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.

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.

epstein, the verb

If the name Epstein were not ubiquitous enough, it has seeped into the lexicon as a verb – with two meanings.

Conspiracy theory websites kicked this off with Epstein (or the lowercase epstein), meaning to make a murder look like a suicide, especially in cases where the motive was to prevent someone from revealing damaging information. While she sits in her cosy prison there’s speculation that Ghislaine Maxwell might ‘get Epsteined.’ This sense has also found its way onto non-conspiracy forums and chats where it’s said in a hyperbolic and jokey way. Example: ‘If he keeps talking about corruption in the agency, they’re going to Epstein him next.’ I take issue with these uses of epstein. Whether serious or jokey, it hinges on Epstein being a victim – even if he was killed, I struggle to see this pedocriminal and master of corruption as a casualty. I’m also bothered by such examples because of their humour – okay, its dark humour, which I often enjoy. But not when it trivialises a case that simmers with rot and where the real victims are mostly girls and young women.

I discovered another meaning of Epstein from reading an article in The Independent by Victoria Richards. She describes how British teenagers have started using Epstein as slang to call out inappropriate or non‑consensual behaviour. Example, when a boy was trying to put something into another’s boy’s trousers, the recipient of the silliness yelled out, ‘Don’t Epstein me!’ Another example from Richards: ‘“Get off, Epsteins!” one of the girls retorted sassily when the rest tried to form a human pile-on of writhing bodies on the sofa.’ At least this sense of the verb epstein is closer to the unsavoury reality of Epstein’s behaviour, not for a second trying to make him out as a victim. Richard’s take on this is poignant: ‘Distasteful, certainly. Yet still, the only way kids can make sense of the very real, human horror they have heard and seen and read about. The only way they can process what adults have done – and in some cases, continue to do – to other young people like them.’

Maybe I’m like those teenagers, trying to process the ‘human horror,’ but I’m using sociolinguistics instead.

What I’ve been reading

Trying to make sense of the political mess we live in, I tucked into Fareed Zakaria’s Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. Like Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth, which I wrote about a couple of blogs ago, Zakaria’s book covers hundreds of years of history, but instead of the typical textbook approach, Zakaria argues that the modern world has been shaped by three great revolutions. The first was political – following on from the Enlightenment, the rise of liberal democracies. The second was economic – triggered by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism (this lessened food scarcity and brought about wealth and leisure time but also inequality and dislocation). The third revolution was (and still is) technological, where we find ourselves today in the digital revolution. According to Zakaria, this is the most destabilizing revolution because it’s outpacing human adaptation. An unsettling thought, yet the book exudes some degree of optimism as it suggests a cyclic nature of these phases of time.

Zakaria, forever the journalist, has a punchy style of writing. Some quotables from the book: ‘Dumping, intellectual property theft, abundant coal, and cheap labour were key ingredients in the growth of US industry in the late-nineteenth century – just as they have been for Chinese industry in the twenty-first century.’ And this one, which fits nicely into my ideological bubble: ‘Even before Trump’s tenure, many people worldwide had stopped regarding the American political system as worth admiring or emulating. America’s present reality combines towering strengths – technological innovation, world-leading universities, strong demographics – with glaring weaknesses, from gun violence to drug overdoses to persistent inequality.’

While reading this revisionist history, my fiction intake came from La pluie d’été (Summer rain) by Marguerite Duras. It’s the story of a poor immigrant family living in the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s. The unemployed parents often leave the children alone for days while they drink and sleep off their hangovers. The children don’t attend school, and this becomes the centre of the action as the eldest son, 11-year-old Ernesto, teaches himself to read and write. With this ability and a sage-like quality, he argues with a local school master who tries to get the children into school. But after 3 days in classes, Ernesto leaves never to return because, as he says, ‘they teach things I don’t know.’ He also questions the social and practical value of formal education in ways that show that he is profoundly wise, a child who seems to carry knowledge that precedes learning. Soon he and his younger sister, Jeanne, develop a bond that is both incestual and symbolically charged.

As the children grow, the novel drifts between realism and myth. Ernesto becomes a kind of visionary figure, speaking in riddles about destruction, creation, and the future. Ultimately, La pluie d’été is less about plot – it’s a meditation on knowledge, innocence, family, and the fragile, luminous moments that shape a life. The writing is a mix of traditional novel storytelling with some of the dialogue – those on education and the existence of God – presented in the format of a stage or screenplay. At the end of the novel, this is explained by the acknowledgement to an early film version of the work. Retaining parts of this as a filmic dialogue is quite effective and keeps the work pacey. Also in this acknowledgement is a thank you to the culture minister at the time of writing, Jack Lang. Yes, the same Jack Lang, now aged eighty-four, who’s embroiled in the Epstein scandal as his name appears over six hundred times in the notorious files alongside some dodgy financial dealings. Perhaps someday epstein the verb will also mean ‘to be exposed for criminality despite being protected by your wealth and power.’

When ‘What If’ Novels Become True

Has it really only been a year? The headlines have piled up so quickly they’ve blurred into a single, exhausting smear – a year of presidential mandates and postings that veer from absurd to cruel, each one landing like another stone in the rucksack I’ve been dragging behind me. I’m not going to list the imbecilic, inhumane and illegal decrees of the current US president, who was inaugurated a year ago today – plenty of news services have done that. Reading them, I realised that so much has happened my brain had already forgotten about or diminished the importance of some of it. I don’t think this is just because of their high number or the fact that some have withered on the vine – what’s happened to the dangers of Tylenol/paracetamol? It’s also due to the anger and despair I’ve experienced with each new story over the past 12 months. Coping with these emotions has entailed living more in the moment – being aware of daily life and grateful for my retirement – and consequently relegated to the past events that I cannot change nor work around.

At times, I have been reminded of What-If novels that imagine a world where some aspect of history happened differently. Philip Roth’s Plot Against America has come to mind too often. Roth offers us an alternative 1940s America in which the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh – in real life a hardcore isolationist and Nazi sympathizer – becomes president after beating FDR in his third election. President Lindbergh signs non‑interference pacts with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Lindbergh’s administration promotes antisemitism, creating policies that tear apart Jewish communities and families under the guise of ‘Americanization.’ I’m left with an uncanny feeling of fiction bleeding into reality – the comparisons between Roth’s quasi-fantasy world and our own don’t need to be enumerated.

Playing with the notion of a What-If novel, I’ve come up with one of my own:

It’s 2026. President Kamala Harris sits in an Oval Office devoid of goldleaf. In place of the aggressive ICE raids from the past decade, a quieter and more technology-driven ‘humane enforcement’ approach is now being used for immigration. However, all is not perfect – this approach faulters when a historic climate-driven migration surge hits the US southern border. In the meantime, Fox News airs a series of videos exposing Harris as having a clandestine affair with a high-ranking CIA official. Amid accusations of exposing official secrets and being branded a slut, Harris claims her innocence. On the world stage, while skirmishes continue in Donetsk, Russia has otherwise retreated. Ukrainian elections have started without Zelensky, who has returned to acting and being the voice of Ukrainian Paddington Bear. Gaza has begun rebuilding despite continued threats from Israeli armed forces, but these have quelled in the light of the Netanyahu trials taking place in the Hague. The ‘Greenland Purchase’ is a joke of the past.

What I’ve been reading

It probably has not helped my mental health these past few weeks of infamy to be reading a post-apocalyptic novel. Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. Set in the Great Lakes region of Canada and America (countries no longer have governments or borders), it has several storylines and follows different principal characters living in a world where some 90% of the population died during a pandemic. The writing is a masterclass of narrative construction as storylines move seamlessly back and forward in time, linking the time before the pandemic to the post-apocalyptic society struggling without internet, electricity, medical services, etc. While this sounds grim – and there certainly are sad moments – I found pleasure in the telling of the story, the relationships among the characters and one set of characters in particular – despite all, a group of musicians and actors travel together to different ‘settlements’ performing Shakespeare.

Another novel that is sad on the surface, but still enjoyable to read has been Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City, translated into English by Howard Curtis (a friend who passed this book on to me). Set in the late 60s in Rome, the story follows the life of Leo, intelligent and witty, but an alcoholic drifter who struggles to hold down jobs. He manages to eat and have a roof over his head thanks to well-off friends, emersed in a Dolce Vita existence of partying and casual sex. But for Leo, under an aura of loneliness and melancholy. Then he meets Ariana. They have an intense romance soaked in alcohol and bonhomie. He’s in love, but she isn’t, and his life spirals down yet again. Still, a gratifying read.

These days, my reading is an act of escape without being escapist – my way of stepping sideways out of the world – not to avoid it, but to breathe long enough to step back in.

Hello 2026

The weirdness of 2025 has left me with no choice but to take a different approach from the usual end-of-year review and farewell. To begin with, I’m not even sure what year it really was.

When it came to US foreign policy, 2025 felt like a replay of 2003. That year saw the US and UK invade Iraq under the fabricated premise of ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ This phrase has now resurfaced in American media (mainly Fox News) and far-right podcasts to justify US military strikes against Venezuela. The false justifications followed public outcry over the unlawful and deadly targeting of Venezuelan fishing boats, on suspicion – without evidence – of drug trafficking into the US. For a clever montage highlighting how the government in 2003 used the exact same rhetoric for false pretexts for war as today’s US government and media mouthpieces, I recommend this recent episode of The Daily Show.

Or have we simply repeated 1992? That was the year US president George H. W. Bush, at the Rio Earth Summit, announced that ‘growth is the engine of change,’ making it clear that the US would not sign any biodiversity treaty. Bush reportedly said at Rio: ‘the American way of life is not up for negotiation.’ Sound familiar? Quotes from the current White House occupant during 2025 include: ‘Climate change is a con job – the greatest con job’ and ‘Our country is on the verge of a comeback, the likes of which the world has never witnessed.’

Stepping further back in time, 2025 could easily be mistaken for 1942, when President Roosevelt bypassed Congress and used his executive powers to incarcerate 120,000 people of Japanese heritage – two-thirds of them US citizens. In 2025, ICE deported an estimated 340,000 immigrants, with some 65,000 still being held in detention centres.

I don’t wish to fall onto the adage about history repeating itself. The assumption there has been of centuries passing and people not learning from the mistakes of history. These 2025 throwbacks are within the twentieth century, some in my living memory. The awful craziness of the past year is the result of wilful ignorance.

Of course, these examples come from the US, which brings me to the other side of this peculiar year: the ways in which the US government is leaving its mark on the rest of the world. I hesitate to revisit the endless list of presidential lies, acts of corruption, hate-fuelled attacks on individuals and countries and the somersaulting of international markets, food security and military alliances. Worse still, even though I live outside the US – in England and France – 2025 was saturated with reports of these events starring you know who. Hardly a day went by without his raspy voice and orange face – and the mute button only works with television. His childish intonation would even be in my head when I read him quoted in the newspapers. In France, the Ouest-France/Tagaday barometer declared the US president the most ‘médiatisée’ person of 2025.

This is why 2025 was such a difficult year to live through – a year so strange and unpleasant that I cannot find the right words for goodbye – ‘Good riddance’ seems too simple and direct. I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. In this week’s New Yorker, Susan Glasser notes ‘In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them.’

Instead, I offer: ‘Hello and welcome, 2026. I do hope you’re a better year than your cousin 2025, who’s spinning and raging out the door like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon.’

Living in this mindful moment, I sit back and embrace the transition into the new year without judgement or expectation, appreciating the emptiness of this quiet pause in time.