Author Archives: trimarcoblog

I'm a writer and linguist. My short stories have been published in several literary magazines and some of my stage plays have been professionally performed with the support of Arts Council England. One of my essays was shortlisted by Wasafiri Magazine for their Life Writing Competition 2014. As a linguist, I've authored four textbooks, including Digital Textuality (2015, Palgrave Macmillan), and I've had my research published in several books and journals. I am also a regular contributor to the Literary Encyclopedia.

The uncomfortable American

Patriotism wasn’t cool when I was growing up in Chicago in the 60s and 70s. Even though America’s bicentennial was everywhere – flags, parades, commemorative everything – the mood was hardly celebratory. Vietnam and Watergate hung over us, and the glossy Disneyfied version of American history was already being questioned in ways that would be labelled woke today.

Half a century later, I’ve spent more of my life outside the United States than in it. Thirty‑five years of adulthood in Britain, with working stints in South Korea and Oman, and more recently a residency in France. My American identity has been chipped away, leaving a childhood core shaped by those unpatriotic decades.

But am I British? In citizenship and in my sense of identity – one of many identities – yes. But the British – on the whole (there are exceptions) will have none of that. Too often, I’m seen as American and nothing else. Even people who have known me for a while feel that need to explain to me that football means soccer and that aubergine means eggplant. Really? And then there are the verbal gymnastics that people engage in so they can bring my American background into the conversation.

Beneath this sits a familiar assumption: Americans are naïve, unsophisticated, a bit dim. It’s not just British – it’s international, reinforced by the elections of the 45th and 47th President of the United States. Despite my degrees, publications, and decades in Higher Education, people still assume I don’t know Rimbaud from Rambo or that I’d sign a financial agreement without a contract. My dry humour is often misread simply because people don’t expect it from an American. I’ll stop myself there.

So where does that leave me? Sometimes alienated in places I call home. Yet held together by a small circle of friends who understand that I don’t fit neatly into the American box.

Despite all this, I’d like to think, I’ve stumbled into the best of both worlds. Growing up in 1970s America meant I wasn’t held back by being working class and the youngest of seven. Had I been raised in Britain then, university would have been unimaginable. I’ve also had the benefit of life in Britain, which has been less polarised than America, and where I have enjoyed a better quality of life (public healthcare being at the centre of this) than I would have had in the US.

Recently I’ve been watching coverage of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It’s unfortunate that this milestone arrives during such troubled – often ugly – times in American history. But historians remind us that the nation has always cycled through turmoil, and the Declaration itself emerged from one such period – full of compromises, unresolved tensions, and an awareness that the experiment could fail, returning America to monarchy. In my uncomfortable American identity, I can’t help seeing the country circling back to a king in all but name, surrounded by a court of powerful billionaires.

What I’ve been reading

Britain is hardly immune to its own turmoil. The fears and violence stirred up by the far right echo America’s problems. While there’s plenty of analysis on the rise of hate crimes – especially since Brexit emboldened racists and social media amplified their vitriol – Nick Lowles’s How to Defeat the Far Right: Lessons from Hope Not Hate takes a different tack. Lowles recognises the link between economic deprivation and anti‑immigrant sentiment, arguing for a holistic approach – building communities, strengthening local economies, and moving beyond mere disapproval or fact‑checking the misinformation pushed by the Reform Party, the English Defence League, Elon Musk, and MAGA supporters. Activism is essential, though not for the faint‑hearted. As Lowles writes, ‘However difficult it may appear, speaking out on politically and culturally sensitive issues only increases our credibility over time.’ He also widens the frame to include climate change, noting research from the Institute for Economics and Peace predicting that up to 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050 due to extreme weather and natural disasters – a shift that will inevitably fuel further hate crimes. Yet the book isn’t just statistics and headlines. It’s part memoir, tracing how the son of a British social worker and a Mauritius‑born charity worker became the CEO of Hope Not Hate. Inspiring.

Bunny’s Vignettes – 3

To read previous vignettes from this fictional series, visit Bunny’s Vignettes.

Mrs Goldstein – 1967

My first teacher was tall and thin with a mop of grey curls and cats-eyed tortoise shell glasses. At least I think she was tall. At five, everyone appeared tall. But she definitely was thin, and that’s important because I could never figure out why I kept accidently calling her ‘Mom.’ The slim Mrs Goldstein resembled my grandmother more than my mother, but I never called her ‘Grandma.’

Mrs Goldstein would hug us when we cried and sing us to sleep at nap time. I don’t remember crying often, especially around adults. This was a direct reaction to being called a cry-baby by my grandmother. I had cried when my parents separated – or half-separated. My father refused to leave our apartment. My mother responded by bringing all four of her children to her mother’s apartment one storey up.

We lived with my grandmother for a couple of months, and saw my father once a week, usually on a Sunday. Then, one day he left. My sister, Franny, told me in whispers that he had found another woman and that he would come back some day. Brian, our older brother, told us that we would probably never see him again.

‘Says who?’

‘Says grandma.’

That ended the conversation. Even at the age of five, I knew that grandma would know because grandma knew everything.

One time I cried in front of Mrs Goldstein. A boy – whose name I’ve long forgotten – called me Bugs Bunny because of my buck teeth. I’d already taken plenty of teasing. When adults weren’t around, Brian would jut out his two front teeth to talk to me. I didn’t like the nickname, but I loved the cartoon, so I tried to think it was funny.

Mrs Goldstein didn’t. She snapped, ‘That’s not very nice.’ And that’s when the tears came. If she said it was mean, then it must have been. She dabbed my face with a handkerchief that smelled of flowery talcum powder and pulled me into a hug. That hug felt warm and real. It wasn’t like the apology hug Franny had to give me for slapping my head – or like the dutiful hug my mother had to give me when she came home from work.

Everything about my mother going back to work as a secretary felt dutiful. She had to do it to pay the mortgage on the building – so we were told. The story was that he left without agreeing to pay alimony. He would only pay child support and his children’s medical and dental bills, nothing more.

He also left without saying goodbye.

Brian, Franny and me were at the Saturday matinee at the Granada Theatre watching The Absent-Minded Professor with Jerry Lewis. How I hated everyone laughing at his buck teeth. Being 13 at the time, Brian was in charge of the money for the movie and the ice creams afterwards. When we arrived at our street, it was nearly five o’clock. From some fifty yards away, we could see a policeman leaving our building and climbing into a police car that had driven off by the time we reached it.

Our mother was waiting for us to return. Something about her was different. Her voice was tired and robotic. Her eyes hardly blinked. She held Tina on her lap and handed the wiggling two-year old over to Franny while asking us about the film. In the conversation that followed nothing was said about the policeman. Brian and Franny exchanged glances. I knew not to ask. Soon we were gobbling down chocolate cake grandma had made – even though we already had ice creams and hadn’t eaten dinner yet.

While our mother was washing dishes and out of earshot, our grandmother told us that we would not be seeing our father that Sunday because he had left. No explanation. ‘Your mother is upset. Just leave her be.’

‘So, when can we move back into our apartment?’ Franny asked in a timid squeak.

Grandma bristled. ‘Maybe in a couple of weeks. We have to exterminate the place first.’

Later Franny – two years older than me and therefore an authority – explained that you exterminate to get rid of bugs and that our father’s habits brought in cockroaches. But Brian didn’t believe it – ‘Dad was spic-and-span.’ He spoke in the language of television commercials. I was baffled by this, unable to calculate even the remote possibility that grandma was being untruthful.

Summer vacation had just started and for the first and only time, the three of us were enrolled in summer day camps while Tina stayed with grandma. I didn’t say anything to anyone about my disappearing father – grandma’s phrase. I was ashamed for reasons I didn’t understand. I wished Mrs Goldstein were around. The camp leaders were college students, good at refereeing sports and handing out Band-Aids, but little else. Mrs Goldstein on the other hand knew how to hug. No wonder I called her ‘Mom’ by mistake.

I’m a sleeping penguin

As soon as I crawl into bed, I set my watch to sleep mode. Every morning, somewhere between Le Monde and the puzzles in The Independent, I check my health app for my previous night’s sleep scores.

At first, seeing how much sleep I really got, and how much was deep sleep, light sleep or REM sleep, was fun and mildly interesting, but nothing to be taken too seriously. That is, until I started to notice patterns. On nights where I haven’t had any alcohol, I tend to sleep better. I also noticed that the day following a night of more deep sleep, I tend to write and edit more quickly, and I’d like to think with better results.

Armed with this information, I’ve changed some habits. I generally drink less alcohol, and when I do, it’s early in the evening and never close to bedtime. I’ve also started doing a short spell of yoga (twenty minutes) in the late afternoon. Before you think I’m tooting my own virtuous horn, I should point out that this is less about virtue and more about being extremely self‑competitive and goal‑oriented – the health app feeds off people like me. And there’s a downside – my tendency to spin into self-loathing when I haven’t achieved my goals. I’m trying to re-wire my brain on that score.

I’ve also taken from this the idea of identifying with the sleep patterns of animals. In its whimsical way, after the first week of recording my nightly sleep, the app describes what type of sleeper I am. Instead of the boring old ‘levels’, the watch wearer is assigned an animal from a typology of eight. I’m a penguin. According to the app, ‘To protect their eggs, penguins remain alert and watchful even while they sleep and keeping a regular schedule, but they tend to wake up too often at night.’ This is me to a T – minus the eggs. Since I’ve left fulltime employment and am no longer writing to someone else’s deadline, I’ve kept a regular schedule of getting to bed around eleven most nights. Waking up often during the night goes back to my earliest memories. Night‑time guard duties probably began with childhood fears, including a bout of neighbourhood arson attacks that always happened at night. Later came wakefulness over being criticised at home (my family’s preferred mode of communication), and in my working life, the buzzing after a busy day or the disentangling of a problematic one. I confess that the troubled world of recent years has also interrupted my z‑time.

Despite these human differences, I welcome the penguin metaphor. They’re adorable creatures – birds that can’t fly, but they’re great swimmers. I also like the idea of zoomorphising (the opposite of anthropomorphising) as it stems from shared characteristics and unites living creatures. While many sports personalities have been called sharks and tigers and other ferocious animals, I prefer the gentler analogies – according to a collection of letters between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, Virginia was a monkey, Vanessa a dolphin and their younger brother Adrian, a wombat.

I don’t know what science these health apps are based on. I suspect it’s a bit of peer-reviewed research mixed in with folk medicine. Nonetheless, the importance of sleep cannot be overstated. Long before medical science and digital technology, Shakespeare had the right idea:

‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast.’ (Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2)

I know I’m not alone in this interest, this somnophilia. Only last week, I heard someone on radio say that sleep monitoring was the latest health craze. I guess, even this penguin can be trendy.

What I’ve been reading

Ali Smith never disappoints. Set in a dystopian near future, her novel Gliff follows the lives of two sisters in their early teens as they navigate alone in a fractured society. This society is a totalitarian Britain, where the girls’ family has been categorised as ‘Unverifiable’ – a cultural underclass. As such they have had their home outlined with red paint and later bulldozed. The story is narrated by the older sister, Bri, who is resourceful and rebellious, but most importantly (for this linguist-reader) she’s curious about language in a geeky way that helps to frame our disjected understanding of this brutal, bureaucratic and surveillance obsessed world. Gliff is the name of a horse the sisters manage to acquire. Gliff has many meanings including a brief glance, a sudden fright or a fleeting moment. The horse becomes a metaphor for freedom and resistance, and at the same time – because the word carries so many meanings – it gestures toward the polysemy of our possible futures. It’s a warning of what may come if technology is used in such ways.

Though not intended, it seems this blog has an animal theme. Whether imagined or real, literal or metaphorical, they live in symbiosis with us.

Bunny’s Vignettes – 2

To read previous vignettes from this fictional series, visit Bunny’s Vignettes.

Obsessive Love – 1965/66

Childhood memories are slippery things. My earliest was being in my grandmother’s arms, waving goodbye to my mother as she left our apartment building one morning and walked down the street in the direction of the parish church and the train station.

I say our building because we owned the three-storey structure, with one seven-room apartment on each floor. Later, I would be told that my grandmother paid for the building. Later still, I’d hear that my father used the GI Bill to secure a mortgage and that Grandma had nothing to do with it.

How old was I? For Grandma to hold me in her arms, I must have been three or four at most. I wasn’t a baby – I didn’t stay in her arms for long – but I needed to be lifted to see out the windows in the sun parlour, to watch my mother’s chubby form walk away and turn briefly to wave. I’m sure she smiled, her even white teeth framed in coral-pink lipstick. She always wore lipstick when she went to church or downtown – for what would later become work. That and face cream were her only makeup.

Her mother, my grandmother, wore cherry red lipstick, beige foundation to hide her freckles, green or blue eyeshadow, and black mascara over brown lashes. She regularly powdered her nose, always carrying a compact. On that day – my earliest memory – Grandma must have been around fifty-seven and more blond than grey. Even though we were indoors, she was likely wearing stilettos. Unlike her daughter, grandma was bony and long-legged, and in stilettos she looked like a stick-insect. This was the 60s, and she only had them in four colours: red, green, yellow, and black. In the 70s, she added white and tan. I only ever caught her in house slippers once. Outside, she wore those stilettos most of the year – except during Chicago’s brutally cold, snow-packed winters, when she switched to high-heeled boots and somehow managed to walk at pace while the rest of us were plodding and sliding along behind her.

That day, her stilettos must have given her – and me in her arms – an extra three inches to look through the panes of glass onto our street. I could see across the way the near-identical three-storey red-brick building, nestled among other such buildings, all with front lawns, all with one tree – following Dutch Elm disease, only nascent maples and a few sturdy old oaks lined our street. From the sides, I could peer into the sun parlours of our neighbours’ apartments, separated by narrow gangways about two yards wide. On one side lived the Novaks, the Williamses and the Marino’s- on the other, the Steins, their in-laws, and children.

Many moments like this marked my childhood – waving off my mother, staying with my grandmother. But this one stood out. My younger sister must have been asleep in her crib. My older sister and brother were at school. My mother wasn’t going to work – she didn’t return to work until I was five. This moment mattered because Grandma was stressed and worried. I sensed it the way children – emotional sponges – do. A few years later, I realised that was either the day my mother went to see the priest to report that my father ‘was hitting her,’ or the day she caught the el (Chicagoese for ‘elevated train’) downtown to see a lawyer and begin the legal separation from my father. Later, my mother would tell me that when she went to the priest – speaking as if it had only happened once – he asked her what she had done to deserve it. So, a man could hit a woman if she deserved it? That was, according to mother, what set off the divorce process.

That morning, I played with my dolls and later coloured in a Disney colouring book, probably the Mary Poppins one, my favourite. My grandmother made Danish chocolate fudge – dark, thin, and melt-in-your-mouth fudge that left a grainy, sugary layer on your tongue. The kitchen air filled with bittersweetness as she sat across from me at the table and waited for the fudge to harden. She had a cigarette in one hand – from the two packs of Winstons she smoked each day – and a felt-tip pen in the other. In a stenographer’s notebook, she busied herself writing, smiling at her own loopy script. A couple of years later, I would understand what she was writing as this was one of her usual pastimes. My mother’s full name – first, middle, and maiden – never her married name. Grandma would write ‘Joyce Agnes Larsen’ over and over. One line per full name. About twenty lines per page. When one page was full, she’d take a protracted drag from her cigarette, sometimes light a new one, and flip to the next blank page and continue.

And then two Schiaparelli’s come along at the same time

I discovered Ernesto Schiaparelli and Elsa Schiaparelli within the space of a couple of days. I resist linking them by their shared surname – as Ernesto and Elsa S – because they weren’t husband or wife, nor siblings for that matter.

During a recent city break in Turin, we visited the highly acclaimed Egyptian Museum, said to house more Egyptian artifacts than any other museum in Europe. Spread across four floors of daily and ceremonial objects, wall paintings, jewellery and of course, mummies and their tombs, it left me buzzing with fascination and curiosity. Yet, at one point, I found myself wondering who had taken all this stuff in the first place. The short answer appeared to be Ernesto Schiaparelli – though he did have fellow Egyptologists and archaeologists working alongside him.

This Schiaparelli led twelve major archaeological expeditions in Egypt between 1903 and 1920. A few grainy black and white photos of the man himself were on display alongside maps showing where different excavations took place. Looking at these images, I was struck by the man’s pride – his puffed chest, the self‑assurance. That was when the guilt sunk in. I glanced at the packs of Italian school children huddled around the mummies’ tombs and assumed none of them were thinking about repatriation or even long‑term loans back to Egypt. But later my thinking shifted when I learned that the Egyptian government of the time had granted permission for all these digs, which were funded by King Vittorio Emanuele III – a familiar name to anyone who has toured northern Italy. And it’s not like Egypt lacks its own treasures – the new and rather ostentatious Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza holds over 100,000 artifacts.

Back at our Turin holiday rental, lounging between outings, I stumbled across a review in La Repubblica of an exhibition at London’s Vicotria and Albert Museum on the works of designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Born in Italy in 1890, this Schiaparelli came to fame after moving to Paris and starting her own fashion house in 1927 – a year before Ernesto died. The shapes and patterns of her designs were surreal and mischievous, with themes ranging from insects and food to human organs. In her time, Schiaparelli’s clothes were one‑of‑a‑kind and highly sought after. Her artistry was recognised widely, and she collaborated with Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Picasso, among others.

Finally getting to see this exhibition – there was a 5-week waiting list – I was mesmerised by the aesthetics and by the idea that people once wore these works of art. I could trace her influence across the decades that followed and understand why she was chosen to create costumes for the glamorous early days of Hollywood and international cinema.

These two Schiaparelli’s came from the same Italian aristocratic family. Ernesto was Elsa’s great uncle. There is no known record — no letters, no memoir references, no photographs, no interviews — suggesting that Ernesto Schiaparelli and Elsa Schiaparelli ever met. Yet in my imagination they meet in a third space: a consciousness‑space where curiosity and creativity reign, and where each nods to their shared ancestry.

What I’ve been reading

I’ve become a Rachel Cusk fan in recent years, and Parade, did not disappoint. To say that it’s a ‘story of’ four artists whose lives overlap places this uncomfortably in the familiar rubric of a novel, when the narration regularly breaks the conventions of that genre. Perhaps novels have become too filmic – and this is one novel that couldn’t possibly be made into a film. At times it reads like an essay composed of conversations in single rooms, the sort of scenes that would repel contemporary film editors and their audiences. And the piecing together of its disparate parts only works on the page. For instance, each of the artists is called G. The first G is male and decides mid-career to start painting upside down. As another G is female, a typical reader starts to wonder if it is the same G who has transitioned – exactly the type of game Cusk plays with her readers. As confusing as it sounds, it works. The four lives separately, and at more subtle levels collectively, explore themes on identity, the nature and value of art and the meaning of freedom. Anything more I could say at this point would be a spoiler – not for revealing the plot, but for denying you, dear reader, the chance to experience it firsthand.

Final thought: I was reading Parade around the time I visited the Schiaparelli exhibition at the V&A. I might not have been aware of it then, but I don’t doubt that in my subconscious, these fictional artists were speaking with Elsa in that same consciousness‑space.

Blogging and Dying

I’ve become a Substack reader but remain a devoted WordPress blogger. Political journalism and commentary thrive on Substack – the stuff of the chattering classes, to which I freely admit I belong. Yet for all its growth, Substack still can’t match WordPress’s audience reach. It tickles me to see analytics showing someone in Bangladesh reading my piece ‘Patriarchy and Harari’ and that my most popular post over the past year was ‘Titanic Languages.’ I follow other bloggers, literary journals, and arts magazines on WordPress, and after nearly a decade, the platform feels like home. If you’re reading this, WordPress, for our tenth anniversary, a gift subscription would be most welcomed.

Recently, I’ve been working on the appearance of these WordPress pages, and it’s been quite an undertaking. After scrolling through dozens of new themes and giving several a trial run, I ended up keeping my old theme but changing the colours. While in this digital housekeeping mode, I discovered that what looks good and professional on a laptop could appear dreadful and amateurish on a phone. For several of my postings, the image got in the way of the text, crunching words into the margin. Since most people read on their phones these days, I’ve been resizing, repositioning and replacing images while listening to Max Richter’s complete 16-hour playlist on Spotify. It’s been a journey.

The main image that needed to be replaced was the feature for the first instalment of my fictional prose pieces called ‘Bunny’s Vignettes.’ I had decided to employ the help of AI to get an image that I could use repeatedly with each instalment. When I explained to Copilot that I wanted a crayon-drawn image of an adult woman who was part rabbit, part woman, they gave me a beautiful sex kitten, complete with busty cleavage. Six prompts later, after I put her into a t-shirt, cut her hair, and revealed her bucked teeth, I was closer to what I wanted, but it didn’t seem to understand that she was still too attractive. ‘Make her normal,’ I protested. It wasn’t until I asked Copilot to make her ‘older’ that it understood ‘less attractive.’ Yes, AI reflects our society.

What I’ve been reading

A lot about dying and death. Joyce Carol Oates’s Breathe is a transformative novel that recounts how a 37-year-old woman, Michaela, navigates through her husband’s dying days and the months following his death. At times this is a love story, brought about through reminiscences and through her denial and later imaginings of her dead husband calling her to join him. Stylistically, the novel uses a fascinating form of free indirect speech. Often, we’re inside Michaela’s mind in a stream of consciousness. At other times, the narration steps outside her thoughts to record dialogue and scenes from her perspective. Occasionally the narration moves further still into a detached commentary that seems to arise from Michaela’s perceptions but with more sobriety. In one such moment, the narrator offers this gem:

‘The ontological mystery of Death: that the dead vanish and never reappear except in dreams. They are gone from us, and we cannot see them, speak with them, touch them, breathe with them. No matter how we yearn for them.’

I understand why this book resonates with support groups for those who have lost loved ones. But here I become the resisting reader. I couldn’t feel complete empathy with Michaela because I take a more Buddhist approach. Ideally, living in the moment, I resist grief that pulls me into the past and leaves me with a present defined by absence. In mindfulness, denial of the present has no place, nor do thoughts of the future that so easily stir up fear. I refer to The Tibetan Book of the Dead – which is not a book about death but really a study of the mind at the moment of death when illusions of what we perceive as life fall away. For the living, this classic tome on Tibetan Buddhism reframes death as part of a continuous cycle, encouraging a less fearful and confused relationship with mortality.

I am aware that this act of blogging is at times my way of working through these beliefs on death and dying.

Bunny’s Vignettes – First instalment

I’m working on a story, which I’ve realised needs to be novella length – in other words, nearly impossible to publish. In the spirit of Charles Dickens and Walter Scott, I thought I’d publish this in monthly instalments (yes, UK English is one L). As each vignette is published in this blog, it is also added to one of my webpages: https://trimarcoblog.com/bunnys-vignettes/

Most of the stories take place in the 60s and 70s, reflecting my own childhood in America. This first instalment is something of a preface.

Kitschmas Memories – 2012

As children we had those bubbles with a snowy scene inside. You would shake them, and glitter would fall like snow on the quaint plastic towns. They were just small enough to fit into one hand. But not this one. This takes two hands. The bubble is circular and looks more like a clairvoyant’s crystal ball than a child’s toy. This is one of those pricey gifts for grownups which infantizes them.

Every December I place it on a corner of a windowsill partially covered by a curtain. It’s there for a passing glance. To gaze at it for too long makes me morose.

The scene is of downtown Chicago with its famous buildings cramped together as if on the same city block, which of course, they are not. The Chicago River snakes along a couple of metal bridges crossing the turquoise painted waterway. One of the bridges has a tiny commuter train on it. If I examine it with my reading glasses, I can just make out the Chicago Transit Authority logo.

When you lift this glass globe with its heavy ceramic base and flip it over, there’s a wind-up key. A couple of good turns and the music box tingles with ‘My Kind of Town.’

This adult toy was a present from my sister from whom I have been estranged for over twelve years. She always sent her siblings interesting and expensive Christmas gifts. Receiving them made me smile no matter how frivolous they were. I would think in those moments that she’s not so bad after all.

Sometimes I wonder if her Chicago-themed Christmas presents were her way of making me nostalgic for the city I left over 30 years ago. Were the Chicago Cubs porcelain coasters, Chicago silver bells and a stuffed lion from the Art Institute of Chicago all about trying to make me regret having left? This reasoning only works if we remembered our childhood in the same way.

Or was she flaunting her money, reminding me of the wealth she married into? She’s always been competitive that way. Whereas such things mean nothing to me.

I don’t miss receiving these gifts from her. And I don’t know why I take the snow bubble out of its box every year.

But I do. This toy that isn’t really a toy.

The snow bubble is like a baby’s head, about the size of my sister’s head when she was a baby, and I was five.

I shake the snow bubble hard. It doesn’t scream like she did.

The little glitter flakes slowly descend on uncertain memories.

###

Who Killed Earth Day?

According to current online sources Earth Day 2026 has the global participation of over 193 countries, with ‘major involvement from workplaces, educators, environmental organisations, and local communities.’ Really? I’m not seeing any of this. Perhaps if I worked in a primary school, I’d witness the classic scenes of children picking up litter with metal claws. But in my actual local community, those scenes remain imaginary. Tree‑planting and recycling initiatives do happen, but sporadically, and not in any way tied to April 22. This is true of my life in France as much as in the UK. Even the French – for whom demonstrations are practically a civic pastime – seem to have skipped organising anything for Le Jour de la Terre this year.

It’s not just 2026. During my four years (2019-2023) as a Councillor in regional government in the UK, Earth Days past without notice. In recent years, I haven’t received emails from organisations, like Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace, announcing some sort of action, rally or demonstration. Last night and this morning, I checked the only two socials I still bother with – LinkedIn and Blue Sky – and found exactly one post acknowledging Earth Day. Thank you, António Guterres.

On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans poured into the streets to support the first ever Earth Day. To date, it’s the largest demonstration in US history. In the intervening 56 years, a lot has happened to the green movement, good and bad, encouraging and soul-destroying. Today we are at a peak of awareness of the sorry state of our planet and simultaneously witnessing a growth of climate-change deniers and political backsliding. Governments and powerful actors are reversing gains that once felt irreversible.

I entitled this blog ‘Who Killed Earth Day?’ as an homage to the documentary ‘Who Killed the Electric Car?’ This 2006 film examined how the first modern electric cars (especially GM’s EV1) were created, briefly succeeded, and then abruptly withdrawn from the market. It argued that a combination of corporate, political and regulatory forces in the US contributed to the electric car’s demise. The parallels don’t need to be spelled out.

But if we extend the analogy, there’s room for cautious hope. Electric vehicles did return. In fact, global EV sales rose 20% last year. I learned this last night, ironically while searching for Earth Day activities and finding none. An email arrived from the New York Times – the Climate Forward newsletter – where David Gelles, in honour of Earth Day, shared a handful of encouraging stories, including: rising EV sales, and EU gas emissions dropping another 3%, now 40% below 1990 levels. Not the call to action I was looking for, but a necessary reminder that progress isn’t entirely stalled. A sprinkling of hope.

What I’ve been reading

I first discovered Octavia Butler’s Kindred when I had to review a research article about the novel. With no time to read it before the review was due, I relied on internet summaries, academic papers and my background in literary theory to critique the article’s publishability. That was enough to pique my interest and make me order the book from the public library. Good thing – a few weeks later, another article on Kindred appeared in my in-tray. Like the first article and ones that I encountered in my research, the themes of race and gender are central in analysing this time-traveller story. The present day of the story is 1976 America, where Dana, a Black woman, is repeatedly pulled back to a southern plantation in the 1800s to save the life of her white ancestor, Rufus. Dana must keep Rufus alive long enough for him to father her great‑great‑grandmother Alice, a free Black woman who is later forced into slavery. Dana has no choice but to confront slavery and womanhood not as history, but as lived reality. No spoilers here. I’ll just say that it’s a compelling, well‑crafted page‑turner, and its social commentary makes it fertile ground for literary theory.

My bedtime read has me emersed in the poems of Walt Whitman. I read Leaves of Grass as a teenager and kept the paperback until the jaundiced pages started falling out. I still relish his free-verse expansiveness and the way his ideas about the self intertwine with nature. I imagine Whitman as an early environmentalist – though the word ‘environmentalist’ in the ecological sense didn’t come along until in the early 1970s – around the time of the first Earth Day.

Bonkers

You know who I’m talking about. His words and actions have been referred to as – and this is not an exhaustive list: nuts, crazy, unhinged, mad, barking, bizarre, cracked, daft, weird and bonkers. These labels come not from social‑media agitators but from mainstream opinion writers and the more serious unsensational podcasters. I’m deliberating avoiding social media pundits who express everything in extremis. Nor am I going to rant about enacting Article 25 to oust a US president who is clearly mentally unfit for office – no point discussing it if Congress doesn’t step up to the plate (to use an Americanism). I am, as a linguist, going to say something about how we communicate this situation.

The main problem lies with these words to describe insanity. They have a built-in amusement factor that dilutes their force when applied to someone who is really mentally unwell. Bonkers, for example, was first used in Britain in the early part of the 20^th century and is derived from the verb to bonk, meaning to hit someone on the head (Oxford English Dictionary). The person who is bonkers is disoriented from the blow and not making a lot of sense. The cartoonish image – complete with whirling birds – undercuts the seriousness of cognitive decline in the most powerful political figure in the world.

The situation is made worse when these same fun words are used hyperbolically in everyday life. How often I’ve heard myself say of someone with a worldview different from my own, ‘he’s crazy’ or ‘she’s loopy.’ I don’t think these people should resign from their jobs and seek psychiatric treatment. Bizarre and weird also share a bed with eccentric and peculiar, rendering them understatements for a US president who posts images of himself as Christ being protected by military-action-hero angels.

Mainstream media has also contributed to this quagmire of communication. Trying to sound objective, news outlets avoid the more amusing and colloquial language only to replace it with sterile euphemisms that miss the mark. The president’s words have been described as ‘digressions,’ ‘ramblings’ and ‘incoherent statements.’ His vulgar expressions and penchant for creating offensive images are placed into the realm of normalcy and treated in the same way as legislative or policy remarks. Writing about Tr*mp’s mental state and volatile temperament, Alan Rushbridger in The Independent rightly summed-up this media response as sane-washing.

Of course, if the media starts investigating the president’s sanity with the same rigour they have to corruption and other acts of infamy, we know the response from this White House – ‘fake news.’

What I’ve been reading

Between 1997 and 2002, Apple had the grammatically annoying slogan ‘Think Different,’ which was credited with reviving the company at a time when it was losing money and market share. Some 25 years later, the idea of thinking differently is enjoying a resurgence. Contemporary thinkers argue that solving today’s global problems requires a revisionist history – that is, thinking differently – to understand what went wrong and a surge of invention and ingenuity – again, thinking differently – to move forward. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance fits into this tradition. In their call to action, they add a crucial step – deploy. There’s no point in having brilliant inventions if governments are tangled in bureaucracy, beholden to corporate interests and fundamentally risk‑averse. Though Klein and Thompson are left-of-centre, they note that the bind that America (and most other countries) are in is not one-sided – progressives and conservatives have done their share of damage.

I’ve also read – sort of – Virginia Roberts Guiffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl. To clarify, I had read so many excerpts from this book and news stories about the high-profile men Guiffre encountered, I wasn’t interested in reading any more. Then a friend told me that she found it necessary reading. When it popped up on Spotify as a free audiobook, I thought I’d give it a go. Despite not being a fan of audiobooks – too slow – my impatience got through the estimated 13 hours of listening by cranking up the speed to 1.2 (more than that made the reader sound like she was on helium) and skipping sections that I had already read or heard about ad nauseum (Prince Andrew, the Paris apartment, etc). It’s a riveting listen/read. Giuffre recounts her experiences of sexual and emotional abuse, her escape, her confrontation with trauma, and the gruelling legal obstacles she faced in seeking justice. Underlying all of this is her psychological journey, which for me was the true take-away – a reaffirmation of the healing power of psychotherapy and meditation.

The anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston once said,‘There are years that ask questions and years that answer.’ Both books, in their own ways, ask urgent questions about our society, and both depend on the years ahead to answer them.

War as a narrative frame

In linguistics we have the concept of framing to help explain how our brains move from word to meaning. The word war, for instance – one that has been on my mind and probably yours these days – instantly activates a frame of images and emotions – buildings blowing up, casualties, refugees, skies filled with grey planes, alongside feelings of fear and outrage. The word in isolation conjures up all of these things.

Frames are a convenient way for linguists to illustrate how encyclopaedic meanings work and how we create typical contexts when we see or hear certain words. The reality is that modern warfare and the reporting of it in Ukraine and the Middle East challenge the simplification effects of narrative frames. As drones and AI-generated war strategies reduce the number of boots on the ground, the familiar war narratives could give the false impression that these are ‘war-lite’ events.

Another example – The blocking of the Strait of Hormuz is being treated by the current US Administration as breaking the rules of war – that is, not fitting into the established war frame. Yet blocking shipping lanes as a war strategy is nothing new. Consider the British naval blockade during World War I, where maritime access was deliberately cut off to starve the Germans and weaken their economy.

This leads me to another point: the war frame also needs to include the lies of war. This too, is nothing new. In the 5^th century BC, the Greek playwright Aeschylus is reported to have said, ‘In war, truth is the first casualty.’ The lies surrounding today’s wars are further complicated by an unlikely and prolific source – the President of the United States – and by the 24-hour news cycle – a melange of mainstream sources, podcasts and social media, pumping out falsehoods, verified reports and bias commentary simultaneously.

Given the war-induced tragedies unfolding before us, the best that I can offer for now is linguistic awareness. Naming and framing shapes not only how we understand – and misunderstand – events, but how we imagine their end.

What I’ve been reading

I found Nastassja Martin’s Croire aux fauves (called In the Eye of the Wild in its English edition) in the fiction section of the Menton library. While this book reads as literary fiction, rich in descriptive detail and figurative language, it turns out to be a memoire. In fact, The English publisher categorises the book as ‘Anthropological memoir/nature writing.’ However you label it, it’s a story well worth reading. Martin is a Russian French anthropologist who, while conducting research in the volcanos of Kamtchatka (the far east region of Russia), was brutally attacked by a bear and left seriously disfigured. The story starts with her admission to a Russian hospital and carries the reader through multiple operations, a transfer to a hospital in Paris, visits from horrified family and friends, more surgeries and eventually her return to the place where it all happened. While these events are taking place, Nastassja relives the attack, acutely aware of how it has altered her relationship with bears and seeing herself as a bear-woman – an idea drawn from Russian mythology. Upon returning to Russian, she discovers that her story had been reported in the news as a woman being attacked by a bear. But she understands it as ‘a bear and a woman meet and the boundaries between them implodes.’

Staying with the themes of hospitals and life-changing events, Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart tells the real-life story of a heart transplant given to a 9-year-old boy. The book chronicles the medical and emotional events for the young recipient, the tragically young donor and their families. I wasn’t certain at first if I would like this nonfictional account having read Maylis de Kerangal’s masterfully written novel Réparer les Vivants on the same subject – which I blogged about. But I was pleasantly surprised. Running alongside the present-day drama, Clarke delves into the history of heart transplant medicine and the treatment of ill children, revealing some astonishing – and disturbing – facts. While her writing might lack the narrative complexity and metaphors of de Kerangal’s work, Clarke has flare and moments of panache: ‘No other part of the human body comes close to matching the metaphorical richness of the human heart. Hearts sing, soar, race, burn, break, bleed, swell, hammer and melt. They can be won or lost, cut or trampled, and hewn from oak or stone or gold.’

Away from wars and hospitals, I’ve been finding moments of introspection in a linguistically ludic poem by Mark Tardi, Eventual Horizon. Two points to make here: 1) I know Mark personally as we worked together at the University of Nizwa in Oman – yet another way of getting introduced to new poetry and a talented poet. And 2) Notice my phrasing above, ‘I’ve been finding…’, is in the present tense. Reading poetry – this poem in particular – involves rereading, thinking, experiencing and rereading again. With each reading, I suspect I am constructing new frames, only to dismantle them once more.