Weedpatch
For a moment, suppose migrancy decriminalised and all the border apparatus, the walls, the arrests, the holding pens, the clogged courts, the caged children, the separation of families, all dismantled. [Read more]
American History
Countdown
It begins with a joke. The Yiddish phrase ‘Ikh hob fargessen’—I forgot!—uttered in panic to an immigration official, turns the hapless Isaac Reznikoff into Ichabod Ferguson. [Read more]
Border
The rock-hound’s use of the word Indian, rather than Mexican, opens fertile ground. A different idea of territory, of legitimacy, of history, of boundary, of intersecting identities. Who then the interloper? Who the immigrant? The undocumented? [Read more]
Antichrist
Is Donald Trump the Antichrist?
A quaint sort of question in these days of general Biblical illiteracy. But I am reading Denis de Rougemont’s Talk of the Devil, written in 1945, and I am up to the section called “Is Hitler the Antichrist.” [Read more]
Memed, My Hawk
My one-dollar book arrived as promised. It had in fact not been mailed from anywhere in Ontario, but from something called World of Books Ltd., Mulberry House, Goring by Sea, in the UK, by Royal Mail. The copy—a Collins-Harvill reprint from 1990—was definitely used, with that soft, rubbed feeling inside and out one associates with lending libraries. [Read more]
West Virginia
Marshall drank Old Crow corn whisky from a bottle while he drove. Marshall’s wife had a limp and could swear something fierce, but she didn’t permit really dirty words. We slept in an unheated attic and sometimes the daughter, Dottie, would come up and crawl under the covers with us. [Read more]