Cultural words in the time of MAGA

Aside from having a form of the word cultural, what do these words have in common: cultural competence, cultural heritage, cultural differences, culturally appropriate, cultural relevance, cultural sensitivity, culturally responsive and sociocultural? Answer: These are words the Tr*mp administration has ordered government agencies to remove from all their documents and websites. Some more amusing and just plain weird examples can be found on this banned word list (such as autism, belong, fluoride and marijuana). But as a sociolinguist – and a human being – I’m bothered and perplexed by these cultural words being treated with such scorn.

Firstly, defining culture as a set of ideas and norms belonging to a societal or national group, culture and things cultural are innately part of being human and terms that we use to describe these aspects of our humanity. In other words, language and culture are intertwined – a language emerges from a culture with shared concepts and experiences – and the flipside – a culture is expressed in its language(s). The writer Rita Mae Brown summed it up when she said, ‘Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.’ How could we ban cultural anything from our language?

On a more practical matter, many of these banned cultural terms are used by scholars and teachers as part of their disciplines. Some of my own research has been in heritage languages, where words like cultural heritage and sociocultural regularly crop up. Only the other day, I was speaking to a friend who teaches English to immigrants in Australia, and she used the term cultural competence. By banning the official use these words, the MAGA government is defunding language and teaching programmes and research, not to mention all the government-funded museums and arts and music programmes which rightly operate in a multicultural framework.

Among the monstrous acts carried out by the US president, this blatant and hypocritical censorship – this is from the administration that claimed the woke are denying us our freedom of speech – might seem small potatoes. Yet, it taps into something far more sinister if we consider areas outside of sociolinguistics. The ban on some of the other cultural words – cultural difference, cultural sensitivity and culturally responsive – are clearly targeting hiring policies and workplace training programmes in diversity. Since the variety of peoples in America are not going to lose or want to relinquish their cultural heritages, such policing of language condones discrimination and division among employees. Sadly, we know from history that this mindset has a tendency of spreading, these days with the unsafeguarded assistance of social media. One has to wonder what the ultimate goal is. Perhaps MAGA is simply striving for a monoculture (if such a thing were possible) and wearing its bigotry as a badge of honour.

What I’ve been reading

Occasionally a book comes along that I don’t want to end. Australian writer Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a memoir combined with history and sociocultural (!) commentary rolled into one. Beautifully crafted with anecdotes and personal insights, the memoir parts focus on the author’s father and his relationship with him, culminating with the author’s own near-death experience. Flanagan’s father was a prisoner of war at a slave camp in Japan when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The author intersperses this story with an historical account of some of the nuclear physicists who created the atomic bomb, in particular Hungarian American Leo Szilard and with the true-life love story between Rebecca West and H.G. Wells. The dots between Szilard and Wells are connected by Szilard devotion to Wells’s 1914 novel The World Set Free, which describes a world at war where atomic energy is used to make deadly explosives. Szilard, whom to my shame I only knew through the Oppenheimer movie, was best known for discovering nuclear chain reactions and later for his activism against nuclear arms. He was also an amateur biologist and environmentalist.

Since Flanagan made several references to H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free, I thought I should give this prophetic book a go. Written as a ‘science romance’ as these SF books were called, it’s quite different from the writing of contemporary novelists. Telling outweighs showing, and the poor reader is a good 10% into the book before the first character appears. But to his credit, the writer doesn’t tell and show the same events, and the prose at the sentence and paragraph level is tight. That is, the novel is more historically interesting from a post-modernist’s perspective than it is enjoyable to read.

I came away from these past couple of weeks speculating about SF written today of a future where multiculturalism has been outlawed – hard to imagine, but people once felt this way about the worlds depicted by H.G. Wells.

Ten Days in a Woman’s Life

Ten days ago, the UK Supreme Court made a pronouncement clarifying that in Britian’s Equality Act, ‘woman’ referred only to those assigned female at birth. This in effect says that a transwoman is not legally a woman. Unsurprisingly, the trans community is furious about the decision. Women like me who have fought for women’s sex-based rights welcome the ruling and the fact that the Equality Act still protects transgender people from discrimination while it also protects people from sex-based discrimination. The difference now is that sex and gender are not being conflated. In most of our daily lives this distinction doesn’t matter, and transwomen could be referred to as women by friends and colleagues. But when legal issues or situations arise, such as safe spaces for women and competitive sports, the sex-based biological difference is acknowledged and legally acted upon. Will the debates around this continue? I wish they would, but too many people in the public eye are wary to engage in this topic, especially if they agree with any aspect of the Court’s ruling. It’s unfortunate that no ruling from the Courts or Britain’s Parliament have addressed the conflation of debate with hate speech.

Easter Weekend saw the death of a pope. The obits were lengthy and the discussion panels on his legacy tried to create a polemic over what type of pope Francis was – liberal or conservative, left-leaning, right-leaning. In every discussion and interview I heard across my three languages, this last pope lost only a small fragment of his liberal credentials when it came to the role of women in the church. The experts in religion shook off this topic as if to say, ‘What do you expect?’

Mid-week saw Trump’s team  announce government efforts to increase birth rates in America. This warped government is considering baby bonuses of $5000 to every American mother after her baby is born and classes for women in charting their menstrual cycles to increase their odds of conceiving. This pronatalist strategy is wrapped around conservative ideology about families based on marriage (as opposed to partnerships) between women and men and with the intent of having enough offspring to form a choir (okay, not their exact choice of words – it’s hard not to be sarcastic).

Speaking of controlling women’s bodies, Thursday morning, I found myself in conversation with a French language partner about the historical contradictions in Poland on the issue of legal abortions. In brief, abortions were legal during the days of the USSR when people had fewer individual freedoms. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1990 Poland’s new president Lech Walesa reestablished the country’s ties with the Catholic Church. By 1993, abortions were only legal in cases of severe abnormalities in the foetus – the woman’s mental and physical health were not taken into consideration. Today in Poland, abortions are only allowed in cases of rape, incest or if the mother’s life is in danger. Incidentally, the Soviets hadn’t been acting out of feminism or concern for women’s health. According to the Arte documentary my language partner and I watched, the Soviet government needed women in the workforce.

The new weekend started with a trip to the public library, where I notice a small recycle barrel partially tucked into a corner near the self-service checkout machines. Not for paper as one would expect in a library, but for bras (or brassieres as some insist on calling them). And of course, it was pink. Why in the library and why partly hidden? Several recycling bring banks, as we call them locally, are peppered across the tiny town of Ely with receptacles for used paper, glass, clothes, shoes and books. But none of them have a recycle barrel for the uniquely female undergarment. In the twenty-first century clothes associated with sexualised parts of the female body are requiring a gentle sort of censorship. At least this woman could end this 10-day cycle of womanhood with a laugh.

What I’ve been reading

I’m a huge fan of Joyce Carol Oates and have written about three of her books for The Literary Encyclopedia. Babysitter has been lauded as one of her bests, and I must agree. Be prepared – this is not a bedtime read. Like many of Oates’s work, some dark, unsettling topics are at the fore. In this case the abduction, rape and killing of children by a serial assailant make for the backdrop that disrupts the ‘pleasant valley’ white suburb of Detroit in the mid-70s. At the centre is Hannah, the wife of a wealthy businessman and mother to their two children. Bored with her passionless marriage, she is seduced by a strange man, not a part of her social circle, who engages in violent sex. One time, she ends up nearly dead. She is traumatised and cannot hide the injuries. Now clearly a victim of rape, her story exposes the sexism and racism of the time. Her story also develops in thriller style, linking to the serial child killer. Fortunately, breaks from the violence can be found in moments of poignant reflection. These lift the storytelling out of social commentary into something deeper and philosophical. When Hannah is forced to sell her grandmother’s pearls, she goes to a pawnshop and is told by the jeweller: ‘You have neglected these pearls, dear. You need to wear pearls often. You should know, pearls require human warmth, intimacy, to maintain their beauty. Their being. Spinoza said, “All things desire to persist in their being.” Pearls are not diamonds, dear. If left alone, they lose heart. They lose hope. Like all of us, they become brittle and begin to die.” At that point in the narrative, the analogy to Hannah’s life is evident.

It’s been a week and a half of sometimes frustrating but also intriguing and enriching women’s stories.

Train Journeys are always non-linear

I’ve taken the train between Peterborough and Edinburgh countless times over the past 40 years. The hilly landscape, the rugged coastline and the familiar stations – York, Darlington, Newcastle – have become comfortably familiar. The world has hardly changed when viewed from picture windows, often at speed creating glimpses and filmic montages. Yet, of course, the world and I have changed. Forty years ago, I was a bewildered student punching above my weight in theoretical and then applied linguistics, finding solace in Scottish poetry and working on my first unpublished novel – my first stab at untangling my dysfunctional childhood by reimagining the early life of my maternal grandmother.

I shook off those memories by filling the four-hour journey with some fiction (a The New Yorker short story) and some nonfiction (Le Monde) and listening to a few podcasts (Lincoln Project, and The News Agents). Between these entertainments my mind wandered back to a time when Thatcher was Prime Minister and Reagan was President and how they were perceived as deviously competent and dangerously bumbling, respectively. Pulling into Waverly Station, I thought that while I still disagree with their views, both world leaders would appear dignified and professional today.

The train journey back reflected on the immediate past. My weekend in Edinburgh had focused on seeing an old friend, whom I hadn’t seen in five years thanks to the Covid lockdowns and mental health issues keeping her indoors, alone and unsociable. We talked through the weekend, confirming we were both in the bubble of centre-left opinion and trying to cope with the barrage of news coming from fascist America – a term that is becoming normalised – without being depressed and despondent. We also talked about our psychological well-being and what we do to take care of ourselves – meditation, exercise and variations of CBT. Between reading articles in The Sunday Observer, my return journey reflected on all of these conversations, along with images from our walk through a corner of the Pentlands, where I used a pair of walking sticks to navigate the grassy and gravelly terrain of inclines and where we saw Highland Cows in the wild, grazing just a few yards away appearing bored. The conductor reminds passengers that the buffet car is in ‘Coach G – G as in golf.’ So Scottish.

As the train pulled into Ely Station, having a sense of satisfaction for reconnecting with my old friend, I jumped into future thoughts – my friend’s recommended books and Italian television to explore and the banality of what I was going to eat for dinner.

What I’ve been reading

The Dalai Lama’s Cat by David Michie is an amusing tale from the perspective of the eponymous cat. This feline narrator is given the human qualities of communication and some abstract understanding for the reader’s benefit but is otherwise catlike. The cat, who goes by several names, describes what it is like being with the Dalai Lama, a life of celebrity and diplomacy sandwiched between hours of daily meditation and practices of compassion. When the Dalai Lama is away, the cat interacts with members of the household and a want-to-be American Buddhist who runs a local café for spiritual tourists. With each of these encounters, lessons in Buddhism emerge. While a bit episodic, there are still some gems to be found. Example, Buddha is quoted (I know, quotes like this are always dodgy as Buddha put nothing to writing that has survived): ‘The thought manifests as the word; the word manifests as the deed; the deed develops into habit; and the habit hardens into character. So, watch the thought and its ways with care.’ Whatever its true source, it’s a reminder of the power of the mind to create good or ill.

For something more literary and profound in its own way is Michael Cunningham’s Day. I loved The Hours, Cunningham’s modern-day retelling of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway that wove Woolf’s life into the storytelling. I’m embarrassed that it has taken me so long to read another Cunningham book. Day came out last year to rave reviews and quickly found its way to my wish list and eventually my public library account. The story takes place on single and separate days spaced a year apart. In the intervening months, a couple separates, Covid upends everyone’s lives, and the wife’s brother has a midlife reassessment, changing careers and winding up stuck during the pandemic in Iceland. Although these events keep the pages turning, the real joy of the story lies in its sociopsychological intrigue. The brother, who is openly gay, has been ‘in love’ with his brother-in-law for years. Note the quotation marks – there’s nothing sexual or even romantic about the relationship. It’s a deep sense of love, for which our culture and therefore language doesn’t have a word. Beyond familial love, to call it a ‘bromance’ – a term more used sarcastically these days – would be an insult to the genuine depth of emotion. Another sociopsychological concept in this novel involves creating a fake identity online presumably for fun. But in time, it is clear to the reader that this alter-ego serves a personal psychological purpose.

Tremors, quakes and talking with Americans

Last week, Nice experienced an earthquake. A 4.1 on the seismometer, it wasn’t dramatic, more of a mini quake that nonetheless managed to scar some apartment walls with cracks. Fortunately, no injuries, no fatalities. Here in Menton, some 30 kilometres away, we were having an apéro with friends on the seventh floor of the Méditerranée Hotel when I felt the floor beneath me shake and shift. We looked at each other and David said, ‘I think it’s a tremor.’ But by the time he got that out it petered into a gentle vibration and then stopped. Unnerving for this earthquake novice, I felt my heart racing while I sat still waiting for the next wobble and wondered how much worse this was going to get. Another tremor quivered in Menton a few hours later. But it was so minor, it went unnoticed in our first-floor apartment, where the sound-space continuum is regularly jolted by a stomping child next door and the rubbish collection just below our balcony.

The south of France is not California or Japan and is not known for its seismic activity, but it does experience a few minor earthquakes each year due to its proximity to tectonic plate boundaries. As I write this, more harrowing stories are emerging from Myanmar following its 7.7 earthquake, which put my experience and western privilege into perspective.

All of this has made me think about the sensation of being on firm ground one minute and then being shifted and jiggled around the next by forces well beyond my control. This triggers thoughts of another kind of tremor, a sensation that is equally jarring  and taps into my feeling of fright and bewilderment. What Tr*mp is doing to America and the world is an earth tremor for some, a damaging earthquake for most of us and for others a deadly catastrophe – the latter is no exaggeration, considering the lives already lost to cuts in USAID and America’s withdrawal from WHO.

The disaster that is the current US administration overwhelms me with bloggable topics. Rather than pick one subject, for now what I offer are personal observations and mental recordings of conversations held with Americas who are not politicians or journalists.

Here in France, I’ve met an American woman who came here at the start of the year. As she explains it, ‘I just left and now I’m looking for someplace to live.’  She didn’t merely throw a dart at a map and decide on Menton. She has friends here that she stayed with until she could find an apartment to rent. Now she’s in that apartment looking for an apartment to buy. Conversations with her are about the property market, French bureaucracy and getting French residency. When someone brings up the situation in America, a lost and angry expression comes over her. She’s reluctant to talk beyond the generalised phrases – ‘it’s awful,’ ‘it’s scary,’ and ‘I’ve escaped.’

Others, still living in America are more willing to talk to anyone who will listen. Forever the scriptwriter, I hear their turns of phrase in my head days later – a kind of ear worm from the furious and isolated. Here’s a prosy poem of what that worm’s been chanting:

Cult, cult. When did they get so stupid? Our generation were the lucky ones. Those Trumplicans – my neighbour – my husband – my old friend. I still can’t believe people would vote for this again – yeah, Covid response – Capitol riots – BS about the election results. They’re hurting now. Oh, no they’re not. Cult, cult. People have been pickled. President Musk. Young men with masculinity poisoning. If we could leave, we would. And they think I need psychological help. What will happen to our schools? Our healthcare, our air, our universities, our freedoms, our farms? Who can speak? You cannot speak to the cult, cult.

What I’ve been reading

Haruki Murakami’s 600 pager Kafka on the Shore has been delighting and mesmerizing my reading time for the past four weeks. A slower reading pace than usual as I’ve tackled it in French – so that’s Kafka sur le Rivage. Since the original was written in Japanese, I figured I’d be reading something in translation anyhow. If I reduce the novel to its bones, it’s a coming-of-age story melted into a post-war saga of love and loss up to the present day, with a mysterious murder, via magical realism. But it’s so much more than these plot descriptors because of the way it tells its stories through metaphors and strange happenings – talking cats, a rainstorm of mackerel and a backstory involving a group of children who fall into temporary comas on a school trip in the final days of WWII – their malady lays suspicion on the American military presence. The characters express themselves with an awareness of Greek tragedies, modern and classical music and a sophisticated blend of philosophy and psychology.

I’ve also been enjoying my subscription to The New Yorker, in particular the essays and analysis on the rolling news of events brought on by you-know-who. My favourite of these has been an essay by Hillary Clinton about Signalgate and the current administration’s version of ‘diplomacy’ (note the quote marks). The title says it all: This Is Just Dumb  With experience and eloquence, another American grapples with the shaking ground beneath us all.

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).