Lelac Almagor teaches fourth grade in a charter school in Washington, D.C. The following article appeared in the New York Times.

She writes:

Our prepandemic public school system was imperfect, surely, clumsy and test-crazed and plagued with inequities. But it was also a little miraculous: a place where children from different backgrounds could stow their backpacks in adjacent cubbies, sit in a circle and learn in community.

At the diverse Washington, D.C., public charter school where I teach, and which my 6-year-old attends, the whole point was that our families chose to do it together — knowing that it meant we would be grappling with our differences and biases well before our children could tie their own shoes.

Then Covid hit, and overnight these school communities fragmented and segregated. The wealthiest parents snapped up teachers for “microschools,” reviving the Victorian custom of hiring a governess and a music master. Others…

From the cover of the Eugene Onegin edition I read.

When we look at literature from the first half of the 19th century, the 1810s and the 1840s first come to mind.

The 1810s of course saw the publication of all six classic Jane Austen novels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and well-known Sir Walter Scott works such as Rob Roy and Ivanhoe (the latter released in very late 1819), to name nine memorable books. The 1840s offered a bonanza of famous novels such as those by the Bronte sisters (including Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights), Charles Dickens (including David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol), Alexandre Dumas (including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers), Nikolai Gogol (Dead Souls), William Thackeray (Vanity Fair), and Herman Melville (Typee, etc.).

The in-between 1820s and 1830s stand out less in the fiction realm…

Remember my recent post entitled, “A Crazy Idea”? Well look at what Susan Collins (R-ME) said as related to voting rights during the For the People Act discussion:

“S1 would take away the rights of people in each of the 50 states to determine which election rules work best for their citizens.”

As Heather Cox Richardson commented in her most recent newsletter: Republicans insist that federal protection of voting rights is federal overreach; that the states should be in charge of their own voting rules.

(“The states,” of course, meaning the Republican-led states.)

It just seems so apparent to me that Republicans propose and vote for any and all measures that will benefit them and their states; whereas Democrats tend to approach government from a more egalitarian perspective. (This isn’t to say that everything they propose is going to be applauded by the nation as a whole, but…

Out, Alone
by Maria Nestorides

It’s a balmy spring afternoon
and I’m on my way to the craft shop
where I’ve booked a class
to make a heart-shaped wreath for my wall.
And I am still waiting…

I park my car wherever I find a spot,
but this is New York City, and
I need a good five minutes to walk to the shop.
A group of young men are huddled together
outside a shop, laughing and joking.
Ask any woman you know. These men
could be as harmless as a bee in the middle
of the ocean, but
to a lone woman, a group of men being loud
and raucous is a clear and present danger.
And I am still waiting…

Alert sounds scream in my mind,
my flight or fight signals are going crazy.
Adrenaline rushes through my body,
preparing me to do whatever I need to do—fast.

Historians Gillian Frank and Adam Laats write in Slate about the long history of suppressing textbooks that discuss race and class and investigating or firing teachers who veer away from the standard patriotic view of American history.

They describe the classic story of the textbook series written by progressive educator Harold Rugg of Teachers College, Columbia. Rugg wanted students to learn about the social, economic and political problems of contemporary society in the 1930s. His books were widely adopted but fell victim to a rightwing campaign that labeled them as socialist or Communist, which they were not. The campaign was successful, and the Rugg books were ousted from classrooms across the nation.

The authors tie the current efforts to ban critical race theory (taught in law school) and The 1619 Project from being taught in schools to this long tradition of avoiding controversial subjects.

There is an even longer tradition…

Return to Sender
by Betsy Mars

I am still waiting
to let go of Loki, hoping
God will see fit to return her
in some form or another
that I will recognize
when it happens
when I see her eyes
I will know all
is right and take my leave
with her, then I will
no longer grieve for her,
but that’s a lie,
for I will always miss
her mottled tongue
licking my hand, pulling
at my heart’s unraveling sleeve.

PAINTING: Summer Evening at Skagen by Peder Severin Kroyer.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I found this call so timely given the pandemic and the fact that, for many of us, so many things are or have been on hold: seeing loved ones, moving, finding a job, taking a vacation, making repairs, etc. This could have gone any number of directions, but what immediately popped into my head was my…

Experimental Artworks – Kunsthalle Vienna

“… Voice dry as the voice of T.S. Eliot droning from a recording, accent still American after years away from America. Appearance as anonymous as a bank clerk’s, forgettable as a bank robber. Writer of books compared with Kafka, Joyce, and dirty postcards. His bruised readers nurse a sense of outrage and assault after trips through the Burroughs landscape, a desert of screams. All the time he talks he moves around the room, or groping for cigarettes, or gesturing with nervous hands. He lines the cigarette pack up with invisible parallels, rearranges the ash pattern in the ash tray. His work is sentences from newspapers, conversations, other authors, the title of something he is reading, things he hears, what is happening around him; it all makes a sort of collage. ‘Brion Gysin first suggested the collage technique to me in 1960. I had been working…

Celestial Ambition
by Yvonne Zipter

Like Lana Turner, I’ve been waiting to be discovered.
Never mind she wasn’t spotted at Schwab’s Drug Store
but at the Top Hat Café. Never mind she wasn’t drinking

a milkshake but a coke and that it wasn’t Mervyn Le Roy,
the director, but Billy Wilkerson of the Hollywood Reporter
who referred her to the agent Zeppo Marx, who got her

that screen test. And never mind I’ve no desire to be
in the movies. I guess what I mean is I want to be like
that recently discovered celestial body, the star formerly

known as HD 86081, the one they’ve now named Bibhā,
which means, in Bengali, “a bright beam of light,”
which is how I want my words to shine, to burn fiercely

as a lantern in the twilit sky of poetry, to twinkle into view
as if I haven’t been here all…