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.

Lemons and Oranges: Coping, or not, with the new world order

The nursery rhyme goes ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clements.’ But in Menton, France, lemons come first. With the annual lemon festival kicking off last weekend, the city’s central garden is decorated with large figures made of lemons and oranges. This year’s theme is outer space, featuring an astronaut (French, of course), spaceships and aliens while lively parades bring traffic to a halt.

I’m aware that I’m enjoying this traditional fete more this year than in previous years. I don’t think this has anything to do with rockets, space beings and sparkling dancers. This has been about partaking in a tradition and allowing myself to be entertained, passive and receptive. I wonder if this is escapism, pretending that life goes on as normal despite what is happening in America, despite the consequences that have us here in Europe shaken and nervously waiting for the next move by our world leaders.

On the one hand, I’m buying into normalcy bias. Carole Cadwalladr explains in her blog what this means: ‘There is an inability to process, accept and confront the dangerous new reality we are in and to focus on the big picture and the pivot of history that’s occurred in the last two weeks.’ She was criticising the New York Times for not reporting on the coup of the tech billionaires that has taken over the White House. She has a point. Cadwalladr’s conclusion offers some hope: ‘It’s a coup. And the international order is collapsing. We aren’t helpless but we need to cycle through the denial part to get to the bit where we start fighting back and take immediate steps to protect ourselves.’

My other hand is not in denial and is all too aware of the history-making events of the past ten days. While the streets of Menton were filled with tourists and shops promoting all things lemon, the US president was slinging cruel and falsely based insults at Volodymyr Zelenski that sounded like they were written by Putin and full of warped narratives. Worse still, this current US government is engaged in so-called ‘peace talks’ where neither the Ukrainians nor the EU have been invited. (This reminds me of the adage that I heard again this week – if you’re not at the table, your on the menu.) Such actions shift the balance of power, making more fragile the international organisations set up to protect democracies and their citizens. This is where another bias comes in – recency bias, where we tend to think of recent events as being far worse than anything in the past. I’m clearly experiencing this and wondering if we are on the brink of WWIII, coupled with financial collapse resulting from trumpanomics.

I’ve run out of hands to refer to, and so, I’m back to contemplating citrus fruit and festivals to get  through the winter months, traditions that go back to medieval times as we are living in a world not too different. If I put both hands together, I can pray.

What I’ve been reading

As The New Yorker is celebrating its centenary, I renewed by subscription – for a while at least. Every few years I take advantage of some special offer and subscribe for three to six months. This 100th anniversary edition is a real treat. For me, the highlights have been two brilliant essays and a surprising poem. Tara Westover, author of Educated – a powerful memoir about growing up in a deeply religious and anti-education family – writes on being estranged from her parents and how a friend tried to lend her his mother. Being estranged from most of my dysfunctional family, I can identify with Westover’s need to feel connected despite all that has happened and despite the patent benefits of estrangement. The other essay appealed to my science nerdiness. Dhruv Khullar provides a sobering account of why it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, for humans to live on any planet or space station outside the earth’s orbit – basically, it will make us ill. Really ill.

The poem comes from Robert Frost and is surprisingly not a reprint from a New Yorker of decades ago. This is from a recent discovery of an unpublished poem entitled ‘Nothing New.’ It has been authenticated by scholars, including Jay Parini, who writing for The New Yorker, puts the poem into the context of other works by Frost. Parini comments that ‘Frost’s unique gift was to write poems that burn a hole in your brain. You never forget his best lines. They stick with you—and they change your life.’  So true. I still remember lines from Frost that I learned in primary school.

Hence, I’ll conclude with reprinting the poem here. I’m sure other Frost fans and societies have already posted this all over social media, and well they should, especially in times like these, wintery in both season and perspective.

Nothing New

(Amherst 1918)

One moment when the dust to-day

Against my face was turned to spray,

I dreamed the winter dream again

I dreamed when I was young at play,

Yet strangely not more sad than then—

Nothing new—

Though I am further upon my way

The same dream again.

—Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Surviving January

Nope, this is not a blog from a survivor of Dry January – the wine continued to flow as usual. Nor is this about winter depression – at times, a sad month but luckily without the winter blues (hard to experience in the sunny south of France). As February kicked off this weekend, I was determined to reboot and restart the year afresh. But not before a few reflections on the surreal month that just passed.

Imperia before the storm

In the second week of January, we gave ourselves a three-day break in Imperia, Italy. I had told friends that this would be our reward for finishing the joyless task of painting the kitchen – including cabinets. True, but the underlying reason was to have a respite before the 47th president was inaugurated, a chance to be preoccupied with Italian language and history while enjoying coastal views and stoned-baked pizzas. I was living in these delightful moments while at the same time imagining myself looking back on them nostalgically – a time before America imploded and the world reacted. Or more immediately, a time before the barrage of news on the vitriolic, anti-environmental, anti-humanitarian, falsehood laden chaos.

Goodbye Facebook

January also marked my last month on Facebook after some fourteen years of posting holiday snaps, images of our protests marches and single-framed comics, while giving my share of thumbs and hearts. I did explain to my followers that this was a political decision against Zuckerberg, the latest technobro to become a Tr*mp enabler and his allowing for hate speech to grow and fester on the site. The reaction to this announcement was mixed. Some support, one serious critic (apparently, I should be happy to have more freedom of speech) and loads of people ignoring me. The latter grouping made me wonder how many closet Tr*mp supporters (including non-Americans) are out there.

Still Jacqueline

The third week of January marked the death of one of my oldest and closest friends. In truth, the sense of loss started a few years ago. The last time I spoke to Jacqueline was over the phone and she was in a care home in Edinburgh. A great raconteur, she told me a few stories that made me laugh, but I later realised that these stories did not involve any of our mutual friends and at no point in the conversation did she ask about my David. That is, she had forgotten who I was. Jacqueline had Alzheimer’s. Like the character in the film Still Alice, Jaqueline was an accomplished linguist and teacher. And like the character in Still Alice, played by Julianne Moore, the signs of this horrible condition had its onset in middle age – Jacqueline was barely sixty when her memory started failing her and her personality began to change. Unlike the film, the experience for Jacqueline and those who loved her could not be encapsulated in two hours. The years of slow deterioration of mental faculties, of speech, of sense of humour had laced a thread of sadness through our lives.

Due to problems scheduling planes and trains and severe weather conditions, I was unable to attend the funeral in person. Instead, on the last day of this surreal month, I watched live stream on my laptop old friends and colleagues at the crematorium reminiscing about Jacqueline and giving her a warm, heartfelt sendoff.

What I’ve been reading

I’ve been engrossed in two books that couldn’t be more different. Sam Freedman’s Failed State explains why Britian is in such a mess, going far beyond Brexit in examining the highly centralised system of government that cripples its ministers. On top of this, the powers of the judicial system, though often necessary but cumbersome, are more than ever challenging the government, making it more accountable, but even less effective. Freedman also points out that ‘the constant need to feed the media beast has led to a rapid proliferation of symbolic legislation designed not to achieve any real-world goal, but to give the impression of activity.’ Good nourishment for this news junkie.

The Overstory by Richard Powers is a book I wish I had discovered before dipping into a couple of soft-science tomes about trees. Yes, she’s harping on about trees again. The first part of this novel introduces nine characters in what I would consider to be interesting and entertaining short stories. The only connection between the stories is their characters’ experiences in one way or another with trees. In some cases, these experiences are accidental and peripheral. For other characters, a hobbyist and a researcher, trees are their raison d’etre. For the latter, I was glad that this book didn’t shy away from the science, and I could revisit words that were new to me just a couple of years ago – raceme, drupe, panicle, etc. Saving our forests brings these lives together in complex thriller-like fashion. While quotables abound in this book, I’ll just leave you with a couple. A geeky teenager concludes, ‘Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.’ Another character is struck by a ‘great truth’: ‘Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.’

In Powers’ book, I’ve also discovered the phrase guerrilla forestry, where activists illegally plant new saplings. I recently wrote a short story that touched on this idea. Once I’ve learned more about sylviculture, don’t be surprised to find me among the forest warriors. There, I’ve rebooted my year ahead.

My 2024 in review without lists

Regular readers know that I’m not a fan of the listacle – those articles that list the best of or worst of or top 10 etc. They’re click bait and often poor examples of writing. By copping out of the type of commentary or critical review that threads an argument,  they offer mere snapshots brimming with clichés. With this hanging over my head for what I shouldn’t do, I’m reviewing 2024 under a few categories.

My year as a verbivore

Yes, I used to refer to myself as a logophile, but I’ve decided to use verbivore instead despite Word underlining it in red. This word was coined by the writer Michael Chabon in 2007 when talking about his love of words.

I’m afraid 2024 hasn’t been good year for verbivores thanks largely to the many national elections taking place all over the world and where politicians have overused words, such as woke, to the point that it can mean the opposite of their original meaning – or simply have no meaning at all aside from being something to despise. I’m also somewhat miffed that words like demure and mindful have gained new meanings thanks to the verbal grasping of social media influencers. Both words are being used to mean low-key and subtle in fashion and style.

The OED ranked brain rot as the word of the year, one that I never used even once. Apparently, it has come out of the Instagram/TikTok generation’s feeling after scrolling through dozens of posts. It can also refer to the low-quality content found on the internet that I do my best to avoid – a challenge when trying to find vegetarian recipes on Pinterest and having to skirt around videos of cats stuck in jars.

While I don’t go around recording myself, I’ll bet that my most used word during this year was incredible. In part, I’ve picked this up from the French who frequently use incroyable. When the worst president in US history (according to historians) gets re-elected after doing and saying so many things that individually should have made him unelectable, that’s incredible. On a more positive note, given my first-hand experience dealing with builders, plumbers and electricians in the South of France, I  thought it incredible that Notre Dame Cathedral was renovated after the catastrophic fire in just over five years.

My year as a reader

This year has been dominated by two writers as in recent weeks I found myself reading yet  another Robert Harris novel, my third this year, and another Amelie Nothomb foray into autofiction, my second for 2024.

After hearing Harris speak about his latest book, Precipice, in Ely a couple of months ago, I delved into this thriller which begins at the onset of WWI. It’s an historical period I’m strangely fond of and the story recounts the true-life affair between Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith and the socialite Venetia Stanley. Asquith’s casualness towards national security is mind-boggling  as his teenage-boy infatuation led him to share with Venetia everything from Cabinet debates to classified documents coming from his wartime generals. Though not as complex or informative as Harris’s Pompeii or as intriguing as his Conclave, Precipice is still an entertaining and interesting book.

Taking advantage of the public library in Menton, I’ve just finished Amelie Nothomb’s La Nostalgie Heureuse (avail in English). The narrator’s view on the world is as quirky as ever and expressed with her usual dry wit. In this story, she’s already a well-known writer living in Paris, who returns to Japan to participate in a documentary about her early life. Key to this is an anxiety-provoking reunion with a man she nearly married some twenty years earlier. A noteworthy aside – she (fictional narrator and real-life author) had written about the relationship in one of her earlier books and when the ex-fiancé is asked by the documentary maker how he felt about that book, he said that he enjoyed it as a ‘work of fiction.’ This is when the narrator realises that her truth could be other people’s fiction – a wink to the reader of this autofiction.

Throughout the year, I have also made it a point to read writers that are highly praised in the literary press that I have never read. Earlier in the year it was Paul Auster and Antonio Scurati and in recent weeks Carson McCullers. I finally read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which most people know from the 1968 film. Set in a small town in Georgia during the Great Depression, the story recounts the lives of several characters who are connected by their work and family circumstances. Their sense of isolation is explored against a backdrop of poverty and racism, with a nuanced struggle with homosexuality. The weaving of the stories reminded me of a typical Robert Altman film – very enjoyable despite the grim subject matter.

On the non-fiction side, this year I’ve continued my nerdy interests in bees and trees, trying to find texts for non-specialists that aren’t too scientifically dry or too jokingly flippant. While I’ve also read some excellent biographies and memoirs, the most thought-provoking and impassioned nonfiction  I’ve experienced this year has been in the opinion pages of the New York Times, The Observer (UK) and Le Monde. They serve as reminders that despite populist voting trends, humanity still exists.

My year as a writer

I started out this year with two writing goals. One was to return to novel #4 and give it a thorough rewrite. While I didn’t produce a full rewrite, I have rewritten about half of it and have made notes for the other half. This task was interrupted by an avalanche of editing assignments that came my way in October and lasted until December. The other writing goal was to simply send out either one short story or one essay every month. I did manage to send out 12 stories/essays this year, but without the monthly regularity – there were a couple of inactive months and a couple bubbling with creativity. Five rejections have been taken on the chin (three were competitions after all) and I await 7 replies.

In the second half of the year, my writing took on a more therapeutic purpose – maybe my way of dealing with complex PTSD. For the first time I’m writing about unpleasant childhood memories and with the creative process taking over, I’m fictionalising certain characters and subplots. I’ve been experimenting with the ‘I-narrator’ by taking on the role of persons other than myself, trying to revisit these episodes from others’ points of view. I seemed to have tapped into something as the work I’ve shown readers so far has been extremely well-received in ways unusual for my early drafts.

My year as a human

Being a linguist, reader and writer are all a part of being a human, but I am aware too that there are other identities of my humanity, such as a friend, spouse, sibling, neighbour, citizen etc. For me, all these roles fill one stratum of physical living in all its sociocultural and psychological dimensions. In this stratum, 2024 has been about witnessing climate change, and then climate change denial by some and inaction by others, along with the public discourse of hate that substantial portions of the population engage with, making me feel like an outlier. I know I’m not alone in this, but I no longer inhabit a space in the norm range.

Another stratum of my humanity exists, but I grapple to explain even to myself. The word spiritual has been stretched and abused by religious and anti-religious alike to the point that I avoid using it. Perhaps this stratum covers all things incorporeal, including abstract thought. This year has made me more aware of this disembodied beingness, if awareness is all I have for now. And so, I continue to practice mindfulness (in the pre-2024 sense of the word – nothing to do with fashionable clothes).

Thank you, readers, for your comments and emoji reactions over the year. I wish you all peace and joy for 2025.

Gisele Pelicot, my choice for Person of the Year

Migrating South for the Winter

As a child in Chicago, I knew elderly neighbours and the grandparents of my classmates who escaped the snow and ice by living in Florida for the winter months. I used to think of these snowbirds, as they were called, with just a hint of envy and sometimes contempt – what made them so special that they didn’t have to trudge through snow or chip ice off their cars?

Now I’ve become one of those snowbirds – well, sort of. In addition to the harsh winter months, I do spend a month of the autumn and another in late spring in the south of France. Summers, and the remaining weeks of autumn and spring are in Cambridgeshire, Britain. Perhaps I’m more of a blackbird than a snowbird. Blackbirds can withstand the British winters, with most staying through the early winter months before migrating, if they bother to migrate.

But this isn’t just about the weather. My migratory habits also have to do with wanting to experience diverse cultures, practice different languages and break the routines of living in one place for a stretch of time. It’s all part of my self-psychotherapy (I’ll revisit this later.)

With this coming and going, I mark the seasons differently now. I don’t know if I should even call them seasons anymore. As I experience nature at its peaks – the winter harvesting of oranges and lemons in the south of France, the spring tulips and summer marigolds in England – the natural year is without a sense of death and renewal. It’s nearly always in bloom and constantly changing – or undergoing shorter lifespans, with no time for mourning.  Time has folded on me, the years without stark seasons appear to pass more quickly, and the transience of life is more evident.

What I’ve been reading…

Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place is a memoir about the author’s love for flat places, like the fens in England (where I live for half the year) and Scotland’s Orkney Island, while coming to terms with complex PTSD. This form of PTSD does not emerge from a warzone or a traumatic incident. It forms slowly over years. In Masuud’s case from her childhood in Pakistan under a controlling father, a medical doctor, who could not relate to having only girls and who treated them medically and psychologically like ‘lab rats’ as Masud realises with hindsight.

When I read her description of complex PTSD, I recognised elements of my own life. Back to self-psychotherapy. It has taken me decades to not see the world through the filter of my dysfunctional and at times verbally abusive family:

‘…complex PTSD is a condition that only gains meaning beyond the situation that caused it. You adapt to the world you find yourself in….If you stay in that environment [your] instincts can help to keep you alive. It’s when you leave that environment that they become maladaptive. Then – and only then – are you a damaged person. You have to laboriously unlearn all those habits, and invent new ones, in a world whose very calmness feels frightening and unreliable to you.’

Masud ties together the solace she finds in the flat countryside with the need to escape childhood memories and learn to live in her new non-traumatising environments as a student, a colleague and as a friend. She turns the tormented memories of Pakistan into the stable sense of self found in the wonder and openness of the British flatlands.

I’ve also been dipping into the poetry of Giovanni Pascoli. This late 19th century poet is one of the most read in Italy. In brief, Pascoli led a tragic life, losing his father, who was murdered by an assassin, at the age of 12 and later witnessing the early deaths of his mother, two brothers and a sister. Despite his poverty, he was able to attend university, becoming a scholar and a political activist in the emerging socialist movement. His writing reflects both the conversational vernacular of his humble upbringing with the elevated expression of a Latin scholar. Reading Pascoli in Italian makes this not only a slow pleasurable read, but also a formidable linguistic exercise. Having said that, in any language, Pascoli’s writing is accessible while giving the reader a little symbolism to deconstruct. In what I suspect was Pascoli’s journey into self-psychotherapy, this poem uses natural images to reflect on the ideas of family, memories and the brevity of life:

Night-Blooming Jasmine

(translated by Susan Thomas)

And the night-blooming flowers open,
open in the same hour I remember those I love.
In the middle of the viburnums
the twilight butterflies have appeared.

After a while all noise will quiet.
There, only a house is whispering.
Nests sleep under wings,
like eyes under eyelashes.

Open goblets exhale
the perfume of strawberries.
A light shines there in the room,
grass sprouts over the graves.

A late bee buzzes at the hive
finding all the cells taken.
The Hen runs through the sky’s blue
yard to the chirping of stars.

The whole night exhales
a scent that disappears in the wind.
A light ascends the stairs;
it shines on the second floor: goes out.

And then dawn: the petals close
a little crumpled. Something soft
and secret is brooding in an urn,
some new happiness I can’t understand yet.

It’s Misogyny and Greed, Stupid

I was going to write about newsworthy adjectives that have cropped up these last two weeks with phrases like crazy-strange campaign speeches and unnatural disasters. But given the elections results from America, I can only think of two words and they’re nouns – misogyny and greed. Others are free to add the word racism – I respect that argument but feel less strongly about it at the moment.

We all witnessed Tr*mp’s violent-strewn attacks against his women adversaries. We know that this former president proudly stacked the courts with anti-choice conservative judges and was found guilty of sexual assault. Most frightfully, only last week he exclaimed that he was ‘going to protect women whether they wanted it or not,’ a paraphrase of the arguments in favour of women wearing burkas. And then there was the ‘bro’ vote – young men who engage in toxic masculinity and spend too much time in the cesspool of social media’s misinformation and conspiracy theories – supporting their orange idol.

As for greed, I’ve heard too many people wearing MAGA hats explain that they were voting for a ‘businessman.’ One told an interviewer ‘I wanna be rich like him.’ Others say that the economy was better during Tr*mp’s term in office. Yes, inflation was lower back then, but inflation, especially food and petrol prices, has been felt all over the world thanks to the Russian-Ukraine war. It wasn’t the result of Biden’s economic policies. Furthermore, unemployment in the US is lower now than it was during Tr*mp Mark I, and more jobs were created during Biden’s four years than in Tr*mp’s. So, it’s not ‘the economy, stupid’ (sorry if this is becoming clichéd). It’s greed. This doesn’t apply universally to the working poor in America who have genuine reasons to be aggrieved, but they are mistaken if they think tax breaks on the wealthy will lift them out of poverty.

I’m working on this blog when there’s a knock at my front door. A man and woman in their fifties smile at me.

Woman: Hello. Are you concerned about leadership and the leaders in our world?

Me: Sorry, not today. I don’t mean to be rude, but really, I’m in no mood. It’s a sad day.

Woman: Actually, we’re here to talk to you about Jesus…

I cut her off. Me: Well, many Jesus-lovers just voted a tyrant back into the White House.

The man bats his eyes in confusion.

Woman: Oh, I understand completely. I have friends in America…

Me: Goodbye.

I close the door on the opportunistic Jehovah’s Witnesses and return to my blog.

These are the highlights of my election post-mortem. The full clinical report includes the double standards applied by the media, the Democrats not having primaries post-Biden, gerrymandering electoral districts and indeed, racism.

Following the post-mortem, there’s a burial. I feel as though I’m in mourning. Perhaps that’s the best way to deal with this. From a Buddhist perspective, mourning has limited value. It’s okay as an initial reaction, but then awareness of the present, being mindful needs to take over. That’s where I’m aiming to be soon.

Preparing for Winter

This weekend, we turn the clocks back. Ten days later, the US has its presidential election. These two events are bumping into each other in my brain’s anxiety lobe.

My David anticipates the clocks going back with a sense of dread. He pulls faces – the emoji with his eyes squinted, a tongue half out. David suffers from SAD (seasonal affective disorder), which is at its worse when we find ourselves in England in the winter months. I’m not so affected by the onset of winter. This is because I grew up in Chicago, where winter meant snowmen, ice skating, mittens drying on the radiator while our hands cradled cups of hot chocolate. That’s not to say I haven’t experienced that greyscale world of depression, but my occasional bouts of it have not been linked to the seasons of shorter days. They’re simply not linked to anything. Nevertheless, sharing a life together, David’s clouds of SAD cover my head as well.

Psychologist Kari Leibowitz has observed that contrary to popular belief, people who live in Scandinavian countries do not have high rates of SAD. Their prevalence of the winter blues is among the lowest in Western countries. This is because Scandinavians embrace the winter months with outdoor festivals, activities and sports and indoor candlelight gatherings with friends and family. That is, our moods and feelings towards winter have a lot to do with our mindsets (as this former Chicagoan knows). Leibowitz explains:

‘…we might have a mindset that winter is limiting or that it is full of opportunity, dreadful or delightful. We conflate the objective circumstances – that winter is cold, dark and wet – with subjective things, like it being gloomy, boring and depressing, when you could just as easily make the case that it is cosy, magical and restorative.’ (from an interview in The Observer )

Leibowitz makes a good point, not only for the onset of winter, but for anything. Our mindsets can predispose us to how we experience situations and events. In this vein, while David is dreading the 26th of October, I’m fearing the 6th of November. Yes, the US election is on the 5th, but given the time difference, the results won’t trickle in until the following day here in Europe. I’m not looking forward to learning that either America will soon have the MAGA version of fascism or that Harris has won, and the Tr*mp/Musk ticket reacts with inciting riots and cyber-pandemonium. Both could ripple  disastrously across the States (another civil war is no longer the stuff of dystopic fiction) and across the world in ways ranging from the environmental to the geopolitical. Of course, logic tells me that other scenarios might occur – American politics is never short on surprises. But that’s not found in the anxiety lobe.

Taking Leibowitz’s advice, I’ve suggested to David that he ‘resets his mindset’ for the weeks we’re in the UK after the clocks go back and before we migrate to France for the winter, starting with evenings of candlelight to soften the mood. We are also planning nights at the cinema, concerts and book talks, along with socialising at our local pubs.

As for resetting my own mindset, my version of candlelight is found in meditation and practicing mindfulness as each new disturbing situation emerges from America. In seeking the ‘delightful,’ to use Leibowitz’s word, I can look forward to the social and political satire in the months and years ahead.

What I’ve been reading

The last two novels I’ve read do not use quotation marks when characters are speaking. This meant careful reading at times to distinguish thoughts from dialogue, but in both cases this style of writing was effective. The first was Sandrine Collette’s On Était des Loups (avail. in English), a dark novel about a hunter who lives in the wilderness with his wife and child until the wife is brutally killed by a bear. He reacts by setting  out on a journey through the mountains and forests with his son in order to find a more appropriate home for the boy, the five-year-old he barely knows and didn’t want in the first place. Both live in the haze of trauma and grief left from the bear attack and deal with it in their own contrasting ways. Like the winter months, light moments can be found flickering in the gloom through character study interwoven with nature writing. A strangely life-affirming novel.

By sheer coincidence on my part, Paul Auster’s Baumgartner is also about a man whose wife had a premature death. When the story starts, he’s nearing retirement, and his wife has been dead for a decade. Set in the town of Princeton, Baumgartner is a professor of phenomenology who encounters falling in love again and incidences, such as falling down the stairs, against the backdrop of the loss of his wife. Without quotation marks getting in the way, the descriptive narrative, blends in beautifully with Baumgartner’s philosophical and mundane thoughts.

Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes is an absorbing account of the British ceramicist’s family history, traced through the ownership of Japanese figurines, called netsuke. These objects were brought to Europe by art collector Charles Ephrussi of the well-known banking family. Years later, he gave the 200 plus netsuke as a wedding gift to his cousin in Vienna, who later had her money and possessions confiscated by the Nazis. De Waal’s descriptions of the acts of antisemitism are chilling. Luckily, while Nazi soldiers occupied the family home, a housekeeper saved the tiny figurines by hiding them in her mattress. Eventually, they’re returned to the Ephrussi’s and inherited by de Waal. This work has inspired me to read more biographies about artists. De Waal mentions the works and lives of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists linked to his family, including Berthe Morisot, whose paintings and drawings I saw  recently at an exhibition in Nice. I’m now reading a biography of her by Dominique Bona. There’s something about the connected world of artists and writers in France at the end of the 19th century and into the early twentieth that makes me wish I lived at that time (though not as a woman).

Digging for Dharma and Finding Dickinson

According to Wikipedia, dharma is ‘untranslatable into English.’ Maybe so, as a single word, but the idea of it certainly could be understood across languages, and it’s a useful one for the times we live in.

The term dharma has different meanings across religions. In Hinduism it’s ‘behaviours that are considered to be in accord with the order and custom that makes life and the universal possible. It is the moral law combined with spiritual discipline that guides one’s life. (more Wikipedia – do forgive me). This fits in with its use in the novel La Tress, which I wrote about this summer. In La Tress, a poor woman in India who is an untouchable and works in the public cesspool describes her situation as her dharma. She accepts her job as her place in the world, this ‘order and custom’ that makes everything possible. Of course, there are plenty of social constraints and customs that rule our lives – love them or loathe them – but I struggle to give them moral and spiritual importance. That is, I can see societies using concepts like dharma to keep the poor and women in ‘their place.’

I’m less uncomfortable with the Buddhist’s understanding of dharma. Even though Buddha did not write any doctrines, there are loads of books and websites devoted to the Buddhist understanding of dharma, packed with deconstructions and taxonomies. The most concise workable definition I have found comes from scholar Rupert Gethin, who defines dharma as ‘the basis of things, the underlying nature of things, the way things are; in short it is the truth about things, the truth about the world’  (not Wikipedia, but Tricycle.org). While this might be a bit esoteric, it’s not muddied by debatable concepts such as morality of spirituality.

To put this another way still, and although she wasn’t writing about dharma, Emily Dickinson depicted truth as ‘stirless.’

The Truth—is stirless—
Other force—may be presumed to move—
This—then—is best for confidence—
When oldest Cedars swerve—

And Oaks untwist their fists—
And Mountains—feeble—lean—
How excellent a Body, that
Stands without a Bone—

How vigorous a Force
That holds without a Prop—
Truth stays Herself—and every man
That trusts Her—boldly up—

Why am I waxing on about dharma and truth? With the viciously false and conspiracy-riddled election campaigns going on across the world this year, I’m seeking some solace. For now, I’m finding it by embracing the concepts of dharma and truth, allowing me to assume that there are underlying truths in the basis and nature of things. Even if people chose not to believe them, they exist.

What I’ve been reading

Continuing my geeky interest in bees, I picked up Lev Parikian’s Taking Flight: How Animals Learned to Fly and Transformed Life on Earth. As an aside, the secondary title in the US version is: The Evolutionary Story of Life on the Wing. Written for a generalist audience, it’s filled with fun facts about creatures with wings. For example, humming birds (the smallest of all birds), bats (the only mammals that fly) and mayflies that in fact live longer than just a day – most of their lives are spent in the nymph stage, which could last up to two years, and it is the adults that live one or two days. Other flying things get fair coverage, such as pterosaurs, dragonflies and my adorable bees. Unfortunately, the latter is subjected to a lightweight approach full of awe, but a little too low on science for my taste. That aside, highly readable, this book has its place on the grown-up’s shelf as an introduction to one corner of evolutionary zoology.

Robert Harris’s An Officer and a Spy is typical of Harris’s books – historical fiction told in the style of a page-turning spy thriller. The subject this time, the Dreyfus Affair, was already a spy story before it got the Harris treatment. In Harris’s version, the focus is on the French officer Georges Picquart, who worked in military intelligence at the time that Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted for spying and sent to the notorious Devil’s Island. Picquart realises that the case against Dreyfus is flimsy at best. During his investigation, he uncovers the true spy, but when he tries to bring this to light, he too is punished in military fashion. Spoiler alert for readers not familiar with the Dreyfus Affair – eventually the truth wins out. As always, the details and use of real materials and quotes are admirable and what I’ve come to expect from Harris. This brings me back to truths and dharma and at one level what the story is really about. What we think is the truth can change with knowledge and the courage to change the opinions of others and ourselves.

Il Duce and the Donald

It’s easy to see how much these two men are alike, down to their speeches made through puckered lips and puffed-up chests. But I’m going to stick my neck out and say how much these two are different. After recently reading Antonio Scuratti’s M: Man of the Century, I look at Mussolini in a different way and as less of a cardboard cutout. This first history-come-novel  of a trilogy depicts Mussolini’s early political life from the time of post First World War Italy until he gained power in 1924.

Unlike Tr*mp, Mussolini was not born gagging on a silver spoon. His father was a blacksmith and his mother a schoolteacher. Mussolini trained to be a teacher but worked for a living as the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, a newspaper for the fasci movement. Mussolini also served in his country’s armed forces during WWI and was wounded. Not so with the former US president, who avoided the draft with student deferments and finally, when those ran out, a medical exemption. Tr*mp’s CV consists of basically one thing – businessperson, a position obtained with properties inherited from his father.

Unlike Tr*mp, Mussolini knew politics and the ways of government. He was active in the Socialist Party before defecting with others to create their own movement over the issue of pacifism during WWI. Mussolini supported workers’ rights while supporting the industrialists, who were trying to reshape and capitalise off the country left bloodied and poor after the war, with little help from their allies America, France and Britain. Tr*mp’s political career was a spin-off from his media personality and self-publicity as a ‘successful’ businessperson.

While both men, once they achieved political power, encouraged and denounced violence in the same breath, Mussolini’s hands were dripping in blood. Metaphorically, of course, since he sent out others to do his dirty work. He specifically ordered the killing of his enemies, including the leader of the socialist party. Some would argue that the orange one is responsible for the deaths on 6 January 2021 at the Capitol, the deaths of anti-racists activists during his term in office and even the deaths of thousands of Americas due to his reckless response as president to the Covid pandemic. But all these examples are about responsibility through verbal coercion and propagandizing.

When it comes to public speaking, while the two men may have presented themselves in similar fashions and to my bewilderment been able to stir up a crowd, the prose of their speeches are starkly different. A skilled writer, Mussolini could craft his language and make logical arguments. And unlike Tr*mp, he never attacked his opponents with schoolchild slurs and name calling, which I’m not going to reprint here as I have reached my saturation point. Mussolini’s discourse would typically pick apart his rivals’ arguments and then tip the rhetorical balance by making threats of  violence: “The Socialists ask what is our program? Our program is to smash the heads of the Socialists.”

While both men attacked democracy, it’s worth considering the nuanced differences. Mussolini called democracy a ‘fallacy’ because people do not know what they want and because  ‘democracy is talking itself to death.’ Tr*mp said that if he lost the 2020 election, it proved that democracy was an ‘illusion’ because ‘the system is rigged’ and ‘everyone knows it.’

One final noteworthy difference, Mussolini’s fascism, unlike the MAGA campaign, spawned an art movement. Il Novecento rejected the avant garde of the early 20th century in favour of more traditional large landscapes and cityscapes, reflecting the fascists’ ideology. From Scuratti’s book, I’ve learned that this movement was founded in part by one of Mussolini’s many mistresses. Whatever the motivations and manipulations of Il Novecento, Tr*mp and his MAGA movement are in a word artless.

Painting by Mario Sironi of Il Novecento

Pointing out the differences between these two leaders not only highlights the unfitness of the former US president for any position of governmental leadership, but it makes me think that fascism is an overused term that like so many political and ideological words, changes its meaning over time. Yet, the essence of it remains as noted in a recent interview with writer Naomi Klein. On the topic of fascism, she said ‘I’m scared whenever we get whipped up in a mob and don’t think for ourselves. That’s how the updated far-right is drawing people in. It’s extremely dangerous.’

What else I’ve been reading

This has turned out to be a summer of big fat reads, with the Antonio Scuratti book weighing it at 750+ small print pages. To counter this, two excellent novellas have capped off the summer. I’ve finally gotten around to reading something by the Belgium writer Amélie Nothomb. Stupeur et Tremblement (avail. in English) is a drole, at times laugh-aloud funny, story of a young Belgium woman’s experience working for a Japanese company. The expected East meets West clashes are there, but so too is a humorous take on workplace bullying (I know, it can be serious and soul-destroying).

The other lightweight but not intellectually so was Thomas Mann’s classic Death in Venice. I first read it decades ago at university. Having since seen the film with Dirk Bogarde, I could only envisage his twinkling brown eyes  as those of Aschenbach. The older me also appreciated the references to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (who wasn’t on my radar until 5 years ago), adding more meaning to the book’s meditation on aestheticism.

Unsubscribed

I’ve been going through my inbox unsubscribing to any newsletter or advertising that I’ve tended to ignore or delete. This e-version of clearing out the closet has me wondering about a couple of things.

For a start, there’s language. The word unsubscribe first appeared in print in the 1570s and its antonym subscribe a century earlier. But in those days, subscribing referred to signing documents. These words didn’t gain their sense of joining something or paying for something until the early 1700s with magazine subscriptions. According to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the most frequent collocates for unsubscribe are you can… and …at any time. I suspect similar findings in other varieties of English. My any time has come, and I’ve unsubscribed to over twenty newsletters and marketing lists.

Have I been unsubscribing or disengaging? Some of the marketing emails I’ve blocked came from IKEA and other middle-class home stores that I no longer need now that the apartment in France and the house in England are furnished and functioning fine thank you very much. I don’t want clutter in my homes or my inbox. I’ve also closed the door on sports clothing – how many wetsuits does a person need?

Reducing consumerism is easy compared to unsubscribing to newsletters. Among those to get my e-axe have been six literary magazines, one British centre-left political magazine, one leftist French newspaper and one centre-right Italian rag. I wonder if I’m disengaging from elements of public discourse out of saturation and/or utter despair. Thanks to writing courses and degrees, literary magazines are ten a penny. Wading through this glut, I occasionally find a publication of a high standard that I might want to send my own work to. I duly subscribe to their newsletter to get free samples of stories and essays. As months pass, I find myself dipping into and quickly out of worn tropes and plot devices that smack of writers’ workshops.

As a political junkie I should be basking in this mega-election year, especially when the recent UK and French elections saw victories for the left. Yet – and here is where despair comes in – the extreme right had significant gains and showed that they shouldn’t be taken lightly. And while I’m pleased that Uncle Joe has stepped aside to give the Democrats a better chance, the Republicans – who have tilted towards authoritarian far-right – are well-funded and could continue their menacing presence for years to come. These vituperative forces are currently exhausting us with their infantile and distorted racist and misogynistic attacks on VP Harris. Media outlets of all political stripes are reporting – posting in those e-newsletters – more on these click-bait comments than they are on the issues at stake in this election. I recall a remark from Kafka: ‘In the struggle that pits the individual against the world, always bet on the world.’ Disengaging, unsubscribing, call it what you will, might not be empowering, but it is therapeutic.

What I’ve been reading

Two exceptional novels of the past couple of years have been inspired by the writings and life of Charles Dickens and have kept me entertained for half of this summer. Zadie Smith’s The Fraud is an historical novel about the writer William Ainsworth, a contemporary of Dickens, who is also a minor character in the book. It explores the roles of Victorian women, attitudes about slavery in the post-abolitionist era and the famous Tichborne trial, involving a working-class man claiming to be the only surviving inheritor of an aristocratic estate. Like Dickens, Smith is a keen observer of human frailty and pretences. Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is a more obvious nod to Dickens. Following in the footsteps of David Copperfield, this eponymous narrator recounts the story of his life from childhood to early adulthood. But this is set in modern times in the poverty-stricken hills of Tennessee amidst the opioid crisis and is a story told with caustic wit, edging at times on satire. At one point the author winks to the reader by having Demon discover Dickens and comment about how it reflected poverty and the life of orphans in a way that could have been written today.

I obviously have not disengaged from these social issues, but it helps to interact with them through the lens of creative prose.

UK Elections 2024 – My Winners and Losers

I had no intention on writing about the results of the election, but I find it hard not to after waking up this morning only to discover my David in front of the tele in his robe, coffee cup in hand. Having been awake since 2 am and finding his brain buzzing with exit poll results, he decided to exorcise the cerebral demons by watching the true results unfurl. Since 6 am my earworms have been repeating results and analyses. To shake these strings of words out of my head, I’m writing.

You, dear reader, know by now that this was a landslide victory for the Labour party with excellent results for some of the smaller, less funded parties, like the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and dare I admit it Reform UK (Nigel Farage’s party). Rather than revisit these themes, I’ll share with you what I am left thinking about, the real winners and losers.

Winners:

The Remainers, those of us who wanted to stay in the EU. Our new PM is a Remainer, and I recall having the pleasure of hearing him speak at one of the many anti-Brexit rallies I attended. Of course, he won’t put us back in the EU as that would involve another referendum, and the country is still dabbing the wounds from participating in the last one. But Starmer has already spoken about closer trade ties to the EU, and that is a key first step, economically and spiritually.

Women are also winners. The number of women MPs has gone up from 226 to 263, which is 40%. Ideally, it ought to be 50%, but I’ll take it. It’s also likely that Rachel Reeves will become Britain’s first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer. For my US readers, this is the senior government minister in charge of all things economic and financial.

Losers:

As always, the people who didn’t vote. Voter turnout was only 60%, the lowest since 1885.

I would love to say that the far-right populists were the big losers, but they’re still kicking in the guise of Reform UK. They did take a beating though, with many high-profile far-right Conservatives losing their seats.

Finally, the media coverage of the election campaign deserves a wooden spoon. Sound bites and click-bait culture reduced candidates to automatons repeating well-chosen scripted phrases with little substance. The media’s attempt at ‘balanced coverage’ translated into one party’s negative story having to be offset by the other party’s negative story, even if the later had to be created through exaggeration of loose facts.

Whew. I hope this has killed the earworms. Time to check up on David to see if he’s still awake.

What I’ve been reading

After hearing Irish writer Anne Enright being interviewed on This Cultural Life (BBC Sounds podcast), I ordered from the library her latest book, The Wren, The Wren. At one level this is a story about three generations of resilient women, exploring the complexities of their relationships to each other along with the themes of love and abandonment. The underlying catalyst that shapes these relationships is a renowned poet, Phil McDaragh. He was married to the first generation of these women. When Phil leaves his family for a new life, and in time for a new wife, in America, his daughter Carmel tries to reconcile the beautiful love poetry he wrote to her mother with his betrayal. Carmel’s daughter, Nell, who was born after her grandfather’s death, is also under the magical spell of Phil’s poetry and uses it discover her own direction in life and the terms of her relationship with her mother. All of this is told in prose and poetry rich in wit and Irish vernacular. It’s worth mentioning that while working on this novel, Enright had some of Phil McDaragh’s poems accepted for publication using his name as her pseudonym.