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Too Late, Trotsky is part blog, part journal, and completely pointless.Following
Postscript: Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012
The ringing, defiant poetry of Adrienne Rich, who died yesterday at eighty-two, articulated the frustrations of women who came of age along clipped paths in the nineteen-forties and fifties, only to discover in the sixties and seventies the extent of their longing to tear up the grass. Her voice resounds, three generations on. From her 1963 poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” a modernist collage in which careless references to women’s lives from Horace, Diderot, Eliot, and Shakespeare are recast in tight, furious stanzas about domestic confinement (“Dolce ridens, dulce loquens / she shaves her legs until they gleam / like petrified mammoth-tusk) to her expansive later poems that elaborate the love between two women, Rich continually stretched categories of feminine identity. She was an explorer, “diving into the wreck,” as the title of one of her most famous poems has it, to help us find what is naked and unencumbered in ourselves: “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.”
We’ve gathered here seven of the twenty-eight poems by Rich published in this magazine between 1953 and 1958. In these early poems, we see the formal discipline and metric grace that Rich would maintain (and push against) throughout her long career. This is decorous verse becoming rude: the anger to which Rich would give such powerful voice bubbles beneath the taut surfaces of these fine poems.
“England and Always” (1953)
“The Marriage Portion” (1953)
“Holiday” (1953)
“Living in Sin” (1954)
“At the Jewish New Year” (1956)
“Moving Inland” (1957)
“The Survivors” (1957)
Photograph by Neal Boenzi/New York Times/Getty Images.
Digging out my Adrienne Rich collections to honor one of the most wonderful and brilliant poets of this age.
Original Post
Liz: Think back to when you were sixteen. Would you have survived the Hunger Games?
Lots of other comments irrelevant to me.
Me: Sixteen for me was the onset of all my irrational fears, which include zombies, robots, velociraptors, and having my underwear fall off while I’m wearing a dress.
Bo: I though you said irrational fears?
Me: That’s what my guidance counselor called them. Until those velociraptors got loose from that AP Biology class that one time.
Me: I went to the John Hammond School of Arts and Sciences, by the way.
Bo: Ba dum bum. And an answer to the previous question, maybe.
Me: I wish Michael Crichton were still alive so I could pitch him a teen novel based on the idea that in south-central Connecticut there’s a private school that accepts talented students and trains them to work at InGen.
I’m just afraid that if I had an iPhone with Siri, I’d say something one day like, “seriously, someone needs to just put me out of my misery,” and that’s when Siri activates SkyNet.
And that’s when the Terminators come.
Let me see if I can find the address of “Sarah Connor” for you.
It feels so different that it startles you when you put in in your mouth for the first time.
Oh, you two. I forgot about you guys.
I forgot how much I love this show, too.
And now, a review of a show that stopped being good three years ago.
As far as I’m concerned, this show ended at the end of season nine.
Every episode, despite being the police procedural format we’ve all come to despise, was innovative, well-written, and every single bit of it hung on the original cast. In one season, CSI: lost half the original characters when Gary Dourdan, Jorja Fox, and Will Petersen left. Since then, the show’s been struggling to return to what it was during seasons six and seven. The problem comes in the format of the show - without characters you root for and care about, it’s little more than someone gets killed, the CSIs find evidence, and they catch the killer.As someone who grew up watching Law and Order and NYPD Blue, I do enjoy the basic police procedural, but as the snobbish writer-type that I became from watching boring television, I like my shows with some pizzazz.
By Colin Nissan
Like the fleeting majesty of a lunar eclipse over the Cliffs of Moher or the long-awaited migratory return of the Shelducks from the North Sea, it is time once again to herald the arrival of Uncle O’Grimacey for his annual tribute to the people of our nation, to ready my weary tastebuds for the frigid, minty mirth they have so dearly missed.
For twelve dreadful months, I have longed for this glorious respite from the cursed monotony of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, for a window of time, albeit grossly curtailed, in which to cleanse my palate of this criminally humdrum triad, and indulge in the delight of your glacial, golden-arched potable, emerald as the boundless azure pastures through which I frolicked as a wee lad, replete with the very clovers that bear your name.
Continue reading at Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
From Ai’s Killing Floor, 1979.
1. Russia, 1927
On the day the sienna-skinned man
held my shoulders between his spade-shaped hands,
easing me down into the azure water of Jordan,
I woke ninety-three million miles from myself,
Lev Davidovich Bronstein,
shoulder-deep in the Volga,
while the cheap dye of my black silk shirt darkened the water.My head went, water caught in my lashes.
Am I blind?
I rub my eyes, then wade back to shore,
undress and lie down,
until Stalin comes from his place beneath the birch tree.
He folds my clothes
and I button myself in my marmot coat,
and together we start the long walk back to Moscow.
He doesn’t ask, what did you see in the river?,
but I hear the hosts of a man drowning in water and holiness,
the castrati voices I can’t recognize,
skating on knives, from trees, from air
on the thin ice of my last night in Russia.
Leon Trotsky. Bread.
I want to scream, but silence holds my tongue
with small spade-shaped hands
and only this comes, so quietly
Stalin has to press his ear to my mouth:
I have only myself. Put me on the train.
I won’t look back.
This is just adorable.
