A unique law, willed into existence by the people of California, declared decades ago that the coast is a public treasure that must be shared by all. Entrusted with this mission is an unusual government agency that has waged many epic battles against the state’s most powerful and wealthy.
One woman has been there since the very beginning.
George Orwell died at University College Hospital, London, on 21 January 1950 at the early age of 46. This means that unlike such long-lived contemporaries as Graham Greene (died 1991) or Anthony Powell (died 2000), the vast majority of his compendious output (21 volumes to date) is newly out of copyright as of 1 January. Naturally, publishers – who have an eye for this kind of opportunity – have long been at work to take advantage of the expiry date and the next few months are set to bring a glut of repackaged editions.
I recently found myself on a metal chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg, in Paris, submitting to my first-ever session of “philosophical therapy.”
I was there because I had gotten an email from a philosophy professor I knew explaining that he offers personal therapy sessions. After months of various lockdowns, it was a chance to have a new experience, and to spend time with someone who doesn’t live in my apartment. Plus it was in English (the professor is also an American who lives in Paris), and it can be done outside.
On one level, sadly, it's about the banalities of domestic life; sadly, I suppose because we all have to live with and deal with them. On another level however there's something else going on beneath the surface of all these domestic tensions, but even that could be said to be similarly banal, since anger, resentment, bitterness and disappointment all come as part of the package.
Peter Ho Davies’s powerful account of fatherhood begins with tests, chromosomes and complications; the chance that the birth might be “normal”, and the chance that it might not. More tests come, and a choice is made: to terminate the pregnancy. The couple return home and, slowly, start to think of what might come next. “Will you write about it?” asks the wife. “You can, if you want.”
My whole dazed life
I implored begged
wailed for saints
ecstatic gurus
to awaken rescue