Doing Yoga, I Think About Simone Biles And My Nonbinary Child
Last Man Standing: Don’t Forget to Stretch!
1. Fallen Stars
Just as far right politicians, in France and the United States, indulge in theories that warn of the danger of being “replaced” by a population intent on taking not only their rightful place, but destroying them (annihilating their very being), the basketball world is experiencing an analogous phenomenon. And why not? Those “Basketball Is Life” t-shirts had it at least partially right: let’s settle for “Basketball Mirrors Life.” One can always find a parallel phenomenon.
The Fight Against Line 3 (& For Wild Rice)
Since 2014, Tara Houska, Nancy Beaulieu, Dawn Goodwin, Taysha Martineau, Winnona LaDuke and hundreds of others have been fighting against the construction of the Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota.
The Riderless Horse (Letter from Port au Prince)
The year was 1963. The name of the horse was Black Jack.
Even for a 10 year old, it was both moving and troubling to see the horse with no rider following the coffin of President John Kennedy–with a spirited strut, yet not easily controlled.
The horse with the empty saddle is an ancient symbol of poignant absence.
The horse without a master, the nation without a leader, the body without a soul.
We are living the painful and dangerous days after the brutal killing of Haitian President Jovenel Moise. The horse has no rider, and does not know where to turn.
Tipping Point
The other day I sat with a man, his name is Ricardo. Or was. I hope is. He was less than a mile from my home, which is filled with the things I buy with paintings—whole bean coffee, volcanic face masks, limonada, audiophile-approved speakers. I can’t stop thinking how close he was, I keep looking out my kitchen window in the direction of Ricardo.
Party Lines
What It Was (July 20)
One year ago today Trump outdid himself rhetorically, reaching astonishing heights of inspiration during a dark hour of American crisis. It was a stirring challenge to the better angels of our nature. Speaking of the pandemic’s rising death toll, Trump tugged at the heartstrings of America when he declared to Chris Wallace, “It is what it is.”
Are You Ready for the Country?
A conversation between Benj DeMott and Celeste Dupuy-Spencer about her painting of the Capitol riot, America’s politics of culture, Christianity and Country music…
The Great Fear (& Independence Day)
Rummaging through Rat Bohemia, People in Trouble, and Forgetting Dolores, I am wondering how to confront or forget Sarah Schulman’s magisterial, if also monumental, heavy-weight, literally door-stopping Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Whew! Who can forget those years of what I once termed (in earlier writing on this crisis and epoch) euphoric fear. Schulman’s novels prophesied it.
Radiation Treatment
So, I am in the tight waiting room sharing space and chairs with half dozen black men in their fifties and sixties — the oldest of them twenty years younger than me. They are all of them thin and dressed in poverty uniform: shabby sweat pants or jeans slipping off slack thighs, loose sweaters and shirts that had once been molded to thicker chests and arms. Tired eyes, mustaches and hair combed, but still unkempt. Worn men, their unprivileged lives on display. They had all of them been driven up by van from black Brooklyn to glossy Mid-town Manhattan for their daily radiation doses.
Address Code
When I read remarks from people prefaced with a series of identity markers (like bar code)—as a gay, het, trans, white, black, disabled, poor, rich, and so on—as if this is who you are, I think, this is not who you are. I think, this tells me nothing I can smell, taste, see, touch, hear. I think, who you are is the bird song you heard through the window that morning, or wished you could recapture from that visit to Tuscany. I think, you are your face in sleep. You are the way you lick the bowl and the way you hold out your hand for a dog to sniff.
Philip Roth’s Ups and Downs (Blake Bailey’s Biography)
Helen Frankenthaler once mused that “artists were like cockroaches, for them everything was grist for the mill…” Philip Roth’s grist came from his close observation of people in his orbit and the world at large. But mostly it came from his own life which he constantly chewed up and regurgitated as fiction until the line between the two blurred.
Walkers in the City: A Brownsville Boy Recalls Alfred Kazin
This is the first chapter in the author’s memoir: Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers (2012). (Paperback edition available from University of Massachusetts Press.)
Known & Unknown
Donald Rumsfeld’s death sent me back to his memoir, Known and Unknown. I wasn’t grabbed by his counterattacks on his critics and colleagues in the Bush Administration. (Years after disasters in Iraq, I doubt anyone would be won over by his case that nation-building-was-not-his-job-and-Bremer-Condi-were-incompetent.) What struck me were his (few) moments of clarity about his own dimness. Such as his reflection on his failure to check in with his wife on 9/11:
“Have you called Mrs. R.?” More than 12 hours after the attack on the Pentagon—I had been so engaged I hadn’t thought of calling her. After 47 years of marriage one takes some things—perhaps too many things—for granted…[A Defense Department official] looked at me with the stare of a woman who was also a wife: “You son of a bitch.” She had a point.
That Month
Wrists bound with satin cords, they wed in June.
Till death or an affair, he said in June.
Moon-fuelled, she keeps each man a month, shows her
faces to Caleb in May, Ted in June.
Nocturne for Washington Square
As a resident of Greenwich Village, my local park is Washington Square. I can’t account for what goes on there late at night. According to the media, there’s a riot going on after dark, with bottles being thrown at cops, brawls and even stabbings. There are those in the neighborhood who want to see a curfew in the park, as well as a skateboard ban and restrictions on how many people can be there. These Good Citizens are aiming at the one source of disturbance they can control: the young. But the atmosphere of frantic abandon is too widespread in the city to be controlled. Many people have emerged from lockdown with intense pent-up feelings, and challenges to the police make law enforcement a tricky task. Last week, a deranged man smashed the windows of my favorite diner and decked the 73-year-old cook. Hundreds of dirt bikes have roared up the avenue under my window at 1 a.m. Bursts of impromptu fireworks pierce the slats of my blinds, and I often hear cries of unleashed rage. In the wee hours, I don’t go out wearing flowers in my hair.
There’s a racial subtext to this issue, since the crowd in the Square includes many people of color, and they bring the culture of their neighborhoods, including music. Race and class have always been the flashpoint of disputes over urban turf, but in the streets of Greenwich Village the rules are lightly applied, even if the mixing doesn’t extend to the high-rent apartments. It’s no surprise that Washington Square is now a site of that diversity, since it has a storied history of free expression. The mood may be hard-edged after midnight, but at twilight, when the sunset is golden in the windows of innumerable buildings, it’s mellow yellow. I have seen no violence, but lots of casual toking and flirting—yes, there is plenty of cruising among people of all races, genders, sexualities, and hair colors that defy the human genome.
Nuts in May
Last Thursday night, in dueling sound bites, Paul Ryan and the tag team of Gaetz/Greene presented starkly different visions of the future of the Republican party.