Self loves C. L. Odell’s poem in the 24 June 2019 New Yorker.
PEONY
An excerpt
So let me have this now
before the blossoms
take my absence
from the yard
and I am again only one-sided,
a living thing responsible
to live, finding myself in tall grass,
whispering back.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
The militarization of the borderlands has become so commonplace that one often grows numb to its manifestations. — Francisco Cantu
In his article, a review of Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Cantu shows how the words border and frontier co-exist in the American mind.
The review begins:
On Election Day 2018, residents of Nogales, Arizona began to notice a single row of coiled razor wire growing across the top of the city’s border wall.
Riveting.
— First Line, All Will Be Well, in the 11 March 2019 New Yorker
Pack rat self. She clipped an article from The New Yorker of 21 March 2011 and kept it tucked away in a drawer. Until today, when self found it again. She kept only one page, so she doesn’t know who the author of the piece is.
In 1993, Kevin Walsh, of the New York Aquarium, said there was a harbor seal living under the Williamsburg Bridge. In ’97, Sieswerda reported that occasional seals could be spotted on out-of-the-way beaches in Brooklyn and Queens. In 2001, kayakers said that they saw about a dozen harbor seals living on Swinburne Island, in the Lower Harbor, two and a half miles from the Verrazano Bridge.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
STATE OF THE RESISTANCE, January 2018
In a new book, How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zibatt argue that democracy does not typically succumb during a catastrophic event, such as a seizure of power by a military junta. It fails more commonly through the gradual weakening of crucial institutions, such as the judiciary and the press. In short, the Union is precisely as strong as its institutions, and those instiutions are being assailed in ways that we’ve seldom seen.
— Jelani Cobb, Talk of the Town, p. 27
Self has been subscribing to The New Yorker for over 30 years.
She saves back issues. Obv.
Here’s an excerpt from a Talk of the Town piece published 28 May 2018:
“The Long Fight,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
After reading the piece, self adds McCain’s The Restless Wave, the book the Senator co-authored with Mark Salter, to her 2019 reading list. In that book, McCain writes
Stay tuned.
In two years, Trump has arranged two of the most bizarre summits in the world:
In the meantime, what has happened to Oleg Sentsov, who was jailed as a “terrorist” for “protesting against Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea and the war Russia’s president unleashed in eastern Ukraine four years ago” (The Economist, 10 June 2018)? No one knows. Here’s the latest article self found about him; it was almost a month ago, in The Guardian.
Trump instead calls for Russia to be allowed back into the G7, which expelled it “for the seizure of Crimea.” According to Trump, that “happened a while ago.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
— Claudia Roth Pierpoint, “Angels and Men” in The New Yorker (16 October 2017)
The article is a review of the Walter Isaacson biography of Leonardo da Vinci, called Leonardo da Vinci. One of the biggest surprises in the piece is the discovery that “one of the last remaining complete notebooks, the Codex Leicester,” is in the possession of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Also: “Leonardo was illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted . . . ”
Dear blog readers, last year self saw the Mona Lisa. It was May or June. A Spanish woman asked self whether she knew where the famous painting was located. Then she asked a museum guard, and the two of us went looking together. And we found it. And she asked self to take pictures of her standing in front of it. And insisted on taking a few of self.
And here’s a wide-angle shot of the gallery housing the Mona Lisa and then self making a horrible face because, honestly, she dislikes having her picture taken (not when the humidity has done things to her hair) and the crowded gallery full of people aiming their cell phones in one direction was so disorienting.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Giraffe
(By coincidence, self happened to be watching 60 Minutes last Sunday and it showed the scene the author describes in the poem, the ‘culling’ of a perfectly healthy giraffe by a Copenhagen zoo)
His eyes were liquid, kind.
His lashes each as long as a hummingbird’s tongue
His fetlocks puffed from galloping, his tail curled upward
From the joy of feeling fleet across the tinted grasslands
And the gold savannah there.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
from The New Yorker, 22 May 2017:
Alas, self missed this film when it showed in theatres last year but she will always, to her dying day, like Colin Farrell.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 