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I have a hobby—well, not so much a hobby as a habit. When I meet people, I punch them in the solar plexus. Well, again, “punch” isn’t the right word. Most times, it’s a just a light tap, a brush that passes quickly. Other times, if circumstances permit and the mood of the moment seems just right, I really haul off and punch. It’s my way of getting to know people, a little signature touch to assure that both I and my newfound acquaintance remember the moment.
for Brian Aldiss
You placed in my hand
a prehistory of mind.
(Yours?
Possibly.
Mine?
Undoubtedly.)
You called it a gift,
your gentle hold
as you relinquished it
betraying your fear
of awakening its angels.
You had etched
just beneath its skin
“Long life—lots of love”
and you kissed me
(I am sure
you wish the same
for all the girls.)
But—
from your high perch
above the ruins of Monemvasia,
does your eye grow tired,
looking over our shoulders?
Do you contemplate
each single entrance,
each love fading as it ascends,
its golden sandals losing luster
in dark tunnels, wearing thin
along the rocky, zig-zag path
toward the grassland above?
Would you warn us
of dark, doughty enemies,
invaders from the sea?
(Would we hear, above
the echoes of the ruins?)
Our sweet young ghosts
we leave at water’s edge.
Let them strengthen their limbs
in rock-strewn sand.
(The climb awaits.)
They cannot imagine as yet
how much more brilliant blue
the sea from each sad height.
Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2015; $30.00 hc 320 pages
It’s difficult to review James Morrow’s fiction without lapsing into a lecture about the importance of satiric literature—Candide, “A Modest Proposal,” yadayadayada—building up to an exhortation that “This Is Important and You Should Read It Because It’s Good for You!” Well, yes, you should read this book, but not out of a grim sense of duty. At his best, when he’s not overcome by outrage at our narrow-minded cruelty, Morrow argues effectively for humane tolerance. He’s thoughtful and funny.
I do not know whether there are people who escape despair, and if there are, I believe that they are not very numerous. I do not envy those people. There is in despair a bitter substance, a fecund poison, the seed of a superior virtue that one cannot find elsewhere. Everyone, sooner or later, ought to aspire to the juice of the hemlock that gives wings, the sacred belladonna. But it is necessary to be able to drink the poison and not die.
The subject of a holocaust—and the one we call The Holocaust—can I use it in fiction or does it use me? Will you object to my appropriation and should I care? In any case, when compelled to speak of such darkness, language copes, shifts, concentrates.
If it isn’t true that to “write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”1 nor that it makes it “impossible to write,” I am sure that in every tent of character we pitch within fiction, however sweet or escapist, there is in some corner, now, unimaginable death.
Continue reading "Paul Voermans: Technique of Awful: When Extremity Takes Us Past the Real" »
Introduction
The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) from the Greek genos (family, tribe, or race) and Latin -cide (killing). Lemkin was a Pole of Jewish descent and he used this term to describe the 1915 massacres of Armenians and Assyrians. Genocide may be defined as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group” (Funk 1).
Continue reading "Victor Grech: Crime and Punishment in Star Trek: Genocide and War Crimes" »