My English department colleagues and I can spend a whole lunch break making fun of To Kill a Mockingbird. A literary roast punctuated by sarcastic regurgitations of Atticus Finch’s sanctimonious advice. Just, you know, take a walk in her shoes, dude, I might sneer, interrupting a teacher’s account of an encounter with a difficult student’s unpleasant parent. Most of us have to teach the novel every year, and our irreverence springs from discomfort. We’re tasked with teaching a book that doesn’t live up to its longstanding responsibility.
Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.
During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.
Past the faceless concrete housing projects, the kebab joints, the corner stores, the bus stops, and the tramlines of the city of Saint-Denis in metropolitan Grand Paris, the sheep snatch at plants on weedy strips between the sidewalk and the street. Urban shepherdess Julie-Lou Dubreuilh, curly-haired and ruddy-cheeked, dressed in black jeans and a royal-blue down jacket, clicks the end of her long staff on the pavement, urging her flock along with low cries of “ehh.” The sheep quicken their pace, ivy yanked from chain-link fences disappearing into their mouths like strands of spaghetti.
Located just north of Paris, the administrative department of Seine-Saint-Denis is France’s poorest and most ethnically diverse. Its Brutalist public housing complexes, once triumphant monuments to socialist modernism, are now sites of social marginalization. It’s the last place one would imagine seeing wandering shepherds tending their flocks. Yet here, and elsewhere in metropolitan Paris, an urban agricultural revolution is taking root.
I definitely pissed off a member of the Bamonte family. I didn’t mean to do it. I was trying to explain to Nicole Bamonte that I’m writing about how I will try, and likely enjoy, any establishment that displays one or more autographed photos of a cast member from The Sopranos, that it’s a seal of approval for me when I walk into a place in the Tri-State area and see a glossy with Vincent Pastore or Drea de Matteo looking down at me. “That means the place will probably be good,” I said to the great-granddaughter of the founder of the Williamsburg red sauce landmark.
She just stares at me for a second, the kind of stare that is meant to offer the person who said something stupid an opportunity to redeem themselves.
“I mean, I didn’t need to watch The Sopranos to know this place is great…”
“Stories of war begin midsentence is one way to start.” The first line of the poem “War Stories” comes in the middle of Pamela Hart’s latest poetry collection, Mothers Over Nangarhar, which presents readers with the inadequacy of language to describe war in the lives of individuals; specifically, individuals whose loved ones are serving in the military. Can language plumb the feelings of anxiety and powerlessness a person may feel when their son, daughter, spouse, or friend is serving in the military? For all that is undisclosed in the context of war, what can be spoken, and how well can the spoken encompass what war does to families and communities?
Tracing material choices that echoed through generations, the book captures the quirks of human inventiveness and the power of sound.