressed for time, feel free to take underwear reading for spin in the kitchen. Wait for your kettle to whistle! Try to manage a few paragraphs in between bites of cereal. Or you know…flip pages while you're chopping up an orange. Just be careful with your bare gams next to any open flames or sizzling bacon. Photo credit: LightField Studios | BigStock
Who knew that a string of twee faerie lights could be a substitute for a reading lamp! They may not be the best alternative, but on the bright (heh) side, at least it would make for a good Instagram photo. And yes, a blanket cocoon is necessary for this position or else your elbows are going to ache. Photo credit: Masson | BigStock
If your house is too crowded to really stretch out, we have a solution for you. Get yourself a reading boat. Water is optional. Seriously, just drag that old canoe out of the garage and plop that sucker in the yard. Whenever you're in the boat, it's reading time and everyone else should know you're not to be disturbed. Photo credit: AS Photo Project | BigStock
This one is for experienced reading position explorers only and it should not be attempted by beginners! We recommend a hardcover for this position, as it'll help give you a better foundation. As a bonus, if you're doing this on the beach or in a sunny area, your feet can act as an adjustable shader. Photo credit: Thunderstock | BigStock
Strap on your best kitten heels and find the most uncomfortable chair in your house! As a warning, if you have cats or curious toddlers, don't wear anything that will dangle. With this planking position, give your mind and body the ultimate workout as you read about grumpy dukes and strengthen your core. Photo credit: LightField Studios | BigStock Now if you'll excuse me, I have a date with my reading boat. The post Adventures in BigStock: Reading Positions for the New Year appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. |
| 332. The Bitches Look Ahead to 2019 Posted: 04 Jan 2019 07:04 AM PST Happy New Year! Sarah, Amanda, Elyse, RedHeadedGirl, and Carrie gather for the second part of our end of year episodes: looking ahead to 2019! We talk about what we want to see in our reading, and what we are looking forward to most: books, comics, tv shows, and more. Among the things we mention in our wishlist: catharsis, humor, hopefulness, smuggling, glorious sci fi romance, alpha women, and warriors. Then we talk about what books we are most excited about in 2019 – prepare for a LOT of book mentions and the possibility of more titles added to your TBR. We're sorry…sort of. Don't worry – all the books will be in the show notes. What about you? What books are you looking forward to most? What's on your wishlist?
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| Posted: 04 Jan 2019 07:04 AM PST
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| Exporting the Technology of Occupation Posted: 04 Jan 2019 07:04 AM PST  An Israeli drone hovering amid tear gas trails above a protest along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, July 27, 2018 Speaking recently to an audience in Tel Aviv via satellite from Moscow soon after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged that Saudi Arabia had used Israeli-made spyware to track Khashoggi's movements before his death. Snowden said that the Israeli cyber-intelligence company NSO Group Technologies had developed software known as Pegasus that was sold to the Saudis and allowed Khashoggi to be monitored by infecting the smartphone of one of his contacts, another Saudi critic, based in Canada. This dissident, Omar Abdulaziz, filed a lawsuit in Israel in late 2018 alleging that the NSO Group had broken international law by selling its technology to oppressive regimes. "NSO should be held accountable in order to protect the lives of political dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists," said his Jerusalem-based lawyer, Alaa Mahajna. The NSO Group is reportedly owned by an American company, Francisco Partners, and both Goldman Sachs and Blackstone are invested in it. The Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, a longtime supporter of the Saudis, has confirmed Snowden's allegations about the Israeli company's dealings with the Kingdom. This is just one of the more sinister examples of a lucrative business. According to the Jerusalem Post, Israel recently sold Saudi Arabia $250 million-worth of sophisticated spying equipment, and Ha'aretz also reported that the Kingdom was offered the NSO Group's phone-hacking software shortly before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman began purging opponents in 2017. Israel and Saudi Arabia both view Iran as a unique threat that justifies their cooperation. Besides spyware and cyber tools, Israel has developed a growing industry based around surveillance including espionage, psychological operations, and disinformation. One of these corporations, Black Cube, a private intelligence agency with links to the Israeli government (two former heads of the Mossad have sat on its international advisory board), has recently gained notoriety—most notably for spying on women who'd accused Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. News reports have also identified the firm's work on behalf of Hungary's authoritarian government, as well as an alleged "dirty ops" campaigns against Obama administration officials tied to the Iran nuclear deal, and against an anti-corruption investigator in Romania. Black Cube and other agencies like it have close ties to the Israeli state because they hire many former intelligence personnel. Over more than half a century of occupation, Israel has mastered the arts of monitoring and surveilling millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself. Israel is now packaging and selling this knowledge to governments that admire the country's ability to suppress and manage resistance. Israel's occupation has thus gone global. The country's defense exports reached a record $9.2 billion in 2017, 40 percent higher than in 2016 (in a global arms market that recorded its highest ever sales in 2017 at $398.2 billion). The majority of these sales were in Asia and the Pacific region. Military hardware, such as missiles and aerial defenses, was the largest sector at 31 percent, while intel, cyber, and information systems comprised 5 percent. Israel's industry is supported by lavish domestic spending: in 2016, defense expenditure represented 5.8 percent of the country's GDP. By comparison, in 2017, the American defense sector absorbed 3.6 percent of US GDP. Despite their occasional diplomatic gestures opposing Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, many nations have become willing customers of Israeli cyber-weapons and intelligence know-how. The Mexican government has also used NSO Group tools, in at least one case, according to The New York Times, apparently to track an investigative reporter who was subsequently murdered; human rights lawyers and anti-corruption activists have also been targeted. Amnesty International has accused the NSO Group of attempting to spy on one of its employees. A Canadian research group, the Citizen Lab, found that infected phones have shown up in Bahrain, Brazil, Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, the UAE, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. During the recent Gaza protests, a former chief executive of the company that built the fence surrounding parts of the Gaza Strip, Saar Korush of Magal Security Systems, told Bloomberg that Gaza was a showroom for his "smart fence" because customers liked that it was battle-tested and proven to keep Palestinians out of Israel. Magal is among the companies bidding to build President Trump's border wall with Mexico (along with another Israeli company) and has built an international business based on its ability to stop "infiltrators," a word commonly used in Israel for refugees. Another new weapon that was used on the Israel/Gaza fence was the "Sea of Tears," a drone that dropped tear-gas canisters on protesters. According to the Israeli website Ynet, its maker soon received hundreds of orders for these drones. Germany is already leasing Israeli drones, while the EU agency Frontex is testing similar drones to surveil European borders in an effort to prevent the entry of migrants and refugees. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has helped to transform his country during his nearly ten years in power into a technological powerhouse that proudly promotes its tools of occupation to a global and domestic market. Speaking to fellow lawmakers in Israel in November, Netanyahu said that "power is the most important [component] of foreign policy. 'Occupation' is bull. There are countries that have conquered and replaced entire populations and the world keeps silent. Strength is the key, it makes all the difference in our policy toward the Arab world." He concluded that any peace deal with the Palestinians could only come with "common interests which are based on technological strength."  Exhibitors displaying Israel's Blue Bird Aero-systems drone at an arms trade show, Chennai, India, April 11, 2018 In 2017, Israel relaxed its rules for granting export licenses to a range of intelligence, surveillance, and weapons manufacturers, though it claims to consider the human rights implications when doing so. But this stretches credibility when Israel has sold weapons just in the last years to countries that commit grievous abuses such as the Philippines, South Sudan, and Myanmar. Netanyahu has become friends with Chadian dictator Idriss Déby, and next on the list may be the Bahraini regime and Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted on charges of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. The Israeli Defense Ministry releases barely any information about how or why its exports are granted. Ha'aretz recently discovered that espionage equipment had been sold to numerous undemocratic regimes, including Bangladesh, Angola, Bahrain, Nigeria, UAE, Vietnam, and others. In some cases, these governments and others have used the systems to target dissidents and LGBTQ citizens, and even to concoct false charges of blasphemy. In early 2019, Ha'aretz also revealed the existence of another Israeli cybersecurity firm, named Candiru, which markets hacking tools and relies heavily on recruiting military veterans from the elite signals intelligence Unit 8200. Since the tech bubble burst in 2000, the Israeli government has pushed local companies to invest in the security and intelligence industries. The result, according to a Privacy International report in 2016, was that of the 528 companies worldwide that worked in this field, twenty-seven were based in Israel—making it the country with by far the highest per capita rate of surveillance and intelligence firms in the world. And in 2016, Ha'aretz reported, a full 20 percent of global investments in the sector were in Israeli start-ups. That same year, human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, one of the few prominent Israelis publicly challenging Israel's arms export policy, and Tamar Zandberg, chairwoman of the left-wing Meretz party, went to Israel's High Court of Justice in an effort to win a suspension of NSO Group's export license. The government demanded that the process was held in camera and the court's ruling was not released to the public. Supreme Court President Justice Esther Hayut explained that "our economy, as it happens, rests not a little on that export." Indeed, in 2017, Israel was second only to the US in raising close to $1 billion in venture capital and private equity for cybersecurity companies. Information released last year by the New York-based data firm CB Insights showed that Israel was the second biggest signer of cybersecurity deals in the world after the US. Although the US led by a large margin, with a 69 percent of global market share, Israel's 7 percent placed it ahead of the UK. The occupation has thus fueled Israel's industrial and defense policy-making through an economic boom that has benefited companies that build, operate, and manage the settlement enterprise. But for Shir Hever, author of The Privatization of Israeli Security (2017) and a world expert on the Israeli arms trade, the occupation is becoming less an asset than a liability. Many Israeli arms sellers, he told me, are "expressing their frustration that customers are not excited about Israeli products because they fail at stopping Palestinian resistance. Russia held an arms fair selling 'battle-tested' gear from the Syria war and has managed to increase sales to Turkey and India, both very important markets for Israeli companies. So why should arms importers consider Israeli arms special?" Hever acknowledges that "authoritarian regimes definitely still want to learn how Israel manages and controls the Palestinians, but the more they learn, the more they realize that Israel does not actually control the Palestinians very effectively. Support for Israel from right-wing groups and politicians around the world is still strong—Brazil's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, being a particularly depressing example—but I think there is more focus on the racism, racial profiling and nationalism and less and less admiration for the 'strongest military in the world.'" He even questions the Israeli government narrative about the success of the weapons and intelligence sector and argues that the industry is in decline because it is so dependent on short-term, ad-hoc alliances. Apartheid South Africa and its decline are a warning from history that Israel would be unwise to ignore. At its height, South Africa was one of the world's biggest arms dealers, behind Brazil and Israel, and this was achieved through enormous state subsidies. Despite a UN arms embargo, the South African regime spent 28 percent of the state's budget on its defense industry in the late 1980s, according to a recent book, Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit, by Hennie van Vuuren, the director of the South African nonprofit watchdog organization Open Secrets. An economy built on military know-how and expertise in techniques of internal repression might seem a source of indomitable strength, but Apartheid was finished less than five years later. Today, growing numbers of American Jews are distancing themselves from Israel, rejecting its government's embrace of ethno-nationalism and supporting instead a one-state solution. For the time being, Israel looks set to remain a major global player in the manufacture and sales of weapons systems and surveillance equipment and expertise—that is now one of the main ways the country defines itself internationally. But international opposition is growing, thanks largely to calls by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement for a military embargo on Israel and its defense industry. Already, one of the country's biggest defense companies, Elbit Systems, has faced boycotts over its activities around the world. Just days ago, the banking giant HSBC announced it was divesting from Elbit Systems. High-profile campaigns like this will surely begin to change the calculus about the economic and moral costs of the occupation—all the more so if Israel continues on its present political path toward the de facto annexation of Palestine. The post Exporting the Technology of Occupation appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. 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| James Baldwin’s Harlem Through a Child’s Eyes Posted: 04 Jan 2019 07:04 AM PST  Illustration by Yoran Cazac, from James Baldwin's Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, 2018 In 1976, James Baldwin released what is perhaps his most novel—and most often forgotten—book: Little Man, Little Man, a curious, hybrid-genre composition without precedent in his body of work. A few years earlier, his little nephew, Tejan, had asked Baldwin—Uncle Jimmy—to write a book about him on one of Baldwin's visits to New York to see Tejan's family at 137 West 71st Street. At the time, Baldwin was spending most of his days in a residence in the southern French village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, so whenever he made the transatlantic trip to drop by his American family's home, friends, kin, and strangers would simply appear at the door like moths to a lantern, seeking an audience with the great writer, and soon the apartment's air would be thick with the sound of voices and music and sweet-pungent with the scent of whiskeys and wines. Tejan and his sister, Aisha, liked to spy on the events; they had learned that their uncle was not simply popular in the neighborhood, but, as the siblings would boast to their friends and schoolmates, he was "an Author," with a capital "A" that betokened Baldwin's celebrity. One day, Tejan claims in the foreword to a lovely new edition of Little Man, Little Man—published last year at the urging of Baldwin scholar Nicholas Boggs, who co-edited the book—he caught his uncle by the arm. "Uncle Jimmy!" he yelled repeatedly. "When you gonna write a book about MeeeeEEE?"  Blinky, illustrated by Yoran Cazac from Little Man, Little Man, 2018; click to enlarge To everyone's surprise, Baldwin finally did just that, crafting a remarkable book that follows a young boy named TJ—a stand-in for Tejan—through Harlem, along with a boy called WT and a bespectacled girl nicknamed Blinky. The book was illustrated with beautiful watercolors by the French artist Yoran Cazac, one of the men Baldwin was closest to in France, and was written in a childlike version of black American vernacular. Subtitled "A Story of Childhood," the American edition described it as a "children's book for adults and an adults' book for children," making explicit its extraordinary multiplicity: for kids and yet not for them, not unlike the way that Gabriel García Márquez's best-known short stories, "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," are both subtitled "tales for children" in spite of their at-times-dense referentiality.  WT, illustrated by Yoran Cazac from Little Man, Little Man, 2018; click to enlarge The ambiguity was well-earned. Little Man, Little Man defies conventional expectations for both children's and adult's literature, functioning, ultimately, as a liminal work that straddles the borders of both genres. In its lack of linear narrative, refusal to conform to standard English, and the sometimes wild, distorted art that accompanies it, Little Man, Little Man seems distinctly Modernist in sensibility for all that it still appears, at first glance, to be an ordinary children's book. Clearer, however, is that it represents the artistic culmination of Baldwin and Cazac's multilayered relationship, a collaboration that resulted, in Baldwin's words, in a literary-artistic "celebration of the self-esteem of black children." This statement doubtless resonated darkly for Baldwin, who had told a French journalist in 1974 that "I never had a childhood. I was born dead." In a way, then, this story—both lighthearted and tinged with suggestions of violence—is also, perhaps, a missive from Baldwin to his younger self, describing a vision of childhood in the future that, while murky, is starrier than the one Baldwin had. All this was lost on the book's earliest reviewers, most notably the author and activist Julius Lester, who dismissed it in The New York Times as "a slight book" that "lacks intensity and focus." Its dearth of a conventional plot made it, in Lester's eyes, an inscrutable failure. Though he praised Baldwin's language, he found Little Man, Little Man bland—"not… especially exciting or disappointing." Had it not been written by Baldwin, Lester declared, it would not have deserved "more than a mention in a reviewers' roundup." Little Man attracted little other attention and was swiftly consigned to the footnotes of Baldwin's oeuvre as a head-scratching curiosity at best and a jejune mistake at worst. But it intrigued Boggs, who discovered it in 1996 at Yale's Beinecke Library and was initially told by David Leeming, who'd composed a 1994 biography of Baldwin, that Cazac was likely dead. Nevertheless, Boggs sought out Cazac and left messages at several arts organizations in France. Then, one day a few months later, the phone rang in Boggs's Brooklyn apartment. Astonishingly, Cazac was on the other end. "I heard you were looking for me?" the artist said. He met the elusive Cazac in 2003, two years before the latter's death, becoming the only scholar to have interviewed Cazac about his artistic collaboration with Baldwin. Re-read today in light of the contemporary resurgence of interest in Baldwin's novels and essays, particularly his meditations on black English and police brutality, Little Man, Little Man brings to life many of Baldwin's arguments as it dissolves rigidly drawn lines between children's and adult literature.  TJ and WT with Miss Lee, illustrated by Yoran Cazac from Little Man, Little Man, 2018 It is telling that TJ's story could take place—even in its darker moments—almost unchanged today; America's reflection, cracked and held up on a stand the color of dried blood, has changed far less than some optimists would prefer to believe. This is most notable in an extraordinary early section. TJ describes frantic, sometimes violent, encounters between black men and the police, his language suggesting the commonplace character of these interactions. It begins by TJ comparing his block to what he has seen on TV and in movies of police chases, but quickly transitions into specific descriptions of his neighborhood, ending with the man the cops are after being "done for. He not going to get off this street alive. Sometime he running down the middle of the street and the guns go pow! and blam! he fall and maybe he turn over twice before he hiccup and don't move no more. Sometime he come somersaulting down from the fire-escape. Sometime it from the roof, and then he scream." TJ speaks with a disquieting specificity and bluntness, as if such events are all too familiar to him. A black child is often forced to grow up early, Baldwin suggests, disabused of notions that children from more privileged families may cling to, such as the idea that police are there simply to protect you.  Miss Lee and TJ, illustrated by Yoran Cazac from Little Man, Little Man, 2018 Yet TJ is still a child, and at the end, when one of the neighbors, Mr Man, makes a pointed comment suggesting that his wife, Miss Lee, has consumed all the gin in the house and should go back in an institution—seeming to imply that she is an alcoholic—TJ does not seem to understand. He senses the tension and is "more scared than he ever been before, and he don't know why." But when Blinky, the wisest of the bunch, begins to dance to music, they all start to laugh and dance as well—even Mr Man and his wife. There are things the kids can afford to learn later on; for now, perhaps it is enough to revel, momentarily, in the joy of sound and movement. * Baldwin had met Cazac in Paris in 1959, by way of his mentor, the gay black artist Beauford Delaney, to whom Baldwin would, seventeen years later, dedicate Little Man, Little Man. Beauford was an early champion of Cazac's art. With Cazac's tousled russet hair, intense eyebrows, and iconoclastic personality, the enigmatic French painter also struck Baldwin immediately, becoming an indelible presence in Baldwin's life. Cazac "was sometimes as exasperating as a boy of ten, and sometimes as inaccessible as a man on ninety," Baldwin reflected in 1977 of his early impressions of Cazac. At the time, the artist was working on a series of brûlages, a technique developed by the French artist Raoul Ubac in which film emulsion is melted, creating swirls and whorls; Baldwin found himself entranced by the surreal, seemingly igneous creations. "They struck me with their violence, and, also, their depth," Baldwin said. Cazac's later art, which Baldwin praised effusively, "defines spaces by challenging it." The two became close. In 1974, Baldwin dedicated what I consider his masterpiece, If Beale Street Could Talk, to Cazac; in turn, the French painter named Baldwin his son's godfather. Their interpersonal relationship, alongside Baldwin's connections with other artists, will be described in more detail in James Baldwin: In the Full Light, a book by Boggs on Baldwin's life, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  Blinky, TJ, and WT, illustrated by Yoran Cazac from Little Man, Little Man, 2018 At Baldwin's rural home in France, they collaborated on the project that would become Little Man, Little Man. Cazac had never been to New York, much less to Harlem, so Baldwin supplied him with photographs of his family and a copy of The Black Book, an epochal 1974 collection of African-American history that included slave auction notices, images of lynchings, patents for black Americans' inventions, posters of the so-called "Black Hollywood" films of the 1930s and 1940s, and more. Despite these records, when he started work with pencils and watercolors, Cazac found himself still struggling to envision that peculiar city an ocean away; as he told Boggs in 2003, he began to "imagine the unimaginable." The result was a vibrant vision of Harlem at once recognizable and strange, with colors freely bleeding out of lines and proportions liable to shift from page to page, as if to suggest that reality itself for the book's protagonists was just the same: never constant, sometimes beautiful, always brimming with the potential for grotesquerie and grandeur alike.  Miss Beanpole, illustrated by Yoran Cazac from Little Man, Little Man, 2018 The images perhaps echo something that Delaney had famously taught a teenage Baldwin, when Delaney asked him to peer at a gutter and tell him what he saw. Nothing, Baldwin replied. Delaney asked him to look again, and then he saw what he'd previously missed: the reflections of buildings in the gutter's oil puddles. The lesson was simple but profound: look again, and you may see more. "Little Man, Little Man is [Baldwin and Cazac's] effort to enact Delaney's lesson," Boggs said to me, so as to "revalue images and experiences deemed ugly or marginal by dominant culture." Cazac's dreamlike art does just this, seeking, through its rich colors and salmagundi of both smiling and brooding faces, to capture a nuanced vision of black childhood that, alongside Baldwin's text, makes Little Man, Little Man stand out as utterly unlike anything in Baldwin's corpus—or, even, American literature more broadly—that came before or after. * In a famous 1979 polemic on language, "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?," Baldwin argued in The Times that "language is… a political instrument, means, and proof of power." Black English, Baldwin wrote, had, through the "alchemy" of slavery's horrors, "come into existence by means of brutal necessity," and its continued existence bothered white Americans, in Baldwin's eyes, as it threatened to convey, through its origins, uncomfortable truths many of them would rather ignore. "It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised," he wrote near the end. "It is his experience." This holds special significance for Little Man, Little Man, which was not only unapologetically written in vernacular, but also held up a mirror to white readers in particular by revealing, in its soft yet sharp brushstrokes, a vision of a world in which no black American, child or adult, is shielded from the dangers of institutionalized racism. But the mirror also captured black Americans in moments both quotidian and tender. Baldwin resisted stereotyping by showing a range of African-American experience; TJ's world could be as frightening as it was ludic and loving. The tender scenes are worth remembering. Baldwin is well-known for his fury; less often referenced are the wonderful moments in his work when his subjects get to be happy, get to love, get to dance. To be sure, with a searing sermonic fire, Baldwin—who had been apprenticed as a preacher at a young age, and, despite his adult agnosticism, never lost the cadences of the pulpit—rained upon the bigotry of America in his work. And yet, for all the threats surrounding TJ and his friends, some of which they understand and some they do not yet, the bad things lurking in shadow and light, there seems something quietly redemptive about one of Baldwin's final works ending with a glimmer of pure, simple rapture. Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood by James Baldwin and illustrated by Yoran Cazac is published by Duke University Press. The post James Baldwin's Harlem Through a Child's Eyes appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. |
| Posted: 04 Jan 2019 07:04 AM PST In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay is on the line.  ©Ellis Rosen Dearest Poets, The women who raised me suffered so many missed opportunities, and I am seized with guilt about it. I construct vivid images from the stories I know. I imagine my grandmother as a married seventeen-year-old woman-child, patiently waiting for the local florist to pass by our house so she could catch a whiff of the fragrant champac flowers she had no money to buy. How long did it take for her to give up on this tiny desire, I wonder? I imagine my mother doodling soft hands offering lotus obeisance to who-knows-which-god, over and over in the margins of her book. She must have been giving away her tenderness, surely? I see my aunt posing shyly for a photo, which is now torn in half. In a year, I will defend my doctoral thesis. This should be a vindication. But it doesn't feel that way. Is there a poem for the taste of ash in my mouth right now? Yours, Dear Vanquished, What your foremothers had to survive so that you could be where you are today is a complex burden to bear. I know that feeling, the guilt you describe. It can seem impossible to feel proud or excited for what you have in front of you when you know that they were not gifted the same opportunities. It can feel hopeless: something you can never fix or undo. Perhaps instead of feeling hopeless, it is our job, and maybe even our responsibility, to dream bigger than our foremothers could have imagined, to continue stretching the universe of what is possible for the girls and women who come after us. I am grateful you wrote this letter, because it allows me to recommend a poem that I think is perfect to start a new year. It is called, "Imagine the Angels of Bread" by Martín Espada. (You can listen to the poet read his poem here!) The poem begins:
The poem continues to imagine a year in which the most vulnerable are returned dignity and reparations. And at the end of the poem, Espada offers us this benediction:
We cannot go back in time to fix what the women of our families endured. But we can remember that our lives were built on their ability to imagine a better world and their willingness to make sacrifices for it. We can carry their history and their struggles, while still carrying hope. We can make them proud. We can promise our daughters, nieces, and goddaughters a future that we are willing to work hard for. We can follow a compass that points us toward justice with every step. Let that taste of ash in your mouth give way to the promise of every humiliated mouth being filled with the angels of bread. –SK * Dear Poets, I am a teacher and mother who is within striking distance of fifty years old. The last decade has been difficult. I divorced at forty, then lost my parents, lost my home and financial stability, raised my children mostly on my own, and survived breast cancer. Now that my life seems to have stabilized a bit, I find that I am depressed and rudderless. After all these battles, life feels like an endless loop of uninspired events and open time. Do you have a poem that can help jolt me out of my malaise? Or accompany me in it? With gratitude, Dear ABNRK, I would like to recommend the titular poem from Tara Hardy's book, "My, My, My, My, My." (You can listen to the poet read her poem here!) The poem begins:
You described a list of losses that would leave anyone feeling rudderless. I am so sorry that you have had to experience so much hardship. I love Tara's poem, because it is a call to arms for your heart. It carries a much-needed reminder that you have a fist at the center of your pulse, and that there is someone who loves you, who thinks you still smell sweet. That person doesn't need to be a romantic partner. They could be a child or a friend. When you are feeling lost, allow the ones who care about you to sail love into your heart like paper airplanes. At age fifty, you have so much more life to live. On the other side of all these crises, life is finally starting to sparkle. I don't want you to miss it. What you have gone through does not make you damaged, it makes you wiser, braver, and stronger. Tara instructs: "Take that rose, the one your flesh wounds / around. Open it and open it and open it. / Toss bits of your scar into the air / like goddamned wedding rice. Or bird seed. / Let some of them sprout. Into so much green / green new day it makes your shins hurt / with how much you want to run. Forward." Forward, friend. Forward. –SK * Dear Poets, Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, it is over between me and the man I've been dating for four months. I thought we had a good thing going, but when a conflict arose, I texted him something unkind. I was immediately apologetic, but since then, he has asked for space and continued to push me away. He won't even meet up and talk. I yearn for him to be vulnerable with me, for us to be vulnerable with each other. I'm frustrated that he has run away, without even officially calling things off. It activates my fear that my unpleasant emotions are not worthy of love. Do you have a poem that describes this desire to connect to someone who doesn't want to connect with you, and the feeling that you might be unworthy of a deeply intimate connection? Sincerely, Dear Sad and Frustrated, I first started replying to your letter by writing about how I find ghosting to be a lazy act of hurtful cowardice. But then I realized I was just projecting my own hurt from being ghosted in the past onto you, and not paying enough attention to what you were looking for. So I reread your letter and found myself thinking about a poem called "Imagining Him Running at the Sight of Deer" by Yesenia Montilla. (Scroll to page seventy-four in the Pittsburgh Poetry Review, issue 5). The poem starts:
I want you to know that I empathize with you. I know the desperation of wanting someone to be vulnerable with you and feeling them pull away. As I mentioned, I know (and despise) the specific hurt of someone not willing to engage. But when he doesn't answer, there isn't any way to know his motivation for running. Instead, your mind runs in circles trying to guess what is wrong with you, what you should have done differently. I know, I have been there. I want to offer you this poem because it allows for another possibility: that his running away is not entirely tied to you. Maybe whatever it was you said that hurt him echoes a past hurt he knows he can't re-engage with. You aren't responsible for that past hurt—you could not have known that you were pressing on a bruise. Being hurt in the past can leave a person always looking for signs of danger, always looking for reasons to run. I don't want to excuse his behavior of disengaging or ghosting, but I want to help you find some peace. It seems you are a gentle thing. You're willing to risk it all. Maybe he thinks he recognizes something he can't help but run from. Maybe what he's running from isn't you, but a shadow your silhouette reminds him of. Maybe it is you he is running from, and it is simply timing that is against you. Maybe it's his loss that he'll never know what would have happened if he stayed. When you can't change someone's mind or change their behavior, sometimes knowing there were factors at play that were there before you arrived, or that you have no control over, can be permission to let them go. –SK Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need your own poem? Write to us! Sarah Kay is a poet and educator from New York City. She is the codirector and founder of Project VOICE and the author of four books of poetry, including B, No Matter the Wreckage, The Type, and All Our Wild Wonder.
The post Poetry Rx: This Is the Year appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Ghost People: On Pinocchio and Raising Boys Posted: 04 Jan 2019 07:04 AM PST Sabrina Orah Mark's monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and raising boys.
My son's first grade teacher pulls me aside to tell me she's concerned about Noah and the Ghost People. "Ghost People?" "Yes," she says. She is cheerful, though I suspect the main ingredient of her cheer is dread. Something she probably picked up from childhood. "Can you encourage Noah to stop bringing them to school?" She is whispering, and she is smiling. She is a close talker, and occasionally calls me "girl" which embarrasses me. "I don't know these Ghost People." "You do." "I don't think so." "He makes them out of the woodchips he finds on the playground. They're distracting him. He isn't finishing his sentences." "Okay," I say. "Ghost People," I say. She smiles wide. One of her front teeth looks more alive than it should be. * As a toddler, Noah always had a superhero in one hand and a superhero in the other. Like the world was a tightrope and the men were his balance beam. Now he makes his own men. Out of pipe cleaners and twigs and paper and Q-Tips and string and Band Aids, but mostly woodchips. I eavesdrop. With Noah there, the Ghost People seem to speak a mix of cloud and wind. They are rowdy and kind. They comfort him. If Adam looked like anything in the beginning, I suspect it would be these woodchips, the color of dry earth. He, too, would be speaking in a language from a place that doesn't quite exist. But now Noah is in the second grade. And as he gets older, I am certain the world will make it even more difficult for him to carry these People around. "For godssake," says my mother, "let him carry the freaking Ghost People around. Who is he hurting?" "Maybe himself?" I say. "Why himself?" she asks, "How himself?" "They're distracting him." "From what?" asks my mother. "From his sentences," I explain. "Who the hell cares," says my mother. * In Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, the first thing Pinocchio does once his mouth is carved is laugh at Geppetto. And the first thing he does once his hands are finished is snatch Geppetto's yellow wig off his head. And the first thing he does once his feet are done is kick Geppetto in the nose, leaving him to feel "more wretched and miserable than he felt in all his life." If what he is making hurts him, why does Geppetto keep carving? Maybe it's because before he even began carving he knew he would call his wooden son Pinocchio. Maybe because Geppetto understands that sometimes the things we create to protect us, to give us good fortune, need first to thin us into a vulnerability where the only thing that can save us are those things that almost erased us. Where the only thing that can bring us back to ourselves is what brought us to the edge of our being in the first place. Or maybe it's just that Geppetto is lonely. "What did you do today at school?" "Nothing," says Noah. When I empty his lunch bag I find three Ghost People inside. In the world of fairy tales, Geppetto is the mother of all mothers. After jail, beatings, poverty, hunger, and crying, all brought on by his spoiled, lying, wooden boy, he still—heartsick—looks for his boy everywhere. They finally unite in the belly of a shark. Pinocchio walks and walks toward a "glow" until he reaches Geppetto lit by the flame of his last candlestick, sitting at a small dining table eating live minnows. He is now little and old and so white he "might have been made of snow or whipped cream." Promising to never leave him again, Pinocchio (only a meter tall) swims out of the shark's mouth, toward the moonlight and the starry sky, with Geppetto on his back. If an old man and a wooden boy ever shared a single birth, it would probably look something like this. Eli, my five year old, doesn't make Ghost People, but his pockets are always filled with sticks and leaves. If I were to keep everything my boys have ever found and brought home, I could easily have enough for a whole tree. Maybe even a small forest. When the shooting happened at Tree of Life, all I could think about at first was the name of the synagogue. All I could think about was the Tree. I shut the news off fast. "What happened to the Tree of Life?" asks Noah. "Nothing," I say. "I think a branch fell," I say. I haven't yet read my boys Pinocchio, the story of a boy carved from a tree, and I don't tell them about the shooting at Tree of Life, either. I get an email from our synagogue: "Join Us for Coffee and an Informal Discussion About How We Can Help Our Children Cope With Frightening Situations As Well As Anti-Semitism." I go to the meeting. I say I've told my boys nothing. Some congregants say I'm keeping my sons in a "bubble." One maps out the Active Shooter Plan she's drawn up with the help of her five- and eight-year olds. Another congregant, feeling protective of me, interrupts with the word "cocoon." "Cocoon is more like it," she explains. What she means, I think, is that bubble implies a lack of air. Whereas cocoon implies transformation. "Her boys might not be ready," says another congregant. Who is ready? I wonder. At forty-three I'm not ready. Ready to know we can be burst into smithereens at any moment? Ready to be hated since forever? An Israeli congregant explains he keeps nothing from his children. He uses the word "inoculation." Like if you inject little pieces of horror into your children they won't shatter when the horror comes. I get his point. I shove a piece of cake into my mouth. I shove a piece of cake into my mouth because I can't shove the entire room into my mouth. Because I can't shove all the windows, and chairs, and all the parents, and all their fears, and all their children, too. I don't know how to save anybody. When I pick Noah up from Sunday school, later that morning, an enormous paper hamsa dangles around his neck by a soft strand of red yarn. The hamsa is brightly colored, and beautiful, and heartbreaking. "It's for protection," says Noah. I watch the other Jewish children spill from the classroom wearing paper hands on their chests, too. "It's the paper hand of God," says Noah. He swings the yarn around so now the hamsa is against his back. He is so small, suddenly. He is wearing rain boots, but I don't remember it raining that day. "My child," I want to say at the meeting at the synagogue, "carries Ghost People around so we'll be fine." I want to say, "I haven't even read my sons Pinocchio yet." I want to say, "How many minutes of all our children's childhoods are left?" Instead, I say, "My children ask me if their black father was ever a slave. They ask me if Trump will ever turn them into slaves. They asked me if I would ever be turned into a slave for being their mother. As black, Jewish boys my children will never be in a bubble. But if there was a bubble big enough, I'd move there in a second." Everyone gets very quiet. "Tell me where the bubble is. Where's the bubble?" I opt out of the next meeting, an improv workshop on "dealing with Christmas, violence, anti-Semitism, shootings, the armed guard now at our synagogue, and more." * In the late sixteenth century in Prague, when the waves of hatred rose against the Jews again, a story started brewing about a Rabbi Loew who made a golem out of prayers and clay, a golem whose job it was to guard the Jews from harm. There are two versions of how the rabbi brought the golem to life: the first is that Rabbi Loew inserted the shem, a parchment with God's name, into the golem's mouth; the second is that he inscribed the word emet or truth on the golem's forehead. Unlike Pinocchio, the golem doesn't speak. Unlike Pinocchio, the golem doesn't lie. But he can hear and he can understand. In a painting by Leonora Carrington entitled "The Bath of Rabbi Loew," Rabbi Loew is in his bathtub dreaming up the golem. The rabbi glows white, not unlike Geppetto in the belly of the shark. In the doorway, carrying a water jug, is most likely the golem in a nightgown. A figure wearing a hat shaped like a gigantic teardrop or a black light bulb stands behind the rabbi holding a towel. Surrounding the bath are what look like the letters of an unknown alphabet or the footprints of Noah's Ghost People. It's hard to tell. When the slander about the Jews using the blood of Christian babies in their rituals begins to quiet, the rabbi decides the golem is no longer needed. In one story, the name of God is removed from the golem's mouth and he dies. But in another stranger and more beautiful story, a little girl rubs the aleph off his forehead, and turns amet to met: truth into death. Because in Hebrew the only thing standing between truth and death is an aleph. In the Sefer Yetzirah, the oldest and most mysterious of all the kabbalistic texts, the aleph is represented by silence, and its "value designation" is "mother." I wonder what would've happened had Geppetto given Pinocchio an aleph. A small one. Carved onto the bridge of his nose. Because, ultimately, isn't silence and truth what Pinocchio is always missing? Originally, Pinocchio was only fifteen chapters long. And in the last chapter, Pinocchio is hanged. It was only at the behest of a pleading editor that Collodi saved the boy. At the end of the expanded Pinocchio, the old wooden puppet sits on a chair with its arms dangling, its head bent, and the real boy Pinocchio barely regards it. He does not go to the puppet. Or fix its head. Or knock on its wood for good luck. He doesn't even have the kindness to speak to it. "How funny I was," he says, "when I was a puppet … and how happy I am now that I am a proper little boy." Noah has begun making paper clothes for his Ghost People. It's winter, after all. I watch him cut out a tiny scarf and realize that I've never taught him to pray. I've taught him the prayers over the wine and the challah and the candles, but I've never taught him to pray. Or maybe praying isn't taught. Or this is praying. Or praying is keeping the Ghost People warm. The mouthless, earless Ghost People. Faith in Hebrew is emunah. It appears in the Bible as "to hold steady," but also as eman which means "a nursing father." "This one," says Noah, "has a fever." I feel the Ghost Person's head. "Is it a fever?" he asks. "It is," I say. He makes for it a paper bed. With a paper blanket. And a crumpled pillow, too. When there is a shooting, and then there is another shooting, and another shooting, all the politicians' "thoughts and prayers" are with the families of the victims. "We don't want your thoughts and prayers," we say. We say this, of course, because it's the thoughts and prayers of men and women we suspect have (like Pinocchio) an aleph missing. We say this because after each shooting it's already too late. The bubble has popped and the Ghost People are already being buried. * My favorite illustration of Pinocchio is by Edward Carey, because in it Pinocchio's nose is a branch. The forking branch is the aleph. Right in the middle of his face, the branch is the silence and the mother. It is Pinocchio's roots. Carey's depiction of Pinocchio brings him closer to the golem than he's ever been. Also, the branch looks exactly like the branch I lied to my sons about. Like the branch that never fell from the Tree of Life. "What happened to the Tree of Life?" asks Noah. "I think a branch fell." I look at my favorite of Noah's Ghost People and think about Rilke. "It remained silent," he writes in his heart-stopping essay On the Wax Dolls of Lotte, "not because it felt superior, but silent because this was its established form of evasion and because it was made of useless and absolutely unresponsive material. It was silent, and the idea did not even occur to it that this silence must confer considerable importance on it in a world where destiny and indeed God himself have become famous mainly by not speaking to us." I kiss the Ghost Person on the head. "What's your name?" I ask. Silence. "It's okay," I say. "I think I know." More silence. I don't know how to protect my sons. I wear their names around my neck on a thin gold chain. Sometimes I lie to them. Sometimes I say nothing. Sometimes I have to tell them that people do terrible things. Every day I send them out into the world. And they come home with rocks and twigs and woodchips and acorns and dead bugs in their pockets. It's been getting colder and colder here. And the news grows grimmer. If I could, would I have a golem sit in the corner of my kitchen, follow my boys to school, accompany us to synagogue, and stand at the door? I look around my house. Maybe the golem is already here. "Hello, hello?" More silence. Maybe my house is the golem. And my neighbor's house, too. And the synagogue is the golem and the school is the golem. Maybe all the buildings in our town are the golem. Or maybe the town is the golem. Or the country, or maybe the whole earth is the golem. Here we are. Inside the golem. Knock, knock. Who's there? It's us. Us who? I wish I could finish this joke, but I can't. The Ghost People are distracting me from finishing my sentences. Thank God. Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia. The post Ghost People: On Pinocchio and Raising Boys appeared first on GuaripeteMagazine. |
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