January 3, 2019 Happily Ghost People: On Pinocchio and Raising Boys By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and raising boys. My son’s first grade teacher pulls me aside to tell me she’s concerned about Noah and the Ghost People. “Ghost People?” “Yes,” she says. She is cheerful, though I suspect the main ingredient of her cheer is dread. Something she probably picked up from childhood. “Can you encourage Noah to stop bringing them to school?” She is whispering, and she is smiling. She is a close talker, and occasionally calls me “girl” which embarrasses me. “I don’t know these Ghost People.” “You do.” “I don’t think so.” “He makes them out of the woodchips he finds on the playground. They’re distracting him. He isn’t finishing his sentences.” “Okay,” I say. “Ghost People,” I say. She smiles wide. One of her front teeth looks more alive than it should be. Read More
January 2, 2019 Department of Tomfoolery Classic Literature as Fortune Cookie Fortunes By Jean-Luc Bouchard Happy 2019! Allow us to tell your fortune for the year to come using ten classic novels: 1. Lord of the Flies An exotic trip is just around the corner. 2. The Jungle You’ll be amazed by the results of your hard work. 3. Beloved The one you love is closer than you think. Read More
January 2, 2019 One Word One Word: Salty By Myriam Gurba In our new column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. One kid raises their hand. They ask, “Miss Gurba, why’d you become a high school teacher?” This is a classic time-killing move. My tone turns serious. I respond, “It was an accident.” Hearing a public school employee be so blunt widens kids’ eyes. They’ve baited me into a tacit game of truth or dare and I’ve knowingly broken the rules. I’m pretty sure they expect me to belt out the opening lyrics of “Greatest Love of All.” They want a saint. What garbage. Catholics raised me, but I’m not a martyr. Still, even teenagers know you’re not supposed to admit that you stumbled into their classroom, but who cares? I did and I stayed and I continue to stumble in every morning. Something my students ask me less often is whether or not I like teaching. Something they ask me even less often than that is what I like about my profession. Read More
January 1, 2019 Best of 2018 Hunting for a Lesbian Canon By Yelena Moskovich We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! At the Aligre flea market near my Parisian flat, I haggle over a trinket I’ve decided to give to my on-the-rocks lover. It is a rock, a small but well-shined one. Twenty euros is too much, I insist. I’m from Ukraine, I tell the seller, in an attempt to get sympathy for my country’s political climate in the form of a discount. He replies that our eyes are drawn to objects that can read us between the lines. I pay the twenty. Let’s back up: as a Ukrainian kiddo during the fall of the Soviet Union, at six years old, I was held back from starting school while my family awaited immigration approval. The process dragged on for over a year, and when we were finally granted entry into the American Midwest as Jewish refugees, I was seven, and my literacy a club-footed Cyrillic. I was put into an Orthodox Jewish school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and began groping my way through two more alphabets, English and Hebrew. The page transformed into a vertical stage, complete with curtains of chattering. Read more >>
January 1, 2019 Best of 2018 Paris, Reviewed By Rosa Rankin-Gee We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Real life reviews from the City of Light, compiled from TripAdvisor.com Musee d’Orsay MUSÉE D’ORSAY Not worth unless you are into art Only go if you are interested in art history. I love history, but I couldn’t stay here for more than an hour, as its pictures doesn’t make sense to me. EIFFEL TOWER Very not good! We expect from the Eiffel Tower something romantic. But we got—very not good and not clean around the Eiffel Tower! At night you can’t see the city of Paris because there is not enough lighting!!! After visiting the Eiffel Tower, NO body helped us to find the way to go down!!! Read more >>
January 1, 2019 Best of 2018 Are We All Joyceans Here, Then? By James Frankie Thomas We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of Ulysses. “Are we all Joyceans here, then?” the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway. We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses seminar that met at six thirty P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But to call us “Joyceans” seemed like a stretch. Today—Thursday, January 29, 2015—was only the first day. And besides, this was City College. No article about City College is complete without the obligatory phrase “the Harvard of the proletariat,” which was supposedly both our school’s nickname and its reputation in the mid twentieth century. By 2015, however, no one could deny that our beautiful Harlem campus was in decline. Governor Cuomo had recently slashed the budget for the entire CUNY system, with City College bearing the brunt of the cuts, and the disastrousness of this decision is difficult to convey without resorting to sodomitic imagery. That year, classrooms were so overcrowded that latecomers had to sit on the floor. One of my professors entered his office on the first day to find that his entire desk had been stolen. The humanities building still used old-fashioned blackboards, but the budget didn’t provide for chalk, so professors hoarded and traded it like prison cigarettes. Most bathroom stalls didn’t lock, and for several weeks, the entire campus collectively ran out of toilet paper—I’ll never forget the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2015 and the generosity it inspired in my fellow students, who shared their own toilet paper from home and never stooped to charging for it. It was in this context that the English department decided to offer its first-ever Ulysses seminar, though they offered it as you might offer someone a home-cooked meal that you’re secretly pretty sure contains broken glass. “NB: This is a highly demanding course with a heavy reading load,” the course catalogue warned in bold italics, “more like a graduate seminar than a 400-level college class.” I don’t think it actually said “DON’T TAKE THIS CLASS,” but that was the obvious implication. I have since learned that our idealistic young professor was met with departmental resistance when he suggested a Ulysses seminar, and I now suspect that the department was half hoping no one would register for it at all. Read more >>