Paola Trimarco

France – the all-purpose protest

Another weekend, another protest march through the cities of France – and often another riot. When I left Menton two weeks ago, the student demonstrations were a week old and expected to continue throughout October – the traditional month of strikes and protests. The students’ demands seemed both clear and reasonable – school buildings better equipped to cope with heatwaves, smaller class sizes, more teachers and shorter school days.

In Menton, the student protests have been rather subdued. Some lycée students blockaded their school entrance and set alight to a couple of rubbish bins. The Science Po University students demonstrated in small numbers. Yawn, another week passes.

Elsewhere in France, what started as peaceful protests turned violent. The French I spoke to didn’t seem at all bothered. ‘It’s what we do,’ followed by the Gallic shrug. There was a widespread sense that protest, and occasionally disorder, remains one of the few ways ordinary people can force themselves onto the political agenda.

As the days turned into weeks, the movement broadened. University students joined in to support students’ rights, the unions soon followed to protest the costs of fuel, individuals joined in over inflation and the cost of living. Then, the opportunists arrived – criminals and delinquents took advantage of the crowds to break shop windows, loot and set fire to anything combustible that didn’t move.

The one thing this has not been about is immigrants. Yet outside France, some political figures have been quick to present the unrest as an immigration issue. Depending on which source you read, immigrants are either responsible for the disorder, or the protests are a backlash against immigration. Neither is true. Even the French far right party aren’t playing that card – the Rassemblement Nationale is blaming the government as out of control. These immigration accusations don’t need to be true. To quote Mark Twain, writing decades before the Internet was even born, ‘A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.’

Watching the coverage and commentary on British television, I’m seeing mostly violence in the streets, the fires and destruction. Some commentators have reached for comparisons with 1968, and there are faint echoes in the youth-led demonstrations taking place elsewhere in Europe. French news has included these dramatic images, but the focus has also looked at the role of the riot police and their treatment of the students. My favourite piece of French commentary came from Le Monde, which dryly remarked that the graffiti now covering the nineteenth-century statue in the Place de la République may have undergone an aesthetic upgrade.

What I’ve been reading

Over the last couple of months, between books I’ve been dipping into Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s In Love with the World. The Tibetan Buddhist monk recounts his abandonment of the monastery, taking only a few belongings and the clothes on his back, to undertake a four-and-a-half-year journey, encountering the ‘real world’, including a near-death experience, while travelling his own spiritual path. It’s a primer of Tibetan Buddhist principles, full of traditional stories and relevant anecdotes. What I’ve taken away from this book are the practical insights into meditation and awareness, particularly how to deal with our ‘monkey minds’ – that cascading rush of thoughts that rarely pauses for breath. It’s also been a useful companion while watching events unfold in France. Amid the noise of protests, political point-scoring and competing narratives, the book is a reminder that uncertainty is not an aberration but the normal state of things. As Mingyur Rinpoche writes:

‘Everything is always in flux; by letting it be we simply allow for inherent movement. We can notice preference and desire, but chasing after them blocks the flow of change. Awareness contains impermanence.’

Creative Humans

A jazz concert in Menton, France – nothing unusual about that. The band, a local group called La Compagnie So What, had an average age of about 70 – nothing unusual about that either.

What was unusual was my sudden awareness of the humanness of it all.

A couple of days earlier I’d been at a café with friends, where AI dominated the conversation. All the wonderful, unnerving things these systems can already do, and the even more astonishing things they’ll soon do. We traded stories – some shocking, some impressive – about AI producing creative work that we humans once considered uniquely ours. Novels, songs, poems, photographs, drawings – entire bodies of work generated ‘creatively’ from human-made inputs, human instructions, and human precedents, yet often faster and, disturbingly, sometimes ‘better.’

And then there I was at the concert. The bass player was wearing a hearing aid. The ensemble itself was delightfully odd – not the usual piano-led quartet, but bass clarinet, guitar, double bass, and a trumpet/flugelhorn player. For one song the audience was asked to crumble up newspapers on cue to fill in for the missing percussions. Would an algorithm come up with such as innovation if it were not directed by a human? That is, if it were an agent and not just a tool?

As John Naughton of The Observer recently pointed out, as AI platforms become increasingly error-averse, they gravitate toward popular, heavily replicated data. The end result is often bland. That’s fine for writing emails but far less promising for creative work. To put this is jazz terms, an AI produced concert would have been heavy on Ellington, Gershwin and Sinatra classics – safe choices for jazz dabblers and newbies. At the concert I attended, the choice of music included three pieces by the band members and another by Mulatu Astatke, the Ethiopian composer, beloved by jazz aficionados but hardly mainstream. No typical AI platform would have selected that playlist.

I heard the film director Paul Schrader speaking on the FRDH Podcast, describing how when he couldn’t hire actors for a controversial film, he created it with AI instead. Despite taking advantage of this technology, he warns, ‘We are the tool and it is the tool master.’ His blunt conclusion is, ‘The AI future is bad.’

I do hope this isn’t true, and that humans are able to retain our creative experiences, both in making art and in receiving it, in the messy, innovative ways only humans can.

What I’ve been reading

Written before the launch of OpenAI, John Auster’s Leviathan is definitely human made, full of the nuance and layered characterisations we would expect from a solid writer of literary fiction. The story’s narrator is a writer, Peter Aaron, who learns that a fellow writer and friend Benjamin Sachs had become a terrorist who accidently killed himself with one of his own bombs. Before the police reveal Sach’s identity, Peter is compelled to set the record straight by recounting Benjamin’s life story as he discovered it through their 15-year friendship. The novel unfolds through their entanglements with women, the accidents that shape their paths, and the choices that follow – a study of personal psychology, identity, and the fragile, unpredictable nature of creativity.

Adele Myer’s The Tobacco Wives was recommended by a friend as one of those word-of-mouth hits in her Florida community. Set in late‑1940s North Carolina, the story takes place in a town effectively owned by a vast tobacco company – a thinly veiled R.J. Reynolds. We see it through the eyes of a 15-year-old seamstress who is temporarily staying with her aunt and making couture dresses for the wives of the tobacco executives. It soon becomes obvious that this is a fictional exposé of the dangers of tobacco production for the workers and more importantly the coverup surrounding the health risks in smoking, especially for pregnant women. The focus on post-war women as labourers and consumers makes this novel worthwhile. As for the writing, it isn’t literary fiction, and at times I could see the seams (no pun intended) between characters and their plot functions. Occasionally the prose felt rather bland. AI‑assisted? Who’s to say.

Bunny’s Vignettes – 6

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

Bunny, Crab, Woman – 1972

I had a stomach ache and didn’t feel like walking home with the new girl. But we were going the same direction, and it was starting to rain – a cold November sleet – and she didn’t have an umbrella. Darcy seemed friendly enough and under our shared umbrella, she smelled of peppermint chewing gum.

The problem with new kids is that they ask a lot of questions. ‘If your real name’s Annette, why do you call yourself Bunny?’

I stared at her soft freckled face. ‘Can’t you tell?’

She half smiled. ‘Suppose. It’s just…’ She hesitated, not wanting to hurt me.

I finished the sentence for her in the dry tone I had cultivated when talking about my looks. ‘It’s my teeth. I know.’

‘And your pigtails. They’re kind of like rabbit ears.’

I hadn’t thought of that before. I only wore pigtails to keep my stringy hairs out of my eyes when I played baseball.

‘Bunnies are cute. So, it’s not a bad name.’ She stopped walking for that moment. We were nearly at her home, one of the three-storeys around the corner from my family’s building. ‘But it’s just like you’re telling people it’s okay to make fun of you.’

‘They’re going to make fun of me anyhow. I figure, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,’ I said boldly. These were lines I stole from a sit-com.

Darcy laughed softly and said, ‘Okay, Bunny, see you tomorrow.’ Before I could say, ‘See you later, alligator,’ she was running and splashing in puddles towards her apartment. This was the start of a friendship that lasted for some five years until her parents divorced and the family moved away.

My stomach was all knotted up when I arrived home. I edged out of wet penny loafers, hung up my peacoat and went straight to my bedroom. I hadn’t noticed my mother at the dining table, quietly looking up some figures in an Ephemera as she worked on a client’s astrology chart.

But she noticed me, ‘Hello.’

‘Oh, hello, sorry,’ I spoke across rooms and flopped down on the bed.

‘It sounds like the crab is a bit crabby,’ Mom said standing in the doorway. Whenever she didn’t like my behaviour, she brought up the fact that my star sign was Cancer, the crab.

‘I’ve got a stomach ache, that’s all.’

Mom stepped over to me and touched my forehead with the back of her hand. ‘No fever. Get some rest.’

I just nodded and after she left, I went to the bathroom. It was there and then – at the age of ten – that it started. I didn’t know why or what. I just knew I was ill – the Cancer with cancer! My heart racing, I pulled up my trousers and went into the dining room, where my mother had returned to her astrology work, accompanied by a glazed donut.

‘Mom,’ I managed to push out a single syllable.

She placed her finger on the page of an opened book and looked to me.

‘There’s blood in my panties.’ My voice crackled with fear.

I was ready for her to clutch me in her arms, tell me it was going to be okay and then call for an ambulance. Instead, she appeared annoyed – or disappointed – I couldn’t tell. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘There’s a box of pads under the bathroom sink. Instructions are on the box.’

I knew where babies came from and how they got there, but no one told me about periods. I was to learn about them first from reading a Kotex box, hidden behind toilet paper and bathroom cleaner. My second source of information was school. In a class of girls – the boys had been segregated into another room for the Family Life Hour – I learned the biological nuts and bolts of menstruation and was given a pamphlet with a calendar in it. But that was two weeks after I bloodied the first of many pairs of underwear.

After class, on our way home, Darcy told me that her older sister used tampons. With that, I had to confess that I had started too – but didn’t dare admit my ignorance about tampons.

Darcy’s face went all pale. ‘It doesn’t hurt, does it?’

‘Just stomach aches.’

‘You mean cramps.’

I had more to learn. That evening, I went to Franny, who was in our bedroom studying for a history test while listening to James Taylor.

‘What? I only started three months ago, and I’m two years and two months older than you!’

I didn’t need to be reminded that I was the family freak. The only brunette in a wheatfield of blonds – and now this.

She not only knew all about periods, but she also gave me a handful of tampons from a box hidden in her schoolbag. ‘Don’t tell Mom. She thinks they’re dangerous.’

‘Thanks.’ I wanted to give her sisterly a hug like I had seen on The Waltons and The Brady Bunch. But my family didn’t do that.

‘Welcome to the blood club,’ she said before sitting back on the bed, from where she gazed at me, emitting a slight chuckle.

‘What? What’s funny?’

‘You, Bunny. I was just getting used to the idea of you being a girl – I mean, and not a boy or a rabbit – and now you’re a woman.’

Photo by https://kaboompics.com/ on Pexels.com

Chameleonic identitarians

Last month The Nerve published an extract from Luke Harding’s new book Betrayal, a study of world politics in these unsettled times. The extract focused on the UK’s Reform Party and its connections to the Russian government – including the ways Reform helped the Kremlin’s efforts to discourage the EU from accepting Ukraine as a member. It’s a dense, complex web of a story, but rather than unpack all of it, allow me to linger on one line about Oleh Voloshyn, a pro‑Kremlin Ukrainian diplomat and journalist:

‘The speeches were chameleonic. Voloshyn used the language of human rights and European values to advance anti-democratic, imperial Russian objectives.’

Chameleonic describes a large subset of language used by the far right these days. Following a recent case of sexual assault committed by an asylum seeker in Britain, anti-immigration messaging has claimed that migrants have to be kept out of the country in order to ‘protect women and girls.’ This phrase is used by feminists and politicians against sex-based violence, trafficking and exploitation. While those who are genuinely concerned about the welfare of women and girls don’t fall for this linguistic hijacking, many others do – and that’s precisely the point.

The same linguistic sleight of hand appears in the rhetoric of US Vice President JD Vance and other members of the MAGA government, who claim progressives are stripping people of their freedoms, especially freedom of speech. This agenda stealing from liberals comes from an administration that routinely trolls and intimidates news organisations, arrests reporters and pursues legal action against critics.

Last week, I stumbled across another example of Orwellian language manipulation with the word identitarian. Here I’m translating from the Italian. Roberto Vannacci, the leader of Italy’s newest extreme right party, Futuro Nazionale, describes himself as ‘an identitarian, rooted in Roman and Christian tradition.’ It’s a neat rhetorical trick – identity framed as heritage, tradition, civilisation. Anything else – especially the identity politics of the woke (yes, the term has migrated into Italian) – is cast as false and deserving of ridicule. Beneath the varnish lies the party’s nationalistic, Eurosceptic strain of neo‑fascism.

Which brings me to the US president’s habit of stamping his own identity onto buildings, institutions and even unassuming waterways like the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario. Some identity politics, it seems, are permissible – provided they are his.

These are just drops in the cesspool of contemporary propaganda.

What I’ve been reading

In 2011 Penguin marked the 50th anniversary of its Modern Classics series by releasing fifty slim volumes of short fiction. Among them was Italo Calvino’s The Queen’s Necklace, paired with “The Workshop Hen.” Having read Calvino in Italian, I can say Tim Parks’s translation preserves the dry, ironic humour that makes Calvino’s stories so distinctive and memorable.

For something more openly funny, Natasha Brown’s Universality is one of the cleverest novels I’ve read recently. Its plotlines and character portraits form a satirical microcosm of our age of upheaval and the self‑promoting public discourse that shadows it. The story centres on Jake, a resident of a commune called the Universalist, who hosts an illegal rave and ends up in a brutal fight, bludgeoning the commune’s leader with a gold bar. The aftermath unfolds through multiple narrative perspectives – among them is Richard, owner of the gold bar; Hannah, a journalist investigating the incident; and Lenny, Jake’s anti‑woke provocateur mother. In fiction, the chameleonic language and hypocrisy are easy to digest. In life, they’re hard to escape.

Bunny’s Vignettes – 5

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

The Cocktail Party – 1971

My grandmother wiped down the ebony coffee table with spray polish one last time, knowing the slightest smudge would catch Millie’s attention, and a prompt jokey remark would follow. Grandma could never be the butt of jokes.

Her living room looked like a Hollywood set from a Rogers and Astaire film – glamourous white stuffed sofa and chairs blended into the soft beige wall-to-wall carpeting, a crystal chandelier dangling from the ceiling, end-table lamps with squared shades in an Art Deco style. The paintings were mostly impressionist reproductions – a Monet and a Manet and two Cezanne’s – along with a watercolour my mother painted in her youth of the Lake Michigan coastline from our Chicago neighbourhood.

A half-lit cigarette in her hand, my grandmother walked the long corridor back to the kitchen where the radio was still playing the Saturday afternoon opera live from the Met. Like the living room, the kitchen was nearly all white except for a couple of hand towels and matching oven gloves with a sunflower motif. That morning, she had placed four stemmed cocktail glasses on the table to reclean and buff the water stains off the way bartenders do. Everything needed to be perfect for the girls.

In a large pitcher, Grandma measured out five shots of vodka – no, make that six. Elsa had complained last time that the martinis were a bit weak. She added tonic water and a shot of vermouth. Picking up one of the stem glasses, she poured in a thimble-sized portion of vermouth and swirled it around, barely coating the surface. This would be Rosalin’s, which she would fill with cherry Kool-Aid, calling it a Shirley Temple and adding what she always said, ‘In just a few more years, you can have the real stuff.’

She took a last long drag of her cigarette and crushed the lipstick-stained butt into a crystal ashtray.

The glasses full, she added a green olive on a plastic stick to each. A plate with some twenty more olives was placed on the serving tray along with a porcelain tube of beef jerky sticks, a bowl of mini pretzels and another of salted peanuts. As she stepped along the corridor, she glanced admiringly at herself in the mirror – svelte in her yellow stilettos. That day she wore a floral dress that cinched tight in the waist and flared out like something Grace Kelly wore in Rear Window.

She positioned the snacks and drinks on the coffee table so that Millie and Rosalin, mother and daughter, would sit together on the sofa. Elsa and my grandmother, the two sisters, would have armchairs for themselves.

A firm knock on the door startled her.

That was me. The scene I’ve just described is from my imagination. I wasn’t really there yet, but I knew it went something like that based on what my brother had told me.

With that thick carpet, I couldn’t hear her walking towards the door, but I felt her there with an ear pressed against it, hoping I would go away. So, I knocked harder the second time. The door flew open.

‘I’m not deaf you know!’

A wave of tobacco smoke mingled with Yardley perfume hit me head on.

‘Hi, grandma.’ I was all smiles, which I knew bothered her.

‘It’s the rat. I should have known.’ There was the usual sharpness in her voice when she saw me alone. Though it wasn’t always that way. When I was much smaller, I was her little hamster. Even after I started to call myself Bunny, I was still her hamster. Somehow by the age of nine, I had become a rat.

I held out the October issue of Better Homes and Gardens with its glossy cover of autumnal colours and a perfectly smiling woman at its centre. ‘I’m returning this. Mom said that she copied out the recipe already.’

She squinted her eyes. ‘And you had to return it today, huh?’

That was the only time I heard her acknowledge what my mother called ‘one of Grandma’s sad days’ – the 22^nd of February, the 15^th of May and the 10^th of October – ‘best to leave her alone.’ I just shrugged and glanced past her into the living room. ‘Are you expecting someone today, grandma?’

‘None of your beeswax,’ she snapped, grabbing the magazine. ‘Thank you for this. Goodbye.’

The door slammed shut before I could utter another word.

Earlier that year Brian had to go to our grandmother’s apartment on one of those sad days because she had blown a fuse. She hated anything to do with electricity. He was seventeen at the time and already quite handy with electrical things. He pretended he hadn’t seen the set up in the living room but reported it to me and my sisters. That was the anniversary of Elsa’s death – Grandma’s sister, who had died of tuberculosis in the 1920s. February 22 was when Cousin Millie died in a car crash. That day, the 10^th of October 1971, when I returned the magazine, marked Rosalin’s death. According to our mother, Rosalin had died suddenly, mysteriously at the age of fourteen.

After I told my siblings what I had seen in Grandma’s living room, little Tina looking perplexed asked, ‘What happened to the booze?’

Brian struggled to control his laughter. ‘The ghosts drank it, silly!’

Tina’s eyes and mouth opened wide – the expression she wore for much of her childhood, perpetually frightened or amazed by something.

The following day, I was reprimanded by my mother for ‘spying on Grandma and frightening your little sister.’

‘But I wasn’t spying – and I didn’t scare Tina, Brian did!’

‘Not according to Tina and Franny.’ My mother crossed her arms and waited for a response. She tried to look stern, but her rounded face and pillowy arms would defeat her at moments like this.

I stood motionless, trying to figure out why my sisters lied and why my mother believed them without question. I didn’t trust Brian to admit it. I knew if I said the truth again, it would still sound unbelievable. If I pressed the issue, all three siblings would dislike me more than they already did. A change of topic was needed.

‘I don’t understand why Grandma pretends to have company when…’

‘Enough.’ My mother uncrossed her arms and softened her tone. ‘She’s a Capricorn – that’s why.’

‘Huh?’

‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’

I often thought it strange how my grandmother didn’t have one of her sad days on the anniversary of her husband’s death. But I knew better than to ask about it.

Chicago skyline 1940s – image made with AI. (The writing is pure human.)

Reading Isn’t Dying – It’s Migrating

Whether they read slowly or quickly, digitally or on paper, on public transport, in bed or in the bath, readers love talking about the act of reading almost as much as the books themselves. That was certainly my impression when researching reading group discourse – the activity of reading was a topic people returned to again and again. Journalists, too, seem to use the politically dull summer months to ponder these habits and – once more – the supposed demise of reading as we know it [cue dramatic music].

This warm, dry English summer has found me at the garden table with a book during breaks and lunches. Very little gets read in bed while I wait for David to turn off the tele, check the locks and brush his teeth. These days I prefer news on my phone and ebooks to paper, with one exception: foreign‑language books, whose margins are perfect for pencilled translations. Occasionally I listen to audiobooks, though, as I’ve noted before, reading is quicker than being read to. Since in the UK audiobook revenue has more than doubled in five years, I’m clearly bucking the trend.

According to The Times, Britain is in the midst of an audiobook boom. Spotify’s entry into the market – offering up to fifteen hours of listening with its premium subscription – has helped. Since I’m boycotting (nearly) all things Bezos, Spotify is where I’ve dipped into the odd audiobook. Its Page Match feature, which links audio to the corresponding page in the print edition, lets readers switch formats seamlessly. It’s a clever idea – faster reading and easier than just audio for rereading and savouring favourite passages.

The notion that people are abandoning reading for listening or video simply isn’t true. The Times reports that ‘the worlds of the printed page and earphones are becoming interchangeable: one in three audiobook buyers had already read the same book in print, while one in four went on to buy the physical edition after listening. David Wallace-Wells, writing in the New York Times, surveys several studies on the drop in reading in America, noting how inconsistent methodologies can distort the picture – some exclude ebooks, others audiobooks. Overall, the reduction in reading hours is minimal and fluctuates as new media emerge (cable television, streaming, and so on).

People are still reading books, and rising book sales make that clear. Wallace‑Wells highlights a more surprising trend – older people are skewing the figures because they are the group reading less. ‘In 2003, older Americans read on average just under an hour each day — 58.5 minutes. By last year, that had fallen nearly by half, to roughly 32.4 minutes.’ Here I’m again bucking the trend. When people ask what I’ve been doing with my retirement, I often say, ‘Getting more reading done!’ Isn’t that what older people do? Wallace‑Wells offers an unexpected explanation: ‘For all the hand‑wringing about the effects of new technology on kids, the impacts may be just as corrosive, if not more so, on their grandparents.’

Across the Channel, LeMonde reports a similar pattern of young people reading more than ever. In France, reading is apparently the nouveau chic. Beyond traditional book clubs, young readers are hosting reading parties and gathering in cafés, parks and public spaces with books (and ebooks) in hand – engaging in the solitary act of reading, but together. A je‑ne‑sais‑quoi experience indeed.

What I’ve Been Reading

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Andrey Kurkov and briefly chatting with him about the research behind Grey Bees (which I blogged about). I shouldn’t have been surprised that this polyglot, former soldier and teacher took up beekeeping to write the novel. Among my summer reads was his The Silver Bone, set in Kiev during the Bolshevik Revolution. The historical backdrop lends grit and absurdity – as wars often do. Early on we learn to take the story with humour when the protagonist Samson has his ear lopped off by a sword and keeps the dismembered ear in a desk drawer, where it continues to eavesdrop. By happenstance, Samson becomes an inspector for the local police, and the novel evolves into a detective‑thriller. I found myself more drawn to the military history (I hadn’t realised the role of the Chinese in Ukraine at the time) than to the detective turn.

During Britain’s fifth heatwave this year, I also read Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches). It follows two women, Boulder and Samsa, who move to Rajkovic for Samsa’s corporate job. Boulder, a former chef on a merchant ship, starts a trailer‑based snack business. With the help of a sperm donor, Samsa has their baby, and the two navigate motherhood and the longing for freedom. Though often labelled ‘queer love,’ the novel’s poetic voice and wit give it broader scope. It’s ultimately about intimacy, independence and the strange negotiations of partnership. As a linguist, I especially enjoyed Boulder’s reflections on language:

‘Language is and always will be an occupied territory… Only language can help you belong somewhere and make sure you don’t lose your way. At the same time, language is everywhere, occupying the body’s farthest-flung cells, pushing them to unimaginable places. It urges you on and turns your stomach, confuses your animal instincts, makes you human.’

These two books were the last ones I read on my Kindle before selling it on eBay. As part of my Bezos Boycott, I’m now reading on a Kobo – which, unlike Kindle, lets me upload ebooks borrowed from my local UK library. And perhaps that’s the real story of this summer – not that reading is fading, but that it keeps finding new corners of our lives, slipping into whatever spaces we make for it.

Bunny’s Vignettes – 4

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

The Year Was ‘68

Someone had died.

The news voices pulled my mother out of her office‑bedroom and into the living room, where the black‑and‑white Zenith stood in its wooden cabinet like an altar. She stared at the screen and suddenly tears slid down her face. I’d never seen her cry. Not the howling or whining we children did, but a strangled effort to keep everything inside. It sputtered out anyway – little eruptions between hiccups and words.

My grandmother was absent from the scene, upstairs in her apartment washing and painting her walls and ceilings as she did twice a year to erase the yellow nicotine haze left by her beloved Winstons.

My mother wiped her face and fled toward the kitchen. Pots clattered, and the big ceramic mixing bowl hit the metal table with a thud. I stayed fixed on the screen. My older siblings, Brian and Franny, kept saying ‘wow.’ They told me both brothers had been assassinated. I imagined it happening one after the other on the same day, until I grew older and learned about JFK, Jackie’s pink suit, and the suspicion that still clung to the case.

Tina, three at the time, burst into the room and in her lisping speech announced, ‘Mommy made chocolate chip cookies.’ By the time the cookies reached the living room, our mother had eaten about a third of them. She was still chewing but no longer crying.

For me, it was a year of emotional memories.

A couple of months later, the Democratic National Convention took place miles away on Chicago’s South Side – and in our living room, on that same Zenith TV. The news showed angry demonstrations and riots. With so much coverage, I sometimes confuse what I lived with what I absorbed through the television.

I woke early and parked myself in front of the cartoons. Brian crept into the apartment. His wide, guilty eyes told me he’d been out all night. At fourteen, he was hanging around older hippies, smoking weed and – I suspect – firebombing police cars outside the convention. His eyes locked on mine as he pressed a finger to his lips. I nodded. He winked and flashed the two‑finger peace sign before tiptoeing to his room.

For that monumental moment, I felt my brother loved me – though he would never use those words.

’68 ended with two unforgettable scenes, both beginning in the living room with the four of us lined up on the vinyl sofa, and both spreading into every room of the apartment and into the rest of our lives. Mom and Grandma stood before us, arms crossed. I was sure we were in for a whopper of a scolding.

‘Okay,’ Grandma said.

Our mother blurted out, ‘Your father is very ill in hospital – cancer.’

Franny, sitting on one side of me asked, ‘Is he going to die?’

‘Yes,’ Grandma said sharply. ‘It’s for the best. You’ll understand someday.’

I thought about the last time I saw him in our apartment washing dishes while listening to the baseball game. ‘Can we go visit him?’ I asked.

‘No,’ my mother and grandmother snapped in unison.

Franny and I shifted back into the sofa. Tina was on the other side of me, staring at Franny and me blankly confused.

‘Doesn’t he want to see us before he dies?’ Brian’s voice was sounding deeper by the day and that day his bass-baritone questioning clearly frightened Mom and irked Grandma.

‘Okay, we’re going to have to tell them the truth,’ our grandmother said.

‘Mother, please,’ Mom whispered, shooting her a pleading look.

Grandma kept her eyes on us, stunned on the sofa. ‘He’s in a psychiatric hospital – no visitors!’

Mom bowed her head.

I looked to Franny, but she had turned toward Brian. No one spoke.

Mom slipped out of the room. Seconds later, the refrigerator door squeaked open.

Grandma stood tall in her stilettos. She uncrossed her arms, pulled a pack of Winstons from her shirt pocket, and lit a cigarette without looking away from us. Silence stretched through several drags. She blew smoke out the side of her mouth, her eyes flicking from Tina to me to Franny to Brian – then back again to trembling little Tina.

Finally, this female drill sergeant spoke, ‘It’s a stain on the family. You – are – not – to – repeat – this – to – anyone. Ever!’

Apparently, this was more shameful than the separation and divorce. More shameful than his running off with another woman, which by this time we knew from Grandma was because our mother didn’t want to have any more children. It was Tina’s fault for being born. According to Franny, our father’s captivity in a ‘nuthouse’ explained why our aunt Alma in Denmark no longer visited or sent birthday cards. She was either ashamed of her brother, or ‘maybe she was crazy too.’

Brian shook his head and made it a habit to walk away anytime we tried to talk about our father when Mom and Grandma weren’t around.

A week later – same sofa, same characters, different clothes (except for Tina, who lived in her red pullover in the winter), Mom and Grandma in the same stance in front of us with arms crossed.

Mom spoke her rehearsed lines in a clear voice, sounding like a schoolteacher. ‘I’m sorry children. Your father died this morning. His girlfriend said that he didn’t want a funeral. His ashes are going to be scattered in the sea.’

My mother was a widow. She never spoke about him or cried over his passing the way she had for Robert Kennedy, a complete stranger.

Tapestries Everywhere

One of the big news stories for the French and English this past week has been the French loan of the Bayeux Tapestry to the British Museum, while the British are loaning out items from Sutton Hoo to a museum in Normandy. This cultural swap is a momentous event. After more than 900 years, the 11th‑century embroidery depicting the Norman Conquest has returned to Britain, where it was made in the 1070s, most likely in Canterbury.

I’ve long held a soft spot for tapestries, whether hundreds of years old or modern works, like the Joan Miro/Josep Royo Tapestries in Barcelona. There’s something compelling about art made of woven textures – the collaboration of many artisans, the interplay of colour and fibre, the way these pieces carry stories both literal and symbolic. Tapestries can be historical documents, fictional narratives, heraldic statements, or simply sources of warmth and decoration.

I’m surprised more research hasn’t been done on storytelling in tapestry. Research on tapestries is limited and tends to appear in cultural history for generalists, early modern literature and Renaissance art history, rather than in narratology journals. From a narrative perspective, most tapestries I’ve seen depict a main story – biblical, mythology or historical – alongside other mini-narratives, some that appear completely unrelated to the main story. I even found this in portraiture tapestries. Non-linear multi-layered narratives existed long before the modernist and hypertext fiction.

While the transportation of the Bayeaux tapestry to British was making headlines, David and I were in Derbyshire, England visiting Hardwick Hall, home to one of Europe’s largest and most renowned private collections of tapestries and textiles. This ‘country house’ – more of a chateau in my lexicon – is a testament to Elizabethan architecture and artistry. The house was built during the 1580s and 1590s and first furnished by Elizabeth Hardwick (better known as Bess of Hardwick). This noblewoman married four times, becoming richer and more influential with each union. She didn’t start collecting tapestries, however, until late in life when she needed to cover the many walls of this not very modest country house. According to surviving receipts, she had quite a shopping spree in 1592, when she bought – mostly second hand – hundreds of tapestries that are still hanging in the house today. She also worked on these textiles herself, sewing her coat-of-arms and initials into these pre-owned works. Admirable recycling, yes, but also a reminder of how easily art becomes a vehicle for displaying wealth and status. Beautiful and awe‑inspiring all the same.

What I’ve been reading

I’ve been engrossed in Gisele Pelicot’s memoir Et la joie de vivre, literally translated as: And the joy of living. In its English version it’s: A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides. I suspect the English version reminds potential readers that this was the case where a woman, who was drugged by her husband and repeatedly raped by other men, chose to waive her anonymity. I prefer the French version, which assumes familiarity with the case and gives us a title full of irony. This memoir, co-authored by the novelist Judith Perrignon, is powerful for its mix of subtle and stark depictions of the often-ironic discoveries Gisele and her family endured. While press coverage of the story rightly pointed out that the victim was an intelligent middle-class woman, they gave the impression that she ‘became’ a feminist because of what had happened to her. This book paints a more complex picture of a woman who was never subservient and often the breadwinner while raising three children.

While reading this, a similar story surfaced in the British press of another woman drugged by her husband and raped by other men. This case was uncovered through police searches of the dark web into videos where the woman appears unconscious and likely drugged. This investigative approach has grown partly in response to the Pelicot case. Yet in Britain, the victim has chosen to remain anonymous – and because her husband’s identity would reveal hers, he remains anonymous too. Perhaps the Pelicot case hasn’t been a total watershed moment – the sense of shame remains misplaced on the victim.

On the lighter side – and in English – I’ve enjoyed a middlebrow romp through Clare Chambers’s Shy Creatures. Set in the 60s with flashbacks – and well-plotted backstories – to the 1930s-50s, it follows the complicated life of Helen, an art therapist working at a psychiatric hospital. At the centre of this is the discovery of William, a mute in his thirties who had been secretly living with his aunts, shut away from the outside world. Naturally, he becomes a patient at the hospital, where it is discovered that he is extremely shy and artistically talented. There is of course a backstory to explain why he was hidden away – but this blog is a no-spoiler zone. The plotting and reveals sometimes made me feel as though I were watching a television mini‑series, but the characters and shifting attitudes toward psychiatry kept me reading. The real payoff comes in the acknowledgements, where Chambers explains that William was inspired by a real man found living in squalor and unseen by neighbours for some 25 years in the early 1950s. She moved the story to the 60s, a more interesting period for psychiatry and society as a whole. Okay for a summer read.

The uncomfortable American

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I’ve been reading

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

Bunny’s Vignettes – 3

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

Mrs Goldstein – 1967

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

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

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

‘Says who?’

‘Says grandma.’

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

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

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

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

He also left without saying goodbye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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