I lost my grandmother’s opera glasses … an empire in thrall to innovations offered electric shocks in the Prater for a small charge. In wedding dresses, fräuleins dove from moving trains. Scions, following the Great Somnambulator, walked out of windows (into Blush Noisette!) or stepped off bridges in uniform. Thunderclouds amassed as if looking…
Hong Kong has its own Antigone and her name is Chow Hang-Tung. I had never heard of her until June 4, 2021. Every year from 1989 until the start of the pandemic, Hong Kong has commemorated the Tiananmen Massacre with a candlelight vigil at Victoria Park on June 4. Though attendance had been dwindling through…
For Jim Longenbach On or about November 9, 2016, human nature changed. All human speech shifted, and when human speech shifts there is at the same time a shift in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. The word equality — so long associated with liberalism — left the left; they erected the house of complicity in…
“Tomorrow’s Child,” a story by Ray Bradbury, opens with Peter and Polly Horn traveling to a hospital for the birth of their first child. In their technological utopia, a helicopter conveys them across a sky spangled with rocket ships. An advanced birthing machine awaits, promising to eliminate Polly’s labor. At the moment of truth, however,…
No Coward Soul Is Mine No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere I see Heaven’s glories shine And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest As I Undying Life, have power in thee …
The worst thing that was ever done to a person I know was committed by a man who claimed he loved his victim. “That was not rape,” he told her afterwards. He was in this regard highly unoriginal. Every rape survivor who has shared her story with me was also told by her rapist…
I There are facets of my being of which I am ashamed, but the love of my people is not one of them. (Reader, hear me out.) The bond is primordial, though I am under no illusion that its primordiality exempts it from thoughtful consideration and the question of justification. It has nothing to do…
The State of Israel recently celebrated its seventy-fifth year of existence. If someone had told us way back in 1948 that the country would count nearly ten million people as its citizens, eight million of them Jews; that it would lead the world in technological innovation; that it would be a regional superpower — we…
On June 8, 2022, when the world finally recognized the atrocities of Russian troops on the occupied territories of Ukraine, I proposed an intellectual exercise to my Facebook friends: “Imagine that a couple of years have passed. Russian war crimes are discussed less and less. Perhaps some war criminals have even been jailed. Those who…
We knew we were already too late. Too late to be modernists, too late to be reds, too late to turn against Stalin, too late to fight the Nazis, too late to be red-baited, too late to join the anti-communist left, too late to take money from the CIA for our magazines. We were too…
What a film demands from a viewer varies a great deal. Often not much is demanded. Keeping the characters straight, remembering what has happened, and following the plot are usually enough for much commercial cinema to “work,” to make sense and entertain. We easily accept the illusion that we are watching a fictional cinematic world…
Night Sail I dreamt of sailing Spray, grandfather Herrick’s pilot cutter, from its berth in an old black-and-white on the kitchen wall, past the docks, the cranes and derricks, not to some sluggish oil-rainbowed bight with pier and prom, in the lee of Gosport or Goring, not to the wild side of the Isle…
