@theartofmadeline
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YOU ARE THE REASON
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Kaledo Art
cherry valley forever
Love Begins
todays bird
oozey mess
hello vonnie
Misplaced Lens Cap
blake kathryn
DEAR READER
Stranger Things
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Origami Around
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
ojovivo
dirt enthusiast
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@lieslschillingerarticles
Her recital at Joe Biden’s inauguration electrified viewers and sent the hitherto little known poet’s work to the top of the charts
Article on the electrifying Inaugural poem performance (The Hill We Climb) by Amanda Gorman; and how the young poet got to that stage--and where she is headed. In the Guardian.
Yesterday, on January 6th, one of the darkest days in this country’s history as a democratic nation, the US Capitol was overrun by a pro-Trump mob that had been incited to invade the premises by th…
My dynamic theory of how strongmen (magnets) and social media (megaphones) worked together to create the Jan. 6 Insurrection, and how they will continue to work, extending the reach of Trumpism and anti-democratic energies in the post-Trump era. Lit Hub, Jan. 7, 2021
“Sometimes You Have to Lie,” a biography by Leslie Brody of Louise Fitzhugh, the author of “Harriet the Spy,” reveals a writer who had much in common with her indelible characters.
Review of an expansive, revealing new biography of the children’s author (”Harriet the Spy”) Louise Fitzhugh, written by Leslie Brody. Before she wrote the bestselling children’s books that made her name, Fitzhugh was a wilful, contrarian, lesbian artist, who’d left behind her privileged family in Memphis to lead a self-defined creative life in Greenwich Village. In life, she avoided media spotlight and kept her secrets. This book brings her into the light.
Which world leader do you think the following remarks describe? “He was a liar, a rowdy, an egoist; brutal, sensual, shameless; his whole bearing had something magnificently vulgar, parvenu-like.”…
Essay mulling shared attributes of Napoleon and Trump; considering Napoleon’s enduring fame even after exile; and anticipating the endurance of Trump’s cult following after the presidency . Lit Hub.
Liesl Schillinger When the news of the Covid-19 epidemic emerged from China in January, alongside shocking images of the residents of Wuhan (population 11 million)—I felt a sense of alarm, but not, as yet, dread. Watching footage of hazmat-suited rescue workers delivering baskets of food to quarantined apartment dwellers—who pulled the baskets into their windows …
Essay for the STAToREC pandemic issue--on drawing on plague strategies of the literary past, and the superstructures of the present to find a path forward, through and beyond the pandemic. One of 31 essays by writers on their experiences during the COVID-19 crisis. Collected in Nov 2020 in the book “Writing the Virus,” (from Outpost19); named a “New&Noteworthy” book by the New York Times in January 2021.
How many times, before the spring of this year, were you in the habit of looking at your own face on a day-to-day basis? As a ballpark figure (assuming you’re not a pathological narcissist), let’s …
On the Mirror Stage that the pandemic has forced upon hundreds of millions of people, who rely on Zoom, FaceTime and other screen meetups to face the world outside their homes. Lit Hub. June 2020
Last weekend, Google featured a Doodle on its browser banner that paid tribute to Ignaz Semmelweis; a 19th-century doctor who did more in his lifetime to protect public health than practically anyo…
Story about Ignaz Semmelweis, the prescient doctor who discovered before anyone else the lifesaving value of handwashing hygiene to save lives--and was vilified and ostracized by his peers for his discovery. Lit Hub, March 2020.
Usually a question like this is theoretical: What would it be like to find your town, your state, your country, shut off from the rest of the world, its citizens confined to their homes, as a conta…
My essay, in Lit Hub, on what Camus knew about plagues, which we are learning in real time under the Coronavirus pandemic: the emotional and social fallout of a crisis of this scale, the sense of isolation and abandonment: "Each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky."
The special counsel allowed the attorney general to rob his report of its meaning.
My May 19, 2019 op-ed about the lost opportunity of the Mueller Report, in the Washington Post.
"Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet." What child would sing that song?
My September 2020 Washington Post essay about the assault on the American Ideal advanced by Trump through his anti-immigrant policies. Prompted by Trump henchman Ken Cuccinelli's punitive recasting of Emma Lazarus’s classic poem (put to music by the composer of “God Bless America,” the immigrant Irving Berlin) “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor.”
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Arthur Koestler, as politics, which is to say, this presidency, has turned a spotlight, a searchlight even, on humor and on humorists. Humor is not innocent, Koestler knew; its roots lie in “aggression and apprehension.” Aristotle thought laughter was linked to “ugliness and debasement”; Descartes that it “was a manifestation of joy mixed with surprise or hatred.” It was not surprising given the insult implicit in laughter, Koestler suggests, that powerful men would seek to thwart those who inspired others to laugh at their expense. “Under the tyrannies of Hitler in Germany and of Stalin in the Soviet Union, humour was driven underground,” he writes. “Dictators fear laughter more than bombs.”
My essay about politics and power, and why tyrants hate comedians...and satire. As Arthur Koestler knew...In New York Review of Books, April 2019.
Liesl Schillinger, the translator of Free Day by Inès Cagnati, shares five books in her life.
Q&A with Jane Ciabattari for BOOKMARKS about five politically relevant novels in translation that I love.
Cagnati’s images . . . her intentionally repetitive reflections and refrains, have a force and strength that are magnified by their rough grain.
Q&A in Asymptote about translating Cagnati, and about the origins of my neologisms book “Wordbirds.”
How do you learn the stories of people who are too impoverished, powerless, or uneducated to write their stories themselves? Often it is outsiders who relay them, through leaps of empathetic imagin…
Essay -my introduction to my NYRB translation of Inès Cagnati’s 1973 novel “Free Day” (Jour de Congé), about the power of telling the stories of people who are too oppressed or overlooked to tell them for themselves.
“The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit,” a new biography by Eleanor Fitzsimons, is an admiring portrait of the author of “The Railway Children” and dozens of other books.
Oct. 8, 2019. My review of a biography of the irrepressible children’s author and Fabian Society co-founder E. Nesbit, by Eleanor Fitzsimons, in the New York Times Book Review.
By Liesl Schillinger - While walking in the woods of England's rhyne-ridged Quantock Hills, where William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived in the late 18th century, before either...
Essay and review in “Air Mail” , Jan 2020, of Adam Nicolson’s joint biography of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the fateful year that threw the two poets together (they were in their 20s) in the wake of the French Revolution. In the Quantocks, Britain’s rugged, woodsy, lake and steepy-hill-filled region, the men, along with Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, wandered, talked, theorized, wrote, roistered, and invented a poetry that would honor the common man. The result? Their collaboration: Lyrical Ballads.
By Liesl Schillinger - Chances are, if you have heard the name "Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel," it is because you know the musical tribute that the mathematician and satiric...
Review of a new biography, by Cate Haste, on the racy, intellectual jewel of Vienna, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, writer of Lieder, lover of the leading creative geniuses of Europe in the first half of the 20th century (including the painter Kokoschka), and beyond.