For a solid year, Christian Okeke works twelve hours a day—doing construction, working in a factory, mopping up spilled beer and sticky foam at a bar—to buy his own cello. It arrives naked—no strings, no pegs, and no bridge—so his cellist friend helps him find all he needs.
In elementary school, as a fund-raiser, we kids were sent out to sell 16-ounce boxes of Bachman pretzels for twenty-five cents each. It was easy to sell lots of boxes because everyone loved them. My mother had to stop me from eating whole boxes at a sitting.
“Sympathy” in narrative usually means something more like “complex interest” than “pity.” The goal is (often but not always) to make characters as human as possible, within constraints of form, so audiences will find them meaningful. This requires treating characters with respect, at least to the point of trying to understand them, even if they are crooks, sadists, torturers, murderers, or Nazis. But if a narrative dramatizes very well, it risks justifying bad people or making us feel we “understand” or “identify with” them. This too is sometimes called “sympathy”—though it is more like empathy—for the devil.
Creative writing programs in universities often host visiting writers and poets for public readings, student manuscript consultations, and class visits. As an undergraduate I organized the visit of Gwendolyn Brooks (and her husband, Henry Blakely, Jr., who demanded to know what poetry I, a mere proser, was working on). As…
Elizabeth Jane Cochran, actually. Nellie Bly was her pseudonym. She landed her first newspaper job by writing a furious letter to the editor, words leaping off the page to slap a misogynist columnist. This was in 1885. Then she moved to New York and spent four penniless months persuading Joseph Pulitzer to hire her at the New York World.
Reading Shirley Chisholm’s 1973 book “The Good Fight” was something of a revelation for my students, as it offered not just an insider’s view of Black political thinking and organizing in the early 1970s but also a look at how a major institution like the Democratic Party operates and how difficult it is to mount what was in Chisholm’s case a true insurgent candidacy.
It makes sense that here, in the land of self-improvement, we should grant gratitude its own (albeit politically confused, deceptive, and tainted) holiday. But I suspect we also need Thanksgiving because we are so bad at it.
Padura has won more than two dozen international awards, the last, the Princess of Asturias prize. On that occasion, he wore a Cuban guayabera and held a baseball when he went up to the podium. First loves never die.
Miles Davis no longer belongs to his family. He belongs to the world and the family has no say in how the world wishes to treat him, how each new generation decides it wishes to understand him. This little speech had no effect. I was naïve to think it would.
The stamps do not lie: Their colors pop out of a solemn black background, and the skulls evoke grief, death, and decomposition as surely as poor Yorick’s skull did for Hamlet. But there is no sense of alas, no horror or repulsion. These are sugar skulls, delightful to take into ourselves.