Epic Architecture (a photo)
History
Mad King (a 6-word story)
Ancestors (a 6-word story)
Our ancestors knew this was wrong.
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Book Review: The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
I’m always reading heavy and serious books like Kafka, the classics, or dystopian science fiction. So I decided recently to read something a little more light-hearted for a change of pace.
The book I picked up was from Rachel’s shelf – The Golem and the Jinni, a 2013 debut novel from Helene Wecker. The novel still has some serious themes, but it wasn’t the type of angsty existentialism I usually dig into.
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Warlike (a poem)
Look at our history, we’re a warlike species
we wish to beat + battle
but can we foster peace?
Piece by piece, we lunge toward an unknown future,
fighting animal instincts –
military tanks rumble toward me,
I step barefoot, bloody over broken glass
armed with a lotus flower
to combat their firepower.
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New Facts (a prose poem)
History is collective memory, and it’s always subject to correction.
It’s written by winners, whether daughters of despots or democrats. They build bronze statues that inform us of what happened, who’s calling the shots, who owns the space you occupy.
As the city convulses, an ex-mayor’s monument is fractured, beat to the ground. Our historical texts must be rewritten, newspaper editors must be removed, the revolution must be televised and live streamed to your social media feeds, and you must forget what you’ve learned because
there are new facts.
(Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash)
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Hangin’ in Old City (a photo)
I love Philly. I grew up in the area, and I have a lot of pride in the city. Philly has an incredible Mural Arts program that funds and creates beautiful murals throughout the city. There’s also tons of random art, like this wall of graffiti near a parking lot in the Old City neighborhood.
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Today’s quote – a reminder from James Baldwin on why history matters
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” – commonly attributed to James Baldwin. As the protests have continued lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of history. Some people are acting like Black Lives Matter has come out of nowhere, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
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What is America?
The funny thing about being an American is that, when I was growing up, we used to ask each other as kids, “Where are you from?” We didn’t mean what neighborhood; we meant what country. I would say, “I’m Italian,” because my family has Italian ancestry.
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The Joys (and Difficulties) of Research for Historical Fiction
My cousin had an idea a couple of years ago: an historical novel about a fictional town based on our hometown, set in America’s Gilded Age. We started working on the project and, since then, it’s morphed into developing a script for an audio drama podcast. Since the idea is historical in nature, it meant we had to do a good bit of research. The research has been fun, but it has also come with its share of difficulties.
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