The marketing around these technologies will continue to insist that they are miraculous little machines, helpful tools that allow us to accomplish more of what we want to do. Flawed-but-perfectible calculators for language. As they work their way into more of our speech, we will struggle to say the things we want to say. Then, we will struggle to think of things we want to say. And, then, we will not really be sure who is doing the saying.
Reading John Balaban’s poems and translations, you gain the camaraderie of poets as far-flung as Basho, Li Po, Anna Akhmatova, American John Haag, Georgi Borrisov, Bulgarians Kolyo Sevov and Lyubomir Nikolov; epigraphs by Homer, Polybius, Brecht; the people who wrote, remembered, and sang folk ca dao, and the many characters who live to speak again, from Ovid, miserable in his exile in Tomis, to Root Boy Slim, “lead singer and composeur for his Sex Change Band.”
When Abiodun Oyewole, founding member of The Last Poets, filed a copyright lawsuit against the estate the Notorious BIG (aka Biggie or BIG) it connected the nationalist bard of the 1960s to the politically ambivalent emcee of the 1990s. It also signaled both aesthetic continuity and an ideological impasse between two generations of African-American wordsmiths.
I go my own way, but my kids are back to school or off on an internship now, and with that, the season is officially over for me, and all for the best. It is time to get up off the couch, work, walk, be ambitious, and take in the sun. To transition from a Christmas-stocking diet back to apples, Napa cabbage, lean proteins, and water.
Jarvis tells that story with no glee. He loves the form as much as I do, and as he recounts the lively history of magazines, he finds the story of larger cultural shifts. The first magazines, he writes, were coffeehouses, curating—before the word came into vogue—the best writing, criticism, poetry, advice, and images. Even the word “magazine” was a French derivation from the Arabic word for storehouse. Those smooth pages collected and preserved treasures.
Eddie Balchowsky’s lifestyle had its romance. But it also meant periods of homelessness, nights curled up in a friend’s bathtub to sleep, periods of depression so deep he had to be hospitalized. None of that tore away his kindness.
The film’s strategic map already has commentators in conniptions. If Texas and California are not more disparate than cheese and chalk, what brand of politics even motivates this movie, let alone motivations for our second civil war?
After a time the bin contents blurred into a single substance the color of meat hash. I grew up with food insecurity and unlivable housing, and the deep misery of poverty is always accessible to me.
P.G. Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse, just to add a wrinkle) was one of a type I used to despise and now grudgingly admire: those who maintain their equilibrium by refusing to look at anything dark or glum. Sturdy as a hard rubber ball, he bounced along in near-total denial.
The right has been on this push about Blacks lowering the standards of higher education since the early days of affirmative action in college admissions back in the early 1970s. Many Black commentators and activists have chosen to circle the wagons to defend Gay and cry racism. This is understandable. But there is a larger issue here about exactly how our race is supposed to function within the American university.