The barracks of misery are gone now, nothing more than outlines traced on a field of grass, a field where 56,000 men, women and children left their lives. On this fine spring day, the sky is deep blue and the meadow grass is verdant, punctuated by bright impertinent dandelions. Yet the beauty of Buchenwald, the beech woods of Thuringia, is painful to see atop the knowledge of its ugly past, and I cannot help but shudder at white dandelion fluff floating on the breeze by the former crematorium.
Read MoreYou Don’t Belong Here. How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War, by Elizabeth Becker (Public Affairs, 2021), is an important book, a signpost along the road to gender equality. Becker shows the reader how journalists Frances FitzGerald, Catherine Leroy and Kate Webb experienced the American war in Viet Nam, riding on their own initiative, against mighty pressure, and with amazing courage. Becker’s writing is tight, her descriptions of combat and its emotional fallout are cool and terse. She has been there.
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In 1910, the blue bird of happiness landed in the United States, in New York, to be specific, on Broadway. The Blue Bird was a philosophical play written by Maurice Maeterlinck, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year for it and other works. His Pelléas and Mélisande is better known today, as productions of the Debussy opera continue to enliven the stage. But at the start of the 20th century, The Blue Bird was all the rage, emerging in film and song, baptizing airplanes and race cars, and like most popular cultural symbols, being reduced to its simplest iteration: the blue bird of happiness.
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The 150th anniversary of the publication of Little Women got a bit of attention this year, and I could not remember having read it. The book, by Louisa May Alcott, is considered a classic in the canon of books that young women must read, so I picked up a copy I have had on my shelf for many years. It is a 1912 edition, given to my mother by her mother, and possibly by her mother before that. The women in my family tend to be bookish.
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Time has a way of collapsing into itself on Malta. The country is a group of four islands – Malta, the largest; Gozo, also inhabited; and then the tiny, uninhabited Comino and Filfia – that remain of an ancient land bridge between the Italian boot and the Carthaginian peninsula of Tunisia.
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If ever there was a Western for our times, it is Godless. As a genre, a Western allows any story to be told, as long as there is a struggle between at least two forces set on an open horizon, because the cowboy will be moving on at the end. Western films are Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of American identity turned into a fictional narrative. Mobility is the master key.
Read MoreFeeling dystopic ? It’s a great word, comes from the opposite of utopia, or the imaginary ideal place. Dystopia thus is the imaginary worst place. The after-the-event place. If you’re feeling dystopic these days, you have lots of company. I know some people who think everything will be fine, but I know more people who are preparing for catastrophe. (Note the poetry, dystopic, catastrophic, philosophic. The Greeks met the Romans, and then…)
Read MoreAgain, yesterday, the question. This time from a Belgian, but it has also come from French, Italians, Spaniards. How can someone like Donald Trump possibly have a chance at being president of the United States? There is, of course, no easy answer. Here are some of the reasons I offer, and maybe you have some more to lend me. An American living abroad during election season is always in need of explanatory material.
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But you could duck into it to adjust your stockings. Kiss your boyfriend. Have a short cry. Look for change. Take a nap. Roll a joint. Call your mama. Or change into a superhero costume. For example. If you were in the booth, it was your space. Now all conversation, crying and kissing occurs in public, for better or for worse.
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I arrived home to the latest episode of tragedy in Israel, of two sides so entrenched in their prejudice that they prefer murder to negotiation. The comparison arises naturally, as the language from Israel is exactly that of Mississippi 50 years ago. “They” can’t be trusted, “they” are out to get us, “they” will destroy “our” culture.
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