#katha pollit

[slaybook]

Power in the Ivory Tower

What on earth is going on at NYU?

Katha Pollit vs. Avital Ronell

[closerthanthetinythoughts-blog]

...We're near the end, But oh, before the end, as the sparrows wing each night to their secret nests in the elm's green dome, oh, let the last bus bring lover to lover, let the starveling dog turn the corner and lope suddenly, miraculously, down its own street, home.

from "Small Comfort" by Katha Pollit, found in Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women's Spirituality edited by Marilyn Sewell, p. 175

[nussia-blog]

Ghost feathers, angel bones, I see them rise over West Thirteenth Street, unearthly, shining, tiny Quixotes sailing off to heaven right on schedule; it's the end of August. I'm tired of transcendence. Let's stay home tonight, just us, let's take the phone off the hook and drink a peaceable beer on the fire escape. Across the darkening garden, our lesbian neighbor is watering her terraceful of scraggly geraniums, the super and his wife are having a salsa party, and in a little while the moon will rise over the weary municipal London plane trees and the old classical philologist next door will look up from his lexicon and remember that even Zeus came down for us to love. Love, we could do worse than listen to the city breathing on its way to bed tonight while overhead cold galaxies of milkweed stream and stream.

-- Katha Pollit | "Milkweed"

[acupofpoetry]

In The Bullrushes by Katha Pollitt

Lotus. Papyrus. Turquoise. Lapis. Gold. A jackal-headed god nods in the noon that shimmers over the river as if fanned by invisible slave girls. Frogs fall silent , stunned by the sun or eternity. The Pyramids have been crumbling for centuries. Snug in his bassinet of reeds the lucky baby plays with his toes, naked. What does he care for his mother's eyes in a thorn tree? Around his head an alphabet of flames spells Thunder . Transformation. Woe to women. The sun begins its red plunge down the sky. Deep in the earth a locust's eyes snap open. Frogs resume their trill And punctual to the minute down the path, tottering on jewelled sandals, comes the beautiful lonely princess who's wandered in from another kind of story.

[scowlofminerva-blog]

US invasions have made the work of Muslim feminists much more difficult. The last thing they need is for women's rights to be branded as a tool of the invaders, occupiers, and cultural imperialists.

Katha Pollit, 'After Iraq And Afghanistan, Muslim Feminists Are Leery of Seeming Close to the West' 

[elyktc]

Archaeology - by Katha Pollit

You knew the odds on failure from the start, that morning you first saw, or thought you saw, beneath the heatstruck plains of a second-rate country the outline of buried cities. A thousand to one you'd turn up nothing more than the rubbish heap of a poor Near Eastern backwater: a few chipped beads, splinters of glass and pottery, broken tablets whose secret lore, laboriously deciphered, would prove to be only a collection of ancient grocery lists. Still, the train moved away from the station without you.

How many lives ago was that? How many choices? Now that you've got your bushelful of shards do you say, give me back my years or wrap yourself in the distant glitter of desert stars, telling yourself it was foolish after all to have dreamed of uncovering some fluent vessel, the bronze head of a god? Pack up your fragments. Let the simoom flatten the digging site. Now come the passionate midnights in the museum basement when out of that random rubble you'll invent the dusty market smelling of sheep and spices, streets, palmy gardens, courtyards set with wells to which, in the blue of evening, one by one come strong veiled women, bearing their perfect jars.