I believed there must be some compensation for watching a man die. Part of me even wondered if a cartoon angel might lift out of his still-warm body. Okay, not that, but . . . something. The loaded book that falls from the shelf. The providential bird that lands on the sill. There was nothing. He had his run. He breathed his last. The dumb oxygen tank beeped and respired until, ten minutes later, someone thought to turn it off. The peace and quiet were outrageous.
In her new memoir Gentrifier, Eisner Award-winning culture critic Anne Elizabeth Moore revisits Woolf's premise, refracting it through the lens of her experience of being awarded a "free" house in Detroit in which to live and write. Write A House, the now-defunct arts organization that gave Moore a bungalow in 2016, cast their mission as revising the concept of writer's residencies by "giving the writer the residence, forever."
In 1936, a man born Eric Blair, who had rechristened himself George Orwell, planted roses in the garden of a very small, rented country cottage in Wallington, an English village in Hertfordshire.
This declarative sentence is simple, yet it has the potential to evoke a series of questions, rabbit holes an inquisitive person might follow down into a warren of intersecting tunnels. For example: What was 1936 like politically, socially, and economically in England? Where was Orwell in his career then? Or: What did his given name signify and what history did it carry? What significance lay in his chosen nom de plume that over time was used by friends and family as well? And even: What does it mean to plant roses? What role do roses play in our art and culture and history, and, in present day, what does it mean that we can walk into many grocery stores and florists in the United States and find ready-made bouquets of them? Rebecca Solnit — famously interested in context and the interconnectedness of language, cultural ideas, history, and social justice — explores these questions and many more in her new book, Orwell's Roses.
The octopus avoided his fate long enough.
Reluctant to rise from the glass tank.
A milky heart spilling out of grasp.
I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.