Book Post

Portrait of Ivan Turgenev in his study at his family estate at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, now a museum, by his friend the poet Yakov Petrovich Polonsky (1881). Literary Museum, Pushkin House, St. Petersburg Hello Readers! In the midst of a wee summer pause we notice that Ivan Turgenev’s novelSmokehas recently appeared in a new translation, inviting us to revisit our Turgenev reflection of a while back by Padgett Powell.

Portrait of George Lamming by Carl Van Vechten, 1955 When I first read George Lamming’s 1972 novel, Natives of My Personit made a great impression upon me. Upon opening my battered old copy, I discovered the words “Edinburgh, January 1980” on the inside cover. So it has been more than forty-five years since my first encounter with Natives of My Person.

Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE), from the Villa Adriana, Tivoli (ca 160-169 CE). Palazzo Massimo, Rome According to my father, the boy I used to be had a pretty bad temper. When he was alive, my father would delight in reminding me of the days when, angry at my older sisters, I would yell and rage or jump on my bike and ride off into the humid, sun-drenched Carolina afternoon.

Real door seen in a New York City public school, March 2017 See Part One of this post here! Google claims that its AI chatbot Gemini is disabled by default on the millions of Chromebooks in the hands of students, but New York City education officials acknowledge that Gemini “reinstalls” on Chromebooks and parents, including Jessica Winter in The New Yorker, report that Gemini’s chatbot pops up on the ubiquitous devices to offer to help their children with their work.

School Desk Patent Model. Smithsonian Institution, US Patent and Trademark Office. James S. Rankin from Muscoda, Minnesota, received a US patent for an improved school desk on January 21, 1879. The backrest is made to fit under the shoulder blades and designed so that no hard points or surfaces are touching the spine. The chair was meant to support the students so they might have an “erect and natural position.” It was considered easy to access and allowed easy sweeping of the floors. James S.

Many years ago, as part of a chili cookoff, I decided to dress up as a hobo. I assembled my costume from the first images that came to mind: dirty oversized pants tied with rope, a bindle slung over my shoulder with a can of beans dangling from it—filled with my team’s vegetarian chili—and a bowler hat. The look was Chaplin’s Little Tramp transplanted to a Hooverville.

Toward the end of what should have been my final year at university, my academic performance became wildly erratic and I started walking the city streets regularly at night, sometimes till early dawn. At first my head was full of music, but gradually this yielded to a harsh, intensely combative inner dialogue. Eventually the sub-warden of my hall, Ian, a highly cultured physicist with whom I’d developed a guarded friendship, saw how serious things had become and got me to the campus hospital.

Literary fiction on exit and exile is coming to include return and the returned. This configuration can provide the author with a two-way mirror: the fiction of exile can bring a fresh understanding—and sometimes even appreciation—for the place left behind; the fiction of return can bring a forceful reckoning of one’s own evolution as well as places one thought one knew. It’s rather like a sequence of backward leapfrogging. Who were you before you left? Who were you while you were elsewhere?

DUST The pounding and battering go on, day after day, ceaseless. From my window, I watch the crews with their sledgehammers and heavy equipment smashing at the great bridge over the river, pummeling it into ruin. “But why, for what purpose?” I keep asking at my window. “It’s such a great old bridge, a beloved historic landmark of enduring and essential use.

In 2021 Claudia and John Vega, both high school principals with decades of teaching between them and six children in their combined families, decided to make a change.