Quote for the Day: February 3rd, 2022

I was told love should be unconditional…But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge?
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl: A Novel

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Quote for the Day: February 2nd, 2022

*Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books* by Azar Nafisi

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mindsets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

I’ve been listening to Azar Nafisi’s memoir which today’s quote comes from on audiobook, and I think it’s a timely read considering all the attempts at censorship which are taking place in the United States right now. For example, Gene McGee, the mayor of Ridgeland, Mississippi, is withholding $110,000 in funding from the Madison County Library System until such time as they remove all LGBTQ+-affirming content from their shelves. His personal religious beliefs are being used as the arbiter for the distribution of public tax monies, which is reprehensible. The matter is being brought before the city’s board of alderman, which will make the final decision. You can read more about the Madison County Library System’s fight to keep diverse content available to the community here.

His [McGee’s] personal religious beliefs are being used as the arbiter for the distribution of public tax monies, which is reprehensible.

On January 10th, just 17 days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, the school board of McMinn County, Tennessee voted to have Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, removed from the 8th-grade curriculum. In a statement released by the school board, they said the book was removed on the grounds “of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.” Art Spiegelman’s parents were survivors of the Auschwitz extermination camp, where 1.1 million people were murdered; nearly a million of the people murdered were Jews. Spiegelman’s mother later died by suicide. What do these adults expect? Shall the Holocaust be sanitized to accommodate their puritanical squeamishness? How is reading Maus any more traumatizing than the active shooter drills these children must endure?

Shall the Holocaust be sanitized to accommodate their puritanical squeamishness?

There are more examples of attempts at censorship sweeping the country. Just googling the word “censorship” will bring you up dozens of results, most of which are from incidents occurring in the past couple of years. The books which these people want to limit or remove access to are books which tell the truth about the world and about its history, a history which closely mirrors our present reality. What is that reality? A world in which the horrors of the past are silenced while the suffering of the marginalized is ignored in the present. And the world turns on: business-as-usual.

The books which these people want to limit or remove access to are books which tell the truth about the world and about its history, a history which closely mirrors our present reality.

It is important that we talk about the ideas, themes, and events in these books. It is important for our children to have access to narratives (historical and contemporary) about people with lived experiences divergent from their own. It is important that we say no every time someone tries to distort, sanitize, or artificially alter the reality of the past or the present. Our future depends on it.

It is important for our children to have access to narratives (historical and contemporary) about people with lived experiences divergent from their own.

World War II wasn’t that long ago. The concentration camps of the Nazis are not that long shut down. Anti-Jewish crimes are on the rise. Black people are still being murdered by police. We cannot afford to be silent.

References

Ridgeland Mayor Demands LGBTQ+ Book Purge, Threatens Library Funding by Nick Judin, published online by Mississippi Free Press on January 25th, 2022

School Board in Tennessee Bans Teaching of Holocaust Novel ‘Maus’ by Jenny Gross, published online by The New York Times on January 27th, 2022

Auschwitz: How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust by BBC News, published online on January 23rd, 2020

Quote for the Day: February 1st, 2022

*All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel* by Anthony Doerr

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.
Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

Quote for the Day: January 31st, 2022

*Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail* by Cheryl Strayed

The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Quote for the Day: January 30th, 2022

*Oh, the Places You’ll Go!* by Dr. Seuss

Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest. Except when you don’t. Because, sometimes, you won’t.
Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Quote for the Day: January 29th, 2022

When you make loving others the story of your life, there’s never a final chapter, because the legacy continues. You lend your light to one person, and he or she shines it on another and another and another.
Oprah Winfrey, What I Know for Sure

Quote for the Day: January 28th, 2022

*The Little Prince* by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Poem for the Day: January 27th, 2022

American Deathbed by Jiarong Zhang

is boneboat. We make teeth 

from pennies for our American 

toothfairy. We hide them under our 

pillow next to our nectarine 

acetaminophen. Dali mouths 

opening to other mouths 

form this neck of history. 

I’m sucking my pregnancy 

test like a popsicle. I’m 

breastfeeding the sea. 

You’re in bed with 

your video game girlfriend 

except it’s you on the screen, 

you’re playing in the first person 

your lips are kissing your feet. 

You’re smoking a cigarette 

in the deportees club. 

You’re sitting on the toilet 

beside your female-gendered 

tub. I’m watching an old 

woman crawl up the hill 

of the city. I’m baptizing 

myself in the acidachelake. 

The sun is throbbing 

into my throat. For who. 

For who. I’m scalpel 

-ing an ebony. You’re Fishhawk 

Midnight. My naked legs 

bent into the Geese 

-Shaped V. Before we sleep, 

you look out the window 

to see what’s left of me. Out there, 

beyond the American Deathbed, 

you tell me there are lesions of 

kindness. There are birds 

jeweling our sleeps. There 

are hyacinths, just purring. 

I want my mother to see. 

On the moon, you say 

look closely to see 

a child’s TV 

playing infinitely on loop, 

just purring with gravity. 

I want the old song to play 

of my father snoring in his 

sleep. Mother yelling at me to 

leave. In this twilight, 

even anger is so pretty. 

Live for me.

I love how playful Zhang is with language in this poem. From the lesions of kindness to the hyacinths, just purring, every image Zhang conjures is haunting in its specificity while abstract in its execution. In the background of it all is an undercurrent of electricity waiting to zap the attentive reader. American Deathbed is one of those poems you can’t read just once, and the reader willing to give it the time and attention it deserves will not regret the decision.

Quote for the Day: January 27th, 2022

*Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End* by Atul Gawande

Human beings need loyalty. It does not necessarily produce happiness, and can even be painful, but we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable.
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Poem for the Day: January 26th, 2022

Fresco by Richie Hofmann

I have come again to the perfumed city.
Houses with tiered porches, some decorated with shells.
You know from the windows that the houses
are from a different time. I am not
to blame for what changes, though sometimes 
I have trouble sleeping.
Between the carriage houses,
there are little gardens separated by gates.
Lately, I have been thinking about the gates.
The one ornamented with the brass lion, I remember
it was warm to the touch
even in what passes here for winter.
But last night, when I closed my eyes,
it was not the lion that I pictured first.

Richie Hofmann teaches poetry at Stanford University. His first collection of poetry, Second Empire, was published by Alice James Books in 2015. His forthcoming collection of poetry, A Hundred Lovers, is due to be released by Knopf on February 8th, 2022. His work appears elsewhere in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. You can read more about him and his work on his website.