I’m writing an essay on the banana as the fruit of American colonialism for my English 1A class. It’s worth watching this short report to learn about just one aspect of this fruit’s terrible history—and present:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwFpV2zAApI
From an article in New Scientist:
Each spring, residents of nearby villages drape huge blankets over the Rhône glacier in the Swiss Alps. The glacier, which is the primary source of the Rhône river, has lost 40 per cent of its volume in the past century. By shielding the ice from ultraviolet radiation, the blankets reduce melting by around 50 per cent, but they can’t stop the glacier’s retreat.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2397804-prize-winning-photos-highlight-the-impact-of-climate-change-on-nature/
“Tired of that hermeneutical delirium, the workers turned away from the authorities in Macondo and brought their complaints up to the higher courts. It was there that the sleight-of-hand lawyers proved that the demands lacked all validity for the simple reason that the banana company did not have, never had had, and never would have any workers in its service because they were all hired on a temporary and occasional basis. So that the fable of the Virginia ham was nonsense, the same as that of the miraculous pills and the Yuletide toilets, and by a decision of the court it was established and set down in solemn decrees that the workers did not exist.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
“To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.”
– Anthony Bourdain
This was a read and response essay I wrote last month in school:
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The first news I can remember hearing about as a child was about suicide bombers in Israel. I remember seeing news about suicide bombers on the evening news my mother watched and on the front page of the newspaper my grandfather read. Part of the reason the news was so widely publicized in the US, I know now, has to do with how deeply implicated the US is in the history of modern Israel. Perhaps part of why the news had my attention at the time was because I grew up in Christian household. My mother sometimes told me stories from the bible before bed. My grandfather quoted the bible all the time. We always went to church. We regularly watched Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, and other such films. I understood that this place that had always been in my imagination, Jerusalem and Israel, was now a place where someone never knew, when they got on a bus, whether or not another passenger had a bomb secretly strapped to their chest. I can remember at the time not only being awestruck by that fact, but also wondering: why would anyone blow themselves up in such a way?
It was only years later, when I read the Book of Joshua, the sixth book of the old testament, that I felt I finally understood the answer to that question. I could have known about the plight of the Jewish people in Egypt, their escape from slavery, and their final entry into their promised land even if I had never been introduced to the bible. Those stories are thoroughly a part of our culture. What is not talked about is what happens after the Jews reach their promised land. Because of course this beautiful land was not waiting there empty until their arrival. There were people there already: the ancient Palestinians. The Book of Joshua describes, in terrible detail, what happens next: a brutal attempt at genocide against the Palestinians, mandated by God. Every man, woman, child, and animal of every city the Israelis encounter is killed, by the order of God, except for a single group, whom the Jews enslave. The Jews have a superweapon: they march around the cities of their enemies with the ark of the covenant, and then shout, which somehow destroys the walls of the city under siege. These scenes were vividly brought back to me while watching current footage of the Israelis bombardment of Gaza.
Though these stories are myths, they are very real to the people of Palestine today. And to the highly conservative Israeli government who have encouraged their people for generations, now, to illegally settle in Palestinian territory and forcibly displaced Palestinians. President Biden has made a strong statement of support for Israel. The current conflict is already spreading throughout the region. There are multiple extremists groups throughout the Mideast that believe the state of Israel should be eradicated. More than 1,400 Isrealis have been killed since the beginning of the current conflict, most of them in the initial surprise attack by Hamas. At least 200 more Israelis have been captured and are being held captive in Gaza.
But the basic tenet of every international regulation regarding war and genocide is that the people of a nation should not be made to suffer for the decisions of their government. As one Palestinian commenter said in the video, “We are not trying to throw (the Israelis) into the sea, but to make sure we are not thrown into the desert.” The current Israeli government, led by Netanyahu, is as extremist as any Islamic terrorist organization. It is the Isrealis who have the far superior weaponry. It is the Isrealis who have blockaded Gaza for 16-years. This article in the Global Conflict Tracker demonstrates that Israel's incursions and attacks on Palestinian’s has been constant since the current Israeli government came into power last year. The attack by Hamas may have been a surprise. But the attack itself should not have been surprising. Now the Israeli government has warned the occupants of Gaza—over a million people—to evacuate before an imminent ground strike. Where will they go? The attack by Hamas was absolutely without justification. The Jewish people have suffered atrocity after atrocity, not only during the Holocaust, but throughout their history. But whatever atrocities they have suffered are no excuse for them to impose such terrible suffering and devastation on generations of Palestinians.
After watching the video I watched this one, which was also on the TODAY website: https://www.today.com/video/2-mothers-share-how-they-re-protecting-their-kids-in-israel-and-gaza-196047941880. It shows two mothers, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, with their children. Both mothers and their children have nearly died in the recent attacks. Both mothers lie to their children when their children ask about the sound of bombs, one saying it's a big storm outside, the other saying it's a big car going by. The Israeli mother and her children had to hide in their safe room for over 24 hours during the recent Hamas attacks before they were rescued by Israeli troops. When they left their safe room, they found the rest of their house had been burned down around them. The stories of both mothers are absolutely devastating to listen to. But it is difficult, watching the footage of the Israeli mother, and then the footage of the Palestinian mother, to not compare the two. The Israeli mother sits at a playground on a green lawn among trees with the interviewer. The footage of the Palestinian mother comes from the mother’s phone. It shows nothing but the rubble of buildings in the background. The Israeli family survived a terrorist attack. The Palestinian family, however, did not just survive a single attack: they are struggling to survive a constant bombardment. They are under siege, and the siege is only going to get worse. At one point in the video the Palestinian mother is weeping as she explains there is no electricity, no food, no water, and no medicine. Israel controls all of Gaza’s access to these needs, and is currently allowing none of them into Gaza. The Israeli defense minister recently said "The third phase (of the offensive in Gaza) will require the removal of Israel’s responsibility for life in the Gaza strip.”
I know a number of Jewish people that are my age and younger who support the people of Palestine in this conflict. There are pro-Palestinian protests being held throughout the world, even if they are being forcibly broken up by the police in places such as France and Germany. There have been calls in Israel for the removal of Netanyahu. My hope is that the ultra-conservative government of Israel will be ousted, and a two-state solution finally and officially enacted. Just as the Holocaust led to the formation of the state of Israel, perhaps the Israelis government's actions will lead to the acceptance by the people of Israel of an official state of Palestine. But given the history of the Isrealis-Palestinian conflict, I do not have much hope that such a solution will happen.
“I don’t express myself in my paintings, I express my non-self.” —Mark Rothko
When I write I don’t feel it is “Michael Battisto” writing. I never have.
I do not think I write to get away from that self. But I do believe I write best when I do not feel any of the obligations given to that self.
If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.”
—Anne Boyer, from her resignation letter to the New York Times Magazine in protest of that magazine’s treatment of Israel’s invasion of Gaza
“What was accomplished in music before the end of the eighteenth century has hardly been begun in the pictorial field.” —Paul Klee
From CNN:
The death toll in Gaza since October 7 has risen to 4,651 with more than 14,245 wounded, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza on Sunday.
A spokesman for the ministry, Dr. Ashraf Al-Qidra, said during the past 24 hours, 266 people had been killed including 117 children.
The ministry has received 1,450 calls concerning missing people believed to be under the rubble, 800 of whom are children, according to Al-Qudra.
Demands by Israel for the evacuation of Gaza hospitals amount to “a death penalty for patients,” according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.
The organization said the Israeli military issued three evacuation orders for the Al-Quds hospital on Friday. Spokesperson Nebal Farsakh told CNN Sunday: “We do not have the means to evacuate them safely. Most of the patients are with critical injuries.”
A total of 24 hospitals, including Al-Quds, are under the threat of “being bombed at any second due to Israeli evacuation orders,” Farsakh said.
A Tiny Beetle Is Destroying Entire Forests | National Geographic| Short Film Showcase
Bark beetle colonies feed and reproduce on the inner bark of ponderosa and limber pines, wreaking deadly havoc on the tree's ability to circulate nutrients and absorb water. Due to changes in climate and other factors, the recent outbreak of these destructive insects has reached proportions never before seen in recorded history. Alarming estimates from the U.S. Forest Service state that 100,000 beetle-infested trees fall daily across the United States. To combat this epidemic, Professor Diana Six has made it her mission to crack the genetic code of the pine tree. She hopes that studying the relationship between the mountain pine beetle and the trees they kill will provide us with valuable insight into the future of our forests. In this short film made at the International Wildlife Film Festival Filmmaker Labs, Professor Six walks among the trees and shares her thoughts on why humans can do more to counteract the effects of climate change:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR30qlK0-Cw
Full Moon by Alice Oswald
Good God!
What did I dream last night?
I dreamt I was the moon.
I woke and found myself still asleep.
It was like this: my face misted up from inside
And I came and went at will through a little peephole.
I had no voice, no mouth, nothing to express my trouble,
except my shadows leaning downhill, not quite parallel.
Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight.
Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer.
Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking
No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight.
Like in woods, when they jostle their hooded shapes,
Their heads congealed together, having murdered each other,
There are moon-beings, sound-beings, such as deer and half-deer
Passing through there, whose eyes can pierce through things.
I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible.
There's no material as variable as moonlight.
I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking:
Good God! Who have I been last night?
My youngest brother is the only person in my family to have completed college. But he still got beaten at Scrabble by my grandmother the week before she found out she had late-stage brain cancer.
Louise Glück
"What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won't need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine."—Louise Glück, “The Night Migrations”
Louise Glück had become a dear friend to me over the last few years. She was the first poet I ever met. She was a regular at the last restaurant I worked at, Chez Panisse, which is how we came to know each other. She had been going there for over forty years. She and my partner Lila loved each other. The first spring Louise went back to Yale after spending the late fall and winter in Berkeley the two of them cried when they said goodbye to each other.
In her writing she was as insightful into human character as Dostoevsky. I do not think there will come again a poet who was so adept at working with classical myth. Her work always asks: how does an extremely sensitive person live through trauma? What happens to us after we do horrible things to each other? How do we live? Is this the way? What does Persephone tell herself, as she is forced underground again for half a year?
Louise was the one who recommended I go to my first writers’ conference in Napa in 2021, which initiated so much for me. She was the first poet to encourage me. Which was incredible, as I grew up reading her, and she was a massive influence on my work. Every time she was in town I would either cook for her or we would go get Chinese food. She loved the cakes I made for her and would always want my recipes. She gave us her ice cream machine because she wanted us to be able to make ice cream whenever we wanted. She was a great cook and took enormous pleasure in eating. I loved being around her. She was one of the most sensitive and intelligent people I ever met. Her intelligence allowed her to find her way through any trauma.
This is one of my favorite poems by her. Out of many. "Nostos" is the Greek term for a homecoming, usually after a long sea voyage.
Nostos
There was an apple tree in the yard—
this would have been
forty years ago—behind,
only meadow. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts—
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
“No sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text, than two policeman are ready to jump on you: the political policeman and the psychoanalytical policeman: futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either idle or vain, a class notion or an illusion.” —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
Yesterday I was honored to find out my poem “when absence is my country” has been chosen as a Best of the Net nominee for Counterclock Literary Journal.
https://counterclock.org/blog/2023-best-of-the-net-nominations