Four Things To Read

A review of Steven Sher’s Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies, by Richard Jeffrey Newman (me): In the days after Hamas’ brutal October 7th attack against Israel, I started to write something in response to those who celebrated the attack, including the atrocities the Hamas soldiers committed “what decolonization meant.” Whatever else might have been true about the attack as an expression of Palestinian resistance—and there is no denying that it was an expression of that resistance—I wanted to point out that the attack itself, especially the atrocities, was also an expression of the antisemitism that is explicit in Hamas’ original charter from 1988 and is at least implicit in the revised version that the organization put forth in 2017. Not to acknowledge both those truths in responding to the attack, I planned to aruge was to compromise whatever solidarity you might express for the Palestinians by allowing it to serve as a cover for a hatred of the Jews that extends far beyond the borders of Israel and Palestine. I still think that is an important to make, which is why I have noted it briefly here. Far more important at this moment, though, is to acknowledge that a very similar hatred informs the war Israel is now prosecuting in order to make good on its goal of “flattening Gaza,” and so I want to draw your attention to my review, published in 2022, of a book of poetry the goal of which is to establish for that hatred the kind of legitimacy that only art can give, in particular in a poem called “Bombing Gaza” that has turned out in hindsight to be horrifyingly prophetic.

Dionne Brand: On narrative, reckoning and the calculus of living and dying: “Where they advocated, over the last 30 or 40 years, shrinking the state they have now swiftly expanded it. Though they have not admitted to the failure of their ideas and austerity policies, they have virtually, though temporarily, overturned 40 years of shrinking the state’s responsibilities to people. You wonder what additional things might have been done that they previously said could not be done. For we have seen how quickly these hitherto impossible changes were ramped up.” Brand is talking here about how Canada dealt with the pandemic shutdown, but the point is well-taken in the States as well. This brief essay is worth reading for its meditation on what the idea of “returning to normal” means, and to whom.

Tales from Crane Nation, by Alex Stein: A review of The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, by Omer Friedlander, this essay is also an interesting meditation on some of the challenges of writing fiction set in Israel about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

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“Coney Island”, A Dadaist Sound Poem by Victor Packer: The link will take you to the Yiddish Book Center’s website, where you can read a translation of this poem in English and listen to Victor Packer recite it in Yiddish. You can read more about Victor Packer in “The One Man Radio Department” on StoryCorps’ website. He was a force to be reckoned with.

“Irene, Goodnight,” by Jessica Cuello: This very powerful poem was up on Poetry Daily’s website in February of this year. It’s from Cuello’s book LIAR.

Four Things To See

These photographs are by Carol Highsmith, who takes pictures of all aspects of American life in all fifty states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. She has donated her life’s work, a collection of around 100,000 images to the Library of Congress.

An elaborate spiral staircase, at the Nathaniel Russell House in South Carolina.

An infrared-camera view of the New River Gorge Bridge in Fayette County, West Virginia.

Prince William Sound on the south coast of Alaska

Slot Canyon in Arizona

Four Things to Listen To

Chuck Mangione - The Children of Sanchez

I really like this live version, but if you want to hear the original version, with lyrics, check it out here.

No Doubt - Don't Speak

The Charlie Daniels Band - The Devil Went Down To Georgia

Squirrel Nut Zippers - Ghost of Stephen Foster

Four Things About Me

I had a very serious girlfriend in my twenties. We were together for close to seven years and had started talking seriously about moving in together. We first got to know each other through what would have been considered a perfectly conventional Victorian courtship: we wrote letters. When I tell my students about this they are incredulous. They can’t understand why we would’ve been interested in news about each other that was already old when we got it.

I am a self-taught piano player.

When I was a teenager, I played bass baritone bugle in the Floral Park Knights of Columbus Drum Corp. I was good enough that I briefly flirted with the idea of trying to get into one of the corps that, at the time, competed in the Drum Corp International, tournaments. I think the one nearest me would have been the Bayonne Bridgemen, which no longer exists.

When I was in my early twenties, I was, briefly, accused of corporate espionage. I was working for a strategic intelligence startup that produced industry-specific databases for high level decision-makers. My job was to read all the computer magazines that were then available, or at least the ones that the company subscribed to, and write overviews of trends in the industry that corporate executives could use in making technology-purchasing decisions. This was in the mid-1980s and the only PC I’d ever owned was an IBM PCjr, so I was pretty much brand new to desktop computers myself. One day, I needed to format a floppy disk so I could save the work I would do that day, but I mistyped the command and ended up reformatting the entire hard drive of the computer I was working on. Thankfully, the person in whose office I was working—I think it was the CEO’s lawyer—was religious about doing backing ups, so nothing was actually lost, but he and the CEO did question me about whether I was in fact working for one of her competitors. I was not. Interestingly enough, I received an email newsletter from that company not too long ago. It’s now a very successful international company with the same CEO.

Image by rawpixel.com

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