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Not too long ago, I received a message through the contact form on my website from a woman named Elena. “I work,” she wrote, “in digital safety for vulnerable populations and recently assisted on a project with ExpressVPN that created a guide for survivors of domestic violence…focus[ing] on how to secure devices, communications, and personal data when technology becomes part of the abuse.” Most of the messages I get through my contact form are either obvious spam or cleverly designed AI scams, so I was immediately suspicious when she asked if I’d be willing to include a link to the guide in a post I wrote about being a survivor of sexual violence. As it turned out, though—and I will admit to being pleasantly surprised by this—not only is ExpressVPN a legitimate digital privacy and cybersecurity company, but the guide, “Tech safety for survivors of domestic violence,” is well-written, thorough, and, in my inexpert opinion, deserving of serious attention. Linking to it—which I will do again here and also later on in this post—seems the least I can do.

I’ve written a great deal about how coming to terms with the childhood sexual violence I experienced has shaped my life, as a writer and as a man, but while I have written in an episodic way about my encounters with domestic violence, I have not yet tried to corral into a similar coherence the way it has been a thread—or perhaps it’s more accurate to call it a motif—running through my life. The closest I’ve come to attempting that kind of synthesis was in a poem called “Coitus Interruptus,” which appeared in The Silence of Men.

Coitus Interruptus

1.

Naked at the window, my wife calls me
as if someone is dying, and someone
almost is, pinned to the concrete face down
beneath the fists and feet and knees of three

policemen. I’m still hard from before she
jumped out of bed to answer the question
I was willing not to ask when the siren
stopped on our block, but now I’m here, and I see

the man is Black, and how can I not
bear witness? They’ve cuffed him,
but the uniforms continue to crowd our street,
and the blue-and-whites keep coming,

as if called to war, as if the lives
in all these darkened homes
were truly at stake, and that’s the thing—
who can tell from up here?—maybe

we’re watching our salvation
without knowing it. Above our heads,
a voice calls out Fucking pigs!
but the ones who didn’t drag the man

into a waiting car and drive off
refuse the bait. They talk quietly,
gathered beneath the streetlamp
in the pale circle of light

the man was beaten in, and then
a word we cannot hear is given
and the cops wave each other back
to their vehicles, the flash and sparkle

of their driving off

throwing onto the wall of our room
a shadow of the embrace
my wife and I have been clinging to.

When I was sixteen, Tommy
brought to my room before he left
the Simon and Garfunkel tape
I’d put the previous night

back among his things. He placed it
on the bookshelf near the door
he’d slammed shut two days earlier
when he was holding a butcher’s cleaver

to my mother’s life. I wanted
to run after him and smash it at his feet;
I wanted to grab him by the scruff of the neck
and crush it in his face, to dangle him

over the side of our building with one
ankle in my left hand and the Greatest Hits
in my right and ask him
which I should let drop.

But I didn’t, couldn’t really:
he was much too big,
and I was not a fighter,
and one of my best friends right now

lives with her son in the house
where her husband has already hit her
with a cast iron frying pan,
and so there is no reason to believe

she is not at this moment cringing
bruised and bleeding in a corner
of their bedroom, or that she is not,
with her boy and nothing else in her arms,

running the way my mother
didn’t have a chance to run,
and there’s nothing I can do
but look at the clock—Sunday,

11:11 PM—and remind myself
it’s too late to call, that my calls
have caused trouble for her already.
When they pushed Tommy in handcuffs

out the front door, past where my mother sat,
quiet, unmoving, and I did not know
from where inside my own rage and terror
to pull the comfort I should have offered her,

the officer making sure Tommy
didn’t trip or run winked at me, smiling
as if what had happened were suddenly
a secret between us, and this our signal

that everything was okay. I wondered
if his had been the voice, calm
and deep with male authority—Son,
are you sure your mother’s in there

against her will?—that when I called
forced me to find the more-than-yes
I can’t remember the words to
that convinced the cops they had to come.

2.

Sophomore year, walking the road
girdling the campus. Up ahead, a woman’s voice
pleading with a man’s shouting to stop.
A car door slamming, engine revving,

and then wheels digging hard into driveway dirt
that when I got there was a dust cloud
obscuring the blue vehicle’s rear plate.
The woman sprawled on the asphalt,

her black dress spread around her
like an open portal her upper body
emerged from. She pulled
the cloth away from her feet,

which were bleeding, and I drove
to where her spaghetti strap sandals
lay torn and twisted beyond repair.
She left them there. Then to her home,

two rooms in a neighborhood house,
and I helped her onto the bed
that was her only furniture, and filled
a warm-water basin to soak her feet,

and he had not hit her, so there was nothing
to report, but she said she was afraid
and would I sit with her a while.
We talked about her home in Seoul,

the man her parents picked for her
that she ran to America to avoid marrying,
and here she laughed—first trickle

of spring water down a winter mountain—

So instead I take from Egypt! I so stupid!
Then: What you think? Can man and woman
sleep same bed without sex? I said yes.

So, please, tonight, you stay here? Maybe he coming back.

He fear white American like you. I was not a fighter,
but I stayed, and in the morning when I left,
she said kamsahamnida—thank you—
and she bowed low, and she did not

ask my name, nor I hers, and though
I sometimes looked for her on campus,
I never saw her again. Just like Tommy,
whom I forgot to say before was white.

Just like the Black woman who lived downstairs
before I got married, whose cries—Help!
Please! He’s killing me!—and the dead thud
of him, also Black, throwing her

against the wall, and his screaming—
Shut up, bitch! Fucking whore!—filled the space
till I was drowning. The desk sergeant
didn’t ask if I knew beyond a doubt

that she was being beaten,
but when she opened her front door
to the two men he sent, she shrieked
the way women shriek

in bad horror movies
when they know they’re going to die,
and I almost felt sorry for calling.
A few weeks later,

a voice on the phone: You know
what’s going on below you, right?
Please, tape a message to the door: “Mr. Peters
has been trying to reach you.” Nothing else.

And whatever you do, don’t sign it.
For a month all was quiet. Then,
coming home early from work
I walked upstairs past people moving furniture

out of her apartment. No one ever
wants to get involved, right? a thin white man
in shorts and a t-shirt whispered bitter
behind me. I kept walking

the way Tommy did when he saw me
trying to catch his eye: head down,
gaze nailed to the floor, and then he was gone,
and the questions I wanted to ask him

never became words. That tape
was all I had, till one day,
cleaning house, my mother
held it up:

Do you still want this?

I never play it.

Throw it out then.

So I did.

§§§

A poem, though, does not make the kind of sense an essay does. The experience a poem invites a reader into—even the experience it leads me through as I write it—is an emotional one; its logic is associative, not discursive. It creates what Susanne Langer calls in Feeling and Form, a “virtual experience,” by which she means that a poem, despite being made from discursive language—syntax, after all, is linear—presents the experience it contains as a whole to be encountered as irreducible to the sum of its parts. “Coitus Interruptus,” in other words, is not a report about my experience with domestic violence. Rather, it offers the reader an opportunity to feel what it was like for domestic violence to have been such an intimate part of my life.

Creating this experience necessarily meant leaving out some details of what actually happened, not because they were unimportant, but because they existed outside the emotional web of that intimacy. For example, not too long after “Mr. Peters” asked me to tape that note to my neighbor’s door, I was telling a friend about everything that had preceded my doing so as we sat talking in my living room after dinner. Suddenly, a male voice came up through the grate covering the space in the wall where my radiator was located. “So you’re the motherfucker who called the cops! You better not let me run into you. You won’t like what happens then.”

I am sure that every man reading this recognizes the ethic out of which that threat emerges. Not only had I violated another man’s “territory;” I had done so in a way that explicitly questioned his sovereignty within those boundaries. Similarly, I am sure that every man reading this, if he’s honest with himself, has experienced a moment when he either felt the need to defend his own version of that territory—a defense that I am going to assume was nonviolent, since I am also going to assume that no one reading this has committed an act of domestic violence—or that he has had to weigh the consequences of crossing uninvited into the territory of another man, whether a woman was involved or not.

I say this without judgment. The boundary men establish to define that territory—whether we are asserting it, crossing it, or defending it—is one of the currencies through which manhood is negotiated in a patriarchal culture. Even if you reject the very notion of that boundary, however, even if you have fashioned your life to be perfectly congruent with that rejection, if you were raised as a man in this culture, you know viscerally what the boundary means within the system that gives it form and substance—which means you understand as well the fear I felt when the man who was beating up the woman who lived downstairs from me threatened to re-establish his boundary on my body with who-knows-what level of violence.

I never did run into him, and I am grateful for that, but I also have no idea what happened either to him or to the woman he was beating. I don’t know if the people I saw cleaning out her apartment were doing so because he killed her or because she was able to disappear into one of the underground networks that existed, that still exist, to rescue women in her situation. I know what I hope—that he was held accountable; that she was able to escape and reclaim her life—but it’s also true that not knowing provides me with an oddly and ironically comforting distance. Like Schrödinger’s cat, which is simultaneously alive and dead, both what I want and what I don’t want for those two people are true and not true at the same time. More to the point, I can choose which truth I want to claim as mine. Sometimes, though, the distance making that choice possible doesn’t exist.

Dear Friends,

I have been posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever. This is the last poem that I translated from the first chapter of Bustan, and I am going to take a break from this project for a little while because I have other projects that need my attention. I will eventually return to it, though. I have deliberately not put these translations behind a paywall, but if you’d like to support this work, you can do by becoming a paid subscriber here or by making a one time contribution here.

Whether you contribute or not, I am happy to have you as a reader, and I hope these poems from so many centuries ago have brought you pleasure and perhaps given you food for thought.

§§§

I’ve heard it said about a king of Ghūr
who’d seize his subjects pack mules for his own
that he weighed them down and worked them without food
until the wretched beasts would die, two each day.
When fortune favors ignoble men like that,
it bends the backs of the tight-hearted poor.
From his high roof, that self-important man
will dump his piss and shit on the roofs below.

I’ve heard that once, when he went out to hunt,
that unjust ruler took off at a gallop,
chasing his prey till night overtook him
and he lost all contact with his retinue.
On his own, he did not know the way,
but then, though he never asked for help, night
cast him like a wave at the edge of a village,
where, at that moment, a wise old man
was saying to his son, “My blessed child,
do not take your mule to town this morning.
That undeserving man whom fortune made
our morally corrupt, tight-fisted king—
for whom a coffin will soon replace his throne—
has armed himself to honor the demon’s will.
The cries of those beneath his tyranny
rise as one to fill the dome of heaven.
No one in his kingdom lives at ease,
and no one ever will, not till this man,
so tainted and corrupt he can’t know peace,
carries to hell the curses we call down.”

The son replied, “The road is long and hard.
I cannot go on foot. What should I do?
Your thinking’s always clearer than my own.”
The father said, “If you want my advice,
find yourself a large and heavy stone
and strike this beast that works so hard for you
until you wound its head and legs and flanks.
I have no doubt that worthless miscreant
will have no use for a mule he can’t load up.
Do like the prophet Khidr, who wrecked a boat
to keep it from the cruel tyrant’s hands,
the king who in a year gained many ships,
but a tarnished name for all the years to come.
A curse upon the empire he rules!
May disgrace stain his name till Judgment Day.”

Once he heard his father’s words, the son
did not hesitate to do as he was told,
beating the mule with a stone over and over
until the wounded beast could barely walk.
Then his father told him to make his way
as best he could. The son obeyed, cursing
as he led the lame beast behind the caravan.
The father faced the door and bowed in prayer:
“For the sake, dear God, of the prayers the righteous offer,
let my life be long enough to see
the ruin that must be this despot’s fate.
For if I do not witness his destruction,
I will not sleep in the grave’s eternal night.
Better a woman should bear a still-born fetus
than a boy should become a man who’s a devil;
better a woman than a man who hurts others;
better a dog than a tyrant or abuser.
A boy who gives himself to the use of men
may do injustice to himself, but still
outshines those who do evil to others.”

The king said nothing when he heard all this.
He tethered his horse and, head on his saddle-cloth,
lay awake all night and counted stars,
worry and dejection keeping him from sleep,
but once he heard the rooster’s morning cries,
he thought no more of the night’s long misery.
Having galloped hard throughout the night, his knights,
at sunrise, recognized his horse’s trail.
They saw him in a clearing on that steed
and ran as one to bow prostrate before him.
(They surged like a sea covering the earth.)
One from among his oldest friends—at night,
his chamberlain; by day, his constant companion—
asked, “What did your subjects provide you
while we rested neither our eyes nor our ears?”
The king could not bear to let himself repeat
the foul invective he’d been forced to hear
so instead he leaned his head in close
and whispered low and soft in his friend’s ear,
“Nothing, not even a single drumstick,
and pack mules trampled me from dusk till dawn!”

They sat themselves right there, those noblemen,
and called for food and drink to celebrate.
As the laughter and the shouting filled his thoughts,
the king remembered what that old man said,
and ordered him brought there, tightly bound.
They threw him to the ground at the king’s feet
and that black-hearted monarch drew his sword.
Seeing no escape, that helpless man
raised his head and, emptied of all hope, spoke.
“In death’s shadow, silence serves no purpose.
I’m not the only one who says your fate
is sealed, though I’m perhaps the first you’ve caught.
Why take out your wrath on me alone
when all your subjects also say the same!
You can’t expect to rule by unjust decree
then hear your name be praised throughout the realm;
and if you find it hard to hear this now
stop bearing down so hard on those you rule!
You have the means to choose another way;
the innocents you kill have no defense.
Take from me my few remaining days,
then take a couple more from my sweet life!
Death will take the tyrant too, in his time,
but time won’t blunt the curses on his name.
This wisdom is for you if you accept it.
You will live to regret it if you don’t.
How can a king count himself as praised
by those who praise him when he’s holding court?
What use to him is that entire court’s applause,
when he’s reviled by a woman spinning wool?”
He spoke despite the sword above his head,
holding his soul like a shield against his fate.
Have you seen a pen with a knife at its head?
What flows from its tongue flows that much more smoothly.

The sovereign grew solemn, shamed by all he’d done,
as if an angel whispered in his ear:
“Put down your sword. The retribution you seek
only adds one more to your account.”
The king turned and drew his robes around him;
then turning back, he cast his sleeves wide.
With his own hand he undid the old man’s bonds,
kissing his head, embracing him warmly,
bestowing upon him authority and power.
This was the fruit borne by that man’s hope

Now this tale’s been told for all to hear:
the fortunate will choose the honest as their guide.
The praise of learned men will teach you less
than ignorant critique of your character.
Those who pay you homage do not help;
your friends are those who blame you for your faults.
Let your enemy tell you who you are;
your confidants say what you want to hear.
Giving sweets does harm to one who suffers
if bitter medicine is what he needs.
The stern-faced man who tells you painful truths
will aid you more than kind and pleasant comrades.

No one gives as good advice as this:
if you’re smart, a hint is all you need to take it.

Publication News

A poem from 2020, “The Only Lit Storefront on The Block,” appears in the most recent issue of Glimpse.

Four Things To Read

A Brief History of Israeli Denialism, by Charles Lenchner: Fair warning, this is a graphic quote:

I’m Jewish. I grew up in Israel. I was in the IDF (and later went to prison as a refusenik). [I]’m...not at all surprised by...the bizarre nature of the denialism [concerning Kristoff's article]: open discussion of whether and how dogs could be trained to rape a man. It boggles the mind that those would be the straws being clutched. For all we know, the dogs didn’t insert their dog penises into the rectums of Palestinian prisoners. Maybe they only humped the men while they were bent over, naked. Maybe they lunged at the men’s genitals. Maybe a prison guard smeared peanut butter on someone’s ass and laughed as a dog licked it all up. Do you see now why this entire line is insane? The minute you have naked prisoners and dogs interacting AT ALL you’ve lost.

The Kristoff article Lenchner is referring to, if you haven’t read it is here. I linked to a related piece from Al Jazeera in my Of Note from May 11. I remember reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay about coming to terms with women soldiers taking part in the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. She wrote about—this is my paraphrase—a certain kind of feminist naïveté died that day with the realization (which, in all honesty, should not have been a realization for anyone who did not otherwise believe biology is destiny) that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. The corollary here should be obvious. Those of us, Jewish or not, who had an analogous kind of naïveté about Jews and Israel drummed into us from a young age have had ample opportunities to be disabused of that innocence over the years. This is yet another one. Please read this essay.

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Letters from an American: January 31, 2026, by Heather Cox Richardson:

History is doing that rhyming thing again.

I know this “Letter” is now several months old, but it is still very much worth reading, since the rhyming to which Cox refers is still very much going on. To take one example, she connects Stephen Miller’s recent call “for a ‘labor class’ excluded from citizenship and a voice in government” to the words of South Carolina Democratic Senator James Henry Hammond, who argued in 1858 that in “all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” Hammond, of course, was arguing in favor of slavery, but as Richardson shows, his argument also pulled away the veil that obscures the connection between the exploitation of the enslaved and the exploitation of the working class. I don’t mean, of course, and neither does Richardson, not even my implication, that to be working class is equivalent to being enslaved, just that the statuses “rhyme” at the bottom end of the same, capitalist, socioeconomic continuum. Richardson goes on to make a number of other connections along the same lines, keeping her prose laser-focused on what the Trump administration has been doing and the small signs of hope and resistance that are sprouting up. The piece is very much worth reading.

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The Strangers, by Eugene Lim:

“You’re much more devolved than the people you see as dupes or even those you see as self-justifying puppet masters. Because your mind cannot fathom the complex plot, the infinitely varying story, the total story which you can never, will necessarily never, completely understand—in response you fake it. You make up grand narratives that reduce the world to heroes and villains, to victims and thieves. You’re a child.”

Two books that kept coming to mind while I was reading The Strangers were The Waves, by Virginia Woolf and Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. These associations are entirely intuitive, since I read both those books long enough ago—in particular Stand on Zanzibar—that I remember neither of them clearly. If I try to make sense of thee connections, I would say, in the case of The Waves, it has to do with the way Lim has his characters externalize their inner consciousness in their speech and how, especially in the final chapter, he weaves, or at least gestures towards the weaving of, more than one consciousness together. The Strangers is very different from The Waves, but this is a connection I felt. In the case of Stand on Zanzibar, I think the connection I felt had to do with how the disparate narratives in The Strangers, and the way they ultimately come together through discrete points of connection, in terms both of plot and of language, create a world that is globally dystopian. I won’t say more than that because I don’t remember Stand on Zanzibar well enough to know if I am at all on target. My favorite part of The Strangers is the one in which a man who has been marked for death by his totalitarian government escapes. The story told by the first person who helps him—in a structure reminiscent but also deconstructing of The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron are masterly set pieces that expose and satirize what totalitarianism does to the minds of the people who live under it.

§§§

The Hit Erotica Writers Outwitting Nigeria’s Religious Censors, by Ruth Maclean and Ismail Auwal:

For decades, northern Nigeria has been home to a booming industry of romance novels, written in Hausa by and for women. But in a region that operates under a dual legal system, where Shariah law exists alongside secular courts to strictly regulate public morality, steamier stories are deemed immoral. Some books have been publicly burned by zealous officials. Now, a new generation of writers is publishing far more explicit content — and serializing it on WhatsApp, where it is out of reach of religious and government censors who are still focused on paper books.

This article focuses on one of those writers, Fauziyya Tasiu Umar, who goes by the pen name Oum Hairan. The authors refer to her throughout the article as Mrs. Umar, which is no doubt a nod both to the fact that she is able to speak openly about her work because she is married to a man who supports what she does and to the way she characterized her work when she was called in by the Hisbah, the religious police: “Her books,” this is the authors paraphrasing her, “were targeted at married women…and the point was to convey messages about society…Indeed, in a kind of foreword to each book [she] forbids young, unmarried women from reading them.” The Hisbah let her go. It’s tempting to see this simply as a variation of the strategy pornographers in this country once used to justify their work by demonstrating that it had redeeming social value, but that surface similarity obscures the fact that, as the authors point out, “Hausa women have long had varied erotic lives even as they navigate strict public moral codes, cultural commentators say. A 1954 anthropological biography, ‘Baba of Karo,’ details how Hausa women often had 10 or 20 secret lovers.” This essay, “The Hidden Life of a Kiss,” has screenshots of the relevant passages from that book. I have not commented here on the fact that the women producing these works also profit from them—one woman says she earns more from her erotic novels than from her regular job—or that the women are able to evade the religious censors because they write, and their readers read and pay, entirely on their phones.

Four Things To See

The Division of the Light from the Darkness - Paul Nash (1924)

I found this image in The Public Domain Review, which is a wonderful resource. This engraving is from Nash’s book Genesis, which was published in 1924 by Nonesuch Press, which the Review described as an independent press “founded in the early 1920s by socialists and bisexuals in a basement in London’s Soho [with the goal of making] beautifully designed books less precious and more available; they typically used a commercial printer, but mimicked the handpress aesthetic.” The Review’s write up also includes a short, useful biography of Nash.

§§§

1936 - Lauren Marx (2025)

I found this image in an article in Orion magazine about Lauren Marx’s work. This is Orion’s description of 1936, the subject of which is a Tasmanian tiger:

As a cryptid, the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) is treated as a mysterious, possibly surviving predator long after its official extinction in 1936. Resembling a large dog with stripes along its back, the thylacine was a marsupial carnivore native to Tasmania, Australia, and New Guinea. Sightings and tracks reported over decades fuel cryptid lore, with enthusiasts speculating that small populations might still roam remote forests. Its cryptid status blends fact and legend: a real, recently extinct species that continues to haunt the imagination of those fascinated by elusive, hidden wildlife.

§§§

Ryū Shōten (Dragon Rising) - Ogata Gekkō (1897)

Gekko was a Japanese artist best known as a painter and a designer of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. He was self-taught in art, won numerous national and international prizes, and was one of the earliest Japanese artists to win an international audience.

§§§

Abstraction - Abraham Walkowitz (1906)

Walkowitz was a Russian–American painter who, while not having attained the same level of fame as his contemporaries, nonetheless worked at the center of the modernist movement. He is also known for having made over 5,000 drawings of Isadora Duncan.

Four Things To Listen To

Kandace Springs - Angel Eyes

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Monaco Slim - Ain’t No Good

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Do Yeon Kim - The Beat of Distant Thunder

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Neil Cowley Trio - Built on Bach “Scurry”

Four Things About Me

When I decided in the mid-1980s to get my MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)—notice it is not teaching English as a second language—I did so because I perceived the field to be politically progressive, both in form and content. I understood the job of ESOL teachers here in the States as fostering a kind of equity and inclusivity that was sorely needed. In fact, one of the reasons I decided not to pursue a PhD in Applied Linguistics, even though I was fascinated by the study of syntax and semantics, was that those fields seemed very far removed from anything that might have a real and lasting impact on the lives of ordinary people. I remember reading articles in TESOL Quarterly and elsewhere about the politics of using English as a language of instruction in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa, about the concept of what I think they called at the time and maybe still call “language rights,” the idea that communities had a right to their native language(s) regardless of what the dominant language in a country might be; and I remember being blown away by the concept of language maintenance, the idea that students for whom English was an additional language ought to be given the opportunity to maintain grade-level competence in their home language. (I’m pretty sure that was the term used at the time.) I intuited immediately that these issues should not be put in a silo where they applied only to immigrants—who were, at the time, the population I was most interested in working with—that the questions raised by those positions impinged on language politics as a whole in ways that mattered to native speakers of English too. Once I began teaching, however, and especially once I became the English as a Second Language Coordinator in my department, I had less and less time to worry about those larger issues. Instead, I found myself dealing far too often with the ignorance of professors who knew next to nothing about my field. Sometimes that ignorance was “honest,” in the sense that the professor knew they knew very little about the issues ESL students brought to their classrooms and they were willing to learn. Other times, and at its most extreme, this ignorance was willfully and proactively racist. I remember one instance, where a professor brought me two diagnostic exams written by, he said, “Spanish speakers” who had been misplaced in his class. “And you know how Spanish speakers are,” he told me. “They constantly drop verb endings and they don’t understand subject-verb agreement…” He handed me the essays and went off into the rest of his day. It turned out that these two Spanish speakers were from Haiti and Jamaica respectively. More than that, the Hatian student’s writing was near-native in fluency. She had made one error in the future perfect progressive. The Jamaican student’s writing, on the other hand, bore all the markers one would expect from a student who spoke a dialect other than so-called standard English and who, for whatever reason, had not acquired enough competence in the standard dialect to write at a college level. Clearly, these “Spanish-speaking” students did not belong in that professor’s class, and I was able to move them into classes with instructors whom I knew did not have the kinds of preconceptions that could do those students harm. I will never forget what the Haitian student told me when I met with her. She said she recognized the professor’s racism immediately, but racism had been till that moment an abstraction to her. She came from a country where almost everyone was Black, she said, and she’d been at a complete loss as to how to respond to him when he said he was referring her to me. I have no idea how prevalent that kind of ignorance is now among teaching faculty at any level of instruction, but I have never forgotten that experience as an object lesson in how important it is for educators, and perhaps especially teachers of writing, to know something about other-than-first-language (or dialect) acquisition.

§§§

Starting about five or six years before I retired, I participated in a volunteer initiative on my campus called Conversation Partners. Started by the ESL Program, Conversation Partners paired native English speaking faculty with ESL students so the students would have a chance to practice conversational English. One year, I was paired with a student from the People’s Republic of China whose name I don’t remember. She’d come to the States to study English and a subject I also don’t recall but that she had chosen so she could join her father’s very successful business when she returned home. Her father was a very rich, very powerful executive, with government connections. Towards the end of the semester, we had the one conversation that I remember clearly. It was about the Tiananmen Square massacre, which she said never happened. It was an awkward moment to say the least. I wish I could reconstruct how the subject came up, because I had been very careful to keep politics out of our conversation, and I think she had been as well, not wanting the obvious ideological differences we might encounter to get in the way of why we were meeting: so she could practice her English. Nonetheless, I could not let the moment pass and so I called up on my computer one of the videos that had circulated at the time. She watched it in silence, as did I, and she said not a word when the video was finished. I don’t remember if we met after that, though I’m assuming we did because at the end of the semester she gave me this as a gift:

I have no idea if she intended the gift to have a symbolic significance and I have nothing else to say about my encounter with her, except to acknowledge that, writ large, the silence in which we sat after viewing that video is a silence that people across the world try far too often to hide, and to hide from, than to fill with anything meaningful. It is worthwhile, I think, to name it for what it was.

§§§

There is an essay I will probably never write about a book I was going to write, but won’t. It concerns a group of people I know well, who have a story that I once thought it would be important to tell. I went to each person whose life this book would have touched upon and asked if they thought the book project was worth pursuing and they said they did. Based on that, I submitted a query letter to an editor at one of the major publishing houses. She expressed some interest in the project and I began work on the proposal. Very soon after that, though, I heard that one of the people I’d spoken to was saying that the only reason I wanted to write the book was to make money off of their story. I stopped work on the project immediately, though I kept that fact to myself, preferring not to cause the kind of drama that confronting them would have caused. This was almost twenty years ago, and I have said not a word about the book since. Every so often, though, I hear things that indicate they are still thinking about it. Once, through the grapevine, I heard that one of them threatened to sue me if I ever tried to write it. He even said outright to someone who asked me whether I was still working on the project, “Richard knows better than that. He’s been warned.” Whatever window of opportunity there might have been for the story I thought we’d all agreed was worth telling is long past, so, frankly, even if they suddenly wanted me to pursue the project I would not now do so; and, if I’m being honest, if I thought writing it was worth the fallout, the essay is more interesting to me now anyway. It’s not worth it though, which is why I’ve written about it here, just to get it out of my head.

§§§

A couple of weeks ago, on one of the rare occasions that I was scrolling through Facebook, one of my sisters—I have two and we are estranged, as they are long-estranged from each other—appeared in my “People You May Know” stream. I was surprised to see her there, though I think the algorithm probably surfaced her because of a thread of mutual connections that we have on the platform that go back nearly forty years. Anyway, I was curious, so I went to her profile page to see what I could see, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she has begun making and selling some truly beautiful art. “Pleasantly surprised” is actually not quite accurate. I was happy for her. I remembered a conversation I had long forgotten when I tried to convince our our grandmother to buy her as a graduation gift a truly high quality “artist set”—paints, brushes, colored pencils, whatever. My sister had talent and she had talked to me about wanting to develop it. My grandmother, however, demurred. “She’ll never be able to make a living doing that,” she said. I don’t remember what gift she bought instead, but as far as I know my sister stopped drawing after high school. So it made me happy to see her making art and also sad, since—and you will have to take my word for this—my happiness for her is not sufficient reason to reach across the chasm of our estrangement.

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Dear Friends,

I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever.

One night, a fire broke out in Baghdad.
I’ve heard that most of the city burned to the ground.
One man stood amidst the dust and smoke,
giving thanks his shop remained intact.
A man of wisdom called him out, “You fool!
Are you the only one you care about,
untroubled by this total devastation
because your livelihood remains unburnt?”
None but the stone-hearted turn to stone
watching others bind stones to their bellies.^[1]
How can a rich man eat the food he’s served
when he sees a poor man swallowing blood?

Do not call whole one who seems at ease
if sorrow twists his innards into knots of grief.
Even though his friends have reached the inn,
the tender-hearted man still loses sleep
for those who weren’t able to keep up.
When a king sees an ass weighed down by thorns,
his heart becomes weighed down by that beast’s load.
If you are someone predisposed towards good,
a single line by Saadi will suffice.
This one’s right for you if you will hear it:
If you plant thorns, don’t expect jasmine!

1. This image is rooted in a practice of the time that was intended to distract people from hunger pangs and/or to help them feel full by placing weight against the outside of their stomachs. ↩︎

Last week, I attended an anti-antisemitism training workshop in my neighborhood cosponsored by Malkhut and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). Broadly speaking, the training is part of JFREJ’s larger agenda of building solidarity with other marginalized communities who, as they put it on their website, share “a mutual interest in fighting white supremacist ideology.” More specifically, as one of the presenters described it to me, the goal of this particular training—the audience of which would be primarily Jewish—was to help Jews think about how to respond to antisemitism on the left in ways designed to build understanding, trust, and solidarity, rather than by writing off the people or organizations that expressed the antisemitism as irredeemable antisemites by definition.

I’m glad I went. It was good to sit in a room with other Jews and talk about legitimate concerns for Jewish safety without framing antisemitism as something transcendent and eternal, and I appreciated the way the group did not shy away from acknowledging the differences between antisemitism and other forms of hatred while at the same time rejecting the notion of a hierarchy of oppressions. We obviously did not solve anything during the couple of hours we spent together, but the discussion was thought-provoking in important ways, at least for me, and I thought I would share with you some of what I’ve been mulling over these past few days.

One of my ongoing frustrations with discussions of antisemitism in the United States, both within the Jewish community and in society at large, is that they are overwhelmingly framed by one of two contexts: the Holocaust or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Either Hitler’s Final Solution is held up as the ultimate expression of antisemitism or antisemitism is defined as the real reason that anti-Zionists are anti-Zionist. These two contexts, of course, are not parallel. The Nazis were antisemitic by definition, while anti-Zionists are not. As lenses of analysis, however, they share a kind of historical blindness in that they each elide the history of institutionalized antisemitism in the United States. The JFREJ training did not share that blindness per se. We barely mentioned the Holocaust, and the presenters addressed the question of whether anti-Zionism is by definition antisemitism in a way that made clear it is not, without denying that some antisemites use anti-Zionism as a kind of camouflage. Nonetheless, I found myself wondering if a framing that more explicitly invoked the history of antisemitism in this country could help strengthen even further the kinds of solidarity JFREJ’s trainings are intended to build.

Dear Friends,

I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever.

The famine in Damascus fell so hard that year
that friends forgot what affection felt like.
The sky above them grew so tight-fisted
that neither crops nor date palms drank a drop.
The ancient springs ran dry, and orphans’ tears
was the only water anyone could find.
If plumes of smoke rose from a household’s vent,
it was nothing but a widow’s sigh of grief.
I saw the once well-muscled trees unleaved,
each one poor and weak as the poorest darvish.
The orchard and the mountain, both were bare:
locusts had eaten the gardens; people the locusts!

In the midst of this, a friend came to see me,
a man of wealth and status now so thin
that only skin remained to clothe his bones.
“Tell me,” I said, “what misery is this?”
“Have you no common sense?” he answered me.
It’s wrong to ask what you already know.
Our distress has reached its final limit!
‘No rain falls; no smoke rises to heaven.’”

“But I don’t understand why you’re concerned.
Poison only kills if there’s no antidote!
Someone else might die from deprivation,
but not you. Why would a duck fear a tempest?”
That learned man grew even more enraged,
eyed me like a sage eyes an idiot.
“My dear friend,” he said, “a man safe on shore
will never sit at ease while his friends drown.
It’s true I’ve not grown gaunt because I’m poor;
watching poor men suffer has made me so.
No prudent man would ever want to witness
his own or someone else’s ragged wounds.
You’re right: I have enough to not be wounded,
but the wounds of others send shivers through my flesh.
May anyone like me who has enough
be deprived of ease if he stands idly by.
Each time I see a darvish going hungry,
my own food turns to poison in my mouth.
If a man’s friends are languishing in prison,
how can he take pleasure in a garden?”

Dear Friends,

This week’s collection of articles is shorter than usual. I’ve been busy with other necessary things. I will keep sending these free posts out as long as it makes sense for me to do so. If you’d like to support the work that goes into making them and also have access to the paid tier of It All Connects, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Iran

Anti-imperialist Left or the “Axis of Resistance” Left?, by Naghmeh Soharbi: “It is possible to occupy an anti-imperialist/progressive/whatever you want to call it position that holds the humanity of all these people in the region in its purview and that does not celebrate the Islamic Republic in order to condemn imperialism. We know it is possible because so many people already do that. But the challenge is in articulating that position.” That is part of Sohrabi’s introduction to Dr. Mohammad Maljoo’s articulation of that position. He writes: “From a methodological perspective, the difference between the Axis-of-Resistance left and other anti-imperialist lefts begins at the point where one important reality, namely, imperialist pressure, gradually becomes their sole lens of analysis…It is here that the first slippage…occurs. Internal issues such as poverty, inequality, repression, and the crisis of representation are no longer regarded as problems arising from within society itself; rather, they are often attributed to the direct or indirect role of imperialism. The real lived experience of the people is not seen as it is, but is instead poured into a ready-made explanatory mold.”

Vijay Prashad's Iran, by Farah Mokhtareizadeh: “The document…describes former Ayatollah Khamenei as ‘recognised globally as a voice against arrogance and terrorism,’ calls for the ‘prosecution and extradition of operatives in anti-Iranian media’, meaning the exiled journalists through whom Iranian workers, feminists, and political prisoners communicate with the outside world [and] actually proposes handing those journalists back to a government that, according to Amnesty International and Iran Human Rights, executed at least 1,639 people in 2025 and killed more per capita than any country for which reliable data exists. [The document] end by declaring that ‘if Iran falls, the hope of a better, enlightened future for the world dies with it.’” The document in question, published in CounterPunch with over 170 signatories, is called “Six Non-Negotiable Terms from International Scholars and Former Officials from 30 Countries to End the U.S. War on Iran.” Mokhtareizadeh begins by pointing out that the signatories to the document make very strange bedfellows, including people on the left and on the right who would otherwise be on opposite sides of just about any other political issue. She asks why this should be the case and then goes on to show how conventional left wing analyses don’t work all that well when applied to the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a very long, detailed, closely argued piece of writing that is worth reading next to Dr. Maljoo’s piece above. I have now read through it twice and I will probably need to read it two more times times in order fully to understand depth and the breadth of its analysis. It’s well worth reading because I think it has implications beyond the situation in Iran.

Gaza & Lebanon

Palestinians expose torture and sexual violence in Israeli detention, Al Jazeera Staff: “I was confined in a very small space, and then eight female soldiers appeared fully naked and started to touch sensitive organs in my body. They filmed us and forced us to repeat degrading sexual words.” Those are the words of one of the men quoted in this article. If you balk at the idea that women would do such things, I remind you that this was many people’s response when they first about Lynndie England’s participation at Abu Ghraib. The reports quoted in the article document systemic torture and sexual violence against both male and female Palestinian prisoners. It’s the sort of thing it’s easy to look away from because it’s so disturbing to think about. We shouldn’t look away.

Israel

The Israeli left is speaking only to itself, by Samah Watad: “The closest the conference came to discussing practical solutions was through repeated invocations of the two-state solution — the last familiar political framework many activists in Israel’s “peace camp” still cling to, despite the fact that the territorial and political foundations of such a solution have largely disappeared.” Watad, a Palestinian journalist, writes about the complex feelings surrounding his disillusionment with the third annual “People’s Peace Summit” that was held in Tel Aviv. It’s a thought provoking article, and it made me think about the left in this country and how effective/ineffective it is.

Something is shifting in Israel’s peace camp, by Meron Rapoport: “This represents a shift in how the Israeli “peace camp” perceives itself. It is now a camp of resistance. This resistance is directed not only against “settler terror,” but also the army leadership and the soldiers who stand aside — and, in many cases, actively assist — as settler militias attack Palestinian communities.” Rapoport was at the same conference and came away with an impression very different from Watad’s. It’s not a case of one being true and the other false, or one realistic and the other idealistic. They focus on different things, and where one sees the seeds of something that’s beginning, the other wonders if those seeds will ever grow into anything meaningful.

The United States

AOC Just Lost the Far Left by Making the Single Greatest Mistake, by Hen Mazzig: “Marjorie Taylor Greene has spent her career on Jewish space laser theories, “globalist” rhetoric, Holocaust comparisons that desecrate the camps, and conspiracy material you would find on a 1930s pamphlet table. Her own colleagues kicked her off committees for it. She went anti-Israel, and the record was wiped. Tucker Carlson spent years as the most loathed figure on the American left, until he started platforming anti-Israel voices, and segments of the progressive online world began linking him approvingly. Megyn Kelly was untouchable until she became useful. Ana Kasparian was dismissed by the Hasan Piker wing as a sellout, and is now celebrated for declaring on Piers Morgan that the Jewish lobby controls the United States. Piers Morgan himself is anti-trans, anti-woke, contemptuous of every progressive cultural priority of the last decade, and his clips are passed around by activists who would have boycotted him a year ago, because he platforms anti-Israel guests.” I don’t always agree with Mazzig, though I think he is thought-provoking in important ways, but in this piece he makes an good point. Andrea Ocasio Cortez caught hell for calling out Greene as an antisemite, and the people she caught hell from were on the left, who seemed willing—as the the quote I’ve pulled asserts—to forgive her antisemitism because she’s taken an anti-Israel position. That is a phenomenon on the left that needs to be interrogated.

Insane Pre-Crime Strategy Unveiled for Leftist “Extremists,” by Ken Klippenstein: [T]he White House’s newly released National Counterterrorism Strategy…identifies the ‘left-wing,’ ‘anti-Fascists,’ ‘Anarchists’ and ‘radically pro-transgender’ ideologies as threats equivalent to jihadi groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, or narco-traffickers.” This is truly frightening. As Klippenstein explains, counterterrorism here is really a pre-crime strategy, a quasi-analog version of the movie Minority Report, in which the goal is to identify those who are going to commit acts of terror before they do anything—based on what they say, in other words, rather than what they do. Klippenstein’s final sentence is apt: “The war on terror has come home.”

Prominent Christian Zionist Group Is Lobbying U.S. Lawmakers on Israel—Without Revealing It's Funded by Israel, by Nick Cleveland-Stout: “Eagles’ Wings, which has about 30 employees, is not a registered foreign agent. Craig Holman, an ethics expert and government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, told Drop Site that Eagles’ Wings’ lobbying campaign raises serious questions about the organization’s compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the U.S.’ preeminent law for regulating foreign influence.” People rightly criticize AIPAC for its role in influencing American elections and some direct a similar kind of criticism at that organization, ie, that it lobbies and influences the US government on behalf of a foreign entity. Not enough attention is paid, though, to the role Christian Zionists play—and to the extent that the Israeli government has aligned itself with them—especially given the fact that, as I just learned the other day, there are more Christian Zionists than there are Jews in the world.

Not too long after I began hosting First Tuesdays, an open mic/featured reader literary series that had been running in my neighborhood since 2007, I attended Enough Is Enough, a meeting organized by a group of women poets who were “fed up with the reality of sexual violence, intimidation, and misogyny that continues to exist in our poetry circles.” As a new host, I thought it was important to hear what those women had to say. If First Tuesdays was going to be part of New York City’s larger literary community, then I needed to make that community’s issues my own.

Sadly, and not surprisingly, the stories women told at that meeting were all too familiar, ranging from what might broadly be categorized as “male-hosts-behaving-badly” to institutional-level problems, like the fact that poets who were known serial harassers or worse seemed to suffer no consequences, employment-related or otherwise, even when that behavior was reported. The discussion that followed these stories also covered familiar territory: the importance of listening to and believing women; the need to hold men, and especially for men to hold each other, accountable; strategies for implementing the kinds of systemic change that would make that accountability truly institutional; but when it came to what reading-series hosts like me could do to make our spaces safe, the discussion stalled. We were, after all—and there were more than a few series represented—overwhelmingly volunteers with no real authority over the venues where our series take place, making it hard to think of specific, concrete measures that we would have enough leverage to make stick.

Then one of the women who organized the gathering wondered aloud how it would change things if every reading series in New York included somewhere in its web presence, or at its venue if that were possible, a written commitment to what we now call diversity, equity, and inclusion, incorporating specifically a zero tolerance statement about sexual victimization of any kind. I thought this was a brilliant idea. Such a statement would allow me at the very least to establish publicly both a set of expectations and a standard of accountability for my series’ content, management, and audience. It would serve as a resource I or anyone else involved with First Tuesdays could refer people to when telling them about the series, as well as a publicly accessible code of conduct should it ever become necessary to call someone to account for their behavior, including me.

I wrote a statement, circulated it on the series mailing list to get buy-in from as many regulars as possible, and posted it to the First Tuesdays website, where it has lived now for more than ten years. I did not feel the need to incorporate it into our regular meetings, though, until we began once again to meet in person after the pandemic shutdown and I actually had to ban a fellow poet from our open mic. He’d read an egregiously sexist and implicitly racist poem for which he refused to take any responsibility despite the ample room I gave him to do so, first during the break between the open mic and our featured reader and then in an email exchange over the course of the next week or so. In that exchange, he criticized me for calling him out publicly, immediately after he read the poem. He felt blind-sided, he said, which struck me as a point worth considering, not because I thought I shouldn’t have called him out like that, but because if he’d never read what I’d begun to call the First Tuesdays vision statement, there was no reason for him not to assume our open mic was, like so many open mics are, more of a public square where anything goes than a curated literary space.

That’s when I decided to start reading the statement out loud at the beginning of every meeting:

First Tuesdays is an open mic/featured reader literary gathering where writers who wrestle with the issues of our day—from racism and sexual violence to climate change and economic inequality—can find an audience willing to embrace the risk and discomfort that come with sharing politically engaged, satirical, or otherwise edgy material; where those writers can coexist, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and camaraderie, with writers whose work is more traditional and conservative; where anyone who comes only to listen, even if they just happen to walk in off the street, can sit down with a cup of tea or glass of wine and feel not just welcomed, but challenged, engaged, comforted, seen, maybe even inspired.

At the heart of First Tuesdays, in other words, is an ongoing, proactive commitment to diversity and inclusivity, in both the kinds of literary work we welcome into our community and the people who come to share it. Nothing will erode that sense of community more surely, however, than the mistrust and hatred borne of sexism, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, or any of the other far-too-many ways that human beings have learned to target each other for who they or what they believe. So I will state this plainly. Neither work nor behavior that bespeaks any of those “isms” or “phobias” is welcome at First Tuesdays, and I will, as host, confront and hold accountable anyone who brings either into our midst.

When I first started this practice, I explained it by talking about my exchange with that banned poet. Over the last four years, though, and especially since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, it has become something more important: an affirmation that gathering as we do every month, as we have been doing for the thirteen years that I’ve been running the series—and by “we” I mean everyone: the regulars, the newcomers, the featured readers, the people who just happen to be in the café when the reading starts—that gathering as we do to share the literature we make is in and of itself a form of resistance that we should not take for granted.

When I think about the impact that reading this statement aloud has had on the First Tuesdays community, I think about the people who nod along as I read, even those who’ve heard it month after month since I started, and about the applause the statement sometimes gets, and the softly spoken—and sometimes not so softly spoken—expressions of support I hear when I’m done reading. Listening as I read the statement out loud, in other words, matters to them, just as reading it matters to me. Because even if it feels like all we’ve done on the first Tuesday of the month is walk a block or two to the café to hang out with friends and listen to and talk about literature, we should not forget that there are an awful lot of powerful people in this country who would very much like to undo not just the community that we have formed, but also the capacity inherent in literature to build that kind of community in the first place.

Dear Friends,

I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever.

A wise man in Outer Syria
claimed for his home the corner of a cave.
The path of self-restraint in that dark place
placed beneath his feet contentment’s treasure.
I’ve heard his name was Theophile, in form
human; in thought and action, like an angel.
Like the mystic who surrenders guarantees,
he’d gone begging to rid himself of greed;
since his soul commanded him always to give,
he’d gone from place to place, humbled, and gave;
and now he sought no favor at another’s door,
so great men came to bow their heads at his.

The nobleman appointed by the king
to guard the border where this wise man lived
preyed on the helpless everywhere he found them,
digging in his claws for all he could take.
Pitiless, he razed cities, killed for the sake of it;
his bitter presence curdled the world’s face.
Those who left his tyranny behind
carried his evil name throughout the land;
those who stayed lived lacerated lives,
cursing his name when only they could hear.
(When a despot’s reach grows long enough,
you won’t see wide smiles on men’s faces.)

On occasion, the tyrant came to see the sage,
but Theophile wouldn’t deign to look at him.
“Auspicious one!” the despot once called out,
“Do not turn away from me in loathing!
I’m here to offer you my friendship.
From where does the hate you feel for me come?
Imagine my appointment stripped from me;
would my honor, then, be less than a darvish?
No! And more than that I don’t expect.
Treat me as you do all other men.”

These words incensed that wise and pious man.
“Have you no common sense?” he asked.
“The fact of your existence brings distress
to all; and their distress distresses me.
You’re my friend’s enemy; you’re mine as well.
God, too, sees an enemy in you!
So why should I, in vain, call you my friend?
Do not kiss my hand as if we’re close.
Seek instead the friendship of my friends.
I’ll never befriend my friend’s enemy.
If I did, my friends would have my hide.
How can the stone-hearted sleep at night
when the world sleeps tight-hearted on their account?”

Dear Friends,

I originally started sending these posts out to share with you sources about the war in Iran that you might not otherwise see. Important as seeking out alternative perspectives is—and thank you to those of you who have let me know how much you value—it’s also important not to lose sight of the fact that what the United States and Israel are doing in Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon is part of the same rightwing strategy as the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, the battle over abortion, the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, attacks on higher education, and more. For that reason, I am going to start including links to articles about those issues as well, not because I think you are unaware of them—if you’re one of my readers, you almost certainly are—but because I think it’s useful (and for me it is motivating) to gather together in one place as many different aspects of the whole picture as possible. I will keep sending these free posts out as long as it makes sense for me to do so. If you’d like to support the work that goes into making them and also have access to the paid tier of It All Connects, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Iran

Why Iran’s Oil Infrastructure Is Not Exploding Like Trump Said It Would, by Murtaza Hussain: “But numerous experts inside and outside of Iran strongly disputed the claim that causing a production shutdown on Iranian oil wells would trigger serious harm to the country’s infrastructure, with one expert calling the claim reported in the Times ‘egregiously false.’” I did not know Trump had predicted that Iran’s oil infrastructure would explode and be permanently damaged as a result of the of its blockade of Iranian ports or that the three-day timeline he asserted would pass without incident. This article reveals yet another example of the US underestimating Iran’s strategic acumen.

How Iranian monarchists have targeted anti-war activists, by Amara Sophia Elahi: “‘We’re going to find you, we’re going to rape you, we’re going to kill you.’ This is just one of hundreds of messages that Arjang Alidai, an Iranian-British engineer based in the UK, has received from monarchist compatriots in recent months. Alidai first became a target after he voted in the 2024 Iranian presidential election, which many anti-government Iranians boycotted. They viewed voters as complicit with the Islamic Republic, and many now see Iranians who oppose the US-Israeli war on Iran in the same light.” If you have not paid any attention to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the pre-Islamic-Revolution Shah of Iran, and the movement to restore Iran’s monarchy by bringing him back to power, it’s worth getting to know a little bit about them.

Why the Iranian Regime Owns the Streets, by Mohammad Ali Kadivar: “On the thirtieth night of the war, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Parliament, issued a formal message to the Iranian people placing street presence on precisely the same footing as military performance: ’Just as the soldiers are not abandoning the missiles and the Strait of Hormuz, you should not abandon the streets either.’ Missiles, the Strait, and the street — named together as the three fronts of Iran’s resistance.” This is a fascinating analysis of an overlooked aspect of the Islamic Republic’s organizational acumen: the deliberate cultivation of pro-government rallies and protests as infrastructure.

Music and Survival in Wartime Tehran, by Fateme Karimkhan: “As the devastation from the U.S.-Israeli air campaign became normalized, the political situation inside Iran, as well as in the large Iranian diaspora, only grew more tense and bitter...In such conditions, long dominated by division and suffering, a unifying voice for Iranians emerged from music.” I wish this article included links to some of the music that Kamrikhan talks about. Still, it’s worth reading to get a sense of how Iranians are coping on the ground not only with the devastation that the war has wrought, but with the political tensions that have arisen because of it.

Sentenced to Survive A voice from Tehran, by Mina Khanlarzadeh: “In recent months, state-produced videos, including rap performances presented as signs of resistance, have circulated widely. But those videos should not drown out the voices of young rappers inside Iran who have been punished, silenced, or destroyed.” If you haven’t seen the Iranian-propaganda rap videos, here is an example. Khanlarzadeh’s post includes a video of the rapper Saam, along with the lyrics in Persian and English.

On Anti-Forgiveness, by Naghmeh Sohrabi: “I’ve had so many conversations these past two months with Iranian friends and colleagues in the US about how heartbreaking the absence of an anti-war movement has felt...So many of us have noted, experienced, and even grieved the ways in which colleagues, people we have worked with for years, have not reached out to say “hey, you ok?” either out of discomfort or some other reason I can’t be bothered to fathom.” Sohrabi is painfully honest in this piece about her struggle to come to terms with what she calls the “axis of alienation” on which she says the war has left her.

Gaza & Lebanon

What exactly is white phosphorus and why is it controversial?, by Daniel Tester: “White phosphorus causes serious bodily harm, including suffocation, in closed spaces such as tunnels. Prolonged exposure to the airways can result in nausea, burning, fluid buildup in the lungs and extreme thirst. White phosphorus is also sticky, clinging to skin and clothes, generating temperatures of up to 2,500C and burning through flesh to the bone, causing excruciating injuries. Sometimes wounds will smoke or phosphoric acid will appear. White phosphorus can also poison organs if it gets into the bloodstream, causing death.” Israel has been using white phosphorus weapons in Gaza and Lebanon in violation of international law.

The dark side of Gaza’s new fancy cafes and restaurants,  Eman Abu Zayed: “The war made some people in Gaza rich, especially those who engaged in illicit activities like smuggling, looting, and hoarding during acute shortages. This wealth is now coming out in various forms, including luxury cafes and restaurants.” An on-the-ground opinion piece about a little-reported aspect of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This article, Rise in caesarean section births in Gaza brings danger and infection risks, offers a look at another little-noted consequence of the war.

London police refuse to investigate British nationals accused of war crimes in Gaza, by MEE staff: “[T]he report detailed the alleged involvement of the 10 British nationals, including dual citizens, in the “targeted killings of civilians and aid workers, indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, attacks on hospitals and protected sites, and the forced transfer and displacement of civilians.” The police said they would not pursue the matter further because, according to them, there is “no realistic prospect of conviction and that an effective investigation could not be conducted.” A bit of context: An office charged with tracking possible violations of international law by Israel in Lebanon and Gaza has been closed because its funds were cut, while at the same time officials are considering banning upcoming pro-Palestinian marches because two Jewish men were stabbed in northwest London.

Lebanon’s Beekeepers Are at Breaking Point, by Amelia Dhuga: “‘Bees are responsible for most of the pollination of wild plants and fruited trees,’ says Mohamed Ibrahim Moneim, one of ByBee’s founders. This makes them central to sustaining local food systems and biodiversity.” Another little-noted consequence of war: Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon has exasperated a problem rooted first in climate change and other environmental factors.

Israel

The Treason of the Rabbis, by Avrum Berg: “The rabbinate as an institution has become the handmaid of the government. Dependent on its funds, on the machinations of politicians who manipulate its institutions, and on family dynasties that have nothing whatsoever to do with greatness. And the result is not only silence. It is a Torah-sanctioned worship of power and admiration of violence.” This full-throated condemnation of the Israeli rabbinate by a former Speaker of the Knesset is a welcome example of speaking truth to power. Here’s an example of what he’s talking about.

“Kippah and Punishment,” sans Dostoevsky, by Daniel Gordis: “Yes, the story is fairly disgusting (to put matters mildly), but even in the midst of the sadness about what we’re in danger of becoming, there are rays of light that might not reach beyond the Hebrew-speaking world.” The story Gordis is talking about, which was covered here in The Times of Israel, concerns a man who was detained by Israeli police for wearing, as a personal symbol of peace, a yarmulke with both the Israeli and Palestinian flags on it. The police returned the yarmulke to him after they had cut out the portion that contained the Palestinian flag. The ray of hope Gordis is talking about, which you have to scroll down in his post to read, is a social media post by an Israeli attorney who thinks that man with the yarmulke is “living in a fantasy,” but who nonetheless sees the police who arrested him as agents of “suppression.” It’s good to be reminded that Israeli society is not as monolithic as the country’s critics can sometimes make it seem. There’s also more coverage of this incident here.

The United States

Letters From An American, April 29, 2026, by Heather Cox Richardson: “I want to make sure that yesterday’s speeches by President Donald J. Trump and King Charles III of the United Kingdom don’t get lost in the tidal wave of news. They presented a very clear picture of what is at stake in the United States today.” Richardson lays out in very stark terms the difference between the two speeches. Trump “redefined the United States from a nation based on the principles of the Enlightenment, as it has historically been understood, to one based in the white nationalist ideas of blood and soil,” while King Charles focused his speech, broadly speaking, on democratic values and the importance of diversity. This is an analysis worth reading.

Pentagon announces deal with seven AI companies for classified systems, by Joseph Stepansky: “[The announcement] comes amid wider scrutiny over involvement by companies with the US military, which has gained renewed attention amid a public fallout with the AI company Anthropic and questions over how AI has been used in the US-Israeli war with Iran.” As I read this, I could not help but think about Person of Interest, a TV series in which two super-AI’s, one good and one evil, do battle. The evil AI, called Samaritan (note the ironic absence of good as a modifier), is in pursuit of a society in which government surveillance is total and complete. The good AI, called The Machine, wants not just to stop Samaritan, but to make itself invisible so that humans are no longer tempted to use it. We are, of course, nowhere near that kind of scenario, and we may never be, but this article made me queasy nonetheless about how the military use of AI will shape our future.

Abortion meds still available through telehealth in NY after court restricts mifepristone, by Ryan Kost: “A federal appeals court ruling that prohibits mailing the most common abortion pill nationwide will not immediately disrupt medication abortion access in New York City, providers say.” If you haven’t been keeping up with the ongoing battle over abortion, this article points in a direction you should be paying attention to.

Palantir Is Helping Trump’s IRS Conduct “Massive-Scale” Data Mining, by Sam Biddle: “The IRS use of the software, launched under Trump’s first term and expanded under Biden, is now in the hands of an IRS Criminal Investigations office that has drastically scaled back its pursuit of tax cheats and pivoted, under Trump’s direction, toward investigating ‘left-leaning groups,’ the Wall Street Journal reported in October.” I think that sentence speaks for itself. This is an issue well worth following.

“We Knew They Were Paying Informants:” SPLC Donors Reject Trump DOJ Fraud Claims, by Noah Horowitz: “The Trump administration is taking aim at SPLC’s image by accusing the group of lying to its donor base and propping up the very groups it claims to fight in order to stay in business.” If you know anything about the Southern Poverty Law Center, you know this is bullshit, but it is a frightening example of how the Trump administration is using very 1984-ish logic to go after organizations on the left.

Justice Dept. Targets Hundreds of Citizens in New Push for Denaturalization, Ernesto Londoño and Hamed Aleaziz: “The message it sends is that naturalized citizens don’t have the same rights and stability as native-born citizens,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “The government has used this power in the past to target people it views as political opponents.”

Ghana ‘rejects’ US health deal over data concerns, by Alexis Akwagyiram: “Washington’s pursuit of deals comes after last year’s shuttering of the US Agency for International Development, which had disbursed $40 billion a year across 130 countries.” The Trump administration closed USAID and now wants to use aid as leverage to get personal data on people in Africa, or at least African governments are concerned that the condition set by the US for that aid—that it receive in return information about potential epidemic-causing pathogens—could result in serious privacy violations. Given the concerns that have been raised here about the Trump administration’s data collection and privacy, those African governments are probably right to be concerned.

Dear Friends,

I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever.

I’ve heard that Rum’s ruler spoke these words,
crying before a learned, pious man:
“My enemy has stripped me of my worth,
all except this city and this fort.
Long and hard I worked to make my son
the people’s captain after me, but now
this evil race’s army threatens that,
twisting my manhood like a wrist behind my back.
I need a plan to recover what I’ve lost.
Obsessing over this corrodes my soul.”

The wise one answered, “Be troubled for yourself!
Most of your life, with its best parts, has passed.
The dignity that’s yours right now is yours;
once you’re gone, the world is someone else’s.
If he’s wise, he is; if he’s not, he’s not.
Don’t assume his burdens; he’ll bear them on his own.

To hold what you have taken by the sword
only to let it go is wasted effort.
Don’t find comfort in this five-day-dwelling;
give careful thought to how you’ll take your leave.
Name for me a single Persian ruler,
from Fereidoun back to Zahhak and Jamshid,
who managed to escape his rule’s decline.
The throne of God alone remains forever.

Who can still have hope they’ll never leave,
when everyone who leaves here leaves for good?
A man’s accumulated wealth is his.
After he’s gone, it’s always someone else’s,
but the good deeds that live on after him
have earned eternal mercy for his spirit.
When a great man’s good name remains,
you can say with men of heart ‘He remains!’
Cultivate largesse within yourself
if you would one day eat the fruit it bears.
Practice generosity. Tomorrow,
in God’s court, you’ll be judged by what you gave.

The one whose effort showed along the way
will earn the higher rank in the Court of Truth.
The one who lagged behind, furtive, ashamed,
will fear what he has earned for work not done.
Leave him to bite hard on the back of his hand;
he baked no bread despite the oven’s heat.
You’ll understand full well at harvest time:
only sluggards leave these seeds unsown.

Dear Friends,

I missed sending this email out last week because I was busy finishing up my newsletter series called “On The Trail of a Tale,” which traces the path by which a poem by the 13th century Persian poet Saadi became Benjamin Franklin’s Parable Against Persecution. Part 4 of that series will post on May 1. You can read the first three parts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. I think the series is particularly relevant given the US-Israeli war on Iran for two reasons. Most immediately, it serves as a reminder of Iranian culture’s influence on the West, which the demonizing rhetoric about Iran makes it’s easy to lost sight of; and, more broadly, it demonstrates the power of translation, of being open to other cultures as a matter of principle and practice, and of the potential for change that lies inherent in that openness. In that light, it is very telling that only 3% of the books published in the United States are literary translations. Ours is not a culture that is open to others in that way. Now, on to the links:

The Links

• Letter from an American - April 21, 2026: “There is the unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus.” If you don’t know Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter, you should. She manages to pack a whole lot of information into a single missive. Sometimes, like this one, it’s a take on one aspect of current events. (This one is also worth reading in that regard.) Other times, like this one, it’s a take on history that is relevant to the state of the world today.
• Which Iran Is America Dealing With?: Naghmen Sohrabi traces the consistency and continuity in the way pundits in the west have prognosticated about Iran since the 1990s and points out what may not be immediately obvious unless you're paying close attention: “The issue is not, in any shape or form, whether there is disagreement in Iranian decision-making...[T]he Iranian political system [does] not try to hide its political differences [but the pundits insist on talking] about infighting and factionalism amongst Iran’s political elite [with the goal of being able] to assign or predict blame for a possible failure to reach a deal and the restart of the war...[T]his framework allows us to ignore the realpolitik of how this war was started, why this war was started, and the ways in which the nature of this war has limited the possibilities of negotiating a new deal, a deal that the US did away with in 2018, by focusing on a familiar punditry bogeyman: Iranian infighting and factionalism.”
• The Counterterrorism Czar Without a Counterterrorism Plan: “To current and former national security officials, these were omens, signs of the dangers they predicted last year when President Donald Trump began redirecting counterterrorism resources toward his mass deportation campaign.” This piece by ProPublica delves into the fact that Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s counterterrorism adviser, has yet to come up with a national counterterrorism strategy.
• A history of Israel’s invasions of Lebanon: From Middle East Eye, this piece is worth reading for the history you probably, like me, did not know. For example, did you know that Israel has been occupying southern Lebanon on and off since October 1948? I did not. I am sure the question of whether or not Israel’s actions were justified will be deeply contested, so my goal in sharing this is less to take a side—though I think the side I’m on is pretty obvious—than to offer an example of just how much of the history of that region has been elided in what we learn about it here in the States.
• As Iran crisis drags on, fears of global food catastrophe grow, by John Powers: “‘Food prices will definitely rise in the coming months, making it more difficult for many people around the world to afford adequate and healthy diets,’ Matin Qaim, executive director of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn in Germany, told Al Jazeera. ‘Poor people in Africa and Asia will be hurt the most because they have to spend a high share of their income on food anyway,’ Qaim said.”
• Life Under Israeli Occupation in Syria’s Quneitra, from New Lines: “New Lines visited the southern province to get a sense of life under the Israeli occupation and speak to residents of the area. Many of them live in fear of the unknown, with Israel carrying out raids and arrests at will. Most feel like their soldiers’ presence is an unwelcome imposition that they have no choice but to live with.” I did not know that Israel was also occupying part of Syria.
• Hungary will abide by ICC over Netanyahu, says incoming PM: Hungary’s new prime minister, Peter Magyar, has essentially said that he would have Benjamin Netanyahu arrested so that the International Criminal Court can try him for crimes against humanity.
• These Middle Eastern News Sites Are Actually U.S. Government Propaganda Operations, by Sam Biddle: “Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News are, in fact, part of network of websites and social media accounts purporting to be legitimate Middle Eastern news outlets that are in fact propaganda mills funded by the United States government...” Just something worth knowing.
• Senior UAE scholar says US bases are “a burden and not a strategic asset,” by Bilge Kotan: According to Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent academic with connections to the kingdom’s leadership, “What the UAE needs is to acquire only the best and latest weapons that America has. Therefore, it is time to think about closing the American bases, as they are a burden and not a strategic asset.” It’s a crack in the facade worth paying attention to.
• Remembering Iran’s National Ballet Company, Disbanded in 1979, by Katayoon Halajan: This is an interview with Gita Ostovani, one of the founding members of the dance troupe and a teacher at the National Ballet Conservatory of Iran—because I think it’s important to remember that the Islamic Republic is still the Islamic Republic.
• As barbed wire blocks kids from class, Palestinians stage “Freedom School:” “For more than 40 days during the US-Israeli war on Iran, Palestinian schools were closed in the area. But last week when a ceasefire allowed Palestinian schools in the West Bank to reopen – even if for only three days a week – the children in Umm al-Khair arrived to find the fence blocking the path to their school a kilometre (0.6 miles) away. When the children tried to go around the fence, soldiers launched tear gas and sound grenades at children as young as five years old...Security camera footage recorded by community members showed settlers coming during the night to erect the barbed wire fence. Despite being erected without legal authorisation, soldiers have refused to take down the barrier...”
• The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story, by Yair Rosenberg: “[Einstein] was also a deeply reluctant nationalist. Before Israel was founded, Einstein advocated for a shared state for Jews and Arabs, writing in 1946 that ‘what we can and should ask’ is for ‘secured bi-national status in Palestine with free immigration.’ But once Israel was established, Einstein strongly supported its continued existence, while insisting that its ultimate success depended on the pursuit of peace and fair treatment of the land’s Arab inhabitants.” Rosenberg offers a useful correction to the portrait of Einstein as an ardent anti-Zionist that is often deployed by critics of Israel.
• Hopelessness and Love in an Israeli Prison, by Toby Lichtig: This review of Nasser Abu Srour’s prison memoir The Tale of A Wall, which also includes a profile of the author is well worth reading. I am planning to buy the book.

Publication News

May 2026, next month, marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of my first book of poems, The Silence of Men, which I think is worth celebrating because it is—and this is a testament to CavanKerry Press’ commitment to its authors—still in print and, somewhat remarkably (to me at least), still selling. I just received my 2025 royalty check for $4.83. It’s easy to laugh at that amount, and we’ve all heard the jokes about how poets are only in it for the money (right?), but I have always believed that poetry does its work in the world very slowly. I don’t know how many copies of the book that check represents, or how many people will ultimately read those copies, but it makes me happy and not a little bit humbled to think that poems I wrote more than two decades ago are still doing their work somewhere.

In other news, Bryant Literary Review has published “Faith,” a poem from my next book of poems, 2020, for which I just signed a contract, again, with Fernwood Press. The book is tentatively scheduled to come out in Spring 2027.

Four Things To Read

Dawn, by Sevgi Soysal, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely:

The oppressors…know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re out to prevent. They need their scapegoats. Why else did the kings and emperors of old put so much faith in cruelty? The spectacle of cruelty most of all. They used it to change the past to suit their story. And to prevent what might become. Did they throw their slaves to the lions just for fun? Oppressors need a constant stream of victims to survive.

First published in Turkey in 1975, as Maureen Freely says in her introduction, the story this novel tells “could just as easily have happened yesterday,” though if she were writing that introduction now, she would probably replace yesterday with today. Soysal, who had a distinguished career as a writer and translator, was imprisoned for spreading communist propaganda and obscenity by the Turkish government after the military seized control of the country in 1971. Dawn, the plot of which takes place over twelve hours, recounts the story of a group of friends and acquaintances whose evening meal is interrupted by a police raid. They spend the night in police headquarters, where at least one of them is interrogated quite brutally, and they are released the following morning. What makes the novel so compelling is the way Soysal captures—by moving almost seamlessly between and among the perspectives of both primary and secondary characters—the ordinariness of everyone involved, leaving the contrast between that ordinariness and the political stakes mostly implicit. Oya’s brief meditation on the nature of oppression, in fact—she is the protagonist—is one of the few places in the novel where its politics are explicitly invoked. The parallels to the current state of affairs in this country were hard to miss. I kept having to remind myself that I was reading a novel written more than fifty years ago in a very different country.

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How To Write A Political Poem During These Unprecedented Times, by Adrian S. Potter:

Perhaps we sink too much energy into pretending to be unoffended when we really should feel insulted. As part of his unapologetic reign of bluster, one of our so-called leaders keeps teaching a master class on how to parlay hot takes and brash rhetoric into votes and profit. Meanwhile, I’m busy trying to write a poem that will finally put an end to bigotry, and yes, even within the false mythology of a post-racial society, bigotry still exists.

The tension in this piece is between the self-important navel-gazing that characterizes the way some writers live “the literary life” and the implicit call to action with which Potter ends the piece: “But when I try to write about [these unprecedented times]…my hand instinctively tightens into a fist hoisted high above my head.” The essay was published in 2004, and I imagine that, in light of what’s been happening in the United States and the Middle East, it lands with even more urgency than it did back then. I found myself thinking of Louise Glück’s essay “The Idea of Courage,” in which she critiqued the use of the term courage to described what it took for a poet to write poems that revealed aspects of their life they might not otherwise have revealed. Specifically, I found myself remembering Glück’s point that this usage of courage “concentrates attention on the poet’s relation to his materials and to his audience, rather than on the political result of speech.” We all know the stories of the poets in totalitarian nations throughout history who risked that political result and paid with their lives. Iran, of course, is one of them. How far are we, I asked myself when I finished reading Potter’s essay, from a time when the difference between writing a political poem and raising one’s tightened fist into the air will not be as different as he suggests..

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Refusenik, by Lynn Melnick:

Experience tells me
editors want to read my rape poems

until someone else sends rape poems
that are an extended metaphor

for this ancient god or that well known myth
and not a spirited description of what becomes of labia

when a man forces himself between.

It sounds wrong to say I like this book, as if the book were not all that different from a delicious piece of cake or a well-cooked meal. At the same time, though, to say that I respect the book, that I admire it, falls far short of the ways in which Melnick’s poems—their exploration of the connections between and among her identities as a woman, as a survivor of sexual violence, and as a Jew—moved me and made me think. Overwhelmingly, though, the feeling I have carried with me since I finished Refusenik is the sense of identification I felt when I read the lines I quoted above, because I have found myself, when it comes to the poems I’ve written about my own experience of sexual violence, in the same position as Melnick’s speaker. Except for that declaration of solidarity, though, I don’t want to make this brief paragraph about me or my work, because Refusenik deserves your attention wholly on its own merits. The poems are meticulously crafted, but what I found most interesting in that regard are the poems where, to my ear, the speaker’s speech- and thought-rhythms have the flat, declarative, sometimes disorganized, and somewhat digressive character of someone who is trying to bring coherence to their memories of a trauma they have suffered. I don’t know if that was a conscious choice on Melnick’s part or if it is something I am reading into the poems, but it captured my imagination throughout the book.

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Why I Didn’t Report My Rape, by Anna Krauthamer:

The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons. The less simple, less articulate answer is that to pursue prosecuting and potentially incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me, even when they have hurt me more than I could have ever believed possible. Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened. The prospect of being a participant in other peoples’ incarceration is as alien to me as anything could be, to the point that I can only conceive of it in childish terms—how silly and strange it would be to have a group of people incarcerated at my expense when doing so would do nothing to fix the damage they have already so thoroughly done.

At the heart of this essay is Krauthamer’s attempt to understand the emotional roots of what she says in the paragraph I’ve just quoted. There have been times in my own life when I have wished I could be alone with the men who violated me while they were strapped down on a table, helpless. I never imagined what I might do to them in concrete terms, but I have been angry enough that I was willing to walk up to the edge of that fantasy. At the same time, I understand Krauthamer’s insistence, if I understand her correctly, that to deny the humanity of the men who raped her—which is what she believes would have happened if she’d reported her rape—would ultimately be, under the guise of justice, to validate the act of dehumanization of which those men were guilty. I remember when I told my father about the men who sexually abused me. He and I had not spoken in many years and I was by then in my thirties. “You should have told me,” he said. “At that time, I knew guys who would have broken their legs if I’d told them about it.” When I asked him what good that would have done me, what good he thought it did me in the moment to hear him say it, he was completely at a loss. I remembered this while reading Krauthamer’s article, and it made me think that maybe I agree with her. What I want is for those men not to have done to me what they did, and while I do think it’s important to devise ways for people like that both to be held accountable and to be restored in the community’s eyes to whatever we want to call the status of that accountability, the kind of punishment my father’s response represented——and let’s be honest prison is only a state sanctioned version of that response—will never accomplish that.

Four Things To See

These Disney cartoons are from the Internet Archive. (Unfortunately, if you want to watch the videos, you need to click through to the copy of this issue on my website.)

Steamboat Willie - 1928

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The Karnival Kid - 1929

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The Skeleton Dance - (1929)

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When The Cat’s Away - 1929

Four Things To Listen To

Piers Faccini & Ballaké Sissoko - Special Rider Blues (Skip James Cover)

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Bartok String Quartet No.1: 1. Lento - Emerson String Quartet

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Clarinet Yontev - The Klezmatics

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Engineering Memories - Arash Sobhani / مهندسی خاطره - آرش سبحانی

Four Things About Me

From 1989, a dream I wrote down in one of the journals I kept when I was in South Korea: In a Chinese restaurant, I am walking with a friend past Dan [whom I think was my music theory professor when I was an undergraduate] jamming on the piano with someone whose face I can’t see and whose instrument I don’t remember. My friend and I are seated at a table with two other people, a man and a woman. The other man—whom I thought in the dream was someone else, but who turned out to be me—releases from his fingers a poisonous insect. His finger had a hole in it, and I remember thinking in the dream that it was hollow and that it must have held other insects as well. When I woke up, though, I remembered it as a penis, not a finger. Anyway, the insect was aimed at my companion. It took a few second before I could find where the insect had landed on the table, since it was same color as the tablecloth, and then I flicked it to the floor where a Korean waitress squashed it with a piece of bamboo weaving she held with a pair of tweezers. She was openly disgusted by the squashed insect. Then, my friend and I left in his red sports car. As we drove past a truck, the back of the truck caught fire. We stopped to help put it out and then I woke up.

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These are four dreams from a journal I kept in 1985: I found these dreams in the pages of a journal I kept in 1985. Dream One: Ricky Schroeder in a space suit chasing what I think was a dragon, also in a space suit. Schroeder threw a hook at the dragon which somehow landed in an eye that was attached to the end of the tail of the dragon’s suit. I think they were on the moon. Dream Two: A little girl with glasses runs out of a United Synagogue Youth function and tries to hide behind the rear wheel of a car as it drives way. I chase her, somehow, back into the building and go to look for Harvey, the youth director. He is watching a movie with Gina [his wife]. I see the kid and chase after her again, but when I come back I can’t find Harvey. He calls to me. He is in a chair with Gina in his lap and her arms around his neck. Dream Three: I am walking with two bags of groceries out of which things keep falling past the Knight of Columbus building where the drum and bugle corps I was in used to practice. Maureen, the girl who was the drum major, is standing outside, looking like she wants to help, but she doesn’t. I cross the street to the John Lewis Childs schoolyard [of the elementary school I went to from third through sixth grade] and the bags break. I am trying to tie everything up with two pieces of wire and suddenly I am George Burns telling jokes to an audience that has appeared in the schoolyard. They can’t stop laughing. Then I am on stage with Bing Crosby, but he is the center of attention. Dream Four: I am in a house, at the bottom of a stairwell, and there is a devil upstairs whom I don’t recognize. I am in the middle of a crowd that is challenging the devil, which appears suddenly at the top of the stair case and spits onto someone standing near me something that obliterates him. Everyone starts crossing themselves and saying “Our Father.” Those are the only words I hear. I’m not sure if I say the words with them, but I do not cross myself. We run to another room, which is a classroom being cleaned by a group of students. I’m the last one in. When I enter, everyone else disappears and I am alone with the devil. I either think or say, “If I think you away, you can’t hurt me.” I do it and the devil disappears.

§§§

When I was an undergraduate, I usually went home for intersession. One year, though, I stayed on campus. Since the dorm I lived in closed for the break, I had to move into a room in the only dorm that the administration kept open year round, the one where the college’s international students were housed. One evening, a graduate student from India and I were cooking dinner at the same time, and we ended up having a conversation about Judaism and Jewish culture. He’d never met a Jewish person before and he was very curious, specifically about our religious ceremonies. I was describing for him the point in Shabbos services when the Torah is taken out of the ark, when he interrupted me. He wanted to know if the Torah was one our idols and if the ark was where we kept them. I could understand why he might think that. I’d just finished telling him that everyone stood up when the Torah was taken out, that it was an honor to be the person chosen to do that and then to walk the Torah around the room while everyone sang the prayers, and that the congregants would touch the Torah as it passed—with a prayerbook or the edge of their prayer shawl or sometimes just their fingers—and then kiss the surface they’d touched the Torah with. To someone whose religious practice included actual idols, it would certainly sound like the Jews were venerating the Torah as a representation of the deity and not, simply, a sacred text. I don’t know if my explanation of the difference between the two made sense to him. I never spoke with him again.

§§§

In the early 1990s, I befriended a woman from Hungary named Katalin. I don’t remember why she’d come to New York, nor do I remember the circumstances under which we met, but we became good friends very quickly over a shared interest in language, literature, and language teaching specifically. I’d just started in my position as an English professor at Nassau Community College, where I was one of just a handful of people in the English as a Second Language program who actually had academic credentials in that field. I wasn’t sure back then whether or not I would stay at NCC, and Kate and I would sometimes fantasize about starting an English language school in Budapest. Obviously, that never happened. We stayed in touch by mail for a while after she went home, and I just found a letter that she sent me in August of 1992. On the back is her translation of a poem by the Hungarian poet Gyula Juhász. It’s called “What Was.” I have no idea how good the translation is, but this is exactly how Kate wrote it out:

What was her blondness like, I don’t know already,
But I know that the meadows are blonde,
When the summer turning yellow comes with thick corns,
And in this blondness I feel her again.

What was the blue of her eyes like, I don’t know already,
But when the skies open in autumn,
At the faint farewell of September
I’m day-dreaming back the colour of her eyes.

What was the silk of her voice like, I don’t know already either,
But on the spring’s coming, when the green field sighs,
I feel as if Anna’s warm words speak
From a spring which is as far as the sky.

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Dear Friends,

I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever.

In stories they tell of kings from long ago,
it’s said that when Takla assumed the Zangi throne,
his rule was marked by peace among his subjects.
For that alone he’s worthy of renown.
Still, he once confided to a man of heart,
“My end is near and I’ve nothing to show.
I want to sit in solitary worship
and redeem whatever days I might have left.
Crown, kingdom, status—all will fade.
Only a pauper leaves this world a king.”

At Takla’s words, the enlightened one responded,
standing to his full height. “Takla! Enough!
Service, the road you’re on, is the one you seek,
not the prayer mat, tasbih, or darvish robes.^[1]
Stay seated on your throne; don’t end your reign.
In selfless rule you’ll find the poverty your seek.
Arm yourself with sincerity and truth!
Keep your tongue from vanity and pretense!
The way requires footsteps, not your words;
otherwise, your words will find no footing.
The truly great, whose purity was wealth,
wore their darvish robes beneath their clothes.”

1. Tasbih signifies both Muslim prayer beads and the prayer said while using them; khergeh signifies the traditional robes of the darvish. I wonder if I should use khergeh. In any event, I want to avoid the inevitable Christian association that rosary/prayer beads and “cassock,” which is Wickens’ term carry. ↩︎