pomegranate

The flower with the poem. Or the poem with the flower.

growth

waxy vermilion paint—

these pomegranate flowers

swept sunward

haiku

growth

waxy vermilion paint—

these pomegranate flowers

swept sunward

(based on a longer piece published in Ferbero some years back)

Firecrackers

Firecrackers

I know it’s a long argument but as one who is disturbed by the harmful effects of fireworks on the natural environment I think that part of the new reality should consider the harm that traditional fireworks displays can do. I say fireworks but even running an internet search for “firecrackers + air pollution” without the quotes brings in a good deal of scientific information in this regard.

By scientific I mean organizations like Science, Forbes, Sciencedirect.com, three of the first hits to come up in my search this morning.

No doubt pyromancy has something to do with the enchantment that fireworks explosions continue to provide (some) people with. But it seems to me that professional displays and smaller household get togethers could at least be more limited than they are currently. My immediate context for this is the Barcelona area, but there’s also the international arena television and newer related media bring out.

In any case I feel encouraged by the previously mentioned scientific material. Long arguments have to start somewhere, right?

Barcelona

Up and down the Passeig de Sant Joan. Along the carrer de Mallorca as far as the Rambla de Catalunya. My meanders around our neighbourhood and beyond grow longer.

Barcelona is famously a walker's city. But Phase Three in Barcelona means we still have to wear protective masks even if we can at least we can be out and about, working slowly toward a routine closer to what we consider our ordinary schedules.

“Phase Three”! Who would have thought our lives would come to anything like this? But it’s false to think a bad pandemic wasn’t foreseen and warned against. The signs were there in the specialized press, magazines like The Atlantic, not to mention Nature and others such as Virology Journal. They were there when hand washing and wearing protective gloves in supermarkets began to be advised. 

We simply didn’t know when this would happen or how harsh it was going to be.

So, yes, we go out, but we continue to take care….

Bloomsday and Dalloway Day

Today is Bloomsday, celebrating the publication of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. As it happens, however, tomorrow will mark the third occasion of the similar celebration of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. So the close relation between these two writers grows.

The two books just named have long been linked together, and for a variety of reasons.

Woolf’s novel is a double parody: its hypotexts are Homer’s Odyssey as well as Joyce’s Ulysses.* In the 1919 essay “Modern Novels” (later published as “Modern Fiction”) Woolf praises Joyce’s writing, although with reservations. Offered the chance to publish Ulysses, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press declined (on the grounds that to do so was beyond the technical means of their small company, although the true reason involved the high risk of being sued for publishing indecent material.

Much ink has flowed on these topics and to some extent there is a kind of polarization between those who believe that Woolf admired Joyce’s writing and those who believe the opposite. There is obviously a deeper vein here, however, that of censorship, despised by both of these Modernist writers. In any case it seems to me important that there is now a Dalloway Day as well as a Bloomsday. By way of celebration of both, I would like to quote something from A History of Reading, whose author, Alberto Manguel, tells us of an observation by Spinoza:

 It often happens [Spinoza wrote] that in different books we read histories in themselves similar but which we judge very differently, according to the opinions we have formed of the authors. I remember once to have read in some book that a man named Orlando Furioso used to ride a kind of winged monster through the air, fly over any country he liked, kill unaided vast numbers of men and giants, and other such fancies which from the point of view of reason are obviously absurd. I read a very similar story, in Ovid, of Perseus, and also, in the books of Judges and Kings, of Samson, who alone and unarmed killed thousands of men, and of Elijah, who flew through the air and at last went up to heaven in a chariot of fire, with fiery horses. All these stories are alike, but we judge them very differently. The first one sought to amuse, the second had a political object, the third a religious one.**

Not that I think people will read less as internet and other technological novelties continue to grow. Only that it does seem good to point out that different types of text serve different purposes.

*My source on this is Molly Hoff’s “The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs Dalloway,” Twentieth Century Literature 45:2 (Summer 1999), pp. 186-209.

**Manguel, A History of Reading, Chapter One.

First steps

First steps

Sunday, 7 June 2020. Today Barcelona, like so many other cities, was the scene of a demonstration to denounce police brutality and, more specifically, the recent police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Interlinked oppressive acts like this cut right into the heart of our societies. Such treatment by the police is appalling at any time, but in this case there is the added factor that Afro-Americans are known to be proportionately at greater risk of mistreatment.

This is not only a question of Minneapolis. It involves the entire country. By extension, in a globilizing world, we really are “all in it together.” The United States prides itself on justice for all, and yet race seems somehow to continue to be a factor that sparks injustice and further inequality. The underlying racism and authoritarianism of the Trump administration and our inability to come to terms with an endemic racism makes us look ridiculous. As Jennifer Rubin, writing in the op-ed section of The Washington Post on the hypocrisy of the Trump administration, has written: “Should we feel the need to rebuke a strongman in another country (e.g., Turkey, China, Russia, Hungary) one can only imagine the guffaws that would ensue.”*

The announcement in today’s papers that Minneapolis aims to dismantle its police force and newly rebuild it to promote public safety is a welcome first step.** Obviously many details will have to be attended to in order to carry out such an extensive move. Two questions immediately come to mind: Will it work? If so, can other cities follow suit?

* “How the United States might have condemned the Trump regime”, The Washington Post, 4 June 2020.

** https://www.startribune.com/mpls-council-majority-backs-dismantling-police-department/571088302/