A Website of the Radical Imagination
Dear friends and family,
We found the five of them under a Mango tree last night, to which we had been led by bandits after a release deal was cut by their families.
We were the “guarantors” that the ransom given by their families would achieve their freedom. (This is, in fact, almost never the case, until multiple ransoms are paid.)
It was a dark 10pm, made up of many kinds of darkness.
At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.
Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from shooting, kept walking on the path by the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that, as he had left the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression — all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.
From Simon Ley’s “Marginalia,” an essay included in his posthumous collection, The hall of uselessness (2013)...
Chekhov wrote some 250 stories — among all of them he singled out “The Student” as his favorite.
Perhaps mad laughter, absurd laughter breaks the indulgence in suffering.
“These cookies?” There were a dozen Oreos and an equal amount of Lorna Doones scattered on the hospital tray. “Are you going to eat these?” Atop the cookies was a meal ticket stamped with a single word: bereavement. The floor nurse hovered, shifting her weight leg to leg, waiting on my response. “Do you mind if I take a few?”
It was against my better judgement to give up what little, in my brother’s dying hours, that this hospital had chosen to give back to us. The numbers mattered here. Over the previous two days, although Don was clearly dying—evident to the staff, his family, and most importantly himself—the hospital refused more than two visitors in the private room at a time. Two would come down and two more could go up. But these next two first had to stand in the guard’s line to secure a pass before heading up. Fine, but that whole process took more than twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, while my brother lay bureaucratically alone.
Forty days. Jesus fasted for forty days in the wilderness.
In his novel To Asmara, Thomas Keneally — the author best known for Schindler’s List — offered a compelling portrait of Eritrean caregivers amid an agonizing armed struggle for independence. I flashed on his fiction as I watched the short film (below) made by Times reporters embedded in a Ukrainian medical unit close to the front lines. The film is less romantic than To Asmara. Unlike the Eritrean heroes of Keneally’s novel, the Ukrainian doctors are not paragons. When they must care for a Russian prisoner of war, they do the job but…well, you’ll see. For now, let’s just stipulate the Ukrainians are not saints like Keneally’s fighters and healers. (Or, saying it another way that might speak to longtime First readers, there’s nobody like Fr. Frechette in this unit.)
In his egregiously wrong Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, Chief Justice Roberts appended a sneaky little footnote exempting the nation’s service academies — West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy. Roberts doubtlessly thought he was being crafty when he noted that there are “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present” that necessitates exempting them from the decision. Earlier in his opinion, Roberts wrote that because the 14th Amendment affords citizens “equal protection under the laws,” it forbids discriminating between them on the basis of race. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Roberts wrote.
What follow is the conclusion of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision rejecting affirmative action in higher education…
With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.
Your editor forwarded on the following passages from an informative piece by Michael Tomasky to First‘s…labor caucus:
Nobody seems to have noticed this, but over the course of the spring, the country’s four leading freight rail carriers agreed to grant the vast majority of their workers paid sick days.
Everybody remembers what happened last December. The workers threatened to strike over such days, among other issues. President Biden, generally very friendly toward labor, made it illegal for the workers to strike. He was criticized by unions and workers and fellow Democrats and liberal media outlets, this one included.
None of that criticism was wrong at the time. But it wasn’t the end of the story.
Superintendent Delta Barometre deliberately chose the cheapest and cruelest way to resolve a phone usage issue at New York’s Otisville Correctional Facility. On May 11, 2023, she issued a memo with the header, “SUBJECT: Incarcerated Individual Phone Policy.” In this memo she rescinded a phone policy that permitted each prisoner two thirty-minute phone calls per day (at the officer’s discretion). This was during the suspension of in-person visits due to the pandemic.
San Francisco is made for walking and walkers, though surely not for all times of the day and especially at night when it can be dangerous to walk on a dark and unfamiliar street. I know. I walk two or three miles a day for exercise and to reach a corner store to shop for groceries or a local restaurant like Mixto which serves Peruvian food where I devour the seafood stew.
Walking is probably the most democratic form of travel. It doesn’t cost anything to walk, stroll, or saunter and it doesn’t lift you off the ground and make you higher than anyone else.
Twenty, twenty-five-years ago, a Berkeley City College student started coming to the café where I took morning breaks. She was Mexican American, with pouty lips, a low-back tattoo, and a glorious torrent of black hair falling across and below her shoulders. She was a cousin of a barista, and soon was working part time behind the counter. When she returned a bracelet, I had lost, I offered to reward her, but she declined, so I left $20 in the tip jar.
My first brush with the audience for Film Forum’s Ozu retrospective was a trip. I got off on the wrong block and ran into another Ozu-er who was lost too. As we found our way around the block to the theatre, he told me he saw Tokyo Story when he was teenager, which led him (eventually) to spend decades in Japan where he got married. His Japanese wife met us at the theater.
Persuaded by James to go downtown (from where we lived so close in Echo Park many years) first time in five years (shocked at new residential skyscrapers we were told are including formerly homeless), to The Broad’s superb “Keith Haring” exhibition which I had otherwise intended to avoid (given what I knew would be a kind of “euphoric fear flashback” to the even-pre-AIDS rough-around-town NYC 70-80 years before we moved to LA when we then really did swing into ACT UP action). Glad I went but no nostalgia.
Photos by James Rosen
I so vividly remember watching the Jackie Gleason show with my family as a kid. I always loved the finale when Gleason would do the Joe The Bartender sketch and Frank Fontaine’s Crazy Guggenheim would come out. (Seemed like all the boys in my grade school class watched Gleason because we’d all take a shot at impersonating his signature laugh thereby driving our supervising teachers — what else? — crazy.) The inebriated Guggenheim would tell some wacko story, get a lot of laughs and then, at Gleason’s request, sing an old-timey ballad in the most beautiful baritone around.
The NBA playoffs are always an overly long slog, not just a Manichean struggle.
Cleveland’s sports venues are now 30 years old. The franchise owners want to have either major upgrades to the facilities or brand-new structures. The current stadiums and arena as well as the former Cleveland Municipal Stadium were built with public money which establishes a precedent. On the other hand, the long-gone Cleveland Arena and the Richfield Coliseum were owned and run privately without taxpayer assistance.
Excerpted from an article published by Ernest Hemingway in 1923…
…Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff. Get hold of a good photo of Signor Mussolini sometime and study it. You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by every 19-year-old Fascisto in Italy. Study his past record. Study the coalition that Fascismo is between capital and labor and consider the history of past coalitions. Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words. Study his propensity for dueling. Really brave men do not have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to make themselves believe they are brave. And then look at his black shirt and his white spats. There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.
There is not space here to go into the question of Mussolini as a bluff or as a great and lasting force. Mussolini may last fifteen years or he may be overthrown next spring by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who hates him. But let me give two true pictures of Mussolini at Lausanne.