For now, pronoun declarations are both novel and blatant — which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on whether you’re socially progressive or socially conservative. As in almost every other segment of American life, society is fractured. What does Baron say? In answer to the query in his title (What’s Your Pronoun?), Baron concludes: “[N]obody answers, ‘My pronoun is actually a phrase, he or she.’ The answer will be, ‘My pronoun is she,’ or they, or he, or zie, or one of the many other invented pronouns.”
What’s heartening in all this, for a grammarian, is that people are talking once again about parts of speech. Or at least about one part of speech, the pronoun. But can they remember the others? For example, what’s your interjection?
Nurturing poetry is like bringing a wild creature indoors. We need to learn which leaves, fruits, and flowers it can eat, and which will make it sick, or destroy its free spirit. In other words, poetry is an experience, not a genre. Poetry is a form of exploration, with intuitive and natural aspects that are often neglected while poets—or teachers—focus on specific skills. Poetry, like peace, is personal.
But most of all, we began to notice the birdsong. A little tentative and sputtering at first, by the end of March it filled the air. Broadcast from aerials and hedge tops, a rising choir of chirps, trills and warbles brought life to gardens and echoed off housefronts and shuttered shops with no traffic noise to smother it.
On November 7, 1800, a decree was issued in Paris requiring women to obtain a permit in order to wear pants in public. The French writer George Sand (the penname of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) defied the order by donning men’s attire and freely roaming the streets, sans permit. Once outfitted in her grey wool garb and boots, Sand felt “secure on the sidewalks,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I flew from one end of Paris to the other. It seemed to me that I could have made a trip around the world… No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd.”
At a time when “proper” women would have risked disgrace by being out alone—their place was in the home, after all—Sand was reveling unescorted in the streets. She was a secret female counterpart to the male flâneur, the man of leisure who strolled the boulevards to cultivate what Honoré de Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.” Although Sand’s medium was the pen, her peripatetic explorations of 1830s Paris helped pave the way for those who would eventually take their cameras and roam the streets to capture the goings-on of public life: women street photographers.
In a 2015 interview with the Guardian, Kazuo Ishiguro revealed what he claimed was his “dirty secret”: that his novels are more alike than they might initially seem. “I tend to write the same book over and over,” he said. It seemed a particularly ludicrous statement from a writer who had just followed a clone romance (Never Let Me Go) with an Arthurian epic (The Buried Giant). With Klara and the Sun, his eighth novel, though, it feels like Ishiguro is bringing that dirty secret slightly more into the light. This is a book – a brilliant one, by the way – that feels very much of a piece with Never Let Me Go, again exploring what it means to be not-quite-human, drawing its power from the darkest shadows of the uncanny valley.
Does anybody write kids-with-strange-powers better than Stephen King? And, is there anyone on the scene who has more insider knowledge of the publishing industry? “Later,” King’s third Hard Case Crime installment, threads both of these into a single short novel that packs a punch.
Hatred, distrust, lies and an unexpected sort of love binds these women in an elegant novel that is as interested in the notion of hope and acceptance as it is in murder and revenge.
It is about family – especially mothers and daughters. It is also about obligation and self. Its beautifully rendered vignettes are, in essence, about “the fraying wire” that connects us to the past.
The oldest recording of a human voice:
a machine invented by a typographer.